Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
The World's Last Novel
By John Banville
The Executor: A Comedy of Letters
by Michael Krüger, translated from the German by John Hargraves
Harcourt, 180 pp., $23.00
The question of literary borrowing is a vexed one, to the point that academe had to invent a fancier name and call it intertextuality. Walter Benjamin famously longed to write a book consisting entirely of quotations from the works of others, and almost achieved that ambition in The Arcades Project, his gigantic study of Paris in the nineteenth century, though the thing is probably too much of a ragbag to be considered a book in any proper sense. But at what point does petty pilfering become indictable plagiarism? As lofty an arbiter as T.S. Eliot was blithely tolerant in the matter, remarking that 'immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'
Review, 2395 words
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