The fear among ordinary Vietnamese — murmured, not openly spoken — is that General Giap's death signals the final disappearance of moral decency for decades to come.
Boulouque, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, "the dark side of the soul".
"When the disappearances began Lukashenko crossed a moral line," says Mrs Krasovskaya, who has since fled to the United States with her two daughters.
So should the disappearance of denominations be counted a moral success?
The problem in America is the slow disappearance of the sort of strong moral guidance for children, especially for boys, that teaches restraint, honor and responsibility.
The disappearance of the idle rich deprived the socialists of another moral weapon.
My feeling about the disappearance of such places is not based on nostalgia or a moral aversion to the dominance of money in New York.
As they become embroiled in a lethal turf war between drug lords, the narrator, Gringo, probes the mystery of his mother's disappearance, and that of his cousin a reformed gangster turned pavement hawker.Gringo, torn between moral scruples and the need to "look after number one", learns that there are only two ways to kill a cat: civilised or savage.
The novel examines issues of moral relativism, Western hubris, colonization and ecological disruption in the name of science as it charts the disappearance of the wondrous flora and fauna and the grievous harm done to the indigenous people.
And what Yglesias calls nuttiness still looks like moral common sense to me — a view of intergenerational obligation that human flourishing depends on, and whose disappearance threatens to sacrifice essential goods and relationships on the altar of more transient forms of satisfaction.
