Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
Uttering the Unutterable
By D.J. Enright
The Death of Virgil
by Hermann Broch, translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer
Grosset & Dunlap, 493 pp., $2.95
Hermann Broch's enormous trilogy, The Sleepwalkers (1932), begins with old Herr von Pasenow, an excellent short sketch of character both physical and moral. It ends with a long and rebarbatively abstract epilogue, the tenth installment of a sequence of similar disquisitions on the 'Disintegration of Values' which sadly weaken the impact and hardly clarify the significance of the third part of the trilogy. The Death of Virgil (1945) constitutes a marked advance, or prolongation, in the direction indicated by the philosophizing parts of the earlier work, though with this difference: that the reflections of the dying Virgil, while equally abstract, are largely unargued, they proceed less by logic than by what alas is called 'poetry,' sometimes reminding us of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but rarefied, diluted, and inflated, lacking in pointedness and in Nietzsche's dubious yet undoubted excitement.
Review, 1186 words
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