There is thus a radical difference between The Sleepwalkers and the other great twentieth-century “frescoes” (those of Proust, Musil, Thomas Mann, etc.): In Broch, it is continuity neither of action nor of biography (a character’s or family’s) that provides the unity of the whole. It is something else, something hidden: the continuity of one theme (that of man facing the process of disintegration of values).

He also knows that the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterised (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge. So in Broch’s perspective, the word “polyhistorical” means: marshalling all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate “what only the novel can discover”: man’s being.

C.S..: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is made up of seven parts. If you had treated them less elliptically you could have written seven separate full-length novels.

M.K.: But if I had written seven separate novels, I’d have no hope of “encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world” in one single book. This is why I see the art of ellipsis as crucial. It insists that we go directly to the heart of things.

M.K.: I’ve always constructed them on two levels: on the first, I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes. The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat.

I even used to think that the form that obsessed me was some sort of algebraic definition of my own personality, but one day several years ago, as I was studying Beethoven’s Quartet 131, I had to give up that narcissistic and subjective conception of the form. Look:

First movement: slow; fugue form; approximately 7:30 minutes
Second movement: fast; unclassifiable form; 3:30
Third movement: slow; exposition of a single theme; 1:00
Fourth movement: slow and fast; theme and variations; 14:00
Fifth movement: very fast; scherzo; 5:30
Sixth movement: very slow; exposition of a single theme; 2:00
Seventh movement: fast; sonata form; 6:30

Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movement, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on)