Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers
they never believe the books to which they have dedicated their lives to have originated in some uncorrupted primordial form, some prelapsarian and unspoiled sublimity
on translators vs writers
This, in turn, inflames you, and you move on to cajoling, inveigling, wheedling, making use of every suasion in the synonymicon, making promises you can never fulfill
found themselves virtually alone high up in the rebarbative Caucasus
Of course, to be fully formed—to grow up—means to be tainted by this mode of communicating, as the narrator is in a catechism with her mother about their departure for another town
