| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
An ingenious account of the strange life of English writer Frederick Rolfe, or Baron Corvo. Emphasising patterns - or terrible recurrences - in his subject's life, Symons reveals the man, his sufferings and his unspeakable sins. (Independent on Sunday )
Product Description
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel—"a masterpiece"—and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, self-appointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated aspirant to the priesthood with a bottomless talent for self-destruction. But this singular work, subtitled "an experiment in biography," is also a remarkable self-portrait, a study of the obsession and sympathy that inspires the biographer's art.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
MY QUEST FOR Corvo was started by accident one summer afternoon in 1925, in the company of Christopher Millard. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
MY QUEST FOR Corvo was started by accident one summer afternoon in 1925, in the company of Christopher Millard. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping page turner,
By
This review is from: The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB Classics) (Paperback)
Yes, it's the biography of an obscure early 20th century writer of historical novels who successively charmed and alienated everybody he came across. But it's also the story of a journey, as we'd call it now - how the biographer stumbled across his subject and followed a trail of clues that led him along a twisted trail that ended in a wintry Venice where his subject squandered money lavishly or else lived in a boat on three rolls a day. Yes, everybody does it now, in books and TV documentaries, but Symons did it first and keeps you gripped up to the very last page. It may encourage you to read "Corvo's" books (his real name was Frederick Rolfe), whose construction is equally clever and "modern" but whose prose is a jewelled mix of English, Latin and Greek.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary biographical quest for extraordinary man,
By
This review is from: The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB Classics) (Paperback)
This book (described as 'an experiment in biography') has been highly regarded for years, partly due to the extraordinary character it depicts & partly due to its account of the protracted & complex investigation carried out by its author. 'Baron Corvo', real name Frederick Rolfe aka 'Fr Rolfe' was the son of a Cheapside piano tuner who was dismissed from studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood & then led an impoverished picaresque life around Britain & latterly Venice, functioning variously as an author, artist, photographer, inventor, conman (& allegedly pimp for boys in Venice). He is best known for his wish-fulfilment fantasy 'Hadrian VII', in which a poor English Catholic with priestly aspirations becomes Pope & sets Europe to rights before being martyred. Rolfe's personality was clearly narcissistic & paranoid, leading him into repeated disputes & legal conflicts. It took much effort on the author's part to track down people who knew Rolfe & were prepared to share their experiences of him, but the result is an astounding portrait of a very odd & unsympathetic yet strangely fascinating man.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Truth Must be Somewhere,
By
This review is from: The Quest For Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB Classics) (Paperback)
I first came across the name of Aleister Crowley when I acquired a copy of Maugham's 1907 novel `The Magician'. The character Oliver Haddo is said to be based on Crowley. It made me want to read more.
Symons' book is a scholarly work if it is sometimes written in the style of a boys own adventure story. It traces, quoting its sources, a life which began in London in 1860 and ended in Venice in 1913.In between these dates the subject lived the live of a chancer;of a `ducker-and-diver' and died in poverty. There is very little mention of his writings other than his novel Hadrian 1V,although he wrote copiously on the black arts (The Goetia,The Book of the Law etc) and no mention of his infamous stay in Sicily mentioned by Cammell (Aleister Crowley the Black Magician 1969). However, reading `The Search for Corvo' with no other knowledge about Crowley you feel that you have read a well-written thoroughly researched study of a very unusual man. (To confuse the picture further see also `The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg' Fuller 1990)
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
