“A happy man has no past, an unhappy man has nothing else” | Culture | EUROtoday

What are our favourite novel phrases? There are the traditional ones, after all: “all happy families look alike”, “many years later, in front of the firing squad…”, “I detest vulgar heroes and moderate feelings”, “whatever comes we will go towards it smiling”, “God knows that we should never be ashamed of our tears, for they are the rain that falls on the blinding dust of the earth that hardens our hearts.” But I’m referring to these extra private, private phrases which have marked us in a particular means as readers and make up the tenuous strains on which we effortlessly draw the calligraphy of what we’re.

Each one can have their very own. Among mine are “it is very difficult to fight against the desire of the heart; everything it wants to obtain is bought at the price of the soul” (Justine), “the desert could not be claimed or possessed; it was a piece of cloth blown by the winds” (The English affected person), “disappears from the world as if wrapped in a mysterious cloud, inscrutable in the depths of his heart, forgotten, without the forgiveness of those around him and excessively romantic” (Lord Jim), “you cannot live without loving” (underneath the volcano), “if the island was populated by spirits, they were not monsters but nymphs” (The magician) or “he recoiled from the fear of being a coward and not from the possibility of being hurt” (The 4 feathers). And for a while now there’s one other phrase that has joined these and doesn’t cease echoing in my head: “a happy man has no past, an unhappy man has nothing else” (The slender highway to the deep north).

It is unimaginable to go to the authors of the earlier sentences to touch upon them, since all of them (Larry Durrell, Michael Ondaatje, Conrad, Malcom Lowry, John Fowles and AEW Mason) have already died. But within the case of the final one, by Richard Flanagan, sure. And I’ve carried out it.

I had the prospect to talk with Flanagan about his newest ebook, Question 7 (Books of the Asteroid, 2025), a beautiful and at instances disconcerting textual content that goes past genres—narrative, essay, reminiscence—and that’s in the end a shifting track to his household and his land (Tasmania) through which seem matters as apparently various and connecting because the Second World War, the Japanese focus camps, the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the way they had been created, the love relationship between HG Wells and Rebeca West, Chekhov or the kayak accident through which the writer nearly drowned. Question 7 It has quite a bit to do, exactly, with my favourite Flanagan novel—and one in all my favorites usually— The slender highway to the deep north (Penguin Random House, 2016), from which an excellent five-part Australian miniseries was made in 2025 with the identical title – taken from the Japanese poet of the Edo interval Matsuo Basho -, broadcast on Amazon Prime and with Jacob Elordi, Ciarán Hinds and Odessa (!) Young. The plot is centered on Dorrigo Evans, a physician from the small city of Cleveland, on the island of Tasmania (the identical city the place Flanagan was born), who falls prisoner of the Japanese and experiences the horror of the Death Railway and the camps, from which he emerges a conflict hero for his selflessness. The novel reveals Evans as a younger man, in the course of the conflict (Elordi) and already mature and develop into a star (Hinds) however plagued by the expertise of internment and the cruelty of the guards and the reminiscence of an incredible sad love (Young).

The phrase: within the novel it’s stated that “when he grew old, Dorrigo Evans would not be able to tell if he had read that phrase or had invented it himself.” I requested Flanagan level clean concerning the origin. He was stunned by my enthusiasm for one line in a 445-page ebook. He hesitated slightly. Is it one thing that you may apply to your self? I inspired him, that it got here from inside you, come on. “Look, sometimes I think yes and other times that, well, that it was a pure invention, an idea that I had for that character. I am substantially happy and that character was unhappy because of a love from the past that tormented him. That phrase was true for him, who had a past from which he was never going to escape.” I informed him that in comparison with the rapture of his novel or the emotional components of The question7 He appeared very serene to me. River. “I am not a calm man, it is a mask.”

The slender path It is a ebook stuffed with poetry, Basho, Shisui, allusions to Ulises from Tennysson, to Catullus, to Kipling, the Celan quote at first, the haikus of the Japanese officers when they aren’t chopping off heads, phrases just like the underlined one. “I like poetry, but seeking to create a poetic effect in prose seems like a mistake to me. When novels work is when they cross borders, oceans, storms and waterfalls, and reach other cultures and languages, so they have to submit to the story and its mystery, it is the story you tell that matters and survives. I think it is dangerous to succumb to poetry, the novelist has to narrate.”

Flanagan additionally disagrees that The slender path y Question 7 There are two methods to inform your father’s story. “Question 7 It is linked to several of my novels, such as the first, Death of a guide. And it is essentially a love letter to my parents and a tribute to a disappeared world, that of my island that is fading in these times that sweep away everything.” Isn’t Dorrigo Evans a alter ego from his father, then? “No, let’s see, there are many people who think this, you are not the first. My father, oh how my father was, the character in the novel is very famous, a surgeon and war hero, and a womanizer, imprisoned in the solitude of fame, while my father was a teacher, a family man, a houseman, without great achievements, he was with the people who loved him and those he loved. It is true that my father had those experiences in the war, the fields, but the challenge of the novel was precisely to escape the memories of my father and invent. Do you know what my father told me? That it had been lucky to be a prisoner because there you only had to suffer and you didn’t have to fulfill your role as a soldier, which was to inflict pain on others. My father’s idea of decency and love in those circumstances, the solidarity that helped them survive, was what helped me, with the alchemy of memory, to write. The narrow path”.

In Question 7Flanagan himself visits the sector the place his father as soon as stood. Is there a lot left to exorcise of that, particularly in Japan? “I see it differently, human beings survive because of their ability to forget, and it is understandable, although there is also the freedom to remember and delve into memory. If you bear witness to the darkness that closes the wound and brings some hope and light for everyone. But I do not seek reparation.” Flanagan displays that the atomic bomb whose creation goes by way of Question 7 He made it potential for his father to outlive the conflict and subsequently for himself to exist. “We believe that we live in a rational and quantifiable world, but we are the fruit of strange stories and a strange chain of events.”

Going again to The slender pathas unforgettable because the phrase that motivates these strains is the fantastic scene of falling in love within the Adelaide bookstore. “I have always found bookstores and libraries very erotic places.” The lovely picture of the woman with the crimson camellia in her hair… did it exist? “No, I’m afraid I made it up.”

While we had been there I requested him if it is bizarre being Tasmanian. “Tasmania influences me more than I thought, I am very marked by that primordial jungle, of ancient trees and wonderful animals, and by the indigenous culture and its conception of time and nature, so different. I belong to two worlds, the Western one and that of my island and I have understood that my task is to write about what I know, about what Orwell said was the most difficult: what you have in front of your nose.”

Curiously, I do not know the way we ended up speaking about love. “Family is very important. But you must not waste any kind of love, you must honor everything that comes to you and extend it to what surrounds you. It is a word that we are made to believe is small and naive and we are encouraged to refuse it and not offer it as we should. But we must not lose any opportunity to love. Nor waste any form of love.”

I stated goodbye to Flanagan with a bittersweet feeling. The dialog had had emotion and poetry, however not within the methods I anticipated. Tasmania, household, the bomb, kindness and dignity, rugby and possum hunters. You cannot cut back a author to what you undertaking onto him. It’s all the time one thing else, normally way more. What you see in his work and what strikes you a lot doesn’t must be what’s related for the writer. And but, the woman with the crimson camellia… “A happy man has no past; an unhappy man has nothing else.”