The Polyglots is the story of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East in the uncertain years after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative, Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during a military mission. Teeming with bizarre characters—depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, hypochondriacs, and sex maniacs—Gerhardie paints a brilliantly absurd world where the comic and the tragic are profoundly and irrevocably entwined.
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The Polyglots is the story of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East in the uncertain years after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative, Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during a military mission. Teeming with bizarre characters ‹ depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, hypochondriacs, and sex maniacs ‹ Gerhardie paints a brilliantly absurd world where the comic and the tragic are profoundly and irrevocably entwined.
About the Author
William Alexander Gerhardie was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1895. As a young man he went to London and, when the First World War broke out, joined the army. He was first sent to Russia and later travelled the world before beginning to write. Futility (1922), his first novel, was sponsored by Katherine Mansfield, and other notable works of his include The Polyglots (1925) and Of Mortal Love (1936). Gerhardie's writing was acclaimed as an influence on many of his peers, including Anthony Powell, H. G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning. He died in London in 1977.
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This review is from: The Polyglots (Prion Lost Treasures) (Paperback)
"...the glorious twin towers of All Souls stood, wise and quiet, in the nacre-coloured air. They had stood there long before I had come into the world, and they would stand there long after I had ceased to be."
Partly autobiographical, Gerhardie's second novel and the one that put him firmly on the map. A weird funny original work of comic genius. Published in 1925, the same year as The Great Gatsby; the beginning of what I call a decade and a half of quality pre-war Anglo/Irish/American literature which concludes with For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Last Tycoon in 1940. This period includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Henry Miller(censored), Ezra Pound, James Joyce(Ulysses finished in 1914, first officially printed in France in 1922, the United States in 1934, and Britain in 1936, thanks to censorship. He died in 1941), D.H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, Malcolm Lowry, Nicholas Monsarrat, and Graham Greene. A worthy companion novel, though written later and different in style and somewhat in POV is Richard McKenna's, "The Sand Pebbles" concerning Western commercial & military presence in the Far East.
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