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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Penn Warren's Other Masterpiece,
By
This review is from: World Enough and Time (Voices of the South) (Paperback)
This novel is one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction, and adds a twin peak to Penn Warren's other novelistic masterpiece, All the King's Men.On the surface, the story traces the rise, career, love, and misadventures of Jeremiah Beaumont in the early days of Kentucky and of this republic. Simultaneously it is a meditation on the process of history, and its strangeness to the eyes and ears of later generations. Unlike All the King's Men, wherein there is 1st person narrative by a main character, Jack Burden, who fairly almost drowns in history, here the narrative is 3rd person and objective. We are immediately distanced by the narrator/historian, who holds in his hands the letters and court documents relating to Jeremiah, in the 1st sentence: "I can show you what is left." Indeed, the story is largely based on actual material discovered by Katherine Ann Porter and given to Warren. From here a fascinating narrative opens as we are immediately dropped into frontier Kentucky with the young lawyer's assistant Jeramiah. The passion and violence of the setting is made palpable, along with Jeremiah's youthful lust and apparent idealism, and the manner in which they affect his relationship with his employer -- but to go into details would spoil this engrossing and fascinating story. The merit is the confidence with which Penn Warren engages the strangeness of this world, without the usual method in "historical fiction" of merely dressing up contemporary figures in old costume. These people are puzzles, and the burden of the text is to unwind them. Yet they are so alive on the page, so true, that we are able to follow deeply into their bizarre depths and the alien wonder of early America. In the end, the reader will have lived in early western Kentucky and emerged back in the contemporary world stunned. Penn Warren's passionate engagement with the American psyche carries one through the several hundred pages effortlessly. The book is many things -- straight realism, philosophical speculation, moral tale, melodrama, psychological portrait. Finally, it is simply one of the few 20th century novels to take up the multi-faceted challenge of Herman Melville to plunge into the national heart, with no pre-established goal except to come back home with as much truth as two arms can carry.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disillusionment in early Kentucky,
By Bomojaz (South Central PA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: World Enough and Time (Voices of the South) (Paperback)
This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealistic lawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The World's Lie,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: World Enough and Time (Voices of the South) (Paperback)
This book is difficult, nay, impossible to review in the normal fashion. No adjectives come to mind but deep and dark, dark beyond your heart's wildest imaginings. It is if some daemon or muse from the underworld took hold of Robert Penn Warren's pen as soon as he set it to paper here. Nothing makes sense or lends itself to a rational review. The Andrew Marvell poem whence the book takes its title, with its carpe diem theme, is not apt at all to the book; nor are the Spenserian stanzas that preface the book applicable to it. It's as if Penn Warren had in mind another book altogether before he embarked upon its creation. It's as if Warren, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, was seized by his dark muse and spirited away whilst the book took form. The poem that should form part of title or preface is Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Lie," but without that poem's consolation of the "soul."The plot concerns, ostensibly at any rate, one Jeremiah Beaumont's coming of age in early 19th Century Kentucky and how he discovers, through trial (literally and figuratively) and tribulation that - as Raleigh sonorously intones it - the world is a lie. The experience of reading the book was extremely visceral for me, as it will be for any poetically attuned reader. These lines from the book itself best describe its effect: "Every gully and ditch was a bleeding wound, and every solid object, tree or stone or house, seemed to be losing itself in the vast irremediable deliquescence. Human strength and human meaning seemed to flow away, too, to bleed away with the dissolving world." This deliquescence of everything of worth in the world is seamlessly interlarded - throughout the book - by Warren's dark muse, which is so deft as to quickly turn a description of a seemingly quiet domestic life into nightmare: "Jeremiah says that that time made him think of what old age must be like when two people have outlived all their love and hate for each other, when they know each other's faults so well that the faults no longer have meaning, and the resentments are no more than the accustomed pain of a rheumatic joint, part of the nature of things, when they can live in peace because neither is more than a ghost to the other." There is much ado about the law and justice herein. Jeremiah is himself a lawyer. When reading through these parts, I found myself thinking at one point that this would make good reading for anyone considering the law, only to realise quickly that it would turn any sensitive reader away from the law more powerfully than anything I have ever read. There is, in the end, no law, no justice, absolutely nothing of that nature that obtains here though Jeremiah (with the reader in tow) seeks it desperately. There remains only one truth Jeremiah discovers as he lies face down in the dark, awaiting his execution: "It was dark, and in that darkness you could lie and not know the perimeter and boundary of your being if you did not lay finger to your face, for the darkness entered you and you dissolved into the darkness and were absorbed like a body thrown into the sea to sink forever and flow away from itself into the profundities of no intrusive light......There was always that truth." Yes - one murmurs, much later, turning the last page - there is always that truth. It becomes, upon finishing the novel, quite obvious why the literary world has turned a blind eye to this dark masterpiece in American fiction. It is simply too powerful.
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