![]() It is Helen’s life that we keep coming back to, though, slowly discovering that a tale we thought provided mere architecture for the exploration of the Melmoth myth has its own dark history. The facility with which Perry moves between these worlds and registers recalls Thomas Pynchon or George Saunders – the sense of a writer so completely in control of her craft that she is able to inhabit any number of different guises, each of them perfectly convincing. There’s also a passage taken from the “Cairo Journals of Anna Marney”, which recounts the life of a Turkish beggar who oiled the bureaucratic machine that enabled the massacre of the Armenians. Later, we read a letter from the genial Sir David Ellerby to his wife, Elizabeth, telling of an encounter with a woman in an inn who has met Melmoth. First, we meet Josef Hoffmann, a “dour unlikable boy” growing up in wartime Czechoslovakia who sees Melmoth as he’s marched towards Theresienstadt. Karel gives Helen a collection of texts that speak of a wraith-like figure who appears at times of great sorrow, beckoning “with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel”. This is a book that seeks to provide a model for resistance to contemporary violence It is through a friend called Karel that Helen first comes to hear of the myth of Melmoth, or Melmotka, as she is known in Prague, a woman who wanders the Earth “until she’s weary and her feet are bleeding”, bearing witness to all humanity’s violence and cruelty. She is a pitiable figure, “small, insignificant, having about her an air of sadness whose source you cannot guess at of self-punishment, self-hatred, carried out quietly and diligently and with a minimum of fuss”. ![]() The book’s central character is Helen Franklin, a woman in her early 40s working as a translator in Prague. Perry is not the first to update the tale – Balzac wrote a novella called Melmoth Reconciled – but she has transformed Melmoth into a woman and charged the myth with Christian and folkloric resonances, presenting, like Maturin, a series of documents purporting to prove the existence of this ghastly, tormented figure. The titular figure in the original book was a man, a kitsch mashup of Faust and the Wandering Jew, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 years more time on Earth. Melmoth, Sarah Perry’s third novel and the follow-up to the wildly successful The Essex Serpent, draws both theme and structure from Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |