The Lord Chandos Letter
|
List Price:
$14.00
Hungary Hotels Travel Price:
$11.20
Your Savings: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.912
EAN: 9781590171202
ISBN: 1590171209
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 152
Publication Date: 2005-01-31
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: 2005-01-31
Studio: NYRB Classics
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
In The Lord Chandos Letter, the author conjures a figure from the English Renaissance in order to write about a peculiarly modern crisis of the spirit. In this cryptic, haunting, at times hallucinated document, a young lord writes for the last time to his patron, Sir Francis Bacon, the founding father of modern scientific empiricism. The lord describes a mysterious affliction which has left him entirely bereft of words: the abstractions "which the tongue must enlist . . . have disintegrated in my mouth." The book evokes a state of final internal exile, of death in life.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: A classic, in a great translation
Comment: I'll just add a little to Daniel Myers's review. These stories have long been classics of modernist literature, and they should be read by everyone interested in the history of Symbolism, the heritage of Poe, the history of fantasy fiction, and the development of what Robert Musil called "daylight mysticism" (that's in his "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author," also on Amazon).
What I'd like to add to Myers is that "The Lord Chandos Letter" is a very important text in the history of modernist mistrust of words. It plays a central role in Enrique Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." (also on Amazon), a novel about people who have given up writing. George Steiner has written about "The Lord Chandos Letter" in "Real Presences."
"The Lord Chandos Letter" describes the author's mistrust of all words -- he is given to personal, incommunicable, "sublime" experiences, which can be set off by all kinds of small events: a water beetle rowing across the dark surface of water in a rain barrel; rats dying on the floor of a dairy barn, writhing in the lethal atmosphere of the "sharp, sweetish-smelling" poison; "a moss-covered stone," and "all the shabby and crude objects of a rogh life." In other words, he is no longer moved by the grand, beautiful, pompous, public displays of ordinary life, but only the forgtten, mislaid, overlooked, trivial, "meaningless" things that other people fail to notice. The story is fundamentally about what might still have religious meaning -- although he calls the effect "sublime," not religious. And whatever is genuinely religious must also surpass language.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Epistle of Modernism
Comment: In the supreme example of High Modernist irony, Hofmannsthal eloquently explains why he can no longer communicate. He is an exemplar for Kafka, Borges, Joyce, everyone.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Dreamworks
Comment: This little book is rather difficult to review, for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that what are called the "stories" herein are not really stories at all in the common sense of the word but rather haunting, oneiric vignettes which end as abruptly as they begin - To call them impressionistic would be not only an understatement, but not quite right. - All the characters limned here live in a sort of dreamworld always accompanied by that indefinable, unlocalised sense of dread and foreboding one has in a dream. Thus, sometimes it seems to come from a well, or a barrel, or a golden apple or, in two instances, an encounter with a sort of doppelganger. It's as if the author had discovered some subaqueous realm lying just under normal sense experience and described it with the acute realism of Chekhov (of whom the intense detail in the stories reminded me) combined with the inner horror that Poe expresses at his best...except Hoffmannstahl expresses it better, but he couldn't bring himself (apparently) to complete a story of the kind that Poe wrote. Rather, we have these numinous dream-sequences filled with unnamable dread. It's as if, as Gerard De Nerval wrote of himself shortly before he committed suicide, the dream world was taking over "reality" in the author's mind, or, rather, has taken over.
The "letter", tacked on to the end of these stories, supposedly explaining them, is interesting, but really doesn't tell us anything we can't glean from the stories. It's a manifesto of sorts, basically stating (and I simplify here) that language is incapable of explaining the numinous.
Hoffmannstahl was something of an expert on light, and some of his best descriptions involve the effect of the lighting that lends a scene its all-encompassing "aura". In this, he very much reminds me of Emily Dickinson. I was constantly reminded while reading of her lines:
A certain slant of light-
Winter afternoons-
Oppresses with the heft
Of cathedral tunes.
Well, I shan't go on. I'll leave the prospective reader with a quote from the narrator of "Tale of Two Couples" to give him/her and idea of what to expect:
"I walked along like someone in a dream who is being touched by the atmosphere of his life and by the suspicion that he is dreaming." P.112
This is the effect throughout the book on the reader.
Only four stars because it seems to me that Hoffmannstahl fails to give us anything but a dreamy patchwork of vignettes that lack any sort of meaning or continuity save in these oneiric, numinous flashes of dread and insight.....But, what blinding flashes they are!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hungary Trips Books
Hungary Trips DVD
Hungary Trips Softwares
Hungary Trips Magazines
Hungary Posters
Hungary Art Prints
Hungary Travel 2007 Calendars
2007 Monthly Calendars
Hungary Hotels Travel Special Resources
Hungary Arts
Hungary Entertainment
Hungary Government
Hungary Business
Hungary Culture
Hungary Education
Hungary Health
Hungary Map
Hungary Beach
Hungary Festivals
Hungary Hotels
Hungary Museums
Hungary Theme Parks
Hungary Transportation
Food and Recipes
Sports & Recreation
Travel & Tourism
Hungary Destinations
Budapest, Hungary
Heviz, Hungary
Sopron, Hungary
Eger, Hungary
Szeged, Hungary
Lake Balaton, Hungary
Hungary Hotels
Budapest Hotels
Heviz Hotels
Sopron Hotels
Szeged Hotels
|
Hungary Hotels Travel
Maintained by: Marketer Solutions | Link Building
