Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil ***** / **

Here is what I said when I read The Death of Virgil twenty years ago:

The Death of Virgil was published in German in 1945. When the Vintage International edition was published in 1995, I picked it up in a bookstore and read the first paragraph:

Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left. And here, as the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever the sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.

I was extremely taken with the poetic description, especially with the images of the water. However, I could tell that this 400+ page novel would require the kind of careful attention you need to read poetry, so it was a few years before I got to it.

This first paragraph sums up what's good and bad about the novel. On the plus side, it creates a mood using detailed, vivid images. On the minus side, the sentences can be long-winded, roundabout, and overly "profound." The heart of the novel is Part II, which chronicles a long night during which Virgil ponders the meaning of life and of art. While it contains a number of interesting ideas and deep images, it hides them amongst pseudo-profound prose along the lines of "the forecourt of reality was merely a sham-reality." 

I have to admit to frequent bouts of impatience. I feel sure The Death of Virgil would reward closer reading.

On that closer rereading, I find Part I even more astonishing, as close to poetry as prose can get. Its bewitching mood and evocative imagery of transitions (from sea to land, day to night, clamorous to silent) have, as the translator says in her afterward, "at the same time a concrete and metaphysical meaning."

And I find Part II even more impenetrable and interminable, with its esoteric nighttime visions  untethered to any concrete action. The exposition of Part III, as Virgil speechifies with his friends and with Caesar Augustus about the goals of art, is also tiresome. 

Mystery of time! Saturnian mystery of perception! Mystery of fate's commands! Mystery of the pledge! Light and darkness, united in the two-toned dusk unfold of themselves to the seven colors of the earthly creation, but when the transformation in being will have reached to universal perception, having become unalterable by virtue of being whole, only then will time come to a standstill, not immobile, not like a lake, but like an all-embracing moment, an unending sea of light, lasting through all eternity...

I have to give The Death of Virgil a split rating. The 73 pages of Part I are a five-star revelation. The rest of the book is a two-star slog.