![]() ![]() The Marxist critic George Lukács once defined the novel as the epic of a world from which the gods have departed. ![]() I certainly remembered Voss as a powerful metaphor for the condition of modern man, but when I reread it I was surprised by its force and inevitability. A few years later I was somewhat disappointed by one or two of White’s other books and this must have tainted my recollection. I first read Voss about forty years ago and didn’t pick it up again until very recently. My own very personal candidate for canonization is the Australian writer Patrick White’s novel Voss. There were no such obvious milestones in the second half of the century – novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity’s Rainbow are still awaiting the ultimate judgement that only time can confer. The most important novels of the previous century, as far as I’m concerned, were written before the Second World War: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the works of Franz Kafka. ![]()
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