Korzeniowski (90S)

Authors use the material of life and transmute it. Writers are our modern alchemists. The rough, base lead of life becomes the gold of novels and short stories. In this transmutation, there is a distancing process. A man's wife dies. The pain is acute. Later, he writes of that bereavement: in a play, perhaps or a novel. The very act of writing, of distancing the pain, of loading it on to other shoulders, even if only ficitnal shoulders, is the man's way of dealing with a pain that otherwise would be intolerable. Or take another case ...' At the very heart of Korzeniowski is the process of writing. Out of an incident of murder and escape, Joseph Conrad writes 'The Secret Sharer', a tale of friendship triumphant. As important as what is in his story is what Conrad (Korzeniowski) leaves out: homoerotic desire and the exclusion of the foreigner. Why? With flash-backs, letters, consultations and dramatic reconstructions, James Lansbury has wrtten a brilliant first novel in which the quest for Conrad's identity becomes an investigation into the nature of literary truth.