Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah: From the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier
by Louis Levy
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Description
Originally published in Danish in 1910, Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, Kzradock is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism. Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is show more conducting hypnotic séances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion. When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: "This is a great book, and it speaks a formidable language ... This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt." show lessTags
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A weird little curio for sure. An extremely odd novel from 1910, appreciated by Benjamin and Scholem, that's somewhere between gothic horror, detective farce, and psychoanalytic drama. It's not fully satisfying - I actually think the second section is too short - and the ending twist and resulting philosophy fall a little flat on me and how I think about things. But! It's a quick read and both thought-provoking and fun, I am glad I read it.
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1910
- Original language
- Danish
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 839.813 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures Other Germanic literatures Danish and Norwegian literatures Danish Danish fiction
- LCC
- PT8175 .L47 .M4613 — Language and Literature German, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures Danish literature Individual authors or works 1900-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 47
- Popularity
- 638,478
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.63)
- Languages
- Danish, English, German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
