The Unfortunate Passion of Hermann Broch

By Jose María Pérez Gay

Having earned its author, Jos Mara Prez Gay, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Arts and Sciences (first class), this acclaimed, concise biography focuses on novelist Hermann Broch's preoccupation with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979645735
• ISBN13: 9780979645730
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Floricanto Press
• Length: 141 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Bravo! Bravo!

This short paperback book is a quick, intense reading experience, focusing on the historical biography of the 20th century Austrian writer, Hermann Broch. The translation by Eduardo Mayo is matchlessly smooth and refreshingly casual while seeming to sacrifice no serious and pertinent academic considerations, although there are no footnotes anywhere in the text and there is no bibliography at the back either. The writing style is rich in historical detail and stays highly pictorial or visual even while Broch's lofty abstractions concerning aesthetics and ethics on the absolute are introduced or discusssed. The political background of Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of Hermann Broch's life and on which his writings focus is viscerally, unswervingly, and abundantly made clear. The Nazi soldiers march against the Jewish citizen across each page, one feels. The smell from the concentration camps is not far away. The three main novels, Sleepwalkers, Death of Virgil, and the Guiltless are intelligently but briefly discussed, and their core values are clearly presented. The title of the book points to the idea that as Hermann Broch became an old man, he began to doubt he had spent his life in a worthwhile manner through writing literature, and it is clear from a reading of this fantastically lucid book that he certainly gave his all to it, suffering poverty and humiliation for most of his adult life because of his "unfortunate" passion for it.