The Broadview Reader Book

The word here is "idiosyncratic". It describes a great and unique mind.

This book was often hard to understand because I do not know the history of the region in which Mr. M's mind seems always to have been firmly based. It was also often hard to understand because of the density of Mr. M's thinking. However, when he spoke about writing and his way of writing and about other writers, I was drawn in thoroughly.

The transcript of the interview about Dostoevsky and Swedenborg was fascinating, from the point of view of Mr. M's approach and research and from the comments he makes about Dostoevsky and his novels. Also, Mr. M also takes me to a place I know virtually nothing about (Eastern Europe, or, more precisely, to Poland and to Lithuania, that little country to the northeast). He brings to life a whole world of his childhood and youth, most or all of which has disappeared, apart from landscape. In this sense, the essays are often a magic carpet guided by a sorrowful and often angry, opinionated genie.

Check out the transcript of "An Interview with C.M." by Rachel Berghash, for what seems an intuitive proof of God's existence, based on imagination of the reality of past times --- at page 147 in my edition. This was new to me.

Although I often do not understand Mr. M and sometimes think he accepts and believes only his view of the world, I cannot question his authority to speak. This is a hard book, but worth at least a look into some of the essays, etc.