Interview with Fflur Dafydd - Y Llyfrgell (The Library)

"Y Llyfrgell tells a story, and tells it very well indeed, but there is so much more to it than a mere story. It is multi-layered, and gives the wide-awake reader much food for thought and discussion. It has to do with the death of the book in a digital age, with feminism and political correctness, with the relationship between pure literature and literary criticism, with memory in all its aspects, and much more. Yet it does all this by means of a story which captivates the imagination of the least academic of readers. "


http://www.transcript-review.org/en/issue/transcript-34-science-fiction-and-political-fantasy/interview-fflur-dafydd/more-about-the-novel

"It’s a book very much satirising the behaviour of a minority – I believe that Welsh-language society will still be fundamentally the same – absurd, hilarious, parochial, tenacious, bizarre and wonderful – even with all the technological advances in the world. Whether we move backwards or forwards is irrelevant: we will never escape who we are. But the frontier is important on a creative level – because it also allows for the little incongruities which remind us that this isn’t a completely ‘real’ world - the strangeness of the twins, the behavioural traits of the Head Librarian and the porters, Dan careering along the red carpet with an overweight cook and an albino kitchen-hand as his only back-up, Eben’s quest through the bowels of the library on his hands and knees – all these little things suggest a world that is essentially other. "


http://www.transcript-review.org/en/issue/transcript-34-science-fiction-and-political-fantasy/interview-fflur-dafydd