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Martin Amis, interviewed in today’s WSJ:

Modernity produces its own share of irrational behavior, Mr. Amis believes, and in “House of Meetings” he touches upon the prison fashion, body-cutting and anorexia of prosperous American youths. They are a ghostly echo, he suggests, of the horrors of past centuries–of the gulag, for instance, where one didn’t have a choice about being starved or wounded. Divorce, he says, is another way in which we do to ourselves what wars and slave labor camps once did–it separates men from their women and children. He theorizes that it is a way of “punishing yourself for your privilege, for not having had to endure the sufferings of history. It’s the numbness of advanced democracy and the market state.”

I’m going to have to start reading this guy.