My Babbling Brain

Novels are implicitly pluralistic.

In The Curtain, Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part “the magic curtain, woven of legends,” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. If Cervantes rent the curtain that separate us from the prose of the ordinary life, Kafka tore it down. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could “never correspond to people’s idea of it;” from now on, the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

One of the great virtues of the novel, according to J M Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty.

As novelists know well, fantasies generate realities. Mario Vargas Losa

An article in Prospect by Jonathan Ree