Montano is not an apocalyptic novel, it is not an elegy, it has none of the facile gloom of those who warn of the end of books and lend a helping hand in the closing of the libraries. Montano is an intelligent and joyful paean that proclaims not the demise, but the survival of literature. In the last paragraph, the narrator bids Montano farewell and then meets Robert Musil, the author of the never-completed masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, standing next to an abyss. Though Musil’s cities were mainly Berlin and Vienna, it was Prague that was for him emblematic of literary life, and it was the Prague periodicals Prager Presse and Bohemia that published many of his writings. Prague stood for literature itself. ‘It is the air of the time, the spirit is threatened,’ the narrator says to him. The long-dead author looks towards the horizon and declares:

Prague is untouchable, it’s a magic circle, Prague has always been too much for them. And it always will be.
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