Edwin Frank > Quotes

“A term like modernism has the usefulness of any carrying case, but it is hopelessly overused by now: the endless academic arguments about whether it is a backpack or a steamer trunk, and what to fit in or leave behind, have come to seem like the interminable deliberations of someone determined never to get out the door.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“Moreau is a scientist and an artist, a colonialist handing down the law to “lesser breeds,” a man of God ministering to lost souls, a teacher drilling in lessons, a politician and a tyrant, a would-be God who, as it turns out, is about to lose control of his ugly Eden.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“She uses it to depict character but also to show what it is, she believes, to have character and indeed humanity—or, as in the case of some of her characters, not. These are what she means by “central things,” by contrast to the egotistic, eccentric performance of Joyce.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“In Kafka’s work, symbolism becomes the ongoing pursuit of a meaning that has always moved on. (The symbol, left behind, has been evacuated of meaning.)”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“Is the pursuit comic, tragic, pathetic, all of the above? But to try to define it is simply to engage in the same pursuit at another level. The pursuit is inescapable, and we are not even allowed to conclude that it is fruitless.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“That, some hundred years later, he has come to be taken for granted—and as something of a lightweight—at once reflects and fails to register the extraordinary impact this angry, ambitious, brilliantly innovative young man’s work would have, not only on the novel but in the new technologies of film and radio, whose transformative effects Wells was among the first to appreciate.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“He didn’t like his educated and equally high-strung son, who insisted on being served vegetarian meals, took no interest in the family’s fortunes, and had literary pretensions that kept him up all night and left him exhausted every day.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“The academic study of literature remains linked to university language departments, while our sentimental attachment to the novel draws on a sense of shared community. The novel, no matter how sophisticated, remains homey. No book is more densely located in language and place than Ulysses.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“Novels are based on convention, and such conventions like any conventions are open to change. Complacency can attach itself to this sort of radicalism quite as easily as it can to conservatism, and while Wells is not free of complacency, his best work, especially the early science fiction, is full of a sense of terrifying exposure. That is certainly the case with Moreau, and one of the reasons why it begets not only countless adaptations and spin-offs, such as Jurassic Park, but also helps to shape Heart of Darkness and Animal Farm.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“»So yes, Mann, Proust, and Joyce showed that the universal gesture was possible, though the nature of the gesture in their work remains deeply ambiguous. The books are crammed with real life, but they are also dream books, fantasies. They explore a range of ways of explaining the world and then retract them. They offer paths to freedom but are almost hermetically sealed; they speak for everyone, yet they are self-absorbed; they are new but also oddly archaic; they contain the whole of reality but are wholly devoted to art.«

– Edwin Frank: Stranger than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. - London : Fern Press, 2024. - Page 186”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction

“Civilization is just another form of cannibalism, the only law is the Darwinian imperative of species survival and things will not turn out well. Moving on, the Traveller arrives at the end of earthly time—and discovers a drowning beach prowled by massive predatory crustaceans under a dying sun. There is no trace of humanity, whatever that may have been.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“One Hundred Years of Solitude has a purity of conception and realization that sets it apart from world literature, however, and what gives the book its continuing appeal and power (what spared it from the whimsical and fantastical into which, miraculously, it does not slip) is its extraordinary musicality, the measured flow of its sentences, the intertwining of its returning and varying themes, a musicality that the book possesses and also explores, its people and situations appearing less as individuals or discrete events and more as themes to develop.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

“Wells and Gide are self-conscious writers and self-consciously activist writers: they have that in common.”
― Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel