“I was struck by the fact that Babel’s words—identical to the words of the classics, to the words of other writers—were denser, more mature, and more vivid. Babel’s language shocked, or rather, captivated with an extraordinary freshness and concision. This man saw and heard life with such novelty that we were unable to… Yet no matter how real, sometimes naturalistic Babel’s heroes were, the entire setting and all the events he described—everything ‘babel-like’—were happening in a world slightly shifted, sometimes almost unbelievable, even anecdotal. From an anecdote, he knew how to make a masterpiece.”