not have heard of Pierre-François Lacenaire, but thanks to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, his story may ring a bell. The two men had a lot in common: blighted youths, gambling problems, flirtation with radical politics, prison time and a fascination with the criminal underworld. Lacenaire’s key resemblance, though, is not to the Russian author but his best-known character. In 1834 Lacenaire and an accomplice murdered a petty thief and his mother in Paris.
Alongside these rows over the rights to reality, a powerful strain of contemporary fiction avowedly draws on life. Rachel Cusk, Jhumpa Lahiri and other practitioners of autofiction mould experience into novels, striving to reproduce human consciousness on the page. But though the genre is boldly impatient with literary conventions, all those made-up plots and characters, it also suggests a kind of modesty: over how much reality authors are entitled to take on.
Diligence is one consideration. Rarely do authors go as far in their research as Dostoyevsky: as Mr Birmingham recounts, during the four years he spent in a Siberian labour camp for subversion, he became intimately acquainted with the psychology of murderers. But, adept as they are at sniffing out fakery, readers tend to rumble anyone who skimps on their homework or on noticing the world around them.
To the greatest extent allowable by law. Imagination has no limits. I write 'faction' (literary fiction). Fusing fact and fiction is amazing.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.