Tom McCarthy, “Kafka and the Crash of the System: An Interview with Tom McCarthy” by Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire 26 February 2015

In a way, all of my books are about this kind of quest for the now, to close down the buffer zone of consciousness and self-awareness and irony or language or whatever. Just to close that down and occupy “the now” — which is an impossible or unrealizable fantasy. I guess that’s what Present Tense Anthropology ™ would be. But U. never achieves it. All he ever achieves is buffering. That space of delay and separation. . . . Nothing is less contemporary than contemporary art or fiction. Than art that has something to say about the now. I think the whole point of the now is that it’s precisely what we can’t articulate.