Christina’s Reviews > The Art of the Novel > Status Update

'In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. Indeed, both the Land-Surveyor K. and the Prague engineer are but the shadows of their file cards; and they are even much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right exist as shadows.'

'Those of us who have experienced the totalitarian Communist version of the modern world know that these two attitudes - seemingly artificial, literary, exaggerated - are only too real... in the realm where one pole is the identification with power, to the point where the victim develops solidarity with his own executioner, and the other pole the nonacceptance of power through the refusal to take seriously anything.'

'...all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time—considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy—had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the European novel.'

'Well, I'll never tire of repeating: The novel's sole raison d'etre is to say what only the novel can say.'

'...life is a trap we've always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could desert from the army and start another life in a neighboring country. Suddenly, in our century, the world is closing around us.'

'The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.'