Titus Groan (1946)

Hay literatura fantástica, y luego está esta obra. Leído en español, en una traducción muy, pero muy, buena. ( )

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.” There stands the Gormenghast - as if sealed inside a crystal ball - looming in all its grotesque wonder. The old, musty smell. The susurrus of narrow passages. The torches casting an eerie circle of light. The hustle and bustle of the castle dwellers, while the Gormenghast watches stoically. It has seen 77 generations of the Earls, and by now it is ageless - as if it has worn this air of decay since the beginning of time.

The dwellers of the castle - no, they don't merely live in the castle, they are organic offshoots of the Gormenghast. They scurry through its passages as blood runs through our veins. You can take them out of Gormenghast, you can't take the Gormenghast out of them. These characters are easily a great candidate for the title of the best ensemble cast to be found in literature. And Peake makes it so without obliterating any of their individual personalities. (Fuschia! you are such a sweetheart.) The characters often get an irreverent treatment from Peake, portrayed as exaggerated caricatures, comical and outlandish.

Beyond this cartoonish humor, Peake offers many a leisurely descriptions as he crafts spellbinding scenes, laying down the little details one by one. And just as easily, he conjures up ominous moments sending a chill down the spine. If any authors insist on detail-oriented writing, I wish they would write like Peake (winks at [a:Paul Scott|3119|Paul Scott|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1238040850p2/3119.jpg]). Such atmospheric writing which brings alive a whole new world, casting a mild spell, works wonderfully for me. It is Peake's masterful depictions that make the setting, not the characters and not the story, the protagonist here.

This book here is unique and perfect, I say.

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The Voice of Peake

A few out-of-context excerpts from here and there:

"Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was horrible. It was as though nature had lost control. As though the smile, as a concept, as a manifestation of pleasure, had been a mistake, for here on the face of Swelter, the idea had been abused."

"Lady Groan raised herself in bed and looked fiercely at the open door, bellowed in the deepest and loudest voice, 'SQUALLOR!'. The word echoed along the corridors and down the stairs, and creeping under the door and along the black rug in the Coldroom, just managed, after climbing the doctor's body, to find its way into both his ears simultaneously, in a peremptory if modified condition. Modified though it was, it brought Doctor Prunesquallor to his feet at once. His fish eyes swam all round his glasses before finishing at the top, where they gave him an expression of fantastic martyrdom. ...."

"His face was very lined, as though it had been made of brown paper that had been crunched by some savage hand before being hastily smoothed out and spread over the tissues."

"The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, and their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreaths that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up the hidden walls."

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The Importance of Being Titus

When reading this book, I had looked up the name Titus on Wikipedia. Among the notable people who were named Titus was the Roman emperor from 79 to 81, under whose reign the construction of The Colosseum was completed and it was inaugurated with games that lasted for 100 days.



Titus was also the name of Rembrandt's fourth child and he was often a figure or model in his father's paintings and studies.




( )

I finished off this book a few days ago. I still can't quite decide what I think of it. It's very Gothic and has a subtle sense of humor. There's lots of really great things I like about it - great characters and fantastic descriptions of things (particularly the characters). But at the same time, there's a whole lot of needless repetition, especially in speech. Characters say things over two or three times in quick succession, sometimes in different words, others in the same words. It doesn't really get in the way of reading - it works the majority of the time, but it doesn't work often enough that I feel odd about endorsing the book. And yet, how can I not get wholeheartedly behind the characters? I'm planning on reading the entire trilogy for the challenge, though, so maybe my feelings will sort themselves out by then. ( )

Set in the surreal, hyper-traditional, super-class based world of Gormenghast, this novel centres on the impossibly huge, though half-crumbling castle grounds, where the old Earl is replaced by his baby son, and a lowly kitchen servant, Steerpyke, is ruthlessly cunning and ambitious, and wishes to exercise that ambition by rising as high as he possibly can.

Within the castle walls, everything seems stifled by rituals, and saturated with a cold dead hatred. Decay is everywhere, not just in the buildings, but the people and the culture. It's almost inconceivable that anyone, for instance, could have sex, and I just couldn't understand how the earl produced an heir. In vibrant contrast to this, though, there are the people outside the walls, where there almost seems an overflowing of love and passions, as if bouncing off the vacuum of it in the castle.

Gothic, incredibly inventive, brilliantly written, full of bizarre characters and scenes, this novel might be a little slow, but it's also compelling and utterly fascinating. ( )

Titus Groan features incredible language and tremendously unusual and interesting characters. The setting- a vast, gloomy castle bound up in ancient and obscure traditions- is also a highlight of the book. Unfortunately, the story moves along very slowly, and there isn't much action. Though I enjoyed Peake's poetic descriptions and Halloween imagery, in the end I decided the book was a bit too boring to convince me to read the rest of the trilogy. ( )