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Title: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Broadview Literary Texts) by James Hogg, Adrian Hunter ISBN: 1-55111-226-4 Publisher: Broadview Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.59 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Strange Case Indeed
Comment: Hogg's novel is about 150 years ahead of its time. Published in 1824, the work has everything readers of post-modern novels could ask for, including clustered narratives, self-reflexive point-of-view, unreliable narrators, unsympathetic-protagonist, etc. Hogg is engaging in a highly playful exercise, yet at the same time the novel can be read as an entirely chilling depiction of what may happen to the human psyche when it is given absolutely free-reign. The story takes place in Scotland in the early 18th century, a time of political and religious foment. It chiefly concerns the religious "progress" of Robert Wingham. Robert's mother is a religious enthusiast who has left the household of her husband, George Colwan, laird of Dalcastle, because he does not meet her stringent standards of pious behavior. Before she leaves, she delivers a son, whom Colwan names after him and names him his sole heir. A year after she has left she delivers another son, Robert, whom the editor-narrator who first tells the story is too polite to say is illegitimate, but it's evident by all appearances and intimations that Robert is the son of Lady Colwan and the Reverend Wringhim, a dour, intolerant, "self-conceited pedagogue," who is the polar opposite of the easy-going laird. Reverend Wingham undertakes the instruction of young Robert and eventually adopts him. Robert, like his father, is a cold fish, who abhors the presence of women and anything else that he thinks will lead him to sin. Young George, on the other hand is naturally open and fun-loving, engaging in the "normal" activities young men of the time preferred. This attitude piques the ire of Robert, who sees any activity that is not directly related to religion as frivolous. He starts showing up uninvited whenever and wherever George and his friends get together. When they try to play tennis, Robert stands in George's way and interferes with the game. The same thing happens when they play a rugby-like game on a field outside Edinburgh. Even after George loses patience and punches Robert , the younger brother keeps on insinuating himself, uninvited, every time George and his friends meet. When the Reverend Wingham learns that his precious boy has been roughed up, he incites his conservative faction to retaliate against the liberals with which George and his friends are in league. A full scale riot ensues, reminiscent of the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Neither the editor nor Wingham ever give full assent to the fantastic elements in the story. Events are depicted in as realistic a light as possible, which lends weight to the storyline and keeps things from drifting off into never-never land.
Everything about this novel "works." The editor's framing narrative subverts Wingham's "confession" narrative at just the right points, so the subversion actually adds to the solidity and texture of the work as a whole and adds to its plausibility. The comic characters are wonderfully depicted (including Hogg himself, who puts in an appearance as an unhelpful clod who's too busy observing sheep at a local fair to assist the editor and his party when they want to dig up Wingham's grave). Wingham's descent into fanaticism and his subsequent psychological disintegration is handled as well as it possibly could be. It is also a perfectly drawn cautionary tale about the pitfalls of antinomian religious beliefs. Hogg describes for the reader a splendid representation of just where the path of predestination can lead a susceptible mind. That's where the comparison's to Crime and Punishment evolve. Wringhim, like Roskolnikov, considers himself above the common rung of humanity. Unlike Rodyan, however, Robert never does discover the full import of his megalomaniacal doctrine until it is entirely too late. Readers might be interested to note that Hogg's novel had a direct influence on Stephenson' s Jekyll and Hyde and on Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Hogg was considered by his contemporaries to be something of a rustic genius, and the poetic successor to Robert Burns. He was known as the Ettrick Shepherd, because he did earn his livelihood from raising sheep and was entirely self taught. He was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He's still highly revered in his home country. If more readers become familiar with this one-of-a-kind book, he will be revered more universally. It really is that brilliant a novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: As haunting and unusual as the events it describes
Comment: James Hogg's masterpiece, this strange and evocative study of the effects of Calvinist doctrine on the Scottish mind, has slowly edged its way into the canon in the last twenty years largely because it is first and foremost a rattling good read. Like all the great Scottish novelists from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson to Muriel Spark, Hogg was haunted by the dual promise of Edinburgh both as the refined cosmopolitan Renaissance home of Boswell as well as the fanatically religious city of John Knox. THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS is a response to that dual inheritance, and the novel is filled with doubles and dual structures: two brothers (born on two floors of the same house) vie for filial recognition; one brother duplicates himself when he is visited by a devil figure, Gil-Martin, in his exact semblance; and the story is told in two parts, and one of those is itself doubled. Although the Scots dialect in sections is a real chore to get through, the book is a marvelous frightening read nonetheless, and NYRB has wrapped it all up in a glorious cover featuring a famous Blake illustration. This isn't an easy ghost read, but it is tremendously repaying.
Rating: 4
Summary: Evil Committed by Those Convinced of Their Own Piety
Comment: Praised as a masterpiece, Hogg's novel does indeed have that strange, brilliant quality of uniqueness, that, defying all cookie-cutter fictive forms, creates its own world. The world in question is Puritanism, specifically Scottish Calvinism in its most virulent form. The Calvinists in the novel, Robert Wringhim and his son of the same name, are scabrous parasites, full of religious cant and envy, who plot to takeover the inheritance of the Colwan household through murder, an act they rationalize because they are, they believe, already predestined to be saved so no sin can bring them damnation and secondly because the murder victim is an evil sinner who, in their mind, deserves to be killed. Thus we have the profile of those who commit evil even while convinced of their own piety, a very relevant theme in today's world of quasi-spiritual leaders who foment violence in the name of their faith.
The novel is divided in three parts, ninety pages of The Editor's Narrative, a third-person account of the rivalry and murder; the 130-page first-person Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner; and, thirdly, the 10-page epilogue, told again from the Editor.
This is a very disturbing, funny, frightening novel, especially since its murderous characters are so believable. However, I can only give the novel four stars, not five, because the Confessions section, at 130 pages, is too long. It's unbearable and repetitive to observe Wringham's rhetorical excesses and lame justification and skewed point of view for so long. His evil is clearly and convincingly established and to hear him bloviate about how good he is and how evil everyone else is for over a hundred pages becomes tiresome. However, I don't wish to sway anyone from reading one of the best novels I've ever read about the role piety and self-rectitude play in enabling people to wreak evil and havoc on the world.
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Title: Dracula (Signet Classics (Paperback)) by Bram Stoker ISBN: 0451523377 Publisher: Signet Classics Pub. Date: 01 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World's Classics) by Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bonamy Dobree, Terry Castle ISBN: 0192825232 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon, Marc Romano, Lawrence G. Blochman, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Goldtree Blochman ISBN: 159017044X Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon, Louise Varese, William T. Vollmann ISBN: 1590170431 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Way of Life, Like Any Other (New York Review Books Classics) by Darcy O'Brien, Seamus Heaney ISBN: 094032279X Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 09 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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