George Steiner sets his new novella, Proofs, in 1989, during the series of revolutions that toppled Communist regimes all over Eastern Europe. In this way he gives the appearance of confronting historical material that is recent, ongoing, immediate. But in fact the greater part of Proofs merely retreads the same ground that Steiner has obsessively haunted for over thirty years. Western culture, humanity and barbarism, classical learning, the dead hand of spreading “Americanism,” the importance accorded to art in Marxist thought, and above all the holocaust: these subjects have preoccupied Steiner continuously since he began his writing career in the late Fifties, and Proofs, like the trio of stories bound with it, adds little to his previous reflections.

It is a simple tale. The hero, never named (though called “Professore” by his friends), is an obscure and aging proofreader in a provincial Italian city. He is forced to accept the inevitability of two disasters: the political collapse of the Marxist ideals to which he has faithfully adhered throughout his life, and the concurrent loss of his eyesight—a loss which will mean the end of his career, a career that in its modest way has been triumphant, for he has never been known to make an error. It should be obvious from this short sketch that the hero is an uncomplicated man, one who has dedicated his life to a belief in the existence of absolute truth and untruth. The proofreader’s conviction has made his potentially dull