Evento

Australian Novelist Richard Flanagan

At the Goethe Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Parking is in the building for $2 with validation from the Goethe Institut. Tickets, $15 .

The great truth about fiction is that it is more real than nonfiction. It's more powerful, more personal, more intimate, and more accessible. In fiction, the reader can crawl inside the thoughts of the characters, can see the clothes they wear, and actually feel why the characters choose to love whom they love. Or hate. Or fight with. We the readers, the luckiest people in the world, can experience everything between the lines. That's the glory of literature.

Richard Flanagan, an Australian screenwriter (remember Australia, with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman? That's his screenplay)and novelist whom I'd never read before this past summer, has written a novel that should be broadly visited and revisited. Called The Narrow Road to the Deep North, this novel concerns an Australian physician during World War II, caught inside the hell of a Japanese POW camp. Flanagan bases the novel on the story of his father who was imprisoned in that POW camp, and weaves contemporary Australia into the wartime narrative. It's a love story, it's an homage to the unspeakable, and it's a reminder that the experience is really just a generation or two removed from us, the readers. And in some parts of the world, it's the here and now.

We want you attend this Writers Bloc program with Richard Flanagan, an author whose name might not ring any bells. It's a wrenching war story and a gripping and most meaningful story about survival and recovery, and what happens inbetween.