“In a recent interview about Jane Austen, Fran Lebowitz said that great art is ‘not a mirror, it’s a door.’ Mediocre art is a mirror, and either you get it or you don’t, either you relate to it or you don’t. … But your own country’s mediocre, mirror-like writing is going to hold more appeal than, say, France’s. (The Greats, the doors, the Tolstoys and Kafkas and Flauberts don’t even enter the conversation of translated literature.)”