The inauthentic life of Emma Bovary, the ruthless ambition of Lucien Sorel, the loss of meaning felt by Hamlet, the ideological unyieldingness of Brand. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann points out in an essay how the literature of our own time strikingly comprises no such names. Don DeLillo is one of the best novelists of our time, yet how many recall even a single name among his many characters? Bachmann writes that Thomas Mann was the last great conjurer of names:
