The Dwarf

This novel is almost a holiday for misanthropes and people who hate humanity, seeking the sharpest and most unscrupulous forms to express their hatred for the world and their disgust with it. What prevents it from being a complete celebration is the too-obvious connection to fine literature and therefore the fact that it remains within certain boundaries. Otherwise, there is nothing better one could wish for. The narrator is a dwarf, who uses the saving “I” in his descriptions everywhere, so the author of the book cannot be accused of either sympathy or antipathy toward the storyteller he has invented. This simple shifting of responsibility seems to deprive the pictures he draws of the status of being something objective—yet the reader who sees in them something of their own and intends to read the book to the end quickly stops paying attention to the minor distortion introduced by the subjective voice of this character.

The point is not so much that the dwarf’s picture is convincingly real, but that after a certain time it becomes impersonal, existing separately from the author’s voice. When the ugliness of life itself and the blunt directness of its description become almost excessive, additional authorial reflections on the matter can no longer either worsen or ennoble it.