Cheng zhiwen
English 1110.01, MWF 10:20 – 11:15
Instructor: Cathy Ryan
Assignment: Dalkey Archive
Feb 18th, 2017
Svetislav Basara
Svetislav Basara is a Serbian author of many novels, story collections and essays. He discusses his first novel Chinese Letter in the interview with Ana Lucic. Believing he has more to express, he starts to writes his first novel instead of just writing five or six pages story. Moreover, the background for him to start this literature at the end of seventies, during which it, to him, was a dullness, for spiritual and psychological, resulted from the development of communism. Therefore, he, in order to be somewhere else, wrote this novel and named it as Chinese Letter. What is more, Svetislav Basara has literary works include but are not limited to the following publications.
- Peking by night (1985)
- Kinesko pismo (1985)
- Na ivici (1987)
- Fenomeni (1989)
- Na Gralovom tragu (1990)
- Mongolski bedeker (1992)
- Tamna strana meseca (1992)
- De bello civili (1993)
- Drvo istorije (1995)
The reason I chose Svetislav Basara is that he mentions a point that readers always laugh when reading his novel Chinese Letter, but he never laugh when he was writing this novel. This represent his deep understanding on how comedy is actually consists of all kinds of tragedy. It, like what Svetislav Basara points out at the interview, is really interesting to realize that “ how close laughter is to despair and vice versa”. He talks about the reason he dropped out of the Serbian Writers’ Association, which he calls: “ a hot bed for a number of retrograde ideas”, and he finds that it is meaningless to stay at there. He, to me, is persist on his own thought, like when he feels there is no point to stay at the Serbian Writers’ Association, he just quite without any regret. The stubborn, positively, always make excellent people when they are walking on the right path.
Had I got a chance to interview Svetislav Basara, I would ask him if he likes the novel writing better or his old job, writing story. He did pointed out that writing novel could comprehensively express himself but I am just wondering if it had changed. Besides, I would like to ask him the reason to choose write about China instead of other communist countries, even though he illustrates that China is far enough for him to be somewhere else; but Russia or some other countries also fit in his requirement.