Arnon Grunberg

Fellow citizens

Totalitarian

I used the flight from Amsterdam to Lima (almost twelve hours) to sleep and to read Coetzee’s new novel (Diary of a Bad Year) in Dutch translation. (The book is not out in English yet.)
I’m almost done, but the reviews I read in Dutch newspapers seem to even more puzzling now than when I read them first.
Just one sentence from the excerpt the New York Review of Books published earlier this summer: “If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”