PanFull StopWritten at twenty-two years old while in Burma amidst his military service during the Second World War, Williams’s initial foray into writing strongly bears the traces of the hastened first attempt, the labor of its composition highly evident in its overwrought attempts at a weighty existentialism. The novel takes place in the course of a single day (this very schema recalling the twin pinnacles of high modernism with which this work will disharmoniously resonate) ... The novel’s highpoint comes in its first pages...a brief moment wherein the novel’s evocation of psychological horror lands ... narrative departures (often provided via vivid flashbacks) become weakened through their inability to flesh out a character who is not only horrid but also impossibly flat ... Nothing but the Night exists as little more than a curio on the shelf, a novel that shares only an author’s name in common with Williams’s mature works he would go on to produce.
Alfred Döblin, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
RaveFull Stop\"The great successes of the novel really come from its embrace of formal experimentation, when that technique of montage cuts the reader away from the narrative and characters it has placed at its center and shows us the briefest moments of a helplessly entangled world. These little scenes showcase Döblin’s ability to elucidate the fine details of individual desperation meeting with cosmic cruelty.\
