In the New Yorker, Sophie Haigney bids farewell to the presence of landlines in literature, which have made important appearances in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, and more. “Uncertainty is invaluable in fiction,” Haigney writes. “It is often what makes reading a novel so pleasurable: the instability of the world that we enter; the sense that something is going to happen, though we do not know what; the promise that what we imagine might, in fact, unfold. The mechanics of this uncertainty have often required certain objects: the broken-down car, the doorbell, the unopened package. The landline telephone is perhaps the greatest of these objects.”
Image credit: Billy Brown
The post Landlines, as Seen in Nabakov, Kafka, and More appeared first on The Millions.
