Perhaps only new countries can have a real past, peopled with genuine ghosts and filled with authentic records. Or it is countries other than one's own that are so endowed? Any place that peoples the mind and compels the imagination is not likely to be our own: that past and place are founded, for our own self-preservation, on some variety of Larkin's 'forgotten boredom'. And only the best writers can deliberately reveal their own past as a foreign country, where things are differently done.

LRB 12 January 1995 | PDF Download