A review by ianfjanssen
Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch

2.0

These are my opinions on the work, not a comprehensive judgment on it. Just not my cup of tea, as is said. Even with all of Virgil's perambulating thoughts, I found I had no investment in what happened to him or how he perceived it. Broch set a high bar for himself with this, but I just found it a chore I did not care about sufficiently to persevere; maybe he succeeded, maybe he did not. Indeed, I found myself laughing at passages that probably were not intended as comic because of the seemingly absurd degree to which they were hyperanalyzed and masticated. I understand that this is the style of the work and I can appreciate it on some level for that, but as my grandmother used to say, "Sometimes too much is too much." I think that the prose probably flows much better in German, although that is no fault of the translator; you can see where the original compound nouns probably expressed thoughts and intentions better than the sometimes cumbersome English phrases into which they were translated. I neither recommend nor not seek to dissuade anyone from reading Broch's work, but I suspect you either will embrace it or drop out early, with not much in between. A truly heavy lift.