(Oliver Serang is an American lecturer at Universität Bremen and a research scientist at Thermo Fisher in Germany, where he swims in the river during snowstorms. He has published papers on computational biology algorithms and is the author of the novel Stay Close, Little Ghost. He can be found at colorfulengineering.org.
In this discussion, I talk with Mattias Frånberg about several aspects of my novel Stay Close, Little Ghost, including the following:
-Magical realism in modern urban life: the anonymity and mystery of getting lost in a forest made of concrete
-Modern morality, magical thinking, and how we act when we are unseen by others
-The choice of an unreliable first-person narrator to blur the line between fantasy and reality
-The book's nod to Swan Lake and its relation to the madonna-whore complex and objective evaluations of our romantic partners
-The use of mathematics as a proxy for art, the quest for P=NP and how the two parallel the black swan Odile and the seductive but misguided thirst for objective perfection
-The economics of relationships, the "stable marriage problem", and balancing the universal desire to be loved with our evolutionary instinct to shop for partners
-The place for idealism in the online dating era, the narrator's dilemma of whether to offer his clean hand or his burned hand, and whether genuine honesty is possible in a relationship
Interlocutor Mattias Frånberg is a PhD candidate at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden and guitarist for the band Rage Invest.
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