Volume 39, Number 18 · November 5, 1992
Answers Without Questions
By John Bayley
Mr. Mani
by A.B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin
Doubleday, 368 pp., $22.50
Katerina
by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M. Green
Random House, 212 pp., $18.00
There is a sense in which all novels are 'state of the nation' novels, because the state of the nation is what we have come to think of as our communal consciousness. As a form that instinctively wishes to claim authority the novel has become more and more absorbed in pronouncing on the changing nature of such consciousness. Nationalisms and local awarenesses now lie there close together, replacing in some degree the mass ideological consciousness once associated with fascism or communism.
Review, 3473 words
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