Demanding the Impossible Read Online Free PDF Page B

cynical way, the proofs of our interesting times. And it is a very good effect of postmodern capitalism that everyone is given a chance.
    I don’t even agree with those who claim that postmodernism means Americanization. No, postmodernism means that even in a small nation everyone gets a chance. This is why in Europe some people are against globalization. I think that the big victims of globalization are not the United States or China, but second-level traditional powers like France or Germany. Nobody even speaks their languages today. All my French friends are furious because 40 years ago English was considered vulgar and the true international language was French. Now nobody speaks it. Even English is a loser. I read a wonderful text claiming that what we are talking now, this English, which is emerging as the world language, is some sort of strange language that is actually very different from what is spoken in traditional English-speaking countries. The English language itself will, as a result of its global dominance, become lost. Some of the English that is being spoken somewhere in a Chinese market may well be more real than what English farmers are talking.
    Do you know where I see good points here? Globalization is so amazing that I myself also even know about your Korean films. I even know that Taiwan films are now fashionable. Isn’t this wonderful? The domain that I like very much is the detective novel. My god, now you have them everywhere! Today, there are detective series taking place in Native American reservations in the US, in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, in Venice and Florence, in Iceland, in Brezhnev’s or Yeltsin’s Russia, even in today’s Tibet (James Pattison’s series with the Chinese police inspector exiled there for political reasons as a hero).
    In Sweden, of course: they are the kings of the detective novel there. Stieg Larsson is a special case; he’s not properly a detective novelist, but Henning Mankell definitely is. Mankell’s true achievement is that, among today’s writers, he is a unique artist of the parallax view . That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad and that of Maputo (the capital of Mozambique) – are irretrievably “out of sync,” so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the “truth” of the other. All we can ultimately do in today’s conditions is to remain faithful to this split as it stands and, in the absence of any common denominator, to record it.
    Let’s take an absurd case: Arnaldur Indriðason in Iceland. The whole country of Iceland has fewer than 300,000 inhabitants. Do you know how many copies of his latest detective novel sold in Iceland? 50,000 copies. It’s like the Bible – every family has one. And he’s selling hundreds of thousands in France, Germany, now also in English. Reykjavík City even offers a literary bus tour that focuses on the crime novels of Indriðason. Just like the Mankell tour in Ystad. This is the good side of postmodernism, for me. You couldn’t even imagine all this 40 years ago. We live in such interesting times, with great dangers, but also with hopes.
    And the rules are changing. It’s quite incredible to see the structure of Hollywood. Many foreign actors, directors, and cameramen are able to work there. For example, there, in Hollywood, are Miroslav Ondříček, a Czech cinematographer, and Vilmos Zsigmond, who is one of the most influential Hungarian-born cinematographers in history. The good thing about Hollywood is that, in contrast to what others think, it is much more open to the world. I also like Chinese mega spectacle films like Hero , House of the Flying Daggers , The Curse of the Golden Flower , and so on. The Chinese are now making better historical spectacle movies than the Americans. They are making the best.
    In a way, I like to see how things are really changing. I think, in the long term,