Figes, Eva - Jonathan Raban
JONATHAN RABAN
Konek Landing is a political novel …, a dun-coloured, 'serious', semi-experimental fiction which happens in an unnamed country, a Europe of frontier guards and barbed wire, of cheap boarding houses, police visits, borrowed clothes—a grim, rain-washed, industrial landscape. Stefan Konek, a stateless citizen and an orphan to boot, wanders through this world of Kafka crossed with Beckett in an endless series of interior monologues, fragmentary encounters and gloomy nightmares. I found it monotonous and often incomprehensible, a novel whose difficult surface seems unjustified by any fundamental complexity of conception. Even the language of the book appears to have died of undernourishment in this European wasteland.
Jonathan Raban, "Family Scrapbook," in New Statesman, Vol. 78, No. 2008, September 5, 1969, p. 315.∗
[The entire page is 134 words long]
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