RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was raised and lives in Tasmania.

His new book, “Question 7” (Knopf, $28), takes its title from a metaphysical puzzle posed in a short story by Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

“Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave Station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach Station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach Station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

Chekhov’s point is that the writer’s job is to ask the deepest questions without purporting to answer them.

In a family memoir that weaves together the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the development of the atom bomb, and his father’s internment as a Japanese POW, some of the questions Flanagan asks include: Who owns the truth? Is there a final accounting? If there’s no one left to remember that a particular incident happened — the brutal torture inflicted by a group of camp guards; the incineration of a city and its people — does that mean the incident never happened?

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.