Volume 30, Number 15 · October 13, 1983
No Exit
By Irving Howe
A Minor Apocalypse
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 231 pp., $16.95
So speaks a character in A Minor Apocalypse, first published in Poland four years ago; so might speak a character in almost any other novel coming out of Eastern Europe. Despair is built into the literatures of that part of the world, but since despair, at least of a collective or national kind, cannot be sustained for very long, the question facing both the people and the writers is: What next? We know part of the answer. Most people burrow into privacy, improvising a mixture of withdrawal, opportunism, and small resistance, and hoping, in fundamentally hopeless circumstances, to keep themselves from being eaten away by 'indifference, apathy, chaos.'
Review, 1416 words
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