Richard Flanagan: "The doctor told me I had a year left before I lost my mind."

BarcelonaStrong gusts of wind shake the trees visible through the window of Richard Flanagan's office. The Australian writer reports to the ARA from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, where he was born in 1961, grew up, and still lives. Tasmania is the backdrop for his latest book, Question 7 (Periscopio / Asteroide; Catalan translation by Míriam Cano), a skillful blend of memoir, historical and literary essay, and travel book. Starting with a visit by the author to the Japanese labor camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II, Flanagan not only reconstructs his life but also recalls the literary origins of the atomic bomb—it was first imagined by the visionary H.G. Wells—and denounces the colonial past that ended island nature, leading to a present in which there is perhaps no turning back.

Question 7 It seemed to me like a book of lost worlds: that of his childhood, that of his parents, that of certain Tasmanian fauna and vegetation...

— The world I grew up in is now history. The familiar world and the world outside the home. The island of Tasmania had a unique ecology. There were species of animals and plants that had become extinct across the planet and still survived here. I've always felt that Tasmania had enormous wealth in this regard.

Has this wealth been diminishing?

— These resilient species have also been becoming extinct. It's a process driven by several reasons, but the most important of all is what I call the silent revolution, which has occurred especially in the last 30 years. We have allowed, without raising our voices, the planet to undergo profound and violent changes. I thought I would write a book like Question 7 to put this issue on the table. The revolutionaries who have ruined our world aren't as charismatic as Mao, Lenin, or Khomeini: they're the faceless owners of large corporations, economists, politicians, some journalists... The list is long, and none of these figures are memorable, but they've brought us the destruction of the Earth as it was four years ago.

He speaks as if he had written a denunciation essay, but the tone of Question 7 I found it rather elegiac. Do you agree?

— I write about a lost world and the mindset of some of the people who lived there. The island I grew up on had a tragic past. My parents, who were ordinary people, had to respond to the horror of history, and they did so by clinging to love, which gave their lives meaning. They struggled to impose love on the disaster that surrounded them, until it became their reality. The more I think about my parents, who died almost a hundred years old, the more I believe they are a way of not losing hope in our world. The news tells us there is a lot of misfortune, but if you look at reality on a small scale, you see a lot of kindness and love. There are reasons to hold on to hope—an imperfect hope, yes... but a hope that has a reason to exist.

The book starts from a question that Chekhov posed in a story from his youth.

— He's one of my favorite writers. I've been reading him for over thirty years. In a little-known short story from his youth, after posing several mathematical problems, he utters a mysterious phrase that we can ponder for a lifetime without finding an answer: "Who loves longer, a man or a woman?"

What made you want to condense all these vital lessons into a book? He wrote Question 7 between 2022 and 2023, when he was 61 years old.

— I had been thinking about it for years, but the catalyst for Question 7 I was diagnosed with early dementia. The doctor told me I had a year left before I lost my mind. I began writing the book frantically, against the clock.

Was it then supposed to be a kind of literary testament?

— I was convinced that this was the last thing I would ever write. I wrote the first version of Question 7 in just eleven months. Then I sent it to the editor I've worked with for the past thirty years. I needed her to read it as soon as possible, because I wasn't sure my brain wasn't disintegrating. I wrote the book in a very strange state of mind. The first thing I asked my editor when she finished it was: Does it show any signs of my cognitive decline? She laughed.

I imagine you didn't find it very funny.

— I was perplexed because he'd really liked the book, but I thought I had four days left before I started re-reading. A few weeks later, I had an appointment with my neurologist. She told me there had been an error in the MRI I'd had the previous year. It turned out I didn't have dementia.

How did he react?

— People close to me told me I should have been really pissed off, but I was actually grateful because I was no longer living in a perpetual countdown. My brain was still the same as always... just as bad, I guess! [laughs] On top of that, I got out of that whole ordeal. Question 7What more could I ask for?

The first chapter of the book takes us back to 2012. When her parents were still alive, she traveled to the former Ohama labor camp in Japan. There was no physical trace of that camp left, and most people didn't remember anything. Her father hadn't spoken to her much either, had he?

— He spoke about it in a way I wouldn't have intended. Over the years, I've realized that, for him, memory was more an act of creation than a testament. What he remembered wasn't a lie, but his own personal truth, and as time passed, he forgot the violence he had suffered, first collaborating in the construction of the Death Railway and later in the camp. He preferred to remember the solidarity the prisoners showed one another.

You wanted to find some of the camp guards who had used violence against the prisoners and talk to them. Why?

— My intention was to speak to see where evil is born and how crimes like this could have been committed.

In Question 7 reconstructs his encounter with one of the wildest vigilantes, Lee Hak-Rae, who during the war had used the name Kakurai Hiromura.

— At the end of the war, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and shortly after, when a general amnesty was declared, he was released.

He describes him as an "old, dignified, kind and generous" man.

— Whatever was in the room where he and I were, it didn't have the appearance of evil. What I heard with him was a profound sadness as a human being. If you look at your enemy for long enough, you end up seeing yourself. In crimes like those of war, it's impossible for justice to be done. The only thing you can hope for is that they never happen again. That's why we must be alert to those messages that denigrate some groups with the argument that they don't deserve as many rights as the rest of the citizens. The horror of Auschwitz, of what's happening in Gaza, of the death railway, and of the labor camp where my father was imprisoned didn't begin with the first shot or the first punch, but with the people who propagated harmful ideas. They exist in every society, and we must identify them and be ashamed of them, because it's these people who ultimately make the spread of evil possible.

Upon his return from Japan, he did not explain to his father the truth about his meeting with Lee Hak-Rae.

— I didn't want to tell him that he'd given me the equivalent of $20 to get forgiveness. I knew this would have hurt him deeply.

He didn't tell you what he asked you for either, did he?

— No. I asked my father's torturer to slap me three times. He denied that he had ever acted violently against prisoners. I wanted to prove he was lying. I insisted that he accept the proposal: the Japanese had a technique of delivering very rapid bursts of slaps called bintaWhen he agreed to hit me, the way he braced himself—stretching his arm, closing his hand, and twisting his torso to hit me with maximum force—showed practice. Even though he was over 90 years old, Lee Hak-Rae still had a vivid memory of how to slap someone.

In the book, he explains what he felt when he hit him. And what happened next?

— I felt something similar to what prisoners must hear, because after receiving one blow, they had to accept the next blow without turning around. When he had delivered the third slap, I noticed the room start to shake. At first, I thought it was me, but then I noticed that in the room where we were, the office of the taxi company the man and his son owned in Tokyo, the cabinets were shaking and some were even toppling over. Lee Hak-Rae looked at me in a state of panic, because he thought what was happening had something to do with what he had just done to me. But no: it was a magnitude 7.2 earthquake on the Richter scale.

Question 7 Remember that without the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese would not have surrendered, and your father would have died in the labor camp. Therefore, you would never have existed.

— Life is a collection of very strange coincidences, such as those I explain in relation to the development of atomic energy.

He says it was a writer, not a scientist, who first foresaw its destructive power.

— Yes. It was H.G. Wells in a little-known but highly influential novel from 1914, The liberated worldYears later, the Hungarian physicist Leon Szilárd was inspired by Wells when he developed his ideas on nuclear physics, which were essential to the Manhattan Project, although Szilárd was strongly opposed to the use of the bomb. He even wrote a letter to the President of the United States to warn him of the dangers of using the atomic bomb, but he failed...

He has written Question 7 in Tasmania, like most of his books. Here he explores how the colonizers transformed the island in collusion with some of its inhabitants. I thought he avoided presenting the survivors as victims, as when he talks about his father's time in the labor camp.

— My book isn't written from the perspective of a victim. It's easy to fall into the fallacy of victimhood. If you define yourself based on your victimhood, you're denying yourself full humanity and, on top of that, assuming a position of moral superiority over others. Furthermore, in many cases, you increase the possibility of further crimes being committed, because by victimizing yourself, you in turn raise the possibility of revenge. Victimhood seems to me to be a very dangerous passion. Every human being is both the victim and the executioner. They're the aggressor and the victim. They're the murderer and the murdered corpse. But they're also the lover, the son, the brother... We're fortunate to carry all these possibilities within us. And we turn to art to realize that both goodness and evil can be born in any of us.