Refugees

Fred Vargas talking to The Guardian's Nicholas Wroe in 2008:

"Rousseau was my first love when I was 15. He was so criticised at the time when compared to Voltaire, whom I never liked. But in the French language, his writing achieved the most beautiful music." Since the 1970s, Vargas argues, serious literature has regarded stories as "slightly silly", forcing them to become "refugees" in the crime novel. "It has been a literature of narcissism about 'me and my family', 'me and my problems', 'me and my lover'. I'm sick of it, especially as Proust did this perfectly all those years ago. But when he spoke of himself, he spoke of the whole world. Most writers today just speak of themselves. And Hemingway's language is precisely the opposite of Proust in that it feels rougher, and while Proust could deal with the infinite smallness of life, Hemingway has the infinite hugeness of it."