Word: hadrian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HADRIAN THE SEVENTH (350 pp.)-Frederick Rolfe-Knopf...
...mere poseur. And if some of it is caviar, at least it came out of the belly of a live fish." This week, for the first time in 27 years, one of the major literary curiosities of modern times was reissued on the U.S. literary counter. Hadrian the Seventh might seem caviar to some, to others only a mess of purple eggs laid by a very odd fish indeed. To all, however, it offers one of the wildest sights ever flashed on the brainpan of a madman, a kind of interior cinema of a grand delusion. The author...
Then he published a history of the Borgias that held the critics fascinated in the gothic embrace of its style. Then, in 1904, he wrote Hadrian...
...blue-eyed guesswork, the story of Hadrian's adventures in the Vatican carries a kind of unshakable conviction. Nor is it all a vision: Rolfe is well aware of the humor of his hero's situation, and plays it often for laughs and even for smiles. Yet when the Pope at last dies, felled by an assassin, the moment is quite as high and tragic as the language Rolfe renders...
...French cathedrals, feels his mind threatened like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea"). She also has a lot to say about the modern Romans ("Their voices carry like rockets .. . An American ... feels exposed . .."). And she tries very hard to evoke the past in her description of Hadrian's ruined villa at Tivoli...