Frankfurt, the financial hub of Europe, is home to one of the biggest stock exchanges in the world, where everything is about quick deals and quick money. It is home, too, to a book fair, which also happens to be one of the biggest in the world, and where everything, likewise, is about buying and selling, though the trade is in books—albeit only the newest ones, which appear in their hundreds of thousands each year. On the occasion of the fair, it is worth thinking about one of literature’s most important characteristics: its slowness.
I’m not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to us—and, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently.
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