If you’ve read a lot of Hemingway, for instance, and then have come across the novels of the nineteenth-century French writers Stendhal, and Honoré de Balzac, you will recognize what I’m talking about. Hemingway himself described how he admired them in, I think, A Moveable Feast, but one is nonetheless startled to encounter the similarities between their work and his, when one encounters them. Though it’s possible, of course, that one is primed to see in those former writers a presentiment of the latter, if one has already read what Hemingway has said about them, as I had.