Central Europe’s Proust

Adam Thirwell writes that despite all the geographical accidents to have befallen Central Europe, a cogent literature can still be defined and it turns out to be of very high quality. “This is what these Central European works can help invent: a true method for reading internationally, where the old ideas of form and content are replaced by messier concepts — junk, or kitsch, or defeat…Everyone, always, is living in central Europe.”