Status Updates From In Search of the Free Indiv...

We imagined freedom as a holiday, we walked along the streets and plazas chanting “Free-dom! Free-dom!” but had no idea what freedom was. I ask people I talked to: “How did you imagine freedom in the ’90s?” “We thought we would have the same kinds of stores they had in the West. There would be a lot of everything, no shortages.” No one imagined freedom as work.

Sometimes I am reproached because the people in my books are said to speak too beautifully. In love, and in contact with death, people always speak beautifully. At these moments they transcend their ordinary selves, they rise up on tiptoe. That is the kind of person I keep watch for. I look out for life, for people who have been shaken to the core by life.

It was never my goal to put together a collection of horror stories, to overwhelm. I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked: “How much of the human is there in a human being?” How can the human in this human being be protected? That’s the question I’m looking to answer. I collect the human spirit. You may say: it’s an ephemeral thing, too elusive. But art attempts to capture it. And every era has its own answers.

And-- the English portion of the book ends here.
Don't ask me why it's not fifty-fifty.