‘It leaves out the great romance of construction…It leaves out all the affirmative and life sustaining force that in the greatest modernists is always interwoven with assault and revolt: the erotic joy, natural beauty and human tenderness in D.H. Lawrence, always locked in mortal embrace with his nihilistic rage and despair; the figures in Picasso’s Guernica, struggling to keep life itself alive even as they shriek their death; the triumphant last choruses of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; Alyosha Karamazov, in the midst of chaos and anguish, kissing and embracing the earth; Molly Bloom bringing the archetypal modernist book to an end with “yes I said yes I will Yes.”’

- M.Berman