Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Penguin Modern Classics (1967), Paperback, 176 pages
Description
Written during World War II, a time of personal grief, The Unquiet Grave is both a powerful vision of a civilisation that has endured since classical times and a contemplation of the human condition in all its darkness and absurdity.
User reviews
LibraryThing member neurodrew
The Unquiet Grave
A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Sunday, February 16, 2014
I finished this book about a week ago, and have been avoiding writing about it because I have been thinking and trying to understand it. Palinurus is Aeneas' trusted pilot, washed overboard, and ashore, where he is
The second drags the depression deeper, referring to suicides of friends, and quoting at great length from French savants. In the third the beginning of his marriage is recalled, from Paris to Toulon, and he begins to heal.
Chamfort: "A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing more disgusting before the day is over"
"…melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality"
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment" Santayana
Altogether, I read this as a meditation on enduring life and its challenges, with great beauty in its prose style, but often obscure in meaning.
A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly
Sunday, February 16, 2014
I finished this book about a week ago, and have been avoiding writing about it because I have been thinking and trying to understand it. Palinurus is Aeneas' trusted pilot, washed overboard, and ashore, where he is
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killed. Oracles ascribe the later troubles of the Trojans as they reach Italy to Palinurus' restless spirit, left unburied on a strange shore. The introduction helps to explain the structure of the book. The first section, introduces the author, and the fact of his failed marriage, and sets the time in the midst of WWII. "Two fears alternate in marriage, that of loneliness and that of bondage" "A woman who cannot feign submission can never make a man happy and so cannot be happy herself" The second drags the depression deeper, referring to suicides of friends, and quoting at great length from French savants. In the third the beginning of his marriage is recalled, from Paris to Toulon, and he begins to heal.
Chamfort: "A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing more disgusting before the day is over"
"…melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality"
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment" Santayana
Altogether, I read this as a meditation on enduring life and its challenges, with great beauty in its prose style, but often obscure in meaning.
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LibraryThing member hjenne
Surprisingly concise and rich, it is a book to be placed in the same constellation where Cervantes's "D. Quixote", Dante's "Inferno", Shakespeare's "Othello", and Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal" reside...
Language
Original publication date
1945
ISBN
none
Local notes
Penguin Modern Classics