Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction, and in our novels and poems we sing our human complexity, our ability to be, simultaneously, both yes and no, both this and that, without feeling the slightest discomfort. The Arabic equivalent of the formula “once upon a time” is kan ma kan, which translates “It was so, it was not so.” This great paradox lies at the heart of all fiction. Fiction is precisely that place where things are both so and not so, where worlds exist in which we can profoundly believe
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