Incipit:
had established all by telegram: Jeremiah Pordage supposed to find a black driver in gray uniform with a pink cap, black driver had to look for a middle-aged English leading in the hands of the poetic works of Wordsworth. Although the station was crowded, they found themselves without difficulty.
"The driver of Mr. Stoyte?"
"Mr. Pordage"
Jeremiah nodded and, with Wordsworth in his hand and an umbrella in the other, a little stretched his arms, a gesture of pleading dummy, which esibisse, humorous and with full awareness of its defects, a paltry figure, accentuated by one of the most ridiculous clothes. "Here I am" seemed to say "here I am, poor thing, but as I am." The decrease as a defensive measure and as it prophylactically, had become a habit for him. "
The novel is set in Los Angeles, referring to Beverly Hills (translated here as" Beverly Hills ") and Hollywood . begins with the arrival in Los Angeles Pordage of Jeremiah, an English scholar at the invitation of a wealthy tycoon, Beppe Stoyte, to file an older archive of a noble English family.
Beppe Stoyte really is not interested culture. It only serves to show its enormous wealth. He lives in a kind of castle (which Pordage calls the "Subject" and that inspired the movie Citizen Kane in the Orson Wells), full of works of art (even a Vermeer in the elevator). Beppe - Joseph better (but here the names are all Italianized this old translation) - is obsessed with death and the victim is unaware of his medical adviser, Dr. Obispo, which exploits the fear of the magnet to extract money and to do research on longevity. For his experiments studying the carp that live hundreds of years, in order to discover their secret and use the results to increase the human lifespan. Obispo advantage of its influence on Stoyte to flirt with his girl lover, Virginia, a girl easily corrupt, despite its superficial faith in the Madonna. Obispo's research on the longevity of the carp will confirm in the maps consulted by Pordage, particularly in the diary of an old English nobleman who talks about his experience and the discovery of the vital power obtained by eating the intestines of this fish.
Other characters, not secondary, are Pete, the innocent victim of jealousy Slyte and propter, the philosopher who lives in a simple and independent. These are the conversations between Pete and propter, and above all the long speeches propter walking the novel in part philosophical. The philosophy is a propter true Stoic philosophy: "liberation from the personality, liberation from time and desire, freedom in union with God." In particular - and this is the most interesting part - the struggle to affirm the ideals, according propter, is nothing but a form, even more dangerous, affirmation of the ego.
"The sacrifice of oneself to a cause that is not the highest is the sacrifice to an ideal, which is simply a projection of the ego"
propter see that evil pervades the world and seems to suggest a place "no commitment" of limited action, without presuming to impose good. At the end of the novel it seems the bad outweighs the good: there is murder is not punished and that the guilty get away. But propter would say that this is irrelevant: the evil part of man, and as long as man fails to state the plan of the animal and that of spirituality (as opposed to the plan of humanity), there will be nothing to do and Pete's death, in general terms of human life she is just an accident.
The text is very fluid, with some slowness in the "philosophical". Beautiful letter which Jeremiah wrote to his mother, which gives us an interesting picture of the Oedipal relationship, accepting and aware, indeed proudly claimed (Part II, chap. 1). Carry only the final of the letter, but would be worth the pana to read it all:
"Well, I have nothing to say, as I used to write when I was in school - and in large print, remember? in an effort to make the words fill a half page notebook. I have nothing else to say except, of course, the unspeakable, and what I leave unsaid because you already know. "
It 's a nice phrase for this concluding note.
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