I want to thank everyone who has been patiently following along the epic adventure BC and I have just finished with Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil. May all interested benefit from a slightly more trodden path! And lest you missed anything, a recap:

BC gave us excellent introductions to Broch and to [...]

BC is far too kind to thank me for his challenge. I think it goes without saying at this point that The Death of Virgil is the kind of novel it’s very, very hard to get through on your own, and certainly a “project.” And that’s a very big project I’ve now completed [...]

Part IV of Death of Virgil is called “Air—The Homecoming.” At its opening, Virgil lies supine on a boat, voyaging into the underworld, his friend Plotius manning the oars in the boat’s fore, an unnamed and (to Virgil) unseen helmsman in the aft guiding the trip. The dying, maybe already dead, Virgil sees [...]

BC’s post on Part III of The Death of Virgil touches on several things I knew I would want to write about while reading the section. And he’s done the hard work of researching Broch and his philosophy, which has been incredibly helpful for me (who have been a bit lazier!).

First, I [...]

Finishing up the third section of Death of Virgil leaves one with a great sense of relief, and also, I must admit, a small but very detectible tremor of fear. The relief comes from knowing that the bulk of this acclaimed work lays behind; the fourth and concluding section of the novel is [...]

So Part II – “Fire—The Descent” – arrives, and it arrives with an amping up of the difficulty, arriving with sinewy sentences, going on for pages and pages, interminable pages and pages that sometimes find the prose arrested by flights of poetry cum philosophy that leave a reader mystified and unsure of meaning [...]

Nicole and I have talked about how dense the book is, and “Water—The Arrival” is probably the most straightforward of the novel’s four parts. To put some flesh on this first part, I put together a program that would break things out sentence by sentence. Here are the vital statistics on “Water—The Arrival.”

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Nicole has done a fine job summarizing and taking apart Part I of The Death of Virgil. I am delinquent in posting on the section myself as I am almost done preparing a program that will examine the text of the novel and break it out sentence by sentence, giving an analysis of [...]

The first section of The Death of Virgil, “Water—The Arrival,” tells of Virgil’s arrival at Brundisium along with Caesar Augustus and his retinue. Already ill, Virgil has submitted to the “importunity” of Augustus and agreed to return to Italy from Athens, where he had hoped “that the hallowed and serene sky of Homer [...]

George Steiner, William Gass, Milan Kundera, Hannah Arendt: just a few of the great critics who recognize Broch as a preeminent figure in the theory and practice of the novel. So, let me ask, with the inspiration of those distinguished commentators if not perhaps their thoroughness and perspicuity, about what Broch was trying [...]