The Books Interview — Anna Funder  The Stasiland writer on her
latest book, All That I Am and the extraodinary histor  Your
first book, Stasiland, was non-fiction. Did you always intend
your second to be a novel? I started writing Stasiland as a
novel. The fundamental thing about writing a novel is to create
a believable world and then to have people in it living
believable emotional lives.At a technical level, it didn't seem
possible to do justice to a world in which the [East German]
secret police would break into your flat and steal your dirty
underwear in order to have a smell sample to train a dog to
follow you. All the details of the organisational perfidy were
not credible and I would not have been able to put them in a
novel.  Conversely, presumably there are things you can do in a
novel that you can't do in ordinary discursive prose? Yes.
Despite all our civilised efforts and our best intentions, we
don't understand things first rationally. I think we understand
things best and most clearly on an emo