[...] the abysses in Krasznahorkai are bottomless and not logical. Krasznahorkai often deliberately obscures the referent, so that we have no idea what is motivating the fictions: reading him is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.

[...] "Which do you love more, your family or Albania?" Albania, of course, I told him. A family you can make overnight. You walk out of a coffee house, run into a woman on the corner, take her to a hotel, and boom--wife and children. But you can't make Albania overnight after a quick drink in a coffee house, can you? No, not in one night, and not in a thousand and one nights, either'. . .

Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs dread, the dread of nullity. For the book's persistent question is: If Adam Gordon were able to summon himself into authenticity, would there be anything to see? Are we in fact constituted by our inauthenticities? When Adam appears on a panel to discuss literature and politics, he has nothing to say, and trots out platitudes that he learns by heart, along with a quotation from Ortega y Gasset ('who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes'). [...]