Reimagined: A Celebration of Fiction’s Lifelong Call

Locked away at Oxford University to deliver the Weidenfeld Lectures at the tail end of the epidemic, the speaker chose to dedicate these talks to a lifelong passion: fiction. In the spirit of a battle card and echoing his admired Mario Vargas Llosa, who in The Truth of Lies writes to honor invented literary work, Translation of the World becomes a retrospective celebration of the art that left an imprint on the years: the art of storytelling. The cry is a shout of joy, even if its tone is backward-looking, for the reasons explained in the interview: fiction now faces dangers in a universe that once celebrated invention as a natural product of human dreaming, while even invention risks being surpassed by a climate of political correctness. The final insistence in favor of fiction also serves as an embrace of the ancestors, the writers who made invention joyful and enduring.

“Fiction is an attempt to inhabit the lives of others”

It also makes me want to do an interview with this book…

Hahaha. It is a homage to fiction, to reading fiction, and it also expresses concerns about what fiction should mean in today’s society. Cultural boundaries have shifted, raising questions about who may translate and who may write from different perspectives. A new cultural conversation invites us to consider the health of fiction. Stories matter; they have driven discoveries and social progress. There is a worry that this long discussion could be marred by prejudice this time around.

“Fiction is an attempt to inhabit the lives of others”

What impact does this phenomenon have on your generation or younger writers now?

There is a palpable hesitation to enter spaces that feel alien. Contemporary fiction often gauges originality as a mandatory standard. That scrutiny is useful on paper, but it should not close doors to exploration, to venturing into unfamiliar territory, researching it, and bringing back fresh perspectives. Rather than seeking permission for adventure, writers should focus on what they truly know while still pushing the boundaries of storytelling.

This is a reflection that frames the book. Your life seems inseparable from fiction.

The reflection grows from years connected to the pandemic era, especially through dialogue with American academia while teaching at Columbia. There, writing could feel subject to prior censorship, including the fear around novels about certain identities or voices. Fiction remains a moral imagination at work—an effort to live the lives of others, to deepen understanding without claiming total knowledge. The current cultural climate often challenges this openness, making the classic aim of imaginative freedom harder to sustain. Fiction is not merely entertainment; it is a tool for empathy and risk-taking in exploration of human experience. The core question is whether the practice can survive without dying to limitations imposed on it.

This certainly touches the quality of writing and reading itself.

Imagination travels best when it is allowed to wander. Limiting what can be explored may curb the reader’s appetite and dampen the writer’s courage. If one only writes what is already known, the thrill of discovery wanes. The impulse to write sprang from a wish to see more life than one human life could hold. The aim was to understand what it feels like to walk in another’s shoes, even if only through fiction. Readers might consider Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a landmark example of that instinct.

Either you write, or they write to you…

Yes. Humans move through fiction because reality alone often leaves us unsatisfied. Fiction becomes a space to enact our drama, to search beyond what is familiar, and to mend the gaps in what life offers. It remains the primary vehicle for exploring possibility and feeling a second life as if it were our own.

So, this book was born from this belief.

The Oxford lectures stem from that conviction, and the book that follows grows from the same ground. They ask what fiction delivers that other forms cannot. They acknowledge the sadness that questions the very act of inventing lives that do not exist, yet they defend fiction as an essential discipline: if fiction fades, humanity loses something vital. The work also examines a particular way of approaching the past to understand the inner lives of others, a path that only fiction can illuminate. The understanding of hidden human stories often rests on the imaginative realm that fiction provides, and that indispensable edge is the core of this exploration. The author searched for that essence within the book itself.

What answers were found to these questions?

To address worries without surrendering to a sense of a vanishing world, the answers were sought in the books that shaped the writer’s life. Masterworks by Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, and Latin American voices, along with Mario Vargas Llosa and Javier Marías, formed a guiding constellation. Being at Oxford provided a natural frame for the inquiry, suggesting that a broad library could support thoughtful conferences. The aim was clarity, not nostalgia, and to use literature as a living conversation rather than a static archive.

When you were fifty, you wrote a book reminiscent of The Truth of Lies, a work your mentor published decades earlier. Do these parallels feel meaningful or incidental?

The parallels matter because they mark a kind of literary lineage. Vargas Llosa stands as a constant reference, a name tied to the craft and to a long love of literature. The new book serves as a personal homage: a letter to the writers who shaped the writer’s sensibility, a nod to the moment when text and life intersect. Reading Vargas Llosa during youth shaped the understanding of what a life in letters could become, and the later work mirrors that ongoing conversation about the craft of the novel.

In this context, how does World Translation evolve with reading maturity?

Books reveal the reader’s evolution. The experience with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, illustrates a shift from youth to maturity. A book returns with new insight, reflecting changed loves, beliefs, and politics. Re-reading becomes a way to measure how much a person has grown, a form of pleasure built on discovering oneself anew through literature.

Which lie seduced you the most among all you read?

Perhaps the most seductive lie was the belief that one could live wholly inside a single crafted world. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at seventeen brought a sense that fiction could erase borders and swallow the world. That conviction was powerful and enticing, shaping subsequent reading and writing as if life itself could be rearranged by storytelling.

Which foreign book felt like a personal world you lived in?

To feel unburdened and transported, the reader returns to works like Speech in the Cathedral and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The immersion was intense: months spent with Joyce, chapter by chapter, learning the craft. The first trip to Dublin felt like stepping inside the book, a sensation of living inside a literary city itself.

You argue that the ongoing pull of novels lies in the fascination they ignite, a reason to continue writing and reading.

That is the core reason for this book. It is a note to readers who still see literature as a meeting ground for humanity in a world that sometimes seems less human and more self-absorbed. Literature resists narcissism and invites curiosity about others. As long as those traits endure, fiction will endure as well. If fictional writing dwindles, it may reflect a broader erosion of shared humanity. This is not a distant possibility but a real one to consider.

Long live fiction.

Exactly the same. Long live fiction!