- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.; Reprinted edition edition (8 May 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0892550589
- ISBN-13: 978-0892550586
- Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 1 x 19.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 442,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe. Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave might have been well-known in British literary life twenty-five years ago, but no one under the age of 32 seems to have heard of it. The accusation most often levelled at it is that it is a work of pure egoism - an accusation that fails to distinguish between talking a lot about yourself (which can be very entertaining), and being self-centred (which never is). Connolly did a lot of the former, but was not the latter. The book is a seductive mixture of diary, common-place book, essay, travelogue and memoir - arranged in loose paragraphs, in which Connolly gives us his views women, religion, death, seduction, infatuation and literature. The thoughts are wise, dark, and beautifully modelled, with the balance of the best French aphorisms. For example: "There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover," "No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us - something more than we could learn from ourselves, from a book." The charm of the book lies in the narrator's mischievous, melancholy tone as he shifts between the sublime and the banal: "To sit late in a restaurant (especially when one has to pay the bill) is particularly conducive to angst, which does not affect us after snacks taken in an armchair with a book. Angst is an awareness of the waste of our time and ability, such as may be witnessed among people kept waiting by a hairdresser." It's a book one can fall in love with...
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Reading the Unquiet Grave for the first time is like tasting a few dishes of the most enticing hors d'oevre of one's life. It is not a coherent thesis or novel, but a collection of thoughts by one of the most able minds of his generation.The first paragraph states that the true function of a writer is to create a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. From then on the book travels through several courses at the highest intellectual level down to the most basic: It ranges over several civilisations in both space and time, noting their distilled wisdom - not without humour- and reflecting on art, sexuality, drug addiction, religion and, by the way, the nature of his pet Lemurs. I confess it took me twenty one years to fully understand it, and this understanding reflected my own slow maturing.
What is most surprising about this book is its origin. It was written by the editor Cyril Connolly in a year of depression following the breakdown of a relationship. He was editor of an avante garde magazine in London during WWII. And yet this book is purely classical in its views, and it is perhaps for that reason that it is entirely relevant today, based in the practical accomodation of human nature that gave rise to our greatest civilisations and yet very aware of the high ideals and aspirations that drove them.
His observations on human relationships are accurate; his insights into the causes of the breakdown of marriage seem simple but inescapable because of that, and in my job as a general practitioner doctor, I always find that couples in the middle of a breakdown in their relationship are able to draw some comfort or insight from this book. His observations on art, the three requisites for a masterpiece, if accepted by the reader, go a long way to explaining the incompatibility of modern and classical art.
The most famous quote from this book (the author was obese and self indulgent) 'Inside every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out' is trite compared to his comments on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Taoism and Confucianism are observed in the same detached way as Christianity, all of it in the most exquisite prose than poignantly brings home to the reader the bankruptcy of much modern literary style.
It is easy to see the author as pompous and arrogant, but he succeeds in achieving what he says in the first pages: 'To weave a book that will last a thousand years, the writer must learn to use invisible ink'. Just so. He was 40 when he wrote this book. In a central chapter he states: 'No one over 35 is worth meeting who cannot teach us more than we can learn from a book'. Perhaps. This book is one of my most treasured possessions. It has been a tutor in life. It is classical, eternal, profound, and in a thousand years it will be still be just as relevant.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
THE UNQUIET GRAVE is an incredible book. Every page has condensed bits of wisdom and wit. Truly one of the best books ever. Unfortunately, it is out of print and, alas, that is too bad; I confess that I had to procure a copy of it by nefarious means. If a book was meant to be sought out by any means possible, this is the book.
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