sprawling, ideologically overpopulated, generically ambiguous, Demons—formerly translated as The Possessed—haunts me like a prophetic dream. The title

“I wrote the final chapters day and night in anguish and terrible uncertainty,” he reported to his niece. “I had two epileptic attacks, and I was ten days over deadline.”

the drama of Florence’s centuries-long repentance for having exiled their greatest poet in 1302,

Efes Pilsner,

a, where

The Way They Were,

so absurd as

Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always “what,” not “who.”

alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought