clew's reviews: a book log

Scholarship and failure of will

I recommend Darconville's Cat instead of the others, although official critical opinion seems to be with Confederacy.... The Kurzweil novel is a faint attempt at Umberto Eco-ish intellectual plotting and sophistication. Darconville's Cat doesn't have hunt-the-slipper MacGuffins, but his prose is actually intellectual and sophisticated (especially in the early sense of that word, adulterated and untrue ). Each book has a young lovely person wound into the plots of an elegant and slimy scholar, but Theroux had the nous to write as the scholar, recognizing that the pretty young thing is better to look at, but the prose of the Humbert^2 is more interesting to read.

Confederacy of Dunces is also written in the voice of a horrible would-be intellectual, set in the South as is Darconville..., but my tastes weren't up to the miasma of hopeless self-destruction and unloveableness of Toole's antihero. I want two classical things in a tragedy: beautiful language, and the tragedy has to have been brought on - however loaded the circumstances - by its hero.

Darconville... has both in spades; the book is like a collection of Elizabethan halfbricks flung at the South, women, sex, academia, the narrator - it's a long book.

ISBN: 0805043659

ISBN: 0786885181

ISBN: 0802130208