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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great beginning!, June 3, 2004
Byzantium Endures captures a slice of early twentieth century reality from a very unsuspecting source: That of a Russian youth caught in the riptides of history and his dreams. These forces would eventually cast him out of his homeland into unknown worlds and adventures unimagined by the mainstream. Michael Moorcock builds a story of not just one man, but of an entire civilized world, and the metamorphosis from fledgling western-world hegemony to self-fullfilling prophesy. Moorcock's grasp of world history and the forces that moved chaotically during the early twentieth century is brilliant when captured through the eyes of one character's neurosis. This book is not the climax of his entire story, but a superb entrance into the mindset and the stage of modern humanity, leading to the maturity of the main character, Col. Pyat, in the second of the series, The Laughter of Carthage. I have read the other fantasies by Moorcock, and none compare, to me, with the historical depth created in the Pyat series. It takes more effort and research and countless hours of detailed analysis to write books of this magnitude, and Moorcock is one of the unsung masters of historical fiction in his time, though his notoriety comes from pure fantasy and science fiction. I have grown to appreciate his historical works as I grow older and wiser and look forward to his interpretations of a growing global society.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great novels of 20th/21st century, April 20, 2001
By A Customer
Moorcock is a writers writer, admired both for his popular vitality and his literary subtlety and as such he is more like Balzac or Zola than any modern novelist. The edition advertised here is the full text. Only the first American edition, as far as I'm aware, was very badly cut. The adventures of the anti-Semitic but very evidently Jewish Colonel Maxim Arturovitch Pyat, self-styled White Cossack officer and scientific genius, but actually a B-picture movie actor and con-man, lying, cheating and stealing his bizarre and somehow heroic way to the very gates of Auschwitz is an Everyman for the 20th century, denying the evidence of his own birth if necessary, trying to reinvent reality with every breath and at every turn reality descends upon him, as it does all who avoid it so thoroughly! This is a chilling comedy of our times in four long, fast-moving volumes, each independent in Moorcock's familiar popular style, but profoundly probing the origins of the Nazi Holocaust. There are few absolute heroes and villains in Pyat's eventful times, but many shades and combinations of both. Moorcock's deconstruction of modern myth figures is subtle and intelligent (look out for a youthful Stalin in Byzantium Endures) and when he gets to America in The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands, keep your attention on those cameos and little notes in the margin. Moorcock has a Wagnerian habit of suddenly bringing up the leitmotif to colour and change your whole understanding of what you have experienced before. He is a master novelist, admired around the world, and these books, with Mother London, are his masterpieces. Every educated reader should at least have an informed opinion of them. They should be required reading, both for the vivid and accurate historical pictures they paint and for the example of the European moral tradition in fiction triumphantly alive and well in the hands of a man Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd and many others among his peers have called the master storyteller of our times.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sheer delight!, June 24, 2000
Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, born in 1900 in Kiev, recounts his early years during the revolutionary period of Russian history. He exalts the purity and grandeur of the Slavic soul; rails against modern Christianity which to him is a Judaic corruption of the rational form founded by the Greeks; and, while bemoaning the effete spirit of the modern age, believes still that Byzantium, the seat of true Christianity, endures in his heart. This is a steady tale of moral and ideological ironies, written in a sure hand that lovingly describes a bygone era. Made me sigh with pleasure.
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