A review by herpesma
Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch

2.0

A truly and deeply frustrating book, one of glimpses of rare beauty amidst a sea of onanistic modernist flourish which serves less to impart a sense of a mystic unveiling reality and more an acidhead describing how a person and a rock are the same. Broch is, at times, a highly insightful writer, capable not only of a turn of phrase which rings loud and true but of prolonged sections of staggeringly insightful dialogic narration which makes the large swathes of the book which fail all the more painful. Although ostensibly couched in the reality of a Roman Virgil, the man represented here is much indebted to Dante's depiction of him, nearly as much as Broch's style is indebted to Joyce. What comes about is an attempt at an author's stream of consciousness, and more than that a journey mirroring that of The Divine Comedy as he embarks upon his own death. It's a monumental task, perhaps even a self-defeating one for an author to take up, an impossibility which Broch at first acknowledges and then makes into dreadful fetish, like a schoolyard pariah making play with yesterday's torn-off scabs; piercing beneath the surface but seemingly for the sake only of the praise. Although thus making a near perfect mirror for the Virgil drawn in its pages, the fundamental problem becomes one of sustained tone: what is at first confessional and self-lacerative quickly becomes annoying and parodic as a Monty Python Christianity, all the more upsetting in its play self-awareness lacking any willingness to bend towards a less self-involved perspective. This limitation is perhaps the fault of the modernist movement, which, although interesting to couple with the grand and often universalizing tones of epic and canto, ends up coming across less as a portrait of a confused fever at the end of a man's life and more as Broch's self-soothing debasement and re-attachment to literature. Perhaps he should have listened closer to his own themes of death preceding rebirth, because if ever a book was in need of extensive rewriting, especially because there is an Acropolis buried beneath the many layered grains of omnipresent self-doubt, Broch's occasionally brilliant, always impressive, and utterly intolerable final book is the one. Props to the third chapter and a touching depiction of friendship, especially a fascinatingly pliable Augustus Caesar, drop for the endless repetitions of "denude" in pages-long abstracted paragraphs with nary an airy nook to rest its self-supposed laurels upon