Jonathan Safran Foer
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(Washington, 1977) is een van de meest invloedrijke en controversiële Amerikaanse schrijvers van dit moment. Hij debuteerde in 2002 met Everything is Illuminated (Alles is verlicht), een roman over het leven van zijn Oekraïense grootvader die de Holocaust overleefde. Foers tweede roman Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, (Extreem luid en ongelooflijk dichtbij, 2005), over de 9-jarige Oskar wiens vader omkwam bij de aanslag op het World Trade Centre, werd door The Times 'het werk van een genie' genoemd vanwege de originele schrijftechnieken en unieke presentatie met visuele elementen zoals plaatjes en kaartjes. Beide boeken zijn internationale bestsellers. In 2009 verscheen Eating Animals (Dieren eten), een boek waarin Foer het eetgedrag van mensen onder de loep neemt. Na de roman Here Am I (Hier ben ik, 2016), over een gezin in crisis, volgde in 2019 We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, waarin hij toont wat wij allen kunnen doen om klimaatverandering tegen te gaan.
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Archive available for: Jonathan Safran Foer
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Decisive rules
Whether literature offers solace or confusion, whether it shows the way or disorders, every writer must have been moved in the course of his or her life by a passage, a line, an image or a poem which gave direction to his or her life. Was it a boys' book? A text on a tile? A column? Or rather that highly valued, often quoted passage from world literature? Jonathan Safran Foer, Tash Aw, Ramsey Nasr, Joke van Leeuwen and Petina Gappah read those passages that changed their lives for good, and reveal what happened to them when they read those lines for the first time. The programme starts with a reading from his work by the Iranian author Shahriar Mandanipour.
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Rules or Confusion?
'The message is that you need borders and restrictions the experience freedom'. These are words of Jonathan Safran Foer (US) in a recent interview in a Dutch weekly. Foer, who opens the evening on rules and disorder, is like no other able to bring a story into existence from seemingly unrelated fragments. How does he do that? Is writing for him a way to create order in today's chaotic reality? What are his views on the idea that a writer should confuse the reader? Is this a misunderstanding from the past century that should be disposed of as soon as possible? Journalist Wim Brands talks to Foer about chaos and rules and about the social role that literature can play. Foers latest book, Eating Animals, on vegetarianism, suggests that Foer sees an important role for himself in this respect. In English
