Leonard Krishtalka at MENSA annual meeting at Crown Center
July 3
• July 3-5 MENSA annual meeting at Crown Center, KC, Kris is giving a 45 minute presentation.
Novels should excavate the layers of the human condition. Many are disquieting. Tribalism: a grim social compulsion coded by the evolutionary ghosts in our genetic machine. The dark dualism of the Enlightenment: when anthropology, in its original sin, birthed, blessed, and broadcast bigotry throughout culture––literature, politics, news media, museums, zoos.
Yet other layers are hopeful and humbling: the realization that Homo sapiens is not at the center of anything––not space, not life, not kind.
In excavating these layers, art and science are our subversive acts, subversive story-telling, the risky search for uncomfortable truth. They chart the fault lines, the fate lines, in human history and human affairs, for which the hard-boiled mystery novel, as incongruous as it may seem, is the perfect map. As the detective says in one of my novels, “we’re alike … journalists, archeologists, private eyes … we dig up what history tries to bury.”
