Apropos Casanova: Das Breviarium des St. Orpheus

Szent Orpheus Breviáriuma / St. Orpheus Breviary #1

by Miklós Szentkuthy, Timea Tankó (Translator), György Dalos (Afterword)

«Soy Kant y Verlaine a la vez. Me encanta el carácter multicolor de las payasadas y, al tiempo, la sabiduría y la luz nívea del intelecto.»

Miklós Szentkuthy «No es casual que se compare a Szentkuthy con Proust, Joyce, Nabokov o Borges.»

André Velter, Le Monde

En 1939 un deslumbrante aerolito irrumpió con estrépito en el ambiente literario húngaro. Miklós Szentkuthy publicaba, en edición de autor, A propósito de Casanova . Notas marginales, una obra llamada a crear polémica, acusada de «falta de pudor» y «difamación de la religión», pero también a durar en el imaginario europeo del siglo XX por su radical originalidad. Szentkuthy, que había leído las Memorias de Casanova en alemán, convencido de que el veneciano era un metafísico del siglo XVIII que no representaba la aventura sino el pensamiento, construyó a partir de sus peripecias amorosas un monumento narrativo único, destinado a acceder a la comprensión última de lo que debe ser una vida plena. Pero A propósito de Casanova es también un libro sobre el amor y sobre la civilización que con él ha crecido, en donde la mente brillante y cultivada de su autor nos guiará en la lectura de Casanova a través de 123 notas ordenadas según su peculiar mirada. Este autor se publica por primera vez en España.

Genres: Hungary, Fiction, Literature, Essays, Hungarian Literature, Contemporary, Historical Fiction

427 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his style and erudition Miklós Szentkuthy may be compared with Jorge Luis Borges… The genre of the book is undefinable… As if a historical essay, intellectual satire, ironic biography and metaphysical musings were alloyed all together into an undividable whole.
Breviary is a book of the prayers, hymns, psalms, and readings for the canonical hours… Breviary containing Marginalia on Casanova is a sacrilegious theological treatise… All dogmas are blasphemously turned inside out and combined with the principles of sensuality…

He is a descendant of actors. That is decisive and important before all else… Not lies, just masks, mimics. That is what history is too; that is the darkest instinct of life. That and art. The darkest and also the loneliest.

The author places Casanova somewhere between Don Juan and Cagliostro… He is simultaneously a compelling seducer and a mystical confidence artist… He started his career as a priest…

God wishes that the sermon should not be delivered by a bearded St. John in the wilderness but by a love-stricken Venetian young rascal in a periwig and without genuine faith: the whole religion is thereby cozier, more human, truer. After making his sermon, Casanova got a bagful of love-letters from female admirers; they straightaway smuggle into the sacristy.

But the vocation of a cleric or lawyer isn’t for him… His talent is more universal… His gift is to live pleasurably off others… And thus his travelling from country to country and from heart to heart commences…

“I wonder if, before I die, the question will be resolved as to whether I have been, at root, frivolous and unfaithful or tragically faithful in nature? At one moment I sense that I am a deceiver to beat all deceivers, as by and large I lie continually: by now I am even myself a lie, and there are always heaps of women rushing around me.”

Deceivers attract the gullible like a magnet attracts iron shavings.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vast lyrical self portrait, colossal historical scrapbook, odyssey of travesties, inventory of human feelings, polyglot entropy... hyperbolic phrases naturally surge to mind as soon as one risks a definition of the utterly unclassifiable work of Miklós Szentkuthy (1908--1988). Struck by a perplexing fascination, critics seem incapable of going beyond the level of enchanted stupor --- and evoke pell-mell, by way of prudent delineation, the names of Rabelais, Proust, Joyce, Borges, or even those of Gadda or Lezama Lima. Szentkuthy, moreover, contributed greatly to impose this image of a demiurge, who intended in the serenest of manners to “melt all in a single universal time." Solitary splendidly isolated, long confined to silence, he continued building after the eruption of his first novel, Prae, an emblematic constellation without parallel in European literature.

-from the introduction by Zeno Bianu

Marginalia on Casanova is the first part of Szentkuthy’s “St. Orpheus Breviary” in which Szentkuthy “aimed at depicting the totality of two thousand years of European culture”. The first six volumes were written from 1939 – 1942, and it would be another 30 years before he would publish the seventh volume (due to heavy censorship during the Communist rule in Hungary). In fact – per Bianu’s introduction, this book was basically immediately censored on the grounds of “blasphemous profanity and assault on decency” and as such it was not truly released (as all copies were confiscated at the time) until 1973. At this time Szentkuthy added introductory lives of saints into each of the first six volumes. The “Vita (Life of a Saint)” is presented as a set apart section “1” while the entire rest of the Breviary falls under section “2”: Lectio (Saintly Reading) – much as with his other books that I’ve read, the narrative is broken up into fragmentary numbered subsections (123 of them), here covering the diary of Casanova. But this first section covers the life of Saint Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori. It’s apparent from the opening paragraphs – recall that Szentkuthy was at the time coming out of thirty years of totalitarian censorship – why Szentkuthy chose this saint to append to the first volume of the work. The section begins with Alfonso, late in his life, being prohibited from writing. That he was alive during much of the same time as Casanova was only to the better.

So, as to the Breviary itself. I apologize in advance, but even here at the opening of this review I already can tell this is going to be pretty quote-heavy; in part just because I want to touch on things where it’s best just to let Szentkuthy’s words stand on their own; mostly though it’s just because I love the way he writes, so will take multiple opportunities to quote him.

The book immediately takes up a few distinct strands: Szentkuthy takes pains at the beginning to point out that Casanova is a “descendent of actors”, and that this “is decisive and important before all else” – now keep in mind what Szentkuthy has distinctly and explicitly focused on in Prae and Towards the One and Only Metaphor: the idea of – and the striving for – “imitation”. So when Szentkuthy states

Not lies, just masks, mimics. That is what history is too; that is the darkest instinct of life. That and art. The darkest and also the loneliest. If I were not myself descended from an actor ancestor, I would not believe in my existence. Reality and theatre: unambiguous. Which is why it is so much an absolute law-book and Domesday Book that Casanova's memoirs open with that alpha and omega without which there is nothing: actor, actor, actor

It is at least implied if not explicitly laid bare that this focus will continue in this volume. He’s also – as he has in his prior works – looking at the idea of love/eros; here he is looking at it not only under the premise of Casanova’s memoirs (the true beginning of the Breviary as Szentkuthy recognizes it is in the fleeting moment of innocence that was Casanova’s first emission) but as it relates to the grand scope of history (and archetypes) and especially literature.

Casanova writes a note to his love. Will it truly always be so? Without letters, without the compulsion to write, would there be no love? Is the spirit always cowardly? Or will the body's archetypal erotic cowardice always pass itself off as mind, and this mind again as literature? Mind out of cowardice, literature out of mind: is that inevitable circulation not touching?
What preludes: unselfconscious body-zither-playing and love letter --- some bodily ignorance, nervous error, and some 'littérature' about the moonshine mind, dreams, myths. All literature ‘as such' is charmingly here, but eternally and lethally compromised.

[…]

just take a look at a dancing couple: the subtext of tragicomedy is written in garish letters. For us, but not our Casanova. This is his element --- he knows that this is the maximum in the sex history of Europe, so he plunges in and, with a laugh on his lips, salvages what can he saved. There is no ‘Christian morality' or ‘pagan freedom' here --- instead it is some mysterious, iridescent third party: the dance. There is no brutal vegetation and refined society --- here is a blissful third party: the ball, the carnival.
If there is no love without ‘littérature'-cowardice and conjuring up of the devil, all the less can it exist without the hall. What is so splendid about Casanova is that these “Urphenomena” are nowhere else than with him to he found interwoven in the epic with such nonchalance and yet ontological weight (rococo and Ontology? yes, and how!... Mozart).

The other early theme developed is hinted at in the above quotes, but there is a running current of paganism and Satanism (kind of interchangeable in the text, but paganism obtains a primacy as the book progresses and Szentkuthy reaches further and further back into the mists of primal myth) that becomes intertwined with the love/eros examination (and evolves into madness).

Also in the opening sections are we introduced to (masks, baths/water, balls) some of the recurring motifs of the text.

As already touched upon, this Breviary is an attempt to capture 2000 years of European culture; or, as is frequently referenced in the text: civilization. In this Casanova explicitly operates as a metaphor for civilization (“as an affirmation of self-contradictions”); this is a work not just of margin notes on the diary of Casanova, but it explicitly positions Casanova himself as margin notes on history/civilization. (the word civilization likely occurs more than any other in the book; obviously excluding the little bullshit words that don’t count)

[42. The great thing about language; it can be anything: “Der Docht schwimmt in Öl" [the wick is submerged in oil] --- Docht and Öl: words more real than reality.]

It’s probably apparent through what I’ve said so far that this work is considerably more far reaching than the other two Szentkuthy books I’ve read. While those earlier book were insular (in a way) in regards to literature and representation, this book attempts to span centuries and cultures and myths (and architecture, and scenery) and tie them together to the center that is Casanova. So the book starts with familiar literary themes but quickly has its scope explode and expand rapidly. But Szentkuthy continues to come back to literature, and continues to wrestle with pure description as it relates to narrative.

I thereby opened up one of the most savage battles of my life: the battle of the 'descriptive' versus the 'anecdotizing’, the Romantically luxuriant in statics versus the French moralizing style of a La Bruyere or La Rochefoucauld. I could give the opposition a thousand other names: one is the intellect, the other, gossip; one is neurotic compulsion, the other, unbounded aphorizing; one is poetry the other, morality; one is nonsense concerned with the sole meaningful subjects, the other, complete sense concerned with the most meaningless subjects

{pause. deep breath. finishing up}

There is a section late in the book (95) which I'm pretty sure is by far the longest section (at slightly over 50 pages)where Szentkuthy begins with an outlier episode from Casanova - where Casanova plays the role of voyeur - and Szentkuthy begins to weave the episode together with apocryphal Susannah myth (from the book of Daniel), moves into the Alexandrian gap between love as "poetic dream" and act, that which places the viewed woman forever "in the doorless myth cage of unreality"; from there he begins to weave in the story of Héloïse and Abelard (specifically Abelard's introduction of the Héloïse episode: "the deadly clash of 'love as a vision' and 'love as possession'") - in a long digressive passage he waxes philosophical about the writings of Abelard intermingled with his own personal reflections on women and desire; suddenly he's writing an intricate description of Héloïse: I do mean intricate: it goes on for pages in precise and elegant detail, until Héloïse comes to life, steps off the page, and sits next to the reader (that's not exaggeration, that textually occurs). From there he returns to the Susannah myth, specifically focusing on Tintoretto's painting; he works through the ideas of reality and representation, further removed from that is the fairytale setting "a land of dreams" in which Tintoretto places her, tying it to adolescent unreality, a haze of personal nostalgia for Szentkuthy where he frequently saw the painting in Venice in his youth. He further moves from there to modernist painting techniques (of which he is critical) but quickly shifts to ruminating about the nature of God and creation: where God created objective contents but not "ideas" ("God is a humanist, the most savage, the most anti-theoretical thirster after only-man-and-nothing-else and thereby of individuality, the self-servingness of individuality the private frenzy of an anti-objectivity of spirit."). No, still not done, he links this to an autobiographies episode - (he is still contrasting the Casanova episode to the Héloïse story and the Susannah myth) - until he finally comes back to Casanova spying, and the section ends.

I'm not attempting to lay out his linkages and logical turns here, I'm simply laying out the progression of this section of an example of how he uses the diary of Casanova as a means of reaching back into the past and further back into myth, to have the weight of history bearing down - but also to have the counterforce of modernity and personal autobiography pushing from the other side. It's in this way that he utilizes Casanova as a stand-in and jumping off point for civilization and culture.

To finish this up and move on to something else :: there is a surprising duality to this text. In one way it is the reverse of the Szentkuthy books which came before it (that I've read). Those earlier books were looking for a way to express an inexpressible reality - starting from a blank page how does one capture and express what is inexpressible? But, here, Szentkuthy is starting with a complete text (written centuries earlier) and making the concrete static text come alive and encompass culture and civilization and - yes - reality. So as opposed to attempting to express the inexpressible, he's forcing a static text to be a stand-in for the inexpressible. But here's the duality - he's still doing the same thing that he was doing before, as he is still the one writing his marginalia, and while he might be using a different jumping off point, he's still trying to capture and include everything at once. His scope has limited a bit - as opposed to attempting to captured the totality of reality he is instead merely attempting to encompass 2000 years of culture. It is obvious Szentkuthy never aimed low - it's true he was never fully successful (let's face it, he was constantly attempting impossible tasks) but he's utterly captivating in his efforts.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather rococo and much more accessible than Black Renaissance: St. Orpheus Breviary, Vol. II The reader discovers that the tome is a reading diary of sorts from the author, who read Casanova in a German translation. Treading across the 18C, using Casanova as a Virgil, we ponder the nihilism of the age against the famed memoirist's eschatological yearning. Exile is often a disenchantment, a falling. The book balances the baroque with the cadaverous until Mozart is replaced with Marvell. This is an unexpected development but one rather rich in imagery.

Marvelous prose abounds and it was only an arduous week at work which impaired my pace.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fascinating project, by a clearly talented man, who gives me everything I could want in an author: he's hyper-cultured, obsessive, interested in everything, willing to take risks, and wants you to come along with him (rather than wanting to exclude you). And yet.

The book really is a commentary on Casanova; Szentkuthy retells anecdotes from the Memoirs, often very stylishly, and then spins out of them his own philosophico-romantico-historical thoughts, which are sometimes dazzling, sometimes tedious, but usually worthwhile. Throughout the first half, I was thrilled--the discussions of the eighteenth century were glorious. Szentkuthy is willing to make massive over-generalizations in search of some truth, and I'm glad for it. I lost interest in the second half, because it was less about the eighteenth century, and more about the philosophy love (not my favorite topic of literary discussion); a couple of the digressions (that on Abelard was okay; that on Tintoretto tedious; that on Marvell even more so) were far less enlightening than they could have been. But the project is a worthwhile one, and I wish more of it had been translated.

And herein lies the rub: translated, but not in this manner. We owe Tim Wilkinson some gratitude for bothering to take on a text like this, in a language (let's be honest) almost none of us will ever know, for, I'm guessing, precisely no monetary return or professional esteem. But someone, lets call him or her the editor, needs to take a stand when s/he sees sentences like this:

"This was a theatrical danger signal when Casanova watches these moon trout in the Cypriot evening as if for a moment he would transform into Lucifer who with black Schadenfreude signals the amorous decadence of coming centuries, starting with the excessive sight of women, a pretty picture."

I have no doubt that translating from Magyar is very difficult, but editing English sentences should not be. And given that Szentkuthy translated, e.g., Ulysses, and is considered a giant of Hungarian literature, I doubt he would write anything so barbaric as that (just one among many examples). Hopefully future volumes of his work will show him enough respect to make him sound more competent; or, alternatively, include a brief note from the translator explaining why Szentkuthy sounds like a freshman deranged for a moment on ADD drugs with black Schadenfreude signals.

The St Orpheus Breviary project is a wonderful attempt to produce a modern/post-modern version of self-critical humanism; this volume probably wasn't the best one for me to start with; and it needs to be re-edited, at least. My rating should be understood accordingly.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

'All That Exists Is the Only True Luxury: Miklós Szentkuthy’s "Marginalia on Casanova"'
By David van Dusen
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...

"MARGINALIA ON CASANOVA is the first English translation of Hungarian novelist Miklós Szentkuthy’s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s." [can a monolinguist enjoy such circumstances?]

"It first went to press in the 1820s as Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de Seingalt, a German translation totaling over 6,000 pages in 12 volumes." [Szentkuthy's diary is said to consist of 100,000 pages ; half of which won't be publicly accessibly until 2038]

"Szentkuthy’s ambition was medieval: to produce a catalogus rerum, “an index of all entities.”" [So my knee=jerk reaction to him is pretty to-be-expected, eh?]

"The idea of a commentary on Casanova was suggested to Szentkuthy by Protestant theologian Karl Barth’s commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans." {again, fantastic. Taking as a model for a fictional form, a scholarly/nonfictional form. You've probably not heard of this classic of theology :: The Epistle to the Romans. To my eternal shame I've not read it. It's almost certainly better than Buber's little existentialist tract, Ich und Du ; which I've also not read. Nor have I yet read this Marginalia now under discussing. There's more I've not read than is dreamt of by your literary establishment.}

"Szentkuthy’s [muse] is a Leipzig edition of Casanova’s text: Casanova refracted through Luther’s and Hölderlin’s German." [layers among layers upon layers etc layers]

"An assiduous translator from English with faultless taste in English stylists — Milton, Sterne, Gibbon, Poe are all cited in the Marginalia — Szentkuthy deserves a serious Anglophone reception." [eh. BURIAL is fit for him.'

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miklós Szentkuthy, is from my point of view, the greatest hungarian author. Novel? Essay? When I read it I think to Borges. It's the same labyrinthic story.
In 1939, he began a cycle of 9 books "The breviary of Saint-Orpheus".I read only the two first volume, the venetian duo. From Casanova and Montéverdi.
So Casanova. He had bad réputation. Féllini made of him a sex maniac. I had the same opinion until I read some of his works. Casanova in fact in a philosoph of Enlightment. It's not Voltaire,it's a little master. And libertinage is coherent with his philosophy.
The principal carachter of the book (as the volume on Montéverdi) is Venise. It's a questionment on this city.
Each book began with the story of a life of a saint. Here,it's Saint Alphonse. After,the book is organised in 123 notes on different themes : mask, youth, bath...
Casanova is analysed but also Venise and the life at this time. It's clever, funny and well writed.
It's the reflet of the culture mittel Europa of the begining of the XXth. There is some nostalgy beacause nobody now can write same barocco book.
I like.

[Geoff]

From the introduction:

"Vast lyrical self-portrait, colossal historical scrapbook, odyssey of travesties, inventory of human feelings, polyglot entropy... hyperbolic phrases naturally surge to mind as soon as one risks a definition of the utterly unclassifiable work of Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988). Struck by a perplexing fascination, critics seem incapable of going beyond the level of enchanted stupor- and evoke pell-mell, by way of prudent delineation, the names of Rabelais, Proust, Joyce, Borges ,or even those of Gadda or Lezama Lima. Szentkuthy, moreover, contributed greatly to impose this image of a demiurge, who intended in the serenest of manners to "melt all in a single universal time."

If you're not intrigued, I'd have to check your pulse...

http://www.szentkuthymiklos.hu/

(um, seems like only the Magyar works on that one)

Excerpts:

http://www.hlo.hu/news/miklos_szentku...

The Inevitable Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikl%C3%...

[César Carranza · Rating 3 out of 5]

La verdad es que inicialmente me pareció muy interesante, no entendía muy bien de qué iba el libro, y estaba bien, aunque no era muy claro, se veía en realidad interesante, algo de Casanova, no era muy claro que era...

El autor es un húngaro, tiene una cultura impresionante, el libro es una muestra de ello, tiene una obra aún no editada, con sus notas, 150,000 páginas...

El libro es un ensayo, son 123 notas sobre la vida y la biografía de Casanova, Szentkuthy sostiene que contrario a lo que se piensa, Casanova no es el símbolo de la aventura, más bien el símbolo del pensamiento europeo y occidental, que cada uno de los episodios de su vida tienen un valor filosófico que nos descubre que el hombre era un filósofo místico, cada nota toma como pretexto un episodio, una línea escrita por el, y Miklós nos devela el significado místico y filosófico, la vida como un absurdo donde juega el genio al teatro.

El libro fue calificado de inmoral, y ciertamente uno puede entender por qué, es de un corte de filosofía naturalista y de repente parece cínica, es sin duda un trabajo muy interesante y arriesgado, si es que le doy 3 estrellas es por que a mi, me pareció en muchos puntos un poco forzado, la manera de contar todo tiene unidad, pero me parece golpea un poco la realidad o las frases de Casanova para que tomen la forma que requiere su exposición. Esto me pareció cansado en algún momento, además de que al autor le gusta mucho mostrar que sabe mucho, jaja, pero tiene que ver con mi apreciación, el libro es desde luego brillante y no dudo que pueda ser del interés de mucha gente.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. First of all, it's an uncanny work of literature that defies categorization (thankfully, in the world of literature, categories have little to no utility beyond propaganda purposes). The late Hungarian author has here unleashed, upon his unsuspecting readers, something one can describe as a baroque and uneven mass of polymorphic footnote-like ramblings on Casanova that, from the life details (both real and imagined) of the amorous and peripatetic womanizer, seeks to extract something like a 'character-type'. But this irreverent 'character study' is occasionally interrupted by reflections on the commentator's own descriptive mania. Indeed, Marginalia overflows with artful descriptions (some of them painfully artificial, some more natural than nature itself) of both persons and objects that altogether constellate into what the commentator calls an [amorous] "situation". Here, for all its purported humanism, material object, sights, sounds etc. (even vibes) that pertain to this fragile absolute viz "situation" are accorded no less ontological significance than the thoughts and deeds of "Casanova", "Abelard", "Marvell". I'll let Szentkuthy himself do the talking:

"So, what is it that attracts me to description all the same? First & foremost the fact that in an object, the oval of the lake of the Boboli Gardens, for instance, there are many more novelties, variations, elements, and shades than in any kind of so-called rational thinking. The most complex thoughts, poetic sensibilities, or philosophical sophistications are all stupefying platitudes, oafish homogenizing beside the infinity of nuancing of an object. Thinking, however, imposes a demand for nuance, a microscope madness; it goes where it can best satisfy that insatiability for atoms. That is always a material object, not some kind of human relationship, moral conflict, or anything else of that sort. Of course, description immediately runs aground on a dreadful self-contradiction: precisely because it is an object, the Boboli Gardens, an infinite tissue of infinite shades in comparison with the clumsiness and schematism of a thought: it is precisely on that account that I do not have suitable words to re-store them: a description, whether poetic or surrealistic or photographic, is always an ‘intellectual,’ and therefore primitive, conventional something. The truly intellectual stimulus therefore either remains in the unproductive nervous state of such a stimulus or it really makes a start on ‘description,’ in which case it will in the monotony of conventional attributes. What an object is truly has no name and is utterly ungraspable. (St. Thomas Aquinas: individuum ine abile est.) Only a naïve and comic compulsion drives one into trying all the same. ‘Style’ is thus nothing more than an absurd undertaking; for after all it is impossible to think, thinking amounting to no more than lying, prevaricating, and castrating."

"A ‘thought,’ then, is not something cerebral, not human, — a ‘thought’ exists only in nature, in the objects of the outside world, and is identical with its composition. What is inside us is just
passion — stimulation over and above this unintellectualizable intellect, a lyrical affirmation of this anonymity. ‘Thought’ of the old school is completely extinct, leaving the ‘logic’ of the million shades and constellations of the outside world: those are besieged with unremittingly hopeless love by ‘description,’ the only possible philosophy of the new times — all we have been left with is that
passionate reaction of the raison-immanence that is merely felt and sensed but perhaps never to be expressed. To sum up — a ‘thought’ is both: an absolute description together with an absolute stimulation. In other words, exactly that has become the crown of intellectuality, whereas previously it had been a blemish: its slaves are copying and lyrical bias. If we realize that these two blemishes are two prime merits and two possibilities which exclude all else — that will be a Copernican revolution in the history of thinking as Kant’s was in his time. That is why it was worth becoming immersed, faithless to Casanova, in the dark shadows of the labyrinthine alleys of the Villa Aldobrandini.

"And if the fate of thought in general is of no interest, this conclusion does interest me from the perspective of my own life: through it I am able to provide (the malicious of course will say “to
mask”) a rationale for the diary style of my entire oeuvre, my utter homesickness for an endlessly complete diary. That the roots of that might possibly be neurosis is utterly immaterial: miracles can be born of sickness, a hump from a wonder — just one thing is sure about apples, which is that they fall far from their tree. Why, then, is a diary the ultimate ideal in place of the honest superstition of the old-fashioned ‘objective opus’? Because once I sense the ever-new consequences of the millionfold shades of the world to be a thought, then, as I am first and last a thinker, not a living creature: precisely these constellations alone, just as they are, I note down the description, accepting the risk of an unstylistic self contradiction. Those are thoughts. A true intellectual response to the world is not a myth, not a philosophy, not a novel or an essay: those are isolated citations, irrational narcissifications, games, at best “Les langueurs tendres” as one of old Bach’s sons said— a truly intellectual response is only: a complete life, along with all its startling events, its endless chains of associations, the million varieties of mood. That this can also be disparaged as an ‘illusion of Romantic totality’ signifies less than nothing."

Now, what is a situation other than what philosophers call occasio? Szentkuthy's occasionalism--the attitude in which one treats historical and philosophical material as a contingent occasion (i.e. a paper-thin excuse) for the exercise of one's baroque-descriptive virtuosity, is barely disguised. But is it objective, like Malebranche's, or is it subjective, like a romantic's? Personally, as a novice consumer of European literature, I feel that Marginalia finds limited success as a project to demonstrate the thesis that reality itself is baroque (apparently, this dude translated Ulysses into Hungarian, which makes completely sense). There is an unmistakably maestro-like quality to the way Szentkuthy commands language...

[Ploppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Work of genius or rambling mess? Probably a bit of both. Whatever the case, 100 exhausting pages was enough for me. Escorial (no.3 in the Breviary) was more novelistic, this one is more philosophical, to the point of total abstraction. I thought that after battling my way through and enjoying one Szentkuthy, the rest would read naturally. Perhaps my complete indifference (and even slight aversion) to the core material (Casanova's Memoirs) was also a reason. The opening "vita" on Alphonsus Liguori was great though. And written much later, I might add.

*EDIT: After giving up half-way through, I decided to pick it up again a few months later, and found it pretty great! The Belgian editors advise that this isn't the best entry point into Szentkuthy's Breviary, and indeed it's more "philosophical" and less narrative-driven (even by Szentkuthy's already low standards concerning narrative!) than Escorial. I put quote marks because the language is so fantastical it's difficult to pinpoint what Szentkuthy is driving at exactly with his ruminations on love, reality, truth, art, body and soul, the classical and the baroque, the 18th century etc. All of which makes it an easy text to get lost in. However, as time goes by, ideas start to take shape, namely in the form of paradoxical equivalences (which must be partly the cause of the reader's struggles), i.e. Casanova's endless and seemingly superficial encounters with women actually form a philosophy, and philosophy of thought at that; reality can only be found in minute, trivial details, not in great "moments in history", even less in abstract concepts... It's a bewildering read, but one I'll undoubtedly revisit.

[alex angelosanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

what if one author was bold enough to suggest that books are, actually, clutch

[Sylvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un libro raro. Los comentarios y anotaciones del autor sobre las memorias de casanova son una disertación sobre el amor, la mujer, la moral y muchos otros temas. Difícil y extraño.

[Nicolas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bombastic and Byzantine.