Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing: An Unlikely Comedy Set in the Collapse of The Third Reich
A new edition from New York Review Books makes Anthea Bell’s translation of All for Nothing — the final novel by the acclaimed German writer Walter Kempowski — available to US readers. Can the book redeem the art of monsters? Or does it fall short?
Oscar Mardell reviews All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski.
The Death of “the Death of”
If we truly are witnessing the novel in its death throes, it is but one casualty among many in an accelerating age of cognitive stratification, increased specialization, fish tank communities, and proliferating aesthetic niches. The internet has made so much of this possible, and it’s hard not to see every art form going the same way. No taste is triumphant anymore. This is to say that the mainstream is itself in peril as much as the domination of any narrative art within it. Indeed, the very notion of a mainstream seems to be perishing in overproduction and disaffection with the cultural gatekeepers.
Jared Marcel Pollen on the death of the mainstream.