Product Description

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem -- and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136056 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-15
• Released on: 1995-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Review
"Broch is the greatest novelist European literature has produced since Joyce, and...The Death of Virgil represents the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses." -- George Steiner

"Hermann Broch belongs in that tradition of great twentieth-century novelists who have transformed, almost beyond recognition, one of the classic art forms of the nineteenth century."

-- Hannah Arendt -- Review

Novel by Hermann Broch, published simultaneously in German (as Der Tod des Vergil) and in English in 1945. Best known of the author's works, the novel imaginatively recreates the last 18 hours of the poet Virgil's life as he is brought to Brundisium. Broch, an Austrian Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, concerns himself here and in his other works with the place of literature in a culture in crisis. Written in rich poetic language and rhythmic sentences, the novel has four "symphonic" movements. In the first, the poet who had glorified Rome confronts its vile street life. Having decided that his writing, which excludes the ugly, is false and meaningless, Virgil in the novel's second part decides to burn the Aeneid. In the third part, the emperor Augustus convinces Virgil to turn over the manuscript for safekeeping in exchange for the freeing of his slaves. The fourth movement completes the first three as the moribund author manages to reconcile the opposites of life and death, beauty and ugliness. In what is considered to be one of the most remarkable passages in modern literature, Virgil has a dying vision of himself on a rapturous sea voyage. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Review
"Broch is the greatest novelist European literature has produced since Joyce, and...The Death of Virgil represents the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses." -- George Steiner

"Hermann Broch belongs in that tradition of great twentieth-century novelists who have transformed, almost beyond recognition, one of the classic art forms of the nineteenth century."

-- Hannah Arendt

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Customer Reviews

The nature of art, the nature of dying
Broch twists the concept of "novel" here to throw at us a very long prose poem -of the highest order. Virgil arrives in Brindis with Augustus's naval convoy, coming from Greece, to spend there what will become his last 18 hours on Earth. Suffering from a strong fever, Virgil is in an almost constant delirium, dreaming with a young peasant (his guide from boat to palace), with Plocia, a former lover, and with an imaginary slave. The three of them will guide him to death. The central subject of the book is Virgil's obsession with the destruction of "The Eneid", for considering it imperfect and not worthy of survival. His two best friends, Lucius and Plocius, come to visit trying to confort him and to convince him not to destroy that major work of art (which in real life they actually did). Then Augustus himself arrives, and sustains with Virgil a long philosophical conversation, full of digressions and of Virgil's own hallucinations. The subject here is the nature of Art. Augustus maintains that "The Eneid" is the property of the people of Rome, as its national epic, while Virgil insists that any work of art is the sole property of its author and, in that capacity, he has every right -even more, the duty- to destroy it, by virtue of its imperfection. The long passage is full of Virgil's delirium in which he remembers his bucolic childhood and discusses with his phantoms the nature of love, happiness, success and life. Augustus, in turn, pronounces long and profound statements about the State, politics and community.

The final chapter, a mesmerizing one, is a long hallucination depicting the process of dying, in an absolutely vivid, hair-rising and beautiful way. I don't think there can be around another narration as impressive as this one about the passing from life to death. Virgil's soul sets sail in a ship, surrounded by the people he knew, who are left behind until Virgil metamorphoses into animal, vegetal, mineral, and spirit.

This is a hard reading, long, slow and obscure, and nevertheless it is a master treaty on death and what it means to be dying. That it will never have a mass of readers seems to be clear. But it is also clear that it pays to stay with it and get lost in the magic.

Turgid And Tendentious
Here we go: This book is the most turgid, arduous, impenetrable conglomeration of words I've ever come across (Finnegans Wake excepted). It brinks back memories of my school days in fourth year Latin and causes one to wish again that Virgil HAD burned The Aeneid, so as not to plague us fourth year A-level students, and - even more so, so that Broch would not have this pretentious trope on which to found a spurious Parnassus of fuddled and addled - dense to the point that all poetry is eclipsed - book of....whatever it is.

For -and this is the crux here - this book is not poetic, not the work of a master stylist at all. How many stylists use the same phrase, to wit, "humus of existence" at least fifteen times (I ceased counting after that)? Answer: None. They don't rely on the same phrase so often that it becomes cliché.

And then there is the prescient notion of Broch's Virgil of a coming saviour. I wonder if this has anything to do with Broch's conversion to Catholicism in the last years of his life. The point here is not pro or anti Christianity---The point is: What on earth does Broch mean by having his Virgil go on about a saviour of "perception" rather than mere poets, whose words occlude, rather than clarify perception? Perception implies an object. So, we are not amiss to ask: Perception of what? Broch goes on in such muddled prose that one gleans nothing from the book itself. But, of course, we all know what he is talking about when he brings in, time and again, the three-in-one godhead et cetera.

This book is best suited to theology and philosophy students who, for whatever reason, really do fancy quibbling over dense passages that lead nowhere, over abstruse points of doctrine, over meaningless verbiage.

Lovers of literature, take a pass.

the dreamlike state of dying
This work stands firmly as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature, and is not to be missed by the thoughtful reader willing to spend some time with a great book. As mentioned by other reviewers, the writing, especially the feverish second part (it's a book of four parts), is dense and can be challenging to get through, though that effort will be well paid by the discussion with Augustus in the third, and the sublime death trip of the fourth and final part. The first part documents Virgil's arrival into burning Rome, and sets up what is to follow. One needn't have read anything by Virgil in preparation for this book, and to the best of my knowledge, Broch, though running from the Nazi's, never spent time in a concentration camp. And, for the curious, Broch's grave is in Connecticut.