Even if you would be new, they would like to feel that a name is already prepared for you in advance.... I hope that one day somebody will find a new name for me, not use the old ones."
Whatever else he was, however, above all Singer was a storyteller, one whose works earned him international critical acclaim, including the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. Commentators have likened his psychological examinations to those of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, his supernatural stories have earned comparisons with Nathaniel Hawthorne, his preoccupation with the puzzles of modern life recalls Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, while his sharp observations of everyday life are reminiscent of Anton Chekhov. For the most part, Singer's works dealt with crises of faith: having discarded their old traditions as inadequate to cope with modern society, his characters are engaged in a fruitless search for something to replace them. "Singer portrays men who are between faiths," Nili Wachtel explained in Judaism. "Having freed themselves from the bonds of God and community, they have also freed themselves from their very identities. With their God and their community, they knew who they were and what they were expected to do; now they know nothing as certain." "Again and again in his fiction Singer evokes the destruction of a community, the crumbling of a whole social edifice, because people, one way or another, have averted their faces from a truth they used to know," Michael Wood similarly observed in the New York Review of Books.
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