Description
The Unquiet Grave describes a year’s journey through the mind of a writer who is haunted by the turbulent Mediterranean figure of Palinurus, the doomed pilot whose uneasy ghost demands to be placated. Three movements indicate with deepening intensity the ‘three blust’ring nights’ while he is adrift on the ocean, and the Epilogue examines the myth from both the historical and psychological aspects.
Opinions of this book
Raymond Mortimer (New Statesman): ‘. . . I cannot help imagining writers hundreds of years hence poring over a twentieth-century classic entitled The Unquiet Grave, and admiring in it the mirror of their own pre-occupations . . . a self-portrait, built of reflections and maxims upon religion, love, politics, nature and art, of quotations from congenial authors, and of remembrances from the author’s past . . . Palinurus is enchantingly clever (and how much more, more habitable this island would become if cleverness were less generally despised). He is soaked in literature, Latin, French and English. He is blissfully responsive to nature (particularly to beasts and fruits), to history and to the visual arts . . . He is above all conspicuous for the dire penetration of the gaze he turns upon himself.’
V. S. Pritchett (broadcasting): ‘. . . The author is a brilliant, egotistical and often ferocious critic, one of the most original and scholarly who grew up between the two wars, a man with a bizarre imagination and a superb gift for words and epigams . . . I think this book may turn out to be a minor classic of our time, a modern egotist’s anthology.’ –
Hard cover. 138 pages. In excellent pre-loved condition.