This story is quite a fragile piece, especially perhaps by modern standards, as you allude to. However, it is also exceptionally good(!) and makes you feel amazing after reading it. If a modern writer was lucky enough to have written it and then tried cutting away the intro and epilogue and then read it again and thought, well it’s not q…
This story is quite a fragile piece, especially perhaps by modern standards, as you allude to. However, it is also exceptionally good(!) and makes you feel amazing after reading it. If a modern writer was lucky enough to have written it and then tried cutting away the intro and epilogue and then read it again and thought, well it’s not quite so amazing now, you’d hope they might put them back.
It somehow brings to mind a conversation I once had with a friend who pointed out that if you read a paragraph or a page of Kafka, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were reading a great writer. I guess I mean by that: if you read the intro or epilogue of An Incident on their own you might think “Cut that!” But reading them in the story as a whole you might think they were just about as good as they could be?
This story is quite a fragile piece, especially perhaps by modern standards, as you allude to. However, it is also exceptionally good(!) and makes you feel amazing after reading it. If a modern writer was lucky enough to have written it and then tried cutting away the intro and epilogue and then read it again and thought, well it’s not quite so amazing now, you’d hope they might put them back.
It somehow brings to mind a conversation I once had with a friend who pointed out that if you read a paragraph or a page of Kafka, you wouldn’t necessarily know you were reading a great writer. I guess I mean by that: if you read the intro or epilogue of An Incident on their own you might think “Cut that!” But reading them in the story as a whole you might think they were just about as good as they could be?