Des nouvelles de Mary Doria Russel
Posté : mar. août 26, 2008 12:56 pm
Mary Doria Russel a fait une courte apparition en France il y a quelques années avec Le Moineau de Dieu.
Elle vient de publier aux Etats Unis : Dreamers of the Day.
Elle y revient dans une interview sur le web. Toute l'interview est ici.
"Can you give Apex readers some background on Dreamers of the Day?
Mary Doria Russell: The book got started back in 2001, when Osama bin Laden took credit for 9/11. In his statement, he said the attacks were in part “to avenge the catastrophe of 80 years ago.” Now, not many Americans paid attention to that remark because in our culture, when we say “That’s history,” it’s code for “That’s not important anymore.”
Being an anthropologist, I try to see things from a variety of points of view, so I tried to come up with something awful that happened to Arabs in 1921 and drew a blank. World War I ended in 1918. The Versailles Peace Conference was in 1919… So I thought, Well, maybe bin Laden is rounding? The dreamerscatastrophe was 81 or 82 years ago?
At the time, though, our family had three people slowly dying of terrible diseases and I was still soldiering away on A Thread of Grace, which was a bear to write. So I just filed the 80 Years Ago question away under a mental heading: stuff I’m curious about, but don’t have the time or energy to run down.
Five years, three funerals, one novel, and a couple of new wars later, I had just sent the manuscript for A Thread of Grace to Random House when I came across a reference to the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and I did the math: that’s the catastrophe of 80 years ago. In just a few days at a fancy hotel in Cairo, Winston Churchill, Lady Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and a handful of oil men carved up the Middle East. They invented Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Trans-Jordan – just drew lines on paper and gave these places names and made plans to install puppet governments.
We are still unwinding the damage done in that disastrous week in Cairo. Nearly all wars of the 20th century have their roots in European colonialism. Soldiers and civilians dying today in places like Iraq and Rwanda and Congo and East Timor and on and on – they are all casualties of the conflict that began in August of 1914.
One day, historians may look back call this another Hundred Years War. No end in sight, I’m afraid… "
Elle vient de publier aux Etats Unis : Dreamers of the Day.
Elle y revient dans une interview sur le web. Toute l'interview est ici.
"Can you give Apex readers some background on Dreamers of the Day?
Mary Doria Russell: The book got started back in 2001, when Osama bin Laden took credit for 9/11. In his statement, he said the attacks were in part “to avenge the catastrophe of 80 years ago.” Now, not many Americans paid attention to that remark because in our culture, when we say “That’s history,” it’s code for “That’s not important anymore.”
Being an anthropologist, I try to see things from a variety of points of view, so I tried to come up with something awful that happened to Arabs in 1921 and drew a blank. World War I ended in 1918. The Versailles Peace Conference was in 1919… So I thought, Well, maybe bin Laden is rounding? The dreamerscatastrophe was 81 or 82 years ago?
At the time, though, our family had three people slowly dying of terrible diseases and I was still soldiering away on A Thread of Grace, which was a bear to write. So I just filed the 80 Years Ago question away under a mental heading: stuff I’m curious about, but don’t have the time or energy to run down.
Five years, three funerals, one novel, and a couple of new wars later, I had just sent the manuscript for A Thread of Grace to Random House when I came across a reference to the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and I did the math: that’s the catastrophe of 80 years ago. In just a few days at a fancy hotel in Cairo, Winston Churchill, Lady Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and a handful of oil men carved up the Middle East. They invented Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Trans-Jordan – just drew lines on paper and gave these places names and made plans to install puppet governments.
We are still unwinding the damage done in that disastrous week in Cairo. Nearly all wars of the 20th century have their roots in European colonialism. Soldiers and civilians dying today in places like Iraq and Rwanda and Congo and East Timor and on and on – they are all casualties of the conflict that began in August of 1914.
One day, historians may look back call this another Hundred Years War. No end in sight, I’m afraid… "
