| Is hard to take this last paragraph seriously when most of what the reviewer has said up to that point sounds grumpy and reluctant: “...risking his reputation on cranky ideas, for revising masterpieces and making them worse, for alienating friends and abandoning family.” “...self-destructive impulses led Graves to think he could safely inhabit a household comprising himself, his wife Nancy, his lover Laura Riding, his wife’s lover Geoffrey Taylor, and several children. Their “quadrilateral” ended poorly, with Graves hurling himself from a third-story window in pursuit and imitation of Riding, who had just thrown herself from the fourth floor.” “Perhaps he expected that someone, someday would do for him what he had once done for the Roman emperor Claudius...” “...a few on the esoteric and occult fringes still agree with him.” “... Graves, never humble, characterized the “inspiration” that descended upon him...” “Can we read Graves without looking to the moon?” “When writing fiction, he almost invariably constructs so sturdy a framework of fact, theory, conjecture, and supposition that the conventional pleasures of fiction are elided.” “Perhaps Nausicaa is Graves’s self-portrait as ruthless artist.” “Graves is a great accumulator of incidental detail and memorable anecdotes but, as ever, he’s an indifferent analyst of character.” “Dozens of Graves’s books have little hope of emerging from the lead casket of obscurity.” |