My review:
Wow! This is excellent. How had I not heard about it before?
I only happened on the Quest for Corvo serendipitously while reading about the Dickens-Dostoevsky kerfluffle.
The book is nominally a biography, but so much better structured than the usual soup-to-nuts (or cradle-to-grave) bio.
Symmons sets out to learn about Fredrick Rolfe, author of Hadrian the Seventh, among other books, and uncovers quite a character. Rolfe is charming and talented, but also self-destructive, inevitably turning on those who try to help him. He wants to be a clergyman, but cannot, wants to paint, but fails, wants to write, but never makes any money--he is throughout his life desperately poor. He is a man out of time, addicted to the Renaissance and a homosexual in Victorian England.
The story is structured, roughly, around Symmon's quest, what he finds out when, the lucky breaks that lead him to insights, the nagging holes that he cannot fill but that the reader might do so imaginatively.
The only criticism is that by the end, when we know Rolfe's tendencies, it becomes a bit tedious to learn of yet another patron he cultivated and then turned on--some of that could certainly have been glossed. Otherwise, though, excellent.
Wow! This is excellent. How had I not heard about it before?
I only happened on the Quest for Corvo serendipitously while reading about the Dickens-Dostoevsky kerfluffle.
The book is nominally a biography, but so much better structured than the usual soup-to-nuts (or cradle-to-grave) bio.
Symmons sets out to learn about Fredrick Rolfe, author of Hadrian the Seventh, among other books, and uncovers quite a character. Rolfe is charming and talented, but also self-destructive, inevitably turning on those who try to help him. He wants to be a clergyman, but cannot, wants to paint, but fails, wants to write, but never makes any money--he is throughout his life desperately poor. He is a man out of time, addicted to the Renaissance and a homosexual in Victorian England.
The story is structured, roughly, around Symmon's quest, what he finds out when, the lucky breaks that lead him to insights, the nagging holes that he cannot fill but that the reader might do so imaginatively.
The only criticism is that by the end, when we know Rolfe's tendencies, it becomes a bit tedious to learn of yet another patron he cultivated and then turned on--some of that could certainly have been glossed. Otherwise, though, excellent.
