{"id":14350,"date":"2021-03-22T20:23:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T00:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=14350"},"modified":"2021-03-22T20:23:16","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T00:23:16","slug":"episode-426-laura-lindstedt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-426-laura-lindstedt","title":{"rendered":"Episode 426 – Laura Lindstedt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 426:
\nLaura Lindstedt<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_426_-_Laura_Lindstedt.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“I’m very aware that I see the world through a woman’s eyes and experiences. I think that all my novels do have female main characters and themes that can be considered feminist. There’s something that comes from my femininity into the writing, but it’s not without ambiguity.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Finnish novelist Laura Lindstedt<\/a> joins the show to celebrate the US publication of My Friend Natalia<\/a> (Liveright, tr. David Hackston). We get into the challenges of translating a novel that’s all about the therapy sessions of an extremely literate and hypersexual patient, how the therapist’s method parallels Laura’s writing process, and my meta-theory of who’s actually narrating this amazing novel. We also talk about the influence of Nathalie Sarraute<\/a>‘s poetics and the literary notion of Tropism (physical reaction of natural world), Helsinki’s book-life and how it’s changed in recent years, the joy of playing with the Finnish language and its etymologies, and the notion of gendered writing and why Laura chose to keep the narrator non-gendered (and why that made the audiobook a challenge). Plus, I get to founder over Finnish names, and Laura tells us the place she really<\/em> wants to visit when we’re post-pandemic. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read My Friend Natalia<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“The layering therapy in the novel is based on artistic creation. It is parallel to writing itself. For my writing, I don’t have a plot line when I start. I don’t think of the work or characters at the beginning. I just start to write and the fictional world opens up little by little to me.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n