I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque. Full of good intentions, I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century, both collective and individual. When I began my career, the categorical imperative of every young writer was to represent his own time. In this talk I shall try to explain-both to myself and to you-why I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect to indicate the works of the past in which I recognize my ideal of lightness and to show where I situate this value in the present and how I project it into the future. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. This does not mean that I consider the virtues of weight any less compelling, but simply that I have more to say about lightness.Īfter forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of lightness.
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