“If you know of Yanis Varoufakis, you know him as the economist and Greek finance minister whose nuanced analyses of the crisis of 2008 became perhaps the defining voice among left-wing critics of global finance. If you don’t know who he is, it’s never too late to get to know him – and conveniently Yanis’s most recent works are also his most accessible.”
Following 2017’s Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism is 2020’s Another Now: Dispatches From an Alternative Present. Where Talking to My Daughter was, well, exactly what it says on the tin, Another Now is Varoufakis’s first adventure in fiction. Future technology causes a rip between universes, giving our heroes Costa, Iris and Eva a glimpse at what their lives could have been, had the crisis of 2008 gone a bit differently.
We spoke ahead of Yanis’s online talk for Sheffield’s Festival of Debate on 7 May.
What prompted you to jump genres in this way?
For decades, I was avoiding writing a book by which to answer the question, ‘Well mate, if you don’t like capitalism, what’s the alternative?’ I was avoiding that question like the plague, because it’s just so hard to indulge oneself in writing a modern utopia. Yet another utopic book.
But at the same time I felt the need to answer the question, because we tried Marx’s way. Marx never spoke about communism. He declared himself a communist, and spent all his life describing capitalism, but he never ever, not once did he describe communism. When he was pushed remorselessly, he came up with a nice slogan, which was “from each according