Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
New York, N.Y. : Dell Pub. Co., 1985.
Description
Nicholas Urfe accepts a teaching post on a beautiful, remote Greek island, in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. He meets the enigmatic Maurice Conchis, who introduces him to the exquisitely lovely Lily, his ideal of the perfect woman.
User reviews
LibraryThing member CarlosMcRey
The Magus is the first novel written by an obviously talented writer. If that sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, that's because it is. Every once in a while, you encounter a work that seems as if it should make for great art. There's obviously talent and intelligence on the artist's side,
The Magus is the story of a callow Englishman who is teaching on a small Greek island, where he is drawn into some strange psychological games by one of the inhabitants of the island. Nicholas Urfe is our protagonist, an emotionally stunted womanizer getting over an affair with an Australian air hostess, who takes a teaching position at a Greek academy on the island of Phraxos. He has been warned by a former teacher about a certain gentleman who owns a large estate on the island. Despite this warning (or perhaps because of it), he meets up with said gentleman, Conchis and becomes involved in odd philosophical and psychological games.
The set up is ripe for fascinating explorations of character or philosophy, and the story is full of mythological and literary allusions. However, for all it's apparent brilliance, it never really manages to achieve the kind of mind-bending exploration of truth or human nature that it seems to have set out for itself. Despite the novel's many references to Othello and The Tempest, to me this felt more like a case of Much Ado About Nothing.
All of what should make the novel fascinating, it's psychophilosophical speculation, its many allusions, its labrynthine structure, ultimately work against it.
The psychological exploration reaches an interesting point in a flashback encounter between a rational man and an overwhelming evil, but then that gives way to one bored cad's inability to commit to his girlfriend. The novel's many allusions to literature, to art, to mythology and occultism reach a level of oversaturating, creating the impression that they exist in the novel not so much for their fidelity to the plot but because the author wanted to show that they could be worked into the plot.
And, worst of all, the twisty narrative ultimately twists into itself. I have simple criteria for what makes an effective plot twist: it must create the impression of being both unexpected and inevitable. The twists in The Magus may be largely unexpected, but there is nothing inevitable about them. And without inevitability, a twist is just artificial, a transparent attempt at tricking the reader. The result, then, is of a plot that is not organic so much as mechanical.
For the novel to work as it should, Nicholas should serve as a proxy for the reader. We should feel some thrill or relief when Nicholas has managed to get things his way, feel a sinking feeling when events move unexpectedly outside his control. But neither the character nor the plot ever really allow for that degree of investment.
If I may delve into the analogy of a horror movie (because horror is the least of the genres), when Nicholas goes to open the door into the haunted house, there should be a feeling of, 'No, don't open that door!' Instead, the feeling is one of, 'C'mon, open the freakin' door; I want to see the kind of CGI they used on the monster.'
Most grating is that Nicholas keeps asserting that he has things in hand, that he understands Conchis' scheme, and that he's not going to let himself be manipulated anymore. Seriously, you could change his name to Nicholas Dumbass (with an aside from Nick regarding how he liked to claim he was descended from the French Dumas) without in any way decreasing my estimation of his intelligence. As a reader, it seemed clear the twists were designed to be impossible to guess beforehand.
(Warning: I'm going to start tossing out spoilers here.)
Perhaps most dissapointing was the way that the artificiality of the story affected some of the elements that were actually intriguing. Allison, Nicholas' emotionally damaged Australian girlfriend, makes for a compelling foil for him throughout the early part of the novel. There's something real about her--messy, vulnerable, too honest--that made her endearing to me. After she fakes her death and becomes involved in Conchis's conspiracy, she lost that realness, becoming as artificial as the plot. Whatever spark of messiness animated her early on no longer seems charmingly real by the end, which meant emotionally I was moving in the opposite direction than the protagonist. At the beggining of the novel, I could wish for Nicholas and Allison to try to stay together and work out their issues. By the end, when Nicholas is meeting her and having his little 'OK, I'm a total cad and probably no good for you, but I'm ready to try to commit' speech, I couldn't see why he bothered.
And that is, I think, meant to be the culmination of the novel, the final emotional awakening. A few hundred pages earlier, Conchis had related a story of the island during WWII. In the story, the Nazis occupy the island. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, and Conchis' functions as a kind of liasion for them. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, who are later captured by the Germans. In a bit of cold-bloodedness, the Nazi commander orders Conchis to beat the partisans to death with an unloaded rifle. If he refuses, they will execute the adult males in the village where the partisans were discovered. Of course, we can't be sure how true the story is. Some on the island claim that Conchis' participation with the Nazis was more sinister, and there's no reason to believe his own account of the events won't be self serving.
But the result of this actually intriguing question of truth, guilt and responsibility is: a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. Shortly after finishing the novel, I thought of it as some literary version of David Fincher's 'The Game,' where Michael Douglas undergoes many trials and tribulations to figure out that he should be less of a jerk and ask the cute blond out on a date. 'The Game,' though, manages to be relatively consistent in its pulpiness. This is actually a bit more like some version of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' where the big emotional pay off is that a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. (Call if 'Forty Literary Allusions, One Nazy War Crime and an Island.')
As much as I was disappointed by the novel, it does have some great moments and does reflect the work of an author with some degree of skill. Which is why I feel the most fair thing I can say is that it's the first novel of a talented writer. However, I think like many first novels, Folwes doesn't succeed to match up his ambition with his literary skill.
Show More
and the work itself does not appear to lack for ambition. Yet what comes out seems to lack a certain vitality, to seem impressive more for its ambition than its actual achievements. The Magus is the story of a callow Englishman who is teaching on a small Greek island, where he is drawn into some strange psychological games by one of the inhabitants of the island. Nicholas Urfe is our protagonist, an emotionally stunted womanizer getting over an affair with an Australian air hostess, who takes a teaching position at a Greek academy on the island of Phraxos. He has been warned by a former teacher about a certain gentleman who owns a large estate on the island. Despite this warning (or perhaps because of it), he meets up with said gentleman, Conchis and becomes involved in odd philosophical and psychological games.
The set up is ripe for fascinating explorations of character or philosophy, and the story is full of mythological and literary allusions. However, for all it's apparent brilliance, it never really manages to achieve the kind of mind-bending exploration of truth or human nature that it seems to have set out for itself. Despite the novel's many references to Othello and The Tempest, to me this felt more like a case of Much Ado About Nothing.
All of what should make the novel fascinating, it's psychophilosophical speculation, its many allusions, its labrynthine structure, ultimately work against it.
The psychological exploration reaches an interesting point in a flashback encounter between a rational man and an overwhelming evil, but then that gives way to one bored cad's inability to commit to his girlfriend. The novel's many allusions to literature, to art, to mythology and occultism reach a level of oversaturating, creating the impression that they exist in the novel not so much for their fidelity to the plot but because the author wanted to show that they could be worked into the plot.
And, worst of all, the twisty narrative ultimately twists into itself. I have simple criteria for what makes an effective plot twist: it must create the impression of being both unexpected and inevitable. The twists in The Magus may be largely unexpected, but there is nothing inevitable about them. And without inevitability, a twist is just artificial, a transparent attempt at tricking the reader. The result, then, is of a plot that is not organic so much as mechanical.
For the novel to work as it should, Nicholas should serve as a proxy for the reader. We should feel some thrill or relief when Nicholas has managed to get things his way, feel a sinking feeling when events move unexpectedly outside his control. But neither the character nor the plot ever really allow for that degree of investment.
If I may delve into the analogy of a horror movie (because horror is the least of the genres), when Nicholas goes to open the door into the haunted house, there should be a feeling of, 'No, don't open that door!' Instead, the feeling is one of, 'C'mon, open the freakin' door; I want to see the kind of CGI they used on the monster.'
Most grating is that Nicholas keeps asserting that he has things in hand, that he understands Conchis' scheme, and that he's not going to let himself be manipulated anymore. Seriously, you could change his name to Nicholas Dumbass (with an aside from Nick regarding how he liked to claim he was descended from the French Dumas) without in any way decreasing my estimation of his intelligence. As a reader, it seemed clear the twists were designed to be impossible to guess beforehand.
(Warning: I'm going to start tossing out spoilers here.)
Perhaps most dissapointing was the way that the artificiality of the story affected some of the elements that were actually intriguing. Allison, Nicholas' emotionally damaged Australian girlfriend, makes for a compelling foil for him throughout the early part of the novel. There's something real about her--messy, vulnerable, too honest--that made her endearing to me. After she fakes her death and becomes involved in Conchis's conspiracy, she lost that realness, becoming as artificial as the plot. Whatever spark of messiness animated her early on no longer seems charmingly real by the end, which meant emotionally I was moving in the opposite direction than the protagonist. At the beggining of the novel, I could wish for Nicholas and Allison to try to stay together and work out their issues. By the end, when Nicholas is meeting her and having his little 'OK, I'm a total cad and probably no good for you, but I'm ready to try to commit' speech, I couldn't see why he bothered.
And that is, I think, meant to be the culmination of the novel, the final emotional awakening. A few hundred pages earlier, Conchis had related a story of the island during WWII. In the story, the Nazis occupy the island. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, and Conchis' functions as a kind of liasion for them. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, who are later captured by the Germans. In a bit of cold-bloodedness, the Nazi commander orders Conchis to beat the partisans to death with an unloaded rifle. If he refuses, they will execute the adult males in the village where the partisans were discovered. Of course, we can't be sure how true the story is. Some on the island claim that Conchis' participation with the Nazis was more sinister, and there's no reason to believe his own account of the events won't be self serving.
But the result of this actually intriguing question of truth, guilt and responsibility is: a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. Shortly after finishing the novel, I thought of it as some literary version of David Fincher's 'The Game,' where Michael Douglas undergoes many trials and tribulations to figure out that he should be less of a jerk and ask the cute blond out on a date. 'The Game,' though, manages to be relatively consistent in its pulpiness. This is actually a bit more like some version of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' where the big emotional pay off is that a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. (Call if 'Forty Literary Allusions, One Nazy War Crime and an Island.')
As much as I was disappointed by the novel, it does have some great moments and does reflect the work of an author with some degree of skill. Which is why I feel the most fair thing I can say is that it's the first novel of a talented writer. However, I think like many first novels, Folwes doesn't succeed to match up his ambition with his literary skill.
Show Less
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
This has been a key book for me, one that dreams, and life philosophies, and real choices with real consequences (applied literature!) have been made on. First encountered in rumour and legend--our English teacher, who was a magus type himself, told us about picking it up himself at a younger age
I mean, this existential liquor went down smooooooth. This was to Sartre as Jameson's and water was to those scotches that pack your eyes and nose with cotton balls. Young proxy flees tiresome love affair for plausible adventure on Greek island, falls into something strange--distressing and addictive in its strangeness--instead. A mentor, a mystery, a girl. This is exactly what any young male with half a set of balls and half a book in his head and complicated resentments and a deep, deep ambivalence toward the multi-metaphoric weirdness of the idea of a "career" was looking for. As Nicholas dropped out of some shitty DH Lawrence pastiche into the magic uncertainty, jesting pleasance, safe-or-are-they risks that lie beyond the waiting-room. A masque, every night, and just for me!
A masque full of life lessons for budding lads (and, by all accounts, lasses--this is a book beloved by many--though it's SO male and if I were a woman I'd be rolling my eyes hard, but then maybe that's just my own private reductionism) lads I say not much removed from the writing-down-quotes-from-Bartleby's-in-your-diary stage. What would SPECIAL YOU do if you had to make a SPECIAL CHOICE about who would LIVE AND DIE and maybe STAIN YOUR HONOUR in DOUBLEYA DOUBLEYA TWO and maybe not be so SPECIAL AFTER ALL? I mean, this book literally has a scene where a bunch of eminent psychologists place our man on a throne and talk all about him for hours and then give him a chance to get back at the woman who's "wronged" him; Fowles's purpos is ultimately pedagogical, but the masturbatory element is undeniable.
As a novelist, Fowles is a theorist, but not a systematizer—that is, to take the inevitable permanent Sartre comparison up again, Fowles “existentials” no –ism, no thoroughgoing ethical discipline or public movement, but merely a hobbledehoy, a clapped-up compilation of cannily coordinated concepts to float the author, himself, across the uncharted waters of life and to be taken by the reader, insofar as he or she wishes, as a readymade.
Viz.! The “Godgame,” which our present generation can understand as a process essentially like unto “taking the red pill.” You know? You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, you take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed? The motto of the game: Cause no unnecessary pain, and the question of whether pain is ever necessary. The “existential smile,” which is the smile that’s chewed up all the arbitrary cruelty and meaninglessness life has to offer and accepts it—spits it back like tacks and smiles nevertheless. The key difference between the two editions of this book is that in the first, the existential smile has more than a dash of cruelty in it itself—Conchis is a traumatized man with more than a hint of the “dark triad” (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) about him, Nicholas hits Alison with a brutal fist, the ending is a simple exercise in catharsis-denial. Fowles was mistaken for a crypto-fascist of the (crypto-)Nietzschean ilk by many of his first readers, and you can understand that take from a perspective still sorta mired in the postwar hivemind and only starting to glimpse the radical new approaches to self-actualization of the decade to come. (First edition, 1965; second, 1977 ….) But as we know from reading our Nietzsche properly, the will to power is also the will to joy and the will to kindness; and Fowles took the fairly extraordinary steps for a misunderstood novelist of producing not only The Aristos, an idiosyncratic personal statement of his ideas about a higher spiritual life for humanity, but also a whole second version of The Magus that excises that unintended darkness, whether its source was a failure of art or a personal philosophy still immature. The Aristos is the hobbledehoy and The Magus is the readymade. Conchis becomes a teacher of infinite subtlety, finally earning the Prospero role; the misogyny of the fist is partially expiated, partially defused, partially sublimated into Nicholas’s now more extensively sexual relations with Lily/Julie, but certainly on the whole less objectionable; and the ending is extended, massaged and modulated, and goes from just sudden and unsatisfying to the intentional ambiguity-pathos of great art. This is the version that I love and that reminds me still that it takes strength to be gentle and kind, especially for the adventurous spirit. (I’ll cop to still slyly trying to share some corner of that umbrella; no longer the centre of the universe like one was at 19, but back still straight, still catching glimpses of oneself in the mirror and trying to embody a certain raffish pluck.)
Cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet. Do they end up together, or don’t they? Here is an anecdote from The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Man, by Richard B. Stolley:
In response to a gentle letter from a New York lawyer, dying of cancer in a hospital, who said he very much wanted the couple to be reunited, Fowles wrote back, "Yes, they were." On the same day he got a "horrid" letter from an American woman who angrily demanded, "Why can't you say what you mean, and for God's sake, what happened in the end?" Fowles replied curtly: "They never saw each other again."
Philosophy in action.
*oh, and I was banned from the library because I used to wreck and lose books with perplexing regularity and couldn't pay the fees.
Show More
and being riveted, reading through the night and putting it down and finding that things weren't the same as before. In those days we didn't have the $ that I could just go and buy books whenever I wanted*--weird to think how substantially my reading life up till age 18 was determined by my dad's reading proclivities, ossified decades earlier but still represented by everything on the shelf at home and everything we got for Christmas. But Mr. Bowker's vehement rec kindled a bad desire, and when I went to university and got scholarships and could read whatever I wanted, Fowles was my first port of call. It was great timing--I'd just broken off my first great roma(h)nce, and I was a young man who loved deeply and selfishly and was as close as I would ever be, at that time, to identifying with Nicholas Urfe's vicious, reptilian sense of entitlement and fundamental inability to ever feel himself anything other than deeply, deeply clean.I mean, this existential liquor went down smooooooth. This was to Sartre as Jameson's and water was to those scotches that pack your eyes and nose with cotton balls. Young proxy flees tiresome love affair for plausible adventure on Greek island, falls into something strange--distressing and addictive in its strangeness--instead. A mentor, a mystery, a girl. This is exactly what any young male with half a set of balls and half a book in his head and complicated resentments and a deep, deep ambivalence toward the multi-metaphoric weirdness of the idea of a "career" was looking for. As Nicholas dropped out of some shitty DH Lawrence pastiche into the magic uncertainty, jesting pleasance, safe-or-are-they risks that lie beyond the waiting-room. A masque, every night, and just for me!
A masque full of life lessons for budding lads (and, by all accounts, lasses--this is a book beloved by many--though it's SO male and if I were a woman I'd be rolling my eyes hard, but then maybe that's just my own private reductionism) lads I say not much removed from the writing-down-quotes-from-Bartleby's-in-your-diary stage. What would SPECIAL YOU do if you had to make a SPECIAL CHOICE about who would LIVE AND DIE and maybe STAIN YOUR HONOUR in DOUBLEYA DOUBLEYA TWO and maybe not be so SPECIAL AFTER ALL? I mean, this book literally has a scene where a bunch of eminent psychologists place our man on a throne and talk all about him for hours and then give him a chance to get back at the woman who's "wronged" him; Fowles's purpos is ultimately pedagogical, but the masturbatory element is undeniable.
As a novelist, Fowles is a theorist, but not a systematizer—that is, to take the inevitable permanent Sartre comparison up again, Fowles “existentials” no –ism, no thoroughgoing ethical discipline or public movement, but merely a hobbledehoy, a clapped-up compilation of cannily coordinated concepts to float the author, himself, across the uncharted waters of life and to be taken by the reader, insofar as he or she wishes, as a readymade.
Viz.! The “Godgame,” which our present generation can understand as a process essentially like unto “taking the red pill.” You know? You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, you take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed? The motto of the game: Cause no unnecessary pain, and the question of whether pain is ever necessary. The “existential smile,” which is the smile that’s chewed up all the arbitrary cruelty and meaninglessness life has to offer and accepts it—spits it back like tacks and smiles nevertheless. The key difference between the two editions of this book is that in the first, the existential smile has more than a dash of cruelty in it itself—Conchis is a traumatized man with more than a hint of the “dark triad” (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) about him, Nicholas hits Alison with a brutal fist, the ending is a simple exercise in catharsis-denial. Fowles was mistaken for a crypto-fascist of the (crypto-)Nietzschean ilk by many of his first readers, and you can understand that take from a perspective still sorta mired in the postwar hivemind and only starting to glimpse the radical new approaches to self-actualization of the decade to come. (First edition, 1965; second, 1977 ….) But as we know from reading our Nietzsche properly, the will to power is also the will to joy and the will to kindness; and Fowles took the fairly extraordinary steps for a misunderstood novelist of producing not only The Aristos, an idiosyncratic personal statement of his ideas about a higher spiritual life for humanity, but also a whole second version of The Magus that excises that unintended darkness, whether its source was a failure of art or a personal philosophy still immature. The Aristos is the hobbledehoy and The Magus is the readymade. Conchis becomes a teacher of infinite subtlety, finally earning the Prospero role; the misogyny of the fist is partially expiated, partially defused, partially sublimated into Nicholas’s now more extensively sexual relations with Lily/Julie, but certainly on the whole less objectionable; and the ending is extended, massaged and modulated, and goes from just sudden and unsatisfying to the intentional ambiguity-pathos of great art. This is the version that I love and that reminds me still that it takes strength to be gentle and kind, especially for the adventurous spirit. (I’ll cop to still slyly trying to share some corner of that umbrella; no longer the centre of the universe like one was at 19, but back still straight, still catching glimpses of oneself in the mirror and trying to embody a certain raffish pluck.)
Cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet. Do they end up together, or don’t they? Here is an anecdote from The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Man, by Richard B. Stolley:
In response to a gentle letter from a New York lawyer, dying of cancer in a hospital, who said he very much wanted the couple to be reunited, Fowles wrote back, "Yes, they were." On the same day he got a "horrid" letter from an American woman who angrily demanded, "Why can't you say what you mean, and for God's sake, what happened in the end?" Fowles replied curtly: "They never saw each other again."
Philosophy in action.
*oh, and I was banned from the library because I used to wreck and lose books with perplexing regularity and couldn't pay the fees.
Show Less
LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha
I went into this novel with some trepidation. I was not intimidated by its doorstop size, nor by its reputation as sophisticated metafiction. But it had received a solidly negative review from my Other Reader, and the book's own author John Fowles lamented it as "haphazard ... a novel of
Like any "novel of adolescence," The Magus is a story of initiation, but more explicitly so than most. The fact that the ceremonial aspects of the rite are largely non-consensual, and that the candidate (i.e. the first-person narrator Nicholas) is so profoundly unlikable, were perhaps contributing factors to my Other Reader's thorough disgust with the book. There is an explicit Sadean element here, with or without sadism. It is in some respects a more naturalistic approach to the content of Bernard Noel's Castle of Communion.
In the course of the novel, an elite conspiracy perpetrating a system of "experimental" initiation has as its upshot an opposition between freedom and faith. "There is no god but man," and "Love is the law, love under will" (none of these quotes from the book). The closing epigram reminded me of the words of Liber CLXVI: "This Path is beyond Life and Death; it is also beyond Love; but that ye know not, for ye know not Love." Aleister Crowley gets one solitary name-check here, whena character in a combination of criminal trial and witches' sabbat appears in a Baphomet mask, and Nicholas (gagged) thinks sarcastically to himself, "Doctor Crowley, I presume" (502).
The magus of the title is the inscrutable psychopomp character Maurice Conchis, whom I found more reminiscent of Gurdjieff than of Crowley. The most esoteric influence mentioned by Fowles in a discussion of his sources is C.G. Jung, but it is possible that there was a Gurdjieffian element. The metaphysical concept of "hazard" emphasized by Conchis was key in the work of John G. Bennett, who was active in England promoting Gurdjieff's teachings during the extensive period of the composition of The Magus. (I synchronistically stumbled across a cheap used copy of Bennett's book on Hazard on the same day I finished reading The Magus.)
I did enjoy this book, although it does tend to have the weaker side of the comparisons in which I find myself most likely to include it, whether with Hesse's Steppenwolf, Pynchon's Vineland, or Irwin's Satan Wants Me. I'll still plead for the virtues of "The Prince and the Magician," though, a teaching story on a par with the Bektashi parable of "The Shrine."
Show More
adolescence written by a retarded adolescent" (6, 9). These worries were mitigated by two factors. First, the version I read was a "more than ... stylistic revision" (5) perpetrated over a decade after its initial publication. Second, I had encountered the two-page "fairy story" of "The Prince and the Magician" excerpted in the "Magic Shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly (Summer 2012), and found it wonderful. I can now report that it loses none of its luster in its original context (550-552). There was a big twist at the end of part two (562), which I had seen coming for at least 200 pages, so that was underwhelming.Like any "novel of adolescence," The Magus is a story of initiation, but more explicitly so than most. The fact that the ceremonial aspects of the rite are largely non-consensual, and that the candidate (i.e. the first-person narrator Nicholas) is so profoundly unlikable, were perhaps contributing factors to my Other Reader's thorough disgust with the book. There is an explicit Sadean element here, with or without sadism. It is in some respects a more naturalistic approach to the content of Bernard Noel's Castle of Communion.
In the course of the novel, an elite conspiracy perpetrating a system of "experimental" initiation has as its upshot an opposition between freedom and faith. "There is no god but man," and "Love is the law, love under will" (none of these quotes from the book). The closing epigram reminded me of the words of Liber CLXVI: "This Path is beyond Life and Death; it is also beyond Love; but that ye know not, for ye know not Love." Aleister Crowley gets one solitary name-check here, when
The magus of the title is the inscrutable psychopomp character Maurice Conchis, whom I found more reminiscent of Gurdjieff than of Crowley. The most esoteric influence mentioned by Fowles in a discussion of his sources is C.G. Jung, but it is possible that there was a Gurdjieffian element. The metaphysical concept of "hazard" emphasized by Conchis was key in the work of John G. Bennett, who was active in England promoting Gurdjieff's teachings during the extensive period of the composition of The Magus. (I synchronistically stumbled across a cheap used copy of Bennett's book on Hazard on the same day I finished reading The Magus.)
I did enjoy this book, although it does tend to have the weaker side of the comparisons in which I find myself most likely to include it, whether with Hesse's Steppenwolf, Pynchon's Vineland, or Irwin's Satan Wants Me. I'll still plead for the virtues of "The Prince and the Magician," though, a teaching story on a par with the Bektashi parable of "The Shrine."
Show Less
LibraryThing member CasualFriday
A painfully frustrating read. Beautifully written and often suspenseful and engrossing. I think some of the philosophizing is less than it appears and seems somewhat dated. But what really bothered me was the frustration of the continual lies that Nicholas is told. The effect on the reader is like
Show More
a night-long bad dream where you 're trying to get somewhere -- or get away from someone -- and you keep running into obstacles, and the dream gets sidetracked into something else, and you run into obstacles there, too, and on and on and on, until you wake up, exhausted. Show Less
LibraryThing member PrincessPaulina
* NO SPOILERS WERE USED IN THE WRITING OF THIS REVIEW! *
Individuals like Nicholas from the Magus are common among my generation of hedonistic urbanites: self-centered slackers out for themselves, with no morals or principles guiding their actions.
In the Magus, one such "modern" (read
I know many people like Nicholas, and I wish that this book were required reading on the road to adulthood! The lessons of love and selflessness that Fowles presents are priceless, and may otherwise take some people a lifetime to grasp. Not to mention the many other gems of wisdom making this a book to be read, and re-read, and re-read..
Individuals like Nicholas from the Magus are common among my generation of hedonistic urbanites: self-centered slackers out for themselves, with no morals or principles guiding their actions.
In the Magus, one such "modern" (read
Show More
"self-centered") individual finds himself stuck on a small Greek island, where he becomes entangled in an eccentric millionaire's mysterious web of games and deceit.I know many people like Nicholas, and I wish that this book were required reading on the road to adulthood! The lessons of love and selflessness that Fowles presents are priceless, and may otherwise take some people a lifetime to grasp. Not to mention the many other gems of wisdom making this a book to be read, and re-read, and re-read..
Show Less
LibraryThing member tronella
I finished reading The Magus yesterday. It was... interesting. I can see both why my mum liked it, and why my dad hated it, weirdly. I liked it most of the way through... parts of it reminded me of Lost and of other things I can't quite place, and it was quite fun, trying to work out what was real
Show More
and what wasn't, got you to feel some of what Nicholas must have been feeling. But I wasn't really keen on the ending. I'd have stopped it about 20 or so chapters earlier, before all the stuff with the trial and so on... less annoying, less ridiculous, but still the same ambiguity. Well, never mind. I've read worse things. Show Less
LibraryThing member SamuelW
I am a woefully impatient reader. I have zero tolerance for wasted words, literary flab, narrative bush beating. I like short books and have been known to dislike long ones. My trite complaint of every other classic I read – Dracula, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Lolita, To Kill
It helps that the writing is not at all flabby. Fowles skims the surface of life for the ripest details and uses them to evoke feelings, settings, people. Our narrator, Nicholas, contributes much of the charm; he's a bit egotistical and curt, but you can't help but smile as he dispatches minor characters with damning little epithets – 'spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick'. He is the listless, angst-ridden teenager who somehow manages never to whine at you or waste your time. When he takes up a teaching post in the Greek Islands, and meets a remarkable old man who invites him to spend each weekend at his house, Nicholas functions as a stand-in for the reader, becoming hypnotised by the mysteries of Conchis' invented realm and constantly hungering for more.
Fowles' world is immersive, alluring; brilliantly real and brilliantly unreal. What makes The Magus so enjoyable is the pleasure of being under the spell of a writer who knows what he is doing, and is content to do it without pomp, pretentiousness, or even obvious purpose. Like Nicholas, the reader is blindfolded and led through a labyrinth. Fowles throws in twist after twist; as soon as the reader begins to feel comfortable with the new status quo, the bottom falls out of the story yet again. I have never read a novel that ties itself up in so many knots, and I loved every minute of it.
For those who are not as well read as Fowles, it can be difficult to keep one's feet in a sea of allusions to classic plays, novels, myths and works of art. But the relentless references draw our attention to the nature of the story world that Fowles is weaving for us. We can almost feel him mocking Conchis, who denounces fiction as useless, asking 'Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' Far from being a meaningless fabrication, The Magus is a novel that self-consciously examines the incredible powers of fiction.
So I would highly recommend The Magus: the longest book I have ever read, and the first long book I have ever loved (excluding the later Harry Potter books, which don't count.)
Show More
a Mockingbird – is that they could have, and should have, been shorter. But somehow I fell in love with John Fowles' The Magus, which stretches to some seven hundred pages and took me twenty three hours of solid reading time (according to the Kobo app on my iPad.)It helps that the writing is not at all flabby. Fowles skims the surface of life for the ripest details and uses them to evoke feelings, settings, people. Our narrator, Nicholas, contributes much of the charm; he's a bit egotistical and curt, but you can't help but smile as he dispatches minor characters with damning little epithets – 'spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick'. He is the listless, angst-ridden teenager who somehow manages never to whine at you or waste your time. When he takes up a teaching post in the Greek Islands, and meets a remarkable old man who invites him to spend each weekend at his house, Nicholas functions as a stand-in for the reader, becoming hypnotised by the mysteries of Conchis' invented realm and constantly hungering for more.
Fowles' world is immersive, alluring; brilliantly real and brilliantly unreal. What makes The Magus so enjoyable is the pleasure of being under the spell of a writer who knows what he is doing, and is content to do it without pomp, pretentiousness, or even obvious purpose. Like Nicholas, the reader is blindfolded and led through a labyrinth. Fowles throws in twist after twist; as soon as the reader begins to feel comfortable with the new status quo, the bottom falls out of the story yet again. I have never read a novel that ties itself up in so many knots, and I loved every minute of it.
For those who are not as well read as Fowles, it can be difficult to keep one's feet in a sea of allusions to classic plays, novels, myths and works of art. But the relentless references draw our attention to the nature of the story world that Fowles is weaving for us. We can almost feel him mocking Conchis, who denounces fiction as useless, asking 'Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' Far from being a meaningless fabrication, The Magus is a novel that self-consciously examines the incredible powers of fiction.
So I would highly recommend The Magus: the longest book I have ever read, and the first long book I have ever loved (excluding the later Harry Potter books, which don't count.)
Show Less
LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
I find myself caught between rant and rave. More rave, which is why I rated it so high, but enough wish to rant to withhold that fifth star. This is a strange book. In the Foreword to the 1978 Revised edition, Fowles said one title he considered was "The Godgame." A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe,
Yet I was never tempted to bail--and this read incredibly fast. The book is beautifully, compellingly written. I couldn't put it down with the mystery of Conchis and what he was up to unresolved. In a BBC interview included in the back of my edition, Fowles said he loved "pure narrative" and he feels very few writers can make up for a lack of storytelling ability in other ways--that he values "readability." And you can see that in the novel--it's shamelessly plot-filled--in good and bad ways. Engrossing, eventful, but sometimes stagey--but despite it's literary sensibility definitely accessible. About the only thing I could complain about is Fowles habit of sprinkling bits of Latin, Greek and French untranslated. The Magus is both on the "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" list and Playboy's list of "The 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written." This isn't pornography, there's not much sexual content in terms of number of pages--but it's not only present, it's well-written (rather than, as is almost always the case even in so-called literature, embarrassingly awful.) So many lines were quotable and resonant and there's enough that's twisty in it I could see it repaying more readings. So, interesting writer, interesting book--but rather unsettling.
Show More
comes in 1953 to the isolated Greek island of Phraxos (modeled on the real island of Spetsai) to teach at an elite boarding school. He's our narrator, our focus through 656 pages, and he's callow, a cad, and more than a bit of a snob. He encounters a mysterious man calling himself Maurice Conchis living in a villa who takes on God-like qualities. Not the God of Christians or Jews or Muslims mind you. More of the Pagan kind that enjoys playing with mortals like toys. Half-way through the novel I was completely enraptured by the plot's twists and turns. By two-thirds in though, not unlike Nicholas himself, I was more than a bit exasperated by the intricacies, reversals and cruelties of the game, with the sense that not only Nicholas but I the reader was being toyed with. Fowles in the Foreward admitted reviews of the book had "justified criticisms of excess, over-complexity, artificiality" and I agree the novel is guilty on all fronts. I both liked and was repelled by how Fowles played with the connections between life and fiction--how he never let you forget you were reading fiction--in many senses of the word. With this novel the "truth" keeps shifting under your feet, and I wasn't left feeling satisfied at the end--and suspect Fowles didn't want me to be.Yet I was never tempted to bail--and this read incredibly fast. The book is beautifully, compellingly written. I couldn't put it down with the mystery of Conchis and what he was up to unresolved. In a BBC interview included in the back of my edition, Fowles said he loved "pure narrative" and he feels very few writers can make up for a lack of storytelling ability in other ways--that he values "readability." And you can see that in the novel--it's shamelessly plot-filled--in good and bad ways. Engrossing, eventful, but sometimes stagey--but despite it's literary sensibility definitely accessible. About the only thing I could complain about is Fowles habit of sprinkling bits of Latin, Greek and French untranslated. The Magus is both on the "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" list and Playboy's list of "The 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written." This isn't pornography, there's not much sexual content in terms of number of pages--but it's not only present, it's well-written (rather than, as is almost always the case even in so-called literature, embarrassingly awful.) So many lines were quotable and resonant and there's enough that's twisty in it I could see it repaying more readings. So, interesting writer, interesting book--but rather unsettling.
Show Less
LibraryThing member PilgrimJess
"The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself."
First written in 1965 and revised by Fowles in 1977 'The Magus' is a psycho-sexual fantasy. The story is told by Nicholas Urfe, a 25 year-old English man who takes a job as a teacher on the Greek island in 1953.
I realise that Nicholas isn't meant to be a sympathetic character but I found him so shallow and selfish that I didn't really care what was done to him next. This is a real problem when the story is written in first person, on one hand we are asked to believe that Nicholas was insightful whilst also being amazingly insular and ineffective.
Whilst I enjoyed reading about Conchis's back story, in particular during the Occupation, the introduction of Lily shifted the focus of the tale from him on to Nicholas's 'romance' with Lily just as it was getting interesting. I also found the ending unsatisfactory. Not whether Nicholas and Alison get back together again or not but rather what really was the point of it all, Nicholas certainly wasn't cured by the experience come the end.
"Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society."
This is a story that twists, turns and tantalises, is full of abstraction and some darkly disturbing images, often centring around sex, but personally I felt that it's lack of clarity only confused me so ultimately left me frustrated and disappointed.
First written in 1965 and revised by Fowles in 1977 'The Magus' is a psycho-sexual fantasy. The story is told by Nicholas Urfe, a 25 year-old English man who takes a job as a teacher on the Greek island in 1953.
Show More
Once on the island Nicholas encounters Conchis, a Greek millionaire, who ensnares him into a set of psychological games, masques and mysteries, where nothing and nobody is what they seem forcing Nicholas to question everything he has accepted about himself. I realise that Nicholas isn't meant to be a sympathetic character but I found him so shallow and selfish that I didn't really care what was done to him next. This is a real problem when the story is written in first person, on one hand we are asked to believe that Nicholas was insightful whilst also being amazingly insular and ineffective.
Whilst I enjoyed reading about Conchis's back story, in particular during the Occupation, the introduction of Lily shifted the focus of the tale from him on to Nicholas's 'romance' with Lily just as it was getting interesting. I also found the ending unsatisfactory. Not whether Nicholas and Alison get back together again or not but rather what really was the point of it all, Nicholas certainly wasn't cured by the experience come the end.
"Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society."
This is a story that twists, turns and tantalises, is full of abstraction and some darkly disturbing images, often centring around sex, but personally I felt that it's lack of clarity only confused me so ultimately left me frustrated and disappointed.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kohsamui
"The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the anti-hero's future; leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him no direction, no reward..."- The
This is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a loner from Oxford who spends a year teaching English on a remote island in Greece. On this island he meets a mysterious cast of characters set on teaching him a moral lesson through dramatics and trickery.
This is the worst book that I have read in my life. The characters are flat stereotypes and wholly impossible to like. The plot is an absurd stringing together of amateur sex scenes designed to please the teenage boys that are the obvious target audience of this piece of nonsense. From the countless descriptions of azure water, to the corny junior high school stock characters such as the young, blonde, nymphet identical twins June and Julie, to the comical pseudo-intellectual babble- this book was pure juvenile tedium.
Show More
Magus.This is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a loner from Oxford who spends a year teaching English on a remote island in Greece. On this island he meets a mysterious cast of characters set on teaching him a moral lesson through dramatics and trickery.
This is the worst book that I have read in my life. The characters are flat stereotypes and wholly impossible to like. The plot is an absurd stringing together of amateur sex scenes designed to please the teenage boys that are the obvious target audience of this piece of nonsense. From the countless descriptions of azure water, to the corny junior high school stock characters such as the young, blonde, nymphet identical twins June and Julie, to the comical pseudo-intellectual babble- this book was pure juvenile tedium.
Show Less
LibraryThing member diabhal
I slogged through this book hoping it would get better. It has a mystery element which forces you to keep reading. But by the end you realise that you've wasted hours of you life on a 500 page misogynistic diatribe. I think this is my least favourite book of all time.
LibraryThing member Bookmarque
This book drove me crazy. It started out so well. A shady man with lots of money lures single men to his estate on a Greek Island for the purposes of psychological experimentation. There is a strange woman and silent servants and odd occurrences. Truth takes a vacation and the man is surrounded by
All fine and good - but then it goes too far. It leaves the bounds of plausibility behind. The dupe at the center of all this puts up with a great deal more than he ought. He's repeatedly attacked and lied to and when his former girlfriend kills herself and that event is taken into the whirling plot that surrounds him, he still believes the things people say to him. He still puts himself in situations beyond his control even knowing they will end badly. I can't imagine any sane human being putting up with this for as long as this guy has been.
As if that wasn't enough, but now the author repeats scenes over and over. The twin girls (that mysterious woman wasn't one person, but two, another little creepy aspect) seem to come clean and reveal the truth, but then are found to be duplicitous liars. There are tears and sex and strange kidnappings. Not once. Not twice. Three scenes like this. All ending in violence and the man's assertion that he won't fall for it again. But we know he will. He always does. He's an idiot and I really don't care what happens to him.
Besides that, the plot now has gotten so convoluted with all of the deceit and the liars backpedaling and forgetting their own lies. I can't keep track and I don't really care to. Which is a shame because I really wanted to like this book. Everything I've heard about it is positive, but now I am mystified as to why. Bah.
Show More
lies. What is real and what is fantasy? A great set up. There are a couple of violent interludes where the man is attacked and forced to participate in strange little vignettes. Exactly what this is all supposed to mean is still hidden. The man realizes that he's being manipulated and lied to, but still he puts up with it. The mystery of why is palpable and as we find out that everyone is in on the plot, we're astonished at just how far-reaching this wealthy man's influence goes.All fine and good - but then it goes too far. It leaves the bounds of plausibility behind. The dupe at the center of all this puts up with a great deal more than he ought. He's repeatedly attacked and lied to and when his former girlfriend kills herself and that event is taken into the whirling plot that surrounds him, he still believes the things people say to him. He still puts himself in situations beyond his control even knowing they will end badly. I can't imagine any sane human being putting up with this for as long as this guy has been.
As if that wasn't enough, but now the author repeats scenes over and over. The twin girls (that mysterious woman wasn't one person, but two, another little creepy aspect) seem to come clean and reveal the truth, but then are found to be duplicitous liars. There are tears and sex and strange kidnappings. Not once. Not twice. Three scenes like this. All ending in violence and the man's assertion that he won't fall for it again. But we know he will. He always does. He's an idiot and I really don't care what happens to him.
Besides that, the plot now has gotten so convoluted with all of the deceit and the liars backpedaling and forgetting their own lies. I can't keep track and I don't really care to. Which is a shame because I really wanted to like this book. Everything I've heard about it is positive, but now I am mystified as to why. Bah.
Show Less
LibraryThing member usuallee
One of my favorites. Read it back in '97 when I was 21. Awe-inspiring. A lot of it probably went over my head, but I was enthralled. Kindle version will finally come out late in 2012. Seems like a good excuse to re-read this classic. Since so many of the literary, historical, and other allusions
Show More
were meaningless to me, can't wait to read it again, with 15 years of life experience - and a smart phone in hand! Show Less
LibraryThing member rareflorida
Catch-22. The plot device twists like Hellers novel. Puritans would probably want to ban this book but the funny thing is that the redemption of a bed-hopper could be one of the moral interpretations. Many issues are addressed in the book while the symbolism and literary referances add to the
Show More
thesis worthiness of this novel. It could easily be seen as long and tedious but I believe it is worth the effort.. Show Less
LibraryThing member yarb
The narrator is a cad, and no one in the book is at all chivalrous. That's fine, but the way the narrator expresses his caddishness - "growling" and "glowering" at adversaries, writing vindictive letters and burning them unsent - is a bit third-rate.
I was extremely disappointed that the magic
The women generally act sexy and are uniformly seen through the lens of sex. This is obviously attributable to the narrator but it does get very tiring. The book has an obsession with gender.
The best bits are Conchis' "reminiscences". These four vignettes show the author working for his keep. They are the kernels of stories which he wasn't able to extend, and so had to weave an elaborate frame narrative around to make them viable. But they are by far the most immediate and assured sections of this long book.
The whole theme of lies vs truth is quickly exhausted. You can only play so many shell games before the punter walks away. The episodic plot doesn't help in this regard. So, what is tonight's entertainment, I'm fairly sure the protag says at least once, and I said it more than once.
Overall, a very artificial novel with enough gripping sections to make it worth while.
I was extremely disappointed that the magic
Show More
introduced early on was soon debunked and it became a conventional evil-genius thriller.The women generally act sexy and are uniformly seen through the lens of sex. This is obviously attributable to the narrator but it does get very tiring. The book has an obsession with gender.
The best bits are Conchis' "reminiscences". These four vignettes show the author working for his keep. They are the kernels of stories which he wasn't able to extend, and so had to weave an elaborate frame narrative around to make them viable. But they are by far the most immediate and assured sections of this long book.
The whole theme of lies vs truth is quickly exhausted. You can only play so many shell games before the punter walks away. The episodic plot doesn't help in this regard. So, what is tonight's entertainment, I'm fairly sure the protag says at least once, and I said it more than once.
Overall, a very artificial novel with enough gripping sections to make it worth while.
Show Less
LibraryThing member opiatewave
A friend recommended this book to me with a wink and a warning that I would be thoroughly shocked about two-thirds of the way through it. This is a pretty good psychological thriller with wildly surreal situations in it. It's also highly sensual and convincing. I never saw the movie adaptation of
Show More
it, having been advised not to by that same friend, although I can visualize this story and piece together Nicholas' rapidly deconstructing reality. The most interesting aspect of this story is the complete lack of a convincing "why" - why did these things happen to Nicholas and for what reason? Fowles offers a few plausible explanations, yet moves the story along, forcing the reader to rethink those lines of logic. In the end - and I loved the end, as it felt like a curtain going down on an incomplete scene - readers are still left with that nagging question. A bold gamble, given the scope of this novel. But quite fitting. I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in psychological suspense/thrillers. Show Less
LibraryThing member NaggedMan
Make sure you read the 'revised version'. Urfe cannot bring himself to escape his ?tormentors? ?tutors? and I couldn't bring myself to escape this book. Brilliant writing. Baffling storyline. Don't expect a neat conclusion.
LibraryThing member Myhi
This is maybe the most popular of Fowles - an Oscar movie being written after it (Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn).
A maze of unanswered questions and unexpected happenings, that could drive anybody crazy; a game of a diabolic mind... with some twin sisters and a guy, on an exotic island in Greece.
A maze of unanswered questions and unexpected happenings, that could drive anybody crazy; a game of a diabolic mind... with some twin sisters and a guy, on an exotic island in Greece.
Show More
Another masterpiece of psychology, but a very captivating story in the same time. Show Less
LibraryThing member mermaidatheart
My dad has a Litmus test for the worthiness of a book: if it doesn't grab his interest in the first 100 pages, it's out. I would have done well to follow that advice with this book. While I admire the insane amount of planning and thinking that must have gone into writing it, The Magus seemed to be
It was really hard to get involved--I found the main character extremely unsympathetic, which of course, later turns out to be half the point. It started getting more interesting in the last fourth of the book, but the only reason I even got that far was that I refused to let it beat me. Even when the man was being tormented, I felt no more than the remotest pity for him. And the end of the book, while I see what the author was going for, was a huge let-down and cop-out.
It's possibly I'm not "intelligent" enough to enjoy this book, as the previous English teacher wasn't "intelligent" enough for the Godgame. But I'm pretty sure that's just what the author WANTS me to think, and I'm not swallowing it any more than I'm swallowing Conchis's batsh*t, gratuitous manipulations.
Show More
overreaching in scope and significance. It was really hard to get involved--I found the main character extremely unsympathetic, which of course, later turns out to be half the point. It started getting more interesting in the last fourth of the book, but the only reason I even got that far was that I refused to let it beat me. Even when the man was being tormented, I felt no more than the remotest pity for him. And the end of the book, while I see what the author was going for, was a huge let-down and cop-out.
It's possibly I'm not "intelligent" enough to enjoy this book, as the previous English teacher wasn't "intelligent" enough for the Godgame. But I'm pretty sure that's just what the author WANTS me to think, and I'm not swallowing it any more than I'm swallowing Conchis's batsh*t, gratuitous manipulations.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Steve38
A monument to its time. A book published in the 1960s looking back to the 1950s. A multitude of classical and literary references display the author's typical middle class education of the day. The inclusion of Jung, Freud, Norse sagas, drugs and the Greek islands move it into the liberating 60s.
Show More
Nevertheless a huge creative effort that still has a hairline crack that prevents it being the pristine piece of art it should be. In a world of staged lies the main character remains a Trevor Howard Brief Encounter cameo. The doomed love story plot an unneccessary anchor. Show Less
LibraryThing member Idiom
My English teacher told me I was ready for this when I was 15. It changed my life in so many ways and without my realising, pushed me into the career that I'm in. I've visited it again and again so many times.
Men as Gods; Gods as men. The magic of the Mediterranean and travelling and how we
Leant my first copy to my best friend 20 years ago and he's still got it and hasn't read it! Leant my second copy to an ex-girlfriend who never gave it back. Leant my third copy to someone who covered in with suntan lotion (you know who you are!).
Now, I wait with impatience for the day when my child becomes 15 and I say: I think you are ready for this now.
Men as Gods; Gods as men. The magic of the Mediterranean and travelling and how we
Show More
sometimes need to go away to come closer to understanding ourselves. Has always informed my dreams and still does. This book truely became a part of me.Deep down, I have always been Nicholas and I want Conchis to play with my mind as well. Leant my first copy to my best friend 20 years ago and he's still got it and hasn't read it! Leant my second copy to an ex-girlfriend who never gave it back. Leant my third copy to someone who covered in with suntan lotion (you know who you are!).
Now, I wait with impatience for the day when my child becomes 15 and I say: I think you are ready for this now.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jenandgidon
Men might really like this book. Women, not so much.
LibraryThing member ablueidol
Love it when I first read this back in the 1970's. Would have been in a commune in Shropshire and working on a beef rearing farm-whose wife was vegetarian and a founder member of the local CND. Wonder if the marriage lasted? Don't read this if you want naturalistic fiction, this is a Tempest rather
Show More
then a Richard 3rd read Show Less
LibraryThing member Bookbox
Loved the tricks this books plays as it sucks you in deeper and deeper. One of my all time favs.
LibraryThing member lyzadanger
For the first half of this book I thought it was pretty much the best thing ever. Now it ended and I’m in a bit of shell shock.
I strongly believe that this novel would appeal to those in the Da Vinci Code set. It’s plot-driven and stretches one’s credulity until it kind of breaks. One
It postures itself to be about humanity, reality and the search for identity, but in the end I found that I was still burning with anger on the protagonist’s behalf, not satisfied, and dully, dumbly confused.
Fun times were had with the onslaught of literary, historical and artistic references. Have at; hope you’re better-read than I am!
Update: I read this book just over a year ago, but I cannot stop thinking about it. It informs my metaphorical sense of things. For this reason, I'm upping my rating to 5 stars.
I strongly believe that this novel would appeal to those in the Da Vinci Code set. It’s plot-driven and stretches one’s credulity until it kind of breaks. One
Show More
desires, no, one feels that one must understand what is going on. It’s fascinating, well-written and had philosophical moments that had me–sadly indifferent to most philosophy–on the edge of my seat (well, bed, usually, that’s where I read), almost reaching for a highlighter (those who know me know I also don’t do this either).It postures itself to be about humanity, reality and the search for identity, but in the end I found that I was still burning with anger on the protagonist’s behalf, not satisfied, and dully, dumbly confused.
Fun times were had with the onslaught of literary, historical and artistic references. Have at; hope you’re better-read than I am!
Update: I read this book just over a year ago, but I cannot stop thinking about it. It informs my metaphorical sense of things. For this reason, I'm upping my rating to 5 stars.
Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1977 (revised edition)
Physical description
672 p.; 6.96 inches
ISBN
0440351626 / 9780440351627
Local notes
OCLC = 2704