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← Back to all issuesGranta 6: A Literature for Politics
Winter 1982
This special, double issue of Granta is organized to fill a gap, a felt emptiness in current literary achievement. At a time when it is imperative that we have a literature and a language that are responsible, accountable and instrumental to the lives of we are having to lead – a literature that is an adversary of oppression and not an accomplice to it – we have instead a writing that is remarkable only for its dubious feats of technical virtuosity, its relentless self-referentiality and its deliberate retreat from experience. Granta 6 is dedicated to a different set of possibilities – the possibilities of political engagement.
From this Issue
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A Literature for Politics: Introduction
Bill Buford
‘‘A Literature for Politics' is dedicated to a different set of possibilities - the possibilities of political engagement.’
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Interviews of the Boys from the War
Daniel Kon
‘But you had to be on the islands to know what it was really all about.’
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The Joys of Journalists and Dictators
Andrew Graham-Yooll
‘The crowd then cheers the military. This, too, is a curious display. A few days earlier it had wished every uniformed man a cancer in his mother's liver.’
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Mrs Thatcher’s Religious Pilgrimage
Jeremy Seabrook & Trevor Blackwell
‘Mrs Thatcher's success is not only in her ability to plunder the chapel culture in which she was born - that fertile source of imagery and suasion - for she is also a story-teller to the nation, offering us easy and instant illustrations like those of the brightly coloured pop-up picture books of our childhood.’
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The Holocaust Reinterpreted: An Indictment of Israel
Boaz Evron
‘The Christian world does have a very bad conscience about the Jews, both because of past centuries and because it did indeed remain indifferent during the Nazi extermination...’
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The Wall
Jurek Becker
‘That afternoon a different soldier is standing at the gate. He calls out something that sounds dangerous.’
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Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori
‘For our kind it was impossible to fall in love with a Jewish girl. It meant being unfaithful to our flag.’
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The Transcripts of Eichmann Interrogated
Jochen von Lang & Claus Sybill
‘In the early period the Jewish problem wasn't the main thing. What interested us in Austria was work and bread, freedom and an end to servitude.’
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The Aesthetics of Resistance
Peter Weiss
‘His whole life, he had declared while still at work on this painting, was nothing less than a continual struggle against the backwardness of thought and the killing of art.’
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The Story of a Variation
Milan Kundera
‘I have often heard it said that the novel has already exhausted all its possibilities. I have the opposite impression: that in four hundred years of existence the novel has missed many of its opportunities: it has left many great opportunities unexploited, many roads forgotten, many calls unheard.’
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How to Read the Comics
Ariel Dorfman
‘Unlike the other comic strips in the magazine, ‘The Adventures of Mampato’ was conceived, illustrated, and entirely produced in Chile.’
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An Unfathomable Ship
Uwe Johnson
‘It is the name of an American ammunition ship which went aground in the summer of 1944; as a result the ship sank, since which time only the tips of its derricks and masts and a corner of the bridge are visible.’
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City of the Dead, City of the Living
Nadine Gordimer
‘While I'm ironing, he cleans the gun. I saw he needed another rag and I gave it to him.‘
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South of Nowhere
Antonio Lobo Antunes
‘If you and I were anteaters, instead of a man and a woman talking to each other in this corner of the bar, perhaps I would then be able to accustom myself to your silence.’
