{"title":"Mikl S Szentkuthy","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"marginalia-on-casanova-book-mikl-s-szentkuthy-9780983697244","title":"Marginalia on Casanova","description":"Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy's synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy's Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, \u0026amp; mentalite. Through St. Orpheus' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions, says Szentkuthy, is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems. Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist's sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life \u0026amp; more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova's memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy's very own philosophy of love. Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49524167508241,"sku":"GOR006581457","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50375009141009,"sku":"CIN0983697248G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010594406673,"sku":"NIN9780983697244","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52674962948369,"sku":"NLS9780983697244","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52877096648977,"sku":"GOR011975498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0983697248.jpg?v=1750884424"},{"product_id":"chapter-on-love-book-mikls-szentkuthy-9781940625409","title":"Chapter On Love","description":"\u003cp\u003eWritten between Szentkuthy's first major work, Prae (1934), and the first book of the St. Orpheus Breviary (1939), Chapter on Love (publ. 1936) exemplifies well Szentkuthy's writing of excess. An attempt at polyphonic writing, it brings together the perspectives of an unlikely set of characters including the mayor of a doomed Italian city, given to debilitating impressionism - a penchant for observing and analyzing-apart the minutest shades of reality -, a nihilistic pope, a hanged brigand, a courtesan and her decadent pubertal adorer. They pass through the pages of this quixotic and compelling book under the threat of imminent catastrophe, filling chapter after chapter with passionate, self-generating theorizing and (mock-)philosophizing on the margins of Empedocles, life and death, female stockings, endingness and changeability, ethics and aesthetics, vitality and law, chaos and social order grounded in horror vacui, the forever elusive other person - all enmeshed with well-nigh self-parodic, idiosyncratic feats of ratiocination and theorizing driven ad absurdum, which proliferate on the analogy of (free) association.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e​\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe common denominator of their analytical furore and the yarns they spin is love, which touches not only on the human being, but the whole of nature, from the realm of plants to that of minerals. Szentkuthy's book may don the costume of a historical novel, but it stands under the sign of the pseudo: its deliberately vague setting, somewhere in Italy toward the end of the Renaissance, is in fact but a mask which allows for anachronism (of realia, ideas, data, and even terminology) to ooze through, as the characters and their observations are our contemporaries in every respect.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e​\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBaroque and exuberant, of a sweeping melancholia and at times savage humor, a (mock-)treatise written with an abundance of striking, distant associations that evoke Surrealist practices, this strange novel tantalizingly shows a path not taken by experimental modernism, of the contrapuntal use of point-of-view converted into a contrapuntal use of analytic, essayistic observations of reality, and points towards Szentkuthy's monumental meditations on history sub specie whatsit in the St Orpheus Breviary epic.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51055291531537,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51055294218513,"sku":"NIN9781940625409","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52347919368465,"sku":"NLS9781940625409","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52877087179025,"sku":"GOR012162193","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1940625408.jpg?v=1751315814"},{"product_id":"prae-vol-ii-book-mikls-szentkuthy-9781940625515","title":"Prae, vol. II","description":"\u003cp\u003eConsidered an eerie attack on realism, when published in 1934, Mikl s Szentkuthy's debut novel Prae so astonished Hungarian critics that many deemed it monstrous, derogatorily referred to Szentkuthy as cosmopolitan, and classified him alien to Hungarian culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIncomparable \u0026amp; unprecedented in Hungarian literature, Prae compels recognition as a serious contribution to modernist fiction, as ambitious in its aspirations as Ulysses or   la recherche du temps perdu. With no traditional narration \u0026amp; no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy or satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten novel. In this, it maintains the freedom \u0026amp; openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel \u0026amp; continually fracture space \u0026amp; time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. The book's title, said Szentkuthy, alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre. By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLargely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring 'impossible literature' into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy's contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Frivolities \u0026amp; Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life. Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, Vol. II of this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51055395045649,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51055397470481,"sku":"NIN9781940625515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52146103484689,"sku":"NLS9781940625515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52510452777233,"sku":"GOR014545267","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1940625513.jpg?v=1750900587"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-mikl-s-szentkuthy.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}