I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.