Awake
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature
In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.
In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Voetmann reimagines the absurd, grotesque, and at times, cruel world of Pliny the Elder in his peculiar English-language debut. Each section of the book starts with a quote from Naturalis Historia, the 37-volume precursor of encyclopedias written by the historical author and naturalist, then continues with musings from Voetmann's Pliny the Elder and comic comments from his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who every now and then doubts the legitimacy of the recounted events and his uncle's ability to understand nature as it is ("He is confusing stars with fireflies or something"). Despite being affected by frequent nosebleeds and general malaise, Pliny the Elder tries to produce a "mapping of nature" with reflections on death, the human condition, and various events that shape the world he inhabits (for example, the macabre annual ritual in his native Novum Comum of setting the goddess Laria's portrait on fire and then raping an enslaved boy or a woman). While this kind of brutality may have been the norm for Emperor Vespasian's Roman Empire, the descriptions sometimes feel gratuitous in Voetmann's account. Rather than a plot, this is stitched together with anecdotes and meditations, and it succeeds at rendering the ancient author's moments of inspiration. For a slim volume, it packs a memorable punch.
