Tigana Afterword and more

Начало книги

Tigana is in good part a novel about memory: the necessity of it, in cultural terms, and the dangers that come when it is too intense. Scelto's decision at the end of the novel is a reflection of that, and so is the George Seferis passage that served as one of my epigraphs. The world today offers more than enough examples of both pitfalls: ignorance of history and its lessons, and the refusal to let the past be past.

So, accepting that this is precarious terrain — an author's memories of a book about remembering — what does that imply, more than a decade after the writing?

Well, one might consider caution as a byword.

I doubt there's any other novel I've written for which I'd even attempt a reconstruction of the earliest seeds of the book. But Tigana happens to have had a number of quite specific and very powerful elements in its origin, and some of these I can (or I have persuaded myself that I can) reconstruct.

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