Notes on "The Death of Virgil"

I don't know that a book I've read has ever been slower–time doesn't skid to a halt in this book, time altogether stops.

"O nothing ripens into reality that is not rooted in memory." (p. 38.)

The book's an actual major river, lugubrious, a life work flowing through impediment after impediment on its way to nothing final.

The Roman poet Virgil (b.70 BC, d. 19 BC) is being carried, in a procession led by Caesar Augustus, across the bay of Brindisi. Virgil, dying, is narrating the last 18 hours of his life while keeping close watch on the manuscript of the Aeneid.

When I first started reading the book 20 years ago I thought its major theme was sleep; now that I'm really ready to read it I read it as a text meant to prepare the reader for death.

Doesn't the description of the garbage, the filth, the deplorable living conditions on the bay of Brindisi seem like environmental writing today? That the physical damage we inflict on the earth, the thoughtlessness of man in regard to his surroundings, will no doubt have profound consequences.

It's a book that deserves to be read out loud, even by the solitary reader.

I'm assuming that people don't line up to buy books with the word, "death" in the title, though I could be wrong. I know that reading it now at age 66 I finally understand the meaning of the phrase, 'honor thy father and mother.'

There are scenes of the poet Virgil being laughed at, mocked by the citizens of Brindisi, most of them poor and living in squalor.

Hermann Broch (1886-1951) completed writing "The Death of Virgil" in 1945 and it was first published in a German edition. North Point Press of San Francisco published the English translation, which I'm reading now, in 1983. North Point Press ceased publishing books in 1991