book data
36 ratings, 3.92 average rating, 8 reviews
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published
July 27th 2005
by Persea Books
binding
Paperback, 160 pages
isbn
0892550589
(isbn13: 9780892550586)
description
This enduring classic is "a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough" (Ernest Hemingway). ...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 64)
Read in July, 2002
Any reader or writer, but mostly writers i think, will absolutely adore this book... It contains the musings of a very insightful man who manages to bring some rather broad concepts to very succinct maxims and commentaries, "supplemented with quotations from the masters of European literature, among them Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Goethe, and Voltaire."
Connelly himself, in the volume's introduction, puts it this way: "As a signal of distress from one human being to another, The Unquiet Grave went unanswered, but the suffering was alleviated. As a demonstration of the power of words, however, of the obsessional impetus in an aesthetic form to fulfil its destiny, the work was an object-lesson. All grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind, the manuscript proclaimed; the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and is immune from sorrow." ...more
Connelly himself, in the volume's introduction, puts it this way: "As a signal of distress from one human being to another, The Unquiet Grave went unanswered, but the suffering was alleviated. As a demonstration of the power of words, however, of the obsessional impetus in an aesthetic form to fulfil its destiny, the work was an object-lesson. All grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind, the manuscript proclaimed; the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and is immune from sorrow." ...more
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Cyril Connolly writes "as" Palinurus. Often cynical, always insightful. This book, given to me by a good friend, has traveled with me just about everywhere. It's much different than other works by Connolly, esp. early ones like "The Rock Pool". Much more penetrating. Read it after, but not during, difficult times. Palinurus can sink you if you're not prepared.
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Read in July, 2008
This was a cult classic in the 1950s, but now it's hard to see what all the fuss was about. Connolly was known as a brilliant and talented writer who didn't write much, wasting much of his life with alternate bouts of hedonism and regret. I can can see the waste -- he's nothing if not brutally honest about himself -- but the talent is overrated. There are some zingy aphorisms and melancholy insights, but unless pages of self-flagellation and untranslated quotes from French and Latin authors f...more
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Read in October, 2008
A bit dated, a bit silly, but for all that an interesting specimen of the English Man of Letters. His prognostications are less absorbing than his eliptical and impressionistic descriptions of travels through France ("darker wines at the inns, deeper beds.") And I didn't know he was so into lemurs.
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I've been reading The Unquiet Grave for the aesthetics of his writing. I've yet to spend much time absorbing the content.
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a very good book, more a collection of observations and quotes, a study of melancholy, very absorbing
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The masterpiece of melancholia. "Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable."
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Read in May, 2008
Esencial, una cartografía del poder de la lectura.
Decir más es despreciarlo.
Decir más es despreciarlo.
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