Taking a Long Look Quotes

“How many European novels of the 1950s have we read in which the reader finds oneself cast adrift on a tide of surreal-sounding prose because while the characters seem ordinary enough, the remove is disorienting: where are we? who is speaking? what are we to make of what is being said? Something stunned, dreamlike, permanently anesthetized in the narration. And then we realize: It’s the war that is haunting these pages. The war is the drain, the gap, the terrible lassitude at the heart of the writing.”
― Vivian Gornick, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time