Friday, September 01, 2006

Unreliable witness

Barry Unsworth has an excellent essay at the Guardian about Robert Graves's Claudius books. I must say that I loved, loved, loved those books as a child, I think the peak of my Claudius addiction was at age eleven or so when I read them again and again (I think I had seen some of the Masterpiece Theater television episodes, but it was the voice of the books that really captured my imagination), and throughout my adolescence I was obsessed with Graves and read pretty much everything of his, even the really peculiar ones. (And he featured on an orals topic later in my life, a funny topic on the historical novel that included Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal--the last great grad-school gasp of my teenage reading years, that's one way of looking at it. All my other topics were much more suitably British-literature oriented, on the Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton-Pope-Wordsworth kind of lines.) I, Claudius is really a remarkably good novel, though; pity I have spoiled it for rereading by having already read it about twenty times....

And another Roman-themed one I want to read: Tom Holland praises Robert Harris's new novel Imperium, it sounds wonderfully appealing.

5 comments:

  1. You should wait and read the TLS review of Imperium!

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  2. Oh, how tantalizing, can't wait....

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  3. Do you know that Harris is married to Nick Hornby's sister?

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  4. I only just realized when I read this rather interesting profile:

    http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1863538,00.html

    I don't know why I should find it such a surreal detail (writers and journalists always have this sort of interconnection), but of course I do....

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  5. If you haven't read Harris' story "PMQ" (in Hornby's anthology "Speaking with the Angels"), you should. It is unspeakably funny, and very different form his historical novels.

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