From Inside the Widening Gyre

Title adapted from the first line in the poem, "The Second Coming," by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It refers to a diagram, received in a vision, composed of two conic helixes ("gyres"), one inside the other. Yeats claimed this image captured the contrary motions inherent in world history (dialectics?). He believed in 1921 that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre...

16 August 2011

I'm on record as listing this as my favorite book

Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the most amazing books I've ever read. In short, it is the psychological portrait of a young man who would sacrifice everything for the sake of his art. It's hard to believe this book was written in the 19th century--it feels so contemporary. Indeed, many later writers have acknowledged Hamsun as a major influence on their own work.

More than any artist I know, Hamsun epitomizes the fact that you can have messed up political ideas (he was a Nazi sympathizer), but still be a world-class artist and writer--demonstrating that the two endeavors, politics and art, are not necessarily connected--which may, in fact, be a shock to many cultural Marxists ("Politics decides everything." -Mao). Hunger is, in my opinion, his undisputed masterpiece.

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