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Algernon's Reviews > The Magus
The Magus
by
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
“The Magus” is a debut novel. Fowles himself acknowledges in the preface to the reviewed edition that he practically taught himself how to write by working on this project over more than a decade. That’s what makes the novel both sublime and muddled. And probably the most honest account of a young man’s struggle to understand the intricate web of the human mind and the ways love blooms and fails, the way love turns, like Nabokov once said, into rust and stardust.
In 1964 I went to work and collated and rewrote all the previous drafts. But The Magus remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels – beneath its narrative, a notebook of an exploration, often erring and misconceived, into an unknown land.
I was by turns enchanted and bored to death during this 2019 re-read. I am no longer as young and as easily enchanted as the first time around, but reading the preface has made it a lot easier to navigate through the labyrinth Nicholas Urfe is traversing on his way to emotional maturity.
My heart was beating faster than it should. It was partly at the thought of meeting Julie, partly at something far more mysterious, the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. Now I really was Theseus; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and perhaps the Minotaur.
Now I am left with the difficult task of reducing all this wealth of material, this Behemoth of repressed urges, cultural references and psychological mind-games to the approved Goodreads wordcount, discarding probably half of the bookmarks I’ve initially considered important in the text.
What I really need are a few anchor points, pivotal moments and key stories that guide Nicholas Urfe and the reader through the maze:
1. Nicholas is chosen as a typical British intellectual of the early post-war society, slightly cynical, selfish, arrogant and self-deceiving
2. At its core, this a love story, between Urfe and Alison, but examined in an allegorical, mythical way
3. Greece, its landscape, its culture and its people are the catalyst as well as the backdrop for the journey
4. Psychoanalysis, Carl Jung in particular, explains most of the games and parables used by Conchis, the magus
5. There is no right or wrong answer to the puzzles. The author build his novel around the idea of choice, so each reader will arrive at a different destination at the end of the labyrinth
I have oversimplified the plot here, trying to put my notes into some sort of order. I might as well have chosen to write the whole review focused on a single Conchis story, allegory or quotation. I have a feeling the end result will be as messy as the novel itself.
=1= Nicholas Urfe
Handsomely equipped to fail I went out into the world.
A typical young man from a middle class family with an authoritarian father and an indifferent mother. He goes to the right schools, studies the classical subjects, joins the fashionable clubs (existentialist affectations), is moderately handsome and has an easy time with the ladies. But once university is over, he is bored to death by his job, by his peers and by his future prospects as a mediocre teacher of English.
It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn’t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.
We have here articulated for the first time the idea that a life without magic, without a higher purpose is not worth living. At this moment of the journey, Nicholas is honestly a major a$$hole, not capable of seeing beyond his own comforts, prone to navel gazing and self-pity. Things will not improve in a drastic way over the rest of the novel.
= 2 = Alison
Boy meets girl, in a bohemian setting, in Russell Square. This is by far my favorite part of the novel, for multiple personal reasons, reasons that made me dislike Nicholas intensely, probably because I recognized too many of his affectations and dissimulation from my own past. Also because, on my first visit to London earlier in the year, I stayed on Gower Street, literally a stone throw away from the apartment described in the novel.
Alison is an Australian girl, free of the usual British inhibitions that reveal Nicholas to be a bit of a prude and a snob. Few young men would appreciate a gift too easily offered, and Alison will soon have cause to regret her devotion. I’m firmly on team Alison after a seminal discussion on life goals, after watching the classic “Quai des Brumes”, also one of my all time favorites:
That film made me feel what I feel about everything. There isn’t any meaning. You try and try to be happy and then something chance happens and it’s all gone. It’s because we don’t believe in a life after death. [...] Every time you go out and I’m not with you I think you may die. I think about dying every day. Every time I have you, I think this is one in the eye for death. You know, you’ve got a lot of money and the shops are going to shut in an hour. It’s sick, but you’ve got to spend. Does that makes sense?
I’ve had this sort of moment, and I reacted in much the same way as Nicholas, laughing it off at the time, remembering it now from the far side of 50. Fowles pays his dues also in the introduction, talking about his own return to England, although I would not advise drawing any parallels between the author and his fictional character:
I had escaped Circe, but the withdrawal symptoms were severe. I had not then realized that loss is essential for the novelist, immensely fertile for his books, however painful to his private being.
Allow me one last piece of Alison dialogue (the essence of asymmetric warfare in a relationship), before we head to sunnier places:
“I don’t wanna hurt you and the more I ... want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me, and the more you don’t want me the more you will.”
= 3 = Circe
Greece is seen here as the mythical enchantress that has shocked Nicholas out of his phlegmatic British disposition, made his aware of his artistic pretensions and emotional arrested development. Like Odysseus, Nicholas is in danger of losing himself completely to the magic of these sunny islands. Bourani, the palatial residence of the secretive magnate Conchis, is seen often as a Garden of Eden from which Adam/Nicholas will be exiled after asking one too many questions.
In England we live in a very muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural landscape and its soft, northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion.
Fowles speaks from direct experience, and demonstrates that when he is truly moved, he is one hell of a writer. This year was also my first to visit a Greek island, and the descriptive passages in the book resonate strongly, especially when anticipating the scourge of modern tourism that mostly destroys the things it is supposed to cherish
Goodness and beauty may be separable in the north, but not in Greece. Between skin and skin there is only light.
= 4 = Bourani = the world is a stage, the stage is the world
Everything that went before is the set-up for the spectacle introducing the players (Nicholas, Alison). Now the director, Maurice Conchis, makes his entrance, and everything you think you know will soon be turned around and stood on its head. Deliberately, mischievously, sadistically even. To what purpose? That’s for you, the reader, to decide.
The most striking thing about him was the intensity of his eyes; very dark brown, staring, with a simian penetration emphasized by the remarkably clear whites, eyes that seemed not quite human.
I’ll give you a key to understanding Conchis: he lies! all the time, about everything! Stop trying to make sense of his motivations, and you can begin to understand that you’re not supposed to understand him. At all!
From the same essential introduction to the revised edition, the inception of Conchis is explained:
... a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific; that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim.
Beware of people who think they know everything. Nicholas Urfe is one of them, so full of pride at his intellect, yet so timid to explore his own subconscious motivations.
God and freedom are totally antipathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realize now that they do so sometimes with good reason. But I stick by the general principle, and that is what I meant to be at the heart of my story: that true freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore it can never be absolute freedom.
That was also my first philosophy lesson in college. I bristled at the time at the concept that “Freedom is the understanding of necessity” (attributed to Engels I think). An imposition on my own free will I thought at the time, before reading that famous Steinbeck passage in “East of Eden” (timshel). Conchis embraces a similar point of view in a dispute with Nicholas
‘No man is an island.’
‘Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, telephones, wireless – what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.’
So, we are ready to begin the journey through the labyrinth of self-discovery, deploying mostly psychological warfare and modern parables, as told by the magus Conchis and his creatures of both sexes. We start with a nod to T S Eliot and ‘Little Giding’, included in my review because I love the elegance and the concision of his discourse, as opposed to the hundreds of pages of almost drivel in the novel:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
One way to re-examine the past is through art. Conchis gives pride of place in his villa to a painting by Bonnard. Nicholas sees in it an echo of his time in London with the girls he scorned.
Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole existence a reason.
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
It may not be very original to remark that we mostly recognize Love in retrospect, after the bird has flown, but I give Fowles bonus points for finding the best reference
Next, I believe, comes the story of de Deukans and of that annoying Latin quote :
“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?”
Make of it what you want (I repeat myself, I know) : prose versus poetry, existentialism versus romantism, utilitarian versus elitism, modernism versus clasicism, science versus the supernatural, capitalism versus communism, the self versus the community. The story is told deliberately in an ambiguous way, its role is to provoke, not to explain.
The same could be said of Seidevarre, the Norwegian episode: mysticism and the need for the unexplained in life, the need to leave behind your certainties if you want to make progress towards the unknown. What makes these stories special is not their actual content, but the way Conchis uses them to tackle the higher metaphysical concepts, the way authors have done it from Ghilghamesh to David Mitchell – the storyteller as the magician of the soul.
The solution of the physical problems that face man – that is a matter of technology. But I am talking about general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.
Next, and for a long time, comes the game of cat and mouse between Nicholas and his new love interest : Julie/ Lily. This one is easier to follow, as it is mostly payback for the way he treated Alison, but there are subtleties to the discourse.
The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love.
Nicholas is forced to examine the difference between lust and desire with Julie as a mysterious Ariadne that is one moment an old-fashioned British maiden, the next an emancipated modern hussy. From the many possible quotes available here, I settled on the most simple one, from Conchis, a warning Nicholas fails to heed.
We are all actors, and actresses, Mr Urfe. You included.
The warning comes also from Julie / Lily:
“The real me’s a lot less exciting than the imaginary one.”
Especially when it comes to the person we love, we always lie in order to present ourselves in a better light, or to get easier out of a sticky conversation, to convince ourselves our sentiments are returned. You don’t need a degree in psychology, or highly elaborate masquerades to understand that Nicholas is guilty of being a deceiver, to others and to himself, in particular over the episode of his reunion with Alison in Athens.
As a parenthesis, Fowles comes up with another timely literary reference that I would like to explore further as he presents us with a couple of young lovers en contretemps (‘Huis Clos’ by Jean Paul Sartre) is mentioned by Alison.
I’m getting tired, so I will gloss over the next two major developments : the firing squad parable (a variation of the ‘timshel’ argument) and the mock trial (a parody and a denunciation of the limits of psychoanalysis)
We must always remember that the subject has been launched into the world with no training in self-analysis and self-orientation; and that almost all the education he has received is positively harmful to him. He was, so to speak, born short-sighted by nature and has been further blinded by his environments. It is small wonder that he cannot find his way.
What is important in the economy of the novel is that Nicholas is exiled from Prospero’s Island (yes the analogy is noted by Conchis), is released from Circe’s imprisonment, sent out from the Garden of Eden, and back to London to atone for his sins.
And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me.
Even now, returning to the place where the journey began, looking at the world with newly opened eyes, Nicholas is still prone to navel gazing and to bouts of selfishness. Fowles is once again deliberately ambiguous about the ultimate fate of his characters, but he does offers us another couple of precious keys.
First is the meeting of Mrs. de Seitas, an explicit nod to Charles Dickens and ‘Great Expectations’ , where Nicholas is given two lessons in love. I’ll put them in spoilers, although I consider this is not a plot driven novel:
(view spoiler)
Nicholas has trespassed on both laws with Alison, so his redemption is up to us to decide about. The author notes down his preference in yet another Latin passage, which I will also translate between spoiler tags, for those who prefer surprises:
cras amet qui numquam amavit
quique amavit cras amet.
(view spoiler)
by
Algernon's review
bookshelves: 2019
Jul 29, 2019
bookshelves: 2019
Read 2 times. Last read May 14, 2019 to July 29, 2019.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
“The Magus” is a debut novel. Fowles himself acknowledges in the preface to the reviewed edition that he practically taught himself how to write by working on this project over more than a decade. That’s what makes the novel both sublime and muddled. And probably the most honest account of a young man’s struggle to understand the intricate web of the human mind and the ways love blooms and fails, the way love turns, like Nabokov once said, into rust and stardust.
In 1964 I went to work and collated and rewrote all the previous drafts. But The Magus remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels – beneath its narrative, a notebook of an exploration, often erring and misconceived, into an unknown land.
I was by turns enchanted and bored to death during this 2019 re-read. I am no longer as young and as easily enchanted as the first time around, but reading the preface has made it a lot easier to navigate through the labyrinth Nicholas Urfe is traversing on his way to emotional maturity.
My heart was beating faster than it should. It was partly at the thought of meeting Julie, partly at something far more mysterious, the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. Now I really was Theseus; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and perhaps the Minotaur.
Now I am left with the difficult task of reducing all this wealth of material, this Behemoth of repressed urges, cultural references and psychological mind-games to the approved Goodreads wordcount, discarding probably half of the bookmarks I’ve initially considered important in the text.
What I really need are a few anchor points, pivotal moments and key stories that guide Nicholas Urfe and the reader through the maze:
1. Nicholas is chosen as a typical British intellectual of the early post-war society, slightly cynical, selfish, arrogant and self-deceiving
2. At its core, this a love story, between Urfe and Alison, but examined in an allegorical, mythical way
3. Greece, its landscape, its culture and its people are the catalyst as well as the backdrop for the journey
4. Psychoanalysis, Carl Jung in particular, explains most of the games and parables used by Conchis, the magus
5. There is no right or wrong answer to the puzzles. The author build his novel around the idea of choice, so each reader will arrive at a different destination at the end of the labyrinth
I have oversimplified the plot here, trying to put my notes into some sort of order. I might as well have chosen to write the whole review focused on a single Conchis story, allegory or quotation. I have a feeling the end result will be as messy as the novel itself.
=1= Nicholas Urfe
Handsomely equipped to fail I went out into the world.
A typical young man from a middle class family with an authoritarian father and an indifferent mother. He goes to the right schools, studies the classical subjects, joins the fashionable clubs (existentialist affectations), is moderately handsome and has an easy time with the ladies. But once university is over, he is bored to death by his job, by his peers and by his future prospects as a mediocre teacher of English.
It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn’t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.
We have here articulated for the first time the idea that a life without magic, without a higher purpose is not worth living. At this moment of the journey, Nicholas is honestly a major a$$hole, not capable of seeing beyond his own comforts, prone to navel gazing and self-pity. Things will not improve in a drastic way over the rest of the novel.
= 2 = Alison
Boy meets girl, in a bohemian setting, in Russell Square. This is by far my favorite part of the novel, for multiple personal reasons, reasons that made me dislike Nicholas intensely, probably because I recognized too many of his affectations and dissimulation from my own past. Also because, on my first visit to London earlier in the year, I stayed on Gower Street, literally a stone throw away from the apartment described in the novel.
Alison is an Australian girl, free of the usual British inhibitions that reveal Nicholas to be a bit of a prude and a snob. Few young men would appreciate a gift too easily offered, and Alison will soon have cause to regret her devotion. I’m firmly on team Alison after a seminal discussion on life goals, after watching the classic “Quai des Brumes”, also one of my all time favorites:
That film made me feel what I feel about everything. There isn’t any meaning. You try and try to be happy and then something chance happens and it’s all gone. It’s because we don’t believe in a life after death. [...] Every time you go out and I’m not with you I think you may die. I think about dying every day. Every time I have you, I think this is one in the eye for death. You know, you’ve got a lot of money and the shops are going to shut in an hour. It’s sick, but you’ve got to spend. Does that makes sense?
I’ve had this sort of moment, and I reacted in much the same way as Nicholas, laughing it off at the time, remembering it now from the far side of 50. Fowles pays his dues also in the introduction, talking about his own return to England, although I would not advise drawing any parallels between the author and his fictional character:
I had escaped Circe, but the withdrawal symptoms were severe. I had not then realized that loss is essential for the novelist, immensely fertile for his books, however painful to his private being.
Allow me one last piece of Alison dialogue (the essence of asymmetric warfare in a relationship), before we head to sunnier places:
“I don’t wanna hurt you and the more I ... want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me, and the more you don’t want me the more you will.”
= 3 = Circe
Greece is seen here as the mythical enchantress that has shocked Nicholas out of his phlegmatic British disposition, made his aware of his artistic pretensions and emotional arrested development. Like Odysseus, Nicholas is in danger of losing himself completely to the magic of these sunny islands. Bourani, the palatial residence of the secretive magnate Conchis, is seen often as a Garden of Eden from which Adam/Nicholas will be exiled after asking one too many questions.
In England we live in a very muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural landscape and its soft, northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion.
Fowles speaks from direct experience, and demonstrates that when he is truly moved, he is one hell of a writer. This year was also my first to visit a Greek island, and the descriptive passages in the book resonate strongly, especially when anticipating the scourge of modern tourism that mostly destroys the things it is supposed to cherish
Goodness and beauty may be separable in the north, but not in Greece. Between skin and skin there is only light.
= 4 = Bourani = the world is a stage, the stage is the world
Everything that went before is the set-up for the spectacle introducing the players (Nicholas, Alison). Now the director, Maurice Conchis, makes his entrance, and everything you think you know will soon be turned around and stood on its head. Deliberately, mischievously, sadistically even. To what purpose? That’s for you, the reader, to decide.
The most striking thing about him was the intensity of his eyes; very dark brown, staring, with a simian penetration emphasized by the remarkably clear whites, eyes that seemed not quite human.
I’ll give you a key to understanding Conchis: he lies! all the time, about everything! Stop trying to make sense of his motivations, and you can begin to understand that you’re not supposed to understand him. At all!
From the same essential introduction to the revised edition, the inception of Conchis is explained:
... a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific; that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim.
Beware of people who think they know everything. Nicholas Urfe is one of them, so full of pride at his intellect, yet so timid to explore his own subconscious motivations.
God and freedom are totally antipathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realize now that they do so sometimes with good reason. But I stick by the general principle, and that is what I meant to be at the heart of my story: that true freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore it can never be absolute freedom.
That was also my first philosophy lesson in college. I bristled at the time at the concept that “Freedom is the understanding of necessity” (attributed to Engels I think). An imposition on my own free will I thought at the time, before reading that famous Steinbeck passage in “East of Eden” (timshel). Conchis embraces a similar point of view in a dispute with Nicholas
‘No man is an island.’
‘Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, telephones, wireless – what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.’
So, we are ready to begin the journey through the labyrinth of self-discovery, deploying mostly psychological warfare and modern parables, as told by the magus Conchis and his creatures of both sexes. We start with a nod to T S Eliot and ‘Little Giding’, included in my review because I love the elegance and the concision of his discourse, as opposed to the hundreds of pages of almost drivel in the novel:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
One way to re-examine the past is through art. Conchis gives pride of place in his villa to a painting by Bonnard. Nicholas sees in it an echo of his time in London with the girls he scorned.
Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole existence a reason.
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
It may not be very original to remark that we mostly recognize Love in retrospect, after the bird has flown, but I give Fowles bonus points for finding the best reference
Next, I believe, comes the story of de Deukans and of that annoying Latin quote :
“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?”
Make of it what you want (I repeat myself, I know) : prose versus poetry, existentialism versus romantism, utilitarian versus elitism, modernism versus clasicism, science versus the supernatural, capitalism versus communism, the self versus the community. The story is told deliberately in an ambiguous way, its role is to provoke, not to explain.
The same could be said of Seidevarre, the Norwegian episode: mysticism and the need for the unexplained in life, the need to leave behind your certainties if you want to make progress towards the unknown. What makes these stories special is not their actual content, but the way Conchis uses them to tackle the higher metaphysical concepts, the way authors have done it from Ghilghamesh to David Mitchell – the storyteller as the magician of the soul.
The solution of the physical problems that face man – that is a matter of technology. But I am talking about general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.
Next, and for a long time, comes the game of cat and mouse between Nicholas and his new love interest : Julie/ Lily. This one is easier to follow, as it is mostly payback for the way he treated Alison, but there are subtleties to the discourse.
The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love.
Nicholas is forced to examine the difference between lust and desire with Julie as a mysterious Ariadne that is one moment an old-fashioned British maiden, the next an emancipated modern hussy. From the many possible quotes available here, I settled on the most simple one, from Conchis, a warning Nicholas fails to heed.
We are all actors, and actresses, Mr Urfe. You included.
The warning comes also from Julie / Lily:
“The real me’s a lot less exciting than the imaginary one.”
Especially when it comes to the person we love, we always lie in order to present ourselves in a better light, or to get easier out of a sticky conversation, to convince ourselves our sentiments are returned. You don’t need a degree in psychology, or highly elaborate masquerades to understand that Nicholas is guilty of being a deceiver, to others and to himself, in particular over the episode of his reunion with Alison in Athens.
As a parenthesis, Fowles comes up with another timely literary reference that I would like to explore further as he presents us with a couple of young lovers en contretemps (‘Huis Clos’ by Jean Paul Sartre) is mentioned by Alison.
I’m getting tired, so I will gloss over the next two major developments : the firing squad parable (a variation of the ‘timshel’ argument) and the mock trial (a parody and a denunciation of the limits of psychoanalysis)
We must always remember that the subject has been launched into the world with no training in self-analysis and self-orientation; and that almost all the education he has received is positively harmful to him. He was, so to speak, born short-sighted by nature and has been further blinded by his environments. It is small wonder that he cannot find his way.
What is important in the economy of the novel is that Nicholas is exiled from Prospero’s Island (yes the analogy is noted by Conchis), is released from Circe’s imprisonment, sent out from the Garden of Eden, and back to London to atone for his sins.
And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me.
Even now, returning to the place where the journey began, looking at the world with newly opened eyes, Nicholas is still prone to navel gazing and to bouts of selfishness. Fowles is once again deliberately ambiguous about the ultimate fate of his characters, but he does offers us another couple of precious keys.
First is the meeting of Mrs. de Seitas, an explicit nod to Charles Dickens and ‘Great Expectations’ , where Nicholas is given two lessons in love. I’ll put them in spoilers, although I consider this is not a plot driven novel:
(view spoiler)
Nicholas has trespassed on both laws with Alison, so his redemption is up to us to decide about. The author notes down his preference in yet another Latin passage, which I will also translate between spoiler tags, for those who prefer surprises:
cras amet qui numquam amavit
quique amavit cras amet.
(view spoiler)
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
(Other Paperback Edition)
February 15, 1992
–
Finished Reading
(Other Paperback Edition)
January 17, 2012
– Shelved
(Other Paperback Edition)
January 17, 2012
– Shelved as:
past-times-in-go...
(Other Paperback Edition)
May 14, 2019
–
Started Reading
May 14, 2019
– Shelved
July 29, 2019
– Shelved as:
2019
July 29, 2019
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-7 of 7 (7 new)
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This is probably the reason I read the first chapters in London in one sitting, as I did the last ones after Urfe's exile. But while Conchis was dominating the scenery, I put the novel down and I read other stories (about 10, I believe). That's why it took me so long to finish.Also, I'm not big on Jung and psychoanalysis. It was all the rage in the 50s, but now I'm more interested in social interactions and the influence of the group on the individual.
Hugely impressive review
Will wrote: "Hugely impressive review"Thanks! I struggled a bit with it, so I thought it deserved a more careful write down.
Useful and insightful review. 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity' was said by Engels, as you say, but he was quoting Hegel.
Tim wrote: "Useful and insightful review. 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity' was said by Engels, as you say, but he was quoting Hegel."thank you for the clarification, I was planning to inform myself more about Hegel, Kant and Schoppenhauer, but I got distracted by trivial pursuits and easy novels
I’ll give you a key to understanding Conchis: he lies! all the time, about everything! Stop trying to make sense of his motivations, and you can begin to understand that you’re not supposed to understand him. At all! -------------- So very true. Even if I was a young man I wouldn't want anything to do with this guy. And I've never taken kindly to people who are manipulative.