What do you think?
Rate this book
The Man Who Was Born Again
Paul Busson's legendary tale of the Baron Melchior. This grim account begins with its hero losing his head during the French Revolution, and really picks up from there, with the good Baron through swashbuckling and amorous activities finally becoming the master of death itself.
290 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1921
2 people are currently reading
108 people want to read
About the author
Paul Busson
11 books4 followersPaul Busson (1873–1924), Tyrolean and Viennese journalist and author, is well-known as perhaps the finest adventure fantasy in early twentieth-century German literature. The story of reincarnated memories in eighteenth-century Germany and France, it offers a fine integration of supernatural powers, ghosts, witchcraft, black magic, demons, and evocation of the dead; it is unique in its combination of wild imagination and realism.
Today Paul Busson seems to be forgotten in the Germanic world except as a journalist in the memory of a now very old generation. He was never known at all in English. The translations The Man Who Was Born Again and The Fire Spirits went almost unheeded, even though they appeared at a dearth-time of fantasy [late 20s]. Yet these two novels offer inimitable universes, where fantasy assumes such strong actuality that it achieves its own reality. Even after fifty years, in another language, these universes remain viable.
*text from; writersnoonereads.tumblr.com
Today Paul Busson seems to be forgotten in the Germanic world except as a journalist in the memory of a now very old generation. He was never known at all in English. The translations The Man Who Was Born Again and The Fire Spirits went almost unheeded, even though they appeared at a dearth-time of fantasy [late 20s]. Yet these two novels offer inimitable universes, where fantasy assumes such strong actuality that it achieves its own reality. Even after fifty years, in another language, these universes remain viable.
*text from; writersnoonereads.tumblr.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 16, 2018
I read The Man Who Was Born Again, by Paul Busson. His second novel, the Fire Spirits, is impossible to find in English; this one has been reprinted in translation several times, and happened to be easily available to me in hardcover through the Smith College library. It hadn’t been checked out since 1945: I guess Busson really is an author that no one reads. It probably seemed out of fashion even in the 1920’s: set during the years of the French revolution, the novel seems indistinguishable from a romantic/gothic novel of that time. Its structure is as idiosyncratic as an 1800’s gothic novel, although more condensed; its imagery is continuous with that of E.T.A. Hoffman.
The novel is more or less a sequence of vaguely connected set pieces in a picaresque fantasy-adventure mode, lended coherency by the roguish protagonist’s inner spiritual quest. Born to an aristocratic family background, from a young age Baron Melchior is watched over by opposing beneficent and maleficent spiritual forces. His good side is a mysterious, oriental, tall dark handsome stranger who represents immortality and life of the soul in eternity; the bad angel is a really cool Hoffmanesque devil who carries around a leather purse full of squeaking human souls. Throughout his misadventures the main character is guided onwards by his Anima, in the figure of a girl he wanted to have sex with when he was like 10 years old—this is always the tiresome part of these novels, or at least for me it is because I’m a homosexual and I find it hard to give a shit—and I’m pretty sure it was his cousin, so it’s basically the same thing as Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”
Politics: The story’s final episode, where Melchior goes to France and becomes embedded in the revolution as it takes place, comes out of left field; Busson goes out of way to depict the Baron as a blueblood with a heart of gold, deeply touched by the plight of the revolutionary lower class. This political dimension is interesting and is one of the few things that make the novel actual seem of its time, and not a total anachronism: it’s like Busson feels self-conscious that the story he’s writing is a throwback to an era of more rigid class structure in Germany, when novels like these were written by and for the literate upper classes, depicting the agonized spiritual quests of their upper class protagonists, with things and people outside of that narrow scope of experience treated as exotic objects. Maybe he felt he had to apologize for that, so he tried to create some distance by throwing in some political speeches? I’m not complaining, I thought it was interesting.
Hermetic symbolism: There’s lots of symbols concerning Baron Melchior’s spiritual quest which are consistent throughout the novel but didn’t strike any particular chord with me. The part that I thought interesting was tucked in subliminally:
After climbing here and there among the stones I found a tolerably-preserved vault, where the walls retained some traces of fresco painting. I recognised one of the subjects as the Wedding in Cana, and when I inspected the peeling painting more closely, I discovered that one of the jugs in the picture had an almost effaced inscription on it: Hie jacet, meaning "Here lies." Perhaps it was intended only as a witticism of the painter's, to convey that in these jugs and their wine lay the quiescent force that excites a man's body with the wine and by degrees lets loose all the passions, eventually overpowering his reason.
It might also have signified that mirth slumbered in the round belly of the jug and would express itself in the laughter, gladness and song of those who drank. I meditated on these and similar subjects...
Superficially, the painted jug of wine is incidental to the narrative, since the fresco is introduced only as a plot device (behind the jug is a secret compartment full of treasure): but the protagonist’s musings on the multivalent and conflicting meanings of wine as a symbol signal the author's familiarity with a deep vein of hermetic symbolism. When taken in excess, wine intoxicates the senses and clouds man’s reason; but when taken with care and in cooperation with the reasoning intellect, these intoxicating forces reveal spiritual truths that reason by itself cannot access. To those who lack knowledge and insight, the inscription on the fresco reveals no secrets; but for the narrator, whose intellect penetrates beyond surface meaning, the reward is literal treasure which symbolizes a deeper and rejuvenating font of spiritual truth.
(In an episode that comes shortly after, the Baron engages in discussion with a learned older gentleman on the significance of some markings at the town’s entrance written in thieves’ cipher; his agility in decrypting the markings’ hidden meaning literally saves him from a lynch mob, since in doing so he is able to prove that he is not in fact one of the thieves' gang— as he was taken for.)
The novel is more or less a sequence of vaguely connected set pieces in a picaresque fantasy-adventure mode, lended coherency by the roguish protagonist’s inner spiritual quest. Born to an aristocratic family background, from a young age Baron Melchior is watched over by opposing beneficent and maleficent spiritual forces. His good side is a mysterious, oriental, tall dark handsome stranger who represents immortality and life of the soul in eternity; the bad angel is a really cool Hoffmanesque devil who carries around a leather purse full of squeaking human souls. Throughout his misadventures the main character is guided onwards by his Anima, in the figure of a girl he wanted to have sex with when he was like 10 years old—this is always the tiresome part of these novels, or at least for me it is because I’m a homosexual and I find it hard to give a shit—and I’m pretty sure it was his cousin, so it’s basically the same thing as Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”
Politics: The story’s final episode, where Melchior goes to France and becomes embedded in the revolution as it takes place, comes out of left field; Busson goes out of way to depict the Baron as a blueblood with a heart of gold, deeply touched by the plight of the revolutionary lower class. This political dimension is interesting and is one of the few things that make the novel actual seem of its time, and not a total anachronism: it’s like Busson feels self-conscious that the story he’s writing is a throwback to an era of more rigid class structure in Germany, when novels like these were written by and for the literate upper classes, depicting the agonized spiritual quests of their upper class protagonists, with things and people outside of that narrow scope of experience treated as exotic objects. Maybe he felt he had to apologize for that, so he tried to create some distance by throwing in some political speeches? I’m not complaining, I thought it was interesting.
Hermetic symbolism: There’s lots of symbols concerning Baron Melchior’s spiritual quest which are consistent throughout the novel but didn’t strike any particular chord with me. The part that I thought interesting was tucked in subliminally:
After climbing here and there among the stones I found a tolerably-preserved vault, where the walls retained some traces of fresco painting. I recognised one of the subjects as the Wedding in Cana, and when I inspected the peeling painting more closely, I discovered that one of the jugs in the picture had an almost effaced inscription on it: Hie jacet, meaning "Here lies." Perhaps it was intended only as a witticism of the painter's, to convey that in these jugs and their wine lay the quiescent force that excites a man's body with the wine and by degrees lets loose all the passions, eventually overpowering his reason.
It might also have signified that mirth slumbered in the round belly of the jug and would express itself in the laughter, gladness and song of those who drank. I meditated on these and similar subjects...
Superficially, the painted jug of wine is incidental to the narrative, since the fresco is introduced only as a plot device (behind the jug is a secret compartment full of treasure): but the protagonist’s musings on the multivalent and conflicting meanings of wine as a symbol signal the author's familiarity with a deep vein of hermetic symbolism. When taken in excess, wine intoxicates the senses and clouds man’s reason; but when taken with care and in cooperation with the reasoning intellect, these intoxicating forces reveal spiritual truths that reason by itself cannot access. To those who lack knowledge and insight, the inscription on the fresco reveals no secrets; but for the narrator, whose intellect penetrates beyond surface meaning, the reward is literal treasure which symbolizes a deeper and rejuvenating font of spiritual truth.
(In an episode that comes shortly after, the Baron engages in discussion with a learned older gentleman on the significance of some markings at the town’s entrance written in thieves’ cipher; his agility in decrypting the markings’ hidden meaning literally saves him from a lynch mob, since in doing so he is able to prove that he is not in fact one of the thieves' gang— as he was taken for.)
January 27, 2014
I really liked this interesting tale. Published after WWI it feels like a Victorian era supernatural tale filled with occult and christian/eastern mysticism. I found it to be a great change of pace from what I usually read. It starts off a bit slow but then one really starts to gain interest in the protagonist's life and it takes off from there. Worth checking out.
June 3, 2013
A fractured and hallucinogenic novella about deja vu, reincarnation and the what it was like to be in an 18th Century European army.
December 12, 2022
Die Beschreibung des Phänomens der Reinkarnation in Romanform und wie die Erlebnisse, Handlungen und Traumata der gehabten Inkarnationen das gelebte Schicksal prägen.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews