Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.
Teju ColeNot explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
Teju ColeBut a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
Teju ColeKilling a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.
Teju ColeThe strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.
Teju ColeYou know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.
Teju Cole