To the Hermitage (Paperback)
by
Malcolm Bradbury
To The Hermitage is Sir Malcolm Bradbury's first
novel in nearly a decade, and its length and ambition provide some clue as to
why it has been so long in the making. The novel begins with the arrival of the
great Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot at the Russian court of Catherine
the Great, who is "drawn to grand ideas and learning; she looks to
Paris" and to Denis Diderot, busily completing his Encyclopaedia,
the great work of the European "Age of Reason". Bradbury's world of
"Then" suddenly cuts to "Now", and the arrival in Stockholm
in 1993 of the narrator, a thinly veiled self-portrait of a weather-beaten
novelist and literary critic who has been invited on a "Baltic
junket", an academic gathering to discuss the Diderot Project, a
Swedish-funded enterprise to investigate the life and works of the great
philosopher. Bradbury extracts maximum hilarity from the ensuing academic pondering
of the assembled scholars, including the wonderful deconstructionist professor
"Jack-Paul Verso, in Calvin Klein jeans, Armani jacket, and a designer
baseball cap saying I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION". The group's academic sparring
takes on added poignancy as footage of the hardline
coup to overthrow Gorbachev and silence Yeltsin flashes onto their TV screens.
Bradbury's
novel proceeds to deftly seesaw between the Age of Reason championed by Diderot
and the present so-called end of history and "triumph" of global
capitalism. It ruefully, but also very humorously reflects on the perils of
intellectual idealism then and now, and explores the ways in which
"history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the
past". Sprawling, messy, hugely ambitious and at times very funny, To The Hermitage is up there with Eating People is Wrong
and Rates of Exchange as one of Bradbury's better pieces of fiction. –
Synopsis
"To
the Hermitage" tells two tales: a contemporary story of our narrator, a
novelist, who has been invited to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in
what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project, and one set two
hundred years earlier in which Bradbury brilliantly recreates Diderot's journey
to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of that powerful monarch,
Catherine the Great. ""To the Hermitage" reads like a love
letter to the life of the mind from a man who, in his work as a writer, critic,
academic and teacher has done much to contribute to that dizzying circulation of
ideas which is so richly celebrated here" - "Independent on
Sunday". "A charming, engaging, witty, amusing,
playful, reflective and informative book by a writer who is in
championship-winning form" - "Sunday Express".
Published by Jerry Brotton
Text referred to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
© 1996-2008,
Amazon.com, Inc.
Other interesting
articles: [Next] [1] [2] [3] [4]
[5]
Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia,etc. contactar con: bargasca@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Bárbara Gasquet Carrera
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008