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Writers put '68 under the spotlight at Prague festival
2008-06-01
A dozen international authors, including US novelist Paul Auster, Pakistani Tariq Ali, Canadian Margaret Atwood and Czech Ivan Klima, will evoke what 1968 meant for them at Prague's 18th writers' festival which opened on Sunday. "There are so many parallels between what happened then and today," stressed 61-year-old Auster in an interview with AFP on his arrival for the five-day festival. "I am the same, I think the same, I very much want justice and fairness in the sense that people are living together rather than in a society where every man is for himself," he added. And the writer who is due to publish his next novel, "Man in the Dark" in the autumn, lost no time in linking Iraq and the US's traumatic Vietnam war. "In the context of Iraq I still feel the same way I did back about Vietnam back in 1968, I still feel crazy, meaning, outraged infuriated, frustrated by the stupidity of our government's policies". Back in 1968, Auster was at Columbia University, taking part in massive student demonstrations, Ivan Klima headed an important literary review during the short-lived Prague Spring, and fellow festival participant Natalia Gorbanevskaya, protested in Moscow's Red Square on August 25 against the Soviet crushing of the Czechoslovak experiment with socialism. The audacious protest resulted in her internment in a psychiatric hospital. The writers' experiences will be shared in conferences, lectures and debates during the festival. "1968 is about ideas, freedom of expression, revolt against of bureaucracy, only uneducated people can say it was defeated, because you can not defeat ideas, you can only replace them," commented festival director Michael Marsh. Each year the Prague Writers' Festival, which was created in London before moving to Prague in 1991, unites authors from across the world, some hardly-known and others established literary stars, such as Salman Rushdie in 2001, Nadine Gordimer in 2004 or Michel Houllebecq in 2005. The 2008 event is dedicated to the theme of "Laughter and Forgetting," a reference to Czech author Milan Kundera's novel of the same name and for whom 1968 was also a critical moment. Kundera, who now lives in France, has refused public appearances for years.
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