Word: vestigia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That's why the novel fails. The immediate temptation is to compare Styron to Conrad; Sophie is Polish, and there are even references, late in the novel, to Conrad's Lord Jim. Styron searches for good and evil, for the vestigia that demons leave, just as Conrad did; he may even be answering Saul Bellow's Nobel Laureate call for a return to Conrad, for a return to what Conrad called the "permanent, enduring, essential" in human existence. But Styron doesn't know "the horror." These are small shoes in the footprints of sasquatch...
...first piece, 'Shadow Fancies,' is passable; the next, 'Ballads,' a little better; Vestigia Nulla Retorsum,' awfully poor; 'Student Lamps,' just tolerable; Louis Adolphe Thiers,' good, yea, very good, in fact, the only good article we found; 'Hobbies,' insipid; 'My Friend Balbus,' worse; 'Summer,' worst, - the worst we ever saw. This will do. We do not know how highly cultured the Quarterly's readers may be, but if we may judge of their understandings by the articles written for them, we should say their amount of knowledge, individually, was about that of a four-year-old child...
...Pedem et vestigia...
| 1 |