including some of the worst moments history has known, like the Shoah, should not blind us to our bright moments.
Jonathan Mills We have time to take a few questions from the floor.
Joséph Grima Thank you. My question concerns the idea of complexity. A narrative, of course, is something that induces simplification or, as Alice pointed out, the trivialisation of a certain kind of diversity of the European condition, when that is perhaps the greatest thing Europe has to offer. My question is: how can storytelling, as in the new narrative, preserve the extraordinary wealth of paradoxes that is Europe?
Elif Shafak It’s a nice question, which suggest that, instead of saying ‘new narrative’ perhaps we should be saying narratives, plural, since there isn’t going to be a single discourse, a single angle. However, I think stories play an essential, and not a simplifying,
role. At their best, stories don’t simplify: they show us what it means to put ourselves in the shoes of another; they do give us the space to imagine being someone else, being many characters. Many of my readers in Turkey are very homophobic and xenophobic; and yet I know that they connect with the gay character in the book and feel for the Jewish one. I have seen this happen over and over and over again.
Jonathan Mills Thank you. Next question.
Pier Luigi Sacco I am a cultural economist. It’s important to speak about actual capitals of culture. One such capital, Plovdiv, was recently nominated to pursue an important project on the social integration of the Roma people — a topic President Barroso touched on earlier. This is an incredible challenge, one made extremely difficult by the persistence of toxic narratives that characterise this community in entirely negative ways. Years of this are not easily undermined. The real problem is cultural, which is [why] I think it is very important to