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Oulanem
A neo-Gothic novel of revenge, opiate addiction, lust, deception, and betrayal; harsh realism in the service of psychological disaster and fantasy; romance derailed.
When Karl Marx entered the University of Berlin, he thought of himself as a poet and dramatist. He soon recognized that he was neither, but not before he left behind a novel, a handful of love poems and one act of a play, OULANEM (the cryptic title that Marx gave to his fragment). That fragment is here incorporated into a Gothic novel that reveals the all-consuming, obsessive demands of revenge.
When Karl Marx entered the University of Berlin, he thought of himself as a poet and dramatist. He soon recognized that he was neither, but not before he left behind a novel, a handful of love poems and one act of a play, OULANEM (the cryptic title that Marx gave to his fragment). That fragment is here incorporated into a Gothic novel that reveals the all-consuming, obsessive demands of revenge.
312 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2014
725 people want to read
About the author
Paul Majkut
24 books33 followersPaul Majkut, born in East St. Louis, Illinois, now lives in San Diego, California.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 1, 2014
Oulanem is a fascinating narrative with a haunting halo of darkness. It portrays a man obsessed with revenge while a girl’s fate gets swallowed by the evil of vindictiveness.
A novel populated by emotional and powerful characters—from naiveté and innocence to the most twisted evil.
Mr. Majkut has created a complex and sophisticated novel with a chilling ending of ruin and desolation. A great read. Five stars to Majkut and Karl Marx.
A novel populated by emotional and powerful characters—from naiveté and innocence to the most twisted evil.
Mr. Majkut has created a complex and sophisticated novel with a chilling ending of ruin and desolation. A great read. Five stars to Majkut and Karl Marx.
June 7, 2014
I've known the author since he was writing for The San Diego Review back in the 90s and won more writing awards in more categories than anyone for a decade. He always writes the way he wants, not the way the reader or publisher or critics might want. When he's done, they all seem to like it. He'd talked about writing this novel for a long time. It is vintage Majkut--very subtle, indirect, and suggestive. Readers who read closely love his work because it is quiet and has an cumulative effect. Surface readers who chew books like airport novels usually don't get it at all and it goes over their heads. Oulanem, as usual, is a story that leaves the reader with a bad taste in his or her mouth. It's pretty depressing. Maybe its depressing because, as the author always told me, he is writing about the reader.
June 8, 2014
This is a very literary novel. It is also a 19th-century, historical and Gothic novel. I like the way the writer uses the incomplete work of Karl Marx. I had no idea that Marx wrote drama. The way the writer incorporates this into a novel is great. The story is full of characters who fit like pieces of a puzzle into an overall gruesome plot that moves very fast after heavy beginning that introduces characters and their problems. I didn't know that opium was used to help young women as a medicine for menstruation--and was addictive. Th novel has a great villain.
June 7, 2014
What Thomas Piketty has done for Karl Marx' economic writings like Capital, Majkut has done for Marx's early, abandoned fiction, Oulanem. Piketty brought Capital into the 21st century and Majkut brings Oulanem to the present. In its own quiet way, this novel is scary and gothic and the tension builds very until the very ending. The first 100 pages are slow as the themes and characters are set, but after that it builds inevitable and unescapable momentum.
June 8, 2014
This is a frightening story of a young girl's physical pain and addition, incest, betrayal, and revenge. My kind of story that is well written and suspenseful. The ending, I think, means there will be a sequel featuring Beatrice, the misused young girl. There are so many villains in this novel that I think Majkut thinks the whole of humanity is composed of villains!
May 6, 2014
Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy has left me feeling smarter for reading it.
Food for the mind, interesting and insightful.
To see what Marx was like in university was a lesson, and one liked.
Good read, recommend.
Food for the mind, interesting and insightful.
To see what Marx was like in university was a lesson, and one liked.
Good read, recommend.
June 8, 2014
The author makes Marx readable and even comic. There is some great humor here but you have to be looking for it because sometimes it is very wry and British, Hooray for Majkut for making this forgotten story unforgettable. Funny, yeah, but pretty shocking in the end.
October 20, 2014
This novel is filled with captivating language ,amazing literary texture and eye opening story telling. Very admirable plot set ups. Oulanem has me on my toes with a hot cup of chai tea by my side.
January 15, 2016
KIRKUS REVIEWS
OULANEM
Paul Majkut and Karl Marx
Majkut offers a fresh take on the classic revenge tale inspired by the early writing of Karl Marx.
Only partially completed in 1837, Marx’s verse-drama fragment Oulanem: A Tragedy comprises four scenes and seven characters. Majkut’s slow-burning conspiracy adds to that cast, builds on the scenes and imagines their trajectories, relocating the action from Italy to 19th-century Austria following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Nihilistic philosopher Tillo Oulanem (who sees the world as “a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs”) has accepted an invitation to lecture at Innsbruck’s university. His arrival is heralded by Rudolf Pertini, a seemingly docile civil magistrate who offers lodging to Oulanem and his companion. But Pertini’s charitable demeanor belies his true intentions: He’s been waiting for years to exact revenge on Oulanem. By casting others of Innsbruck as pawns in his scheme, Pertini instigates Oulanem’s undoing. “Now, I set the minor characters in motion,” he says, “and, like grindstones in a mill, they will prepare the flour for my feast…I will set the table, prepare the final banquet, and serve only one guest, who will consume himself.” The pawns provide mostly engrossing story arcs of their own. There’s Albirich, a smug Viennese student of high standing who organizes trysts in an abandoned clock shop; Beatrice, a young woman whose menstruations lead to violent mood swings and, consequently, a laudanum addiction; Oulanem’s protégé, Lucindo, orphaned as a boy and determined to uncover his origins while he fights Albirich for Beatrice’s affections… .These braided storylines produce an image of an insular town consumed by anti-Semitism, infidelity, political tension and superstition… . In a novel written so well, and with such restraint, it’s easy not to feel Pertini’s steadily tightening noose until it closes as all is revealed—to great
satisfaction—in the final act.
An impressive denouement to Marx’s unfinished play.
FOREWORD REVIEWS
CLARION REVIEW
Oulanem
Paul Majkut and Karl Marx
Majkut has done a superb job using Marx’s abandoned fragment to its fullest potential in this highly evocative and chilling narrative.
This unforgettable journey into the creative mind of Karl Marx spotlights what few political analysts have ever examined. Inspired by an obscure dramatic fragment written by Marx in 1837…, this experimental literary endeavor showcases a contemporary author’s illumination of a plot only partially developed yet potent in its caustic social messages.
A gothic tragedy that pits intelligent heroes against conniving villains, Majkut’s story initially focuses on a traveling academic but succumbs to interwoven subplots that attempt to crystallize human motivation… .The result is a series of riveting snapshots… .
Eccentric characters interact in sordid sexual interludes and subtle power struggles, an unusual cast that seems bent on traumatizing one another and seeking self-absorbed aggrandizement.
Filled with dark humor and sarcastic statements, the book reveals much about Majkut’s opinion of his subject—a conceited professor named Oulanem… . Enlightening passages about…“emotional” women and the common practice of laudanum dosing to placate as well as subdue them appear throughout this highly evocative and chilling narrative. Pieces of the past haunt the pages, creating a highly interpretive and innovative work…With language that is both provocative and often amusing, every measured phrase seems to seek a specific response: Scheuermann opens a jar of Sten’s embalming fluid and raises it to just below his flared nostrils, inhales death and life deeply, and knows a solitary pleasure. This stylistic technique has a particular appeal…powerful impressions add to the intrigue.
Though no one will know precisely what Marx may have wanted to express if he had finished the play, Majkut has done a superb job using the abandoned fragment to its fullest potential.
Julia Ann Charpentier
MAJKUT COMMENTS ON HIS NOVEL
I have many criticisms of my own novel, but wouldn't want to deprive you the pleasure of discovering a few of your own. Along the way, you may find a few things you like. I'd prefer to begin with those, but am prepared for sticks and stones.
Just under 6000 words, including the list of characters and stage directions, Oulanem: A Tragedy is a fragment of one complete act of four scenes. It was likely intended as a play of three acts, the standard structure of the time and place.
Marx’ words account for roughly seven percent of the total of the present novel, Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy. Astute readers will recognize brief passages from other of his works placed in characters’ mouths, particularly lines from The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Capital, and The Communist Manifesto, as well as echoes from other poets and dramatists.
The major change of Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy from the original fragment is from verse drama to prose fiction. No words of the original have been removed or changed, though they are rearranged for obvious reasons in the longer, narrative form. The characters keep to the personalities Marx gave them or were suggested by what he wrote, the incidents are the same, and the addition of minor characters is done within the conventions of the time the play was written.
Marx wrote Oulanem: A Tragedy when he entered the University of Berlin in 1837, after difficulties at the University of Bonn. When we met, I too was a university student, though we were not at the same university, not citizens of the same country, spoke different languages, and lived on different continents in different centuries.
You will think these many differences would make communication and joint work difficult, if not impossible, but that was not the case. We soon became fast and lasting friends. We are both garrulous, share a sense of humor that is rooted in morbid sarcasm and irony, and are politically of a mind.
After a great deal of late-night talk over many years, as our friendship grew, Marx allowed that I was free to do what I would with his fragment—or, more accurately, he didn’t object to the story I proposed. He was not interested in completing Oulanem: A Tragedy.
In general, I toned down his rhetorical excess, keeping the intent of the original as a tirade against God. Marx is an angry misotheist and I am an angry Catholic atheist. When Marx wrote, God was not yet dead, just old and sick. Marx joined the growing demand for the Creator’s execution. God reigned as a tyrant to be overthrown. Deicide was in the air. By the time I entered, God’s obituary had been written by Friedrich Nietzsche over 100 years before.
My friend, Louis Althusser, insisted that Marx’s life can be divided into the “young Marx” and the “mature Marx.” The young Marx worked within the framework of German idealism as a “Left Hegelian.” The mature Marx abandoned Hegel and German idealism and created scientific socialism. An “epistemological break” in thought occurred that created an intellectual chasm between the two.
Fortunately, this break was not a problem in the writing of this novel. Oulanem: A Tragedy was written before Marx was either young or mature.
The Marx I worked with on this novel may be thought of as the “immature Marx,” a young man just entering the university, not quite sure what he would study, angry and inquisitive. The intellectual and aesthetic vogues of the time shape his character and thought.
Wisely, in a letter to his father, Marx recognized that he was neither poet nor dramatist. His desire for a literary career soon gave way to history, philosophy, and economics.
Oulanem: A Tragedy is an adolescent work, imitative of the already passé and unfashionable genre, Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”), which was the rage a few decades earlier. The common thread that runs through all of Marx’ life, however, is atheism. It is in Oulanem: A Tragedy that we first encounter this philosophy. A few years later, in his doctoral dissertation, the theme is still alive. “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar,” he proclaims. The themes and histrionics of late 19th-century Sturm und Drang melodrama, particularly Goethe’s Prometheus, still inform his work, and Prometheus, who overthrew the gods, remains Marx’ lifelong hero.
There are seven dramatis personæ in the cast of characters in Oulanem: A Tragedy.
Oulanem, a German traveler
Lucindo, his companion
Pertini, a citizen of a mountain town in Italy
Alwander, a citizen of the same town
Beatrice, his foster-daughter
Wierin
Perto, a monk.
Only five of these characters appear in the one act of the play Marx completed. Alwander and Perto are only names. I graft flesh on them from stock characters of German theater at the time and, above all, from Elizabethan-Jacobean drama.
Alwander is mentioned three times, once in the cast of characters, and twice in stage directions for scene location: “The action takes place inside or before Pertini’s house, Alwander’s house, and in the mountains.” He never speaks and is never seen.
Perto is listed in the cast of characters, but is also only as name identified as “a monk.” He does not appear in the play. Knowing Marx’ fondness for Shakespeare, I preferred the well-intended, bumbling Friar Laurence of Romeo and Juliet to the Mephistophelian Father Ambrosio in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Gothic novel, The Monk: A Romance, though Ambrosio may be closer to the stock character Marx had in mind. In this, both options are legitimate.
For me, Shakespeare’s Othello is preferable as a model not only to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, but to Goethe’s Faust as well. The only deal with the devil I find amusing is in the details. Shakespeare’s example, unlike Gothic writers’ practice, has the advantage of comic relief, a sore failure in heavy-handed German revenge tragedy. Comic relief provides an easy template for the character development of Alwander and Perto.
Oulanem and Lucindo are Germans, though the latter has an Italian name. This allows me to make naming and identity a theme. I make Wierin an Austrian. Lucindo, Pertini, Perto and, obviously, Beatrice, are Italian, though I fashion them as Austrian-Italians. Alwander is a puzzle, so I leave him Austrian. All other characters are my additions.
I have relocated the play in Austria from “a mountain town in Italy,” which I take to be Bolzano, to Innsbruck, separated by the Brenner Pass. Three of the characters who appear as Italian are relocated from Bolzano to nearby Innsbruck. Since Beatrice is the “foster” daughter of Alwander, her true parenthood, like Lucindo’s, is a given dramatic theme.
Sturm und Drang sensibility, if that word can be fruitfully applied to irrational bombast, emotional insecurity, and improbable, hysteric situations, is the soul of Oulanem: A Tragedy. Two-dimensional, stock characters populate Marx’s stage. A hero, his protégé, a villain, a distressed damsel, a doting parent and his friend perform a potboiler that mixes love and death from an unsavory recipe for tragedy.
In Oulanem: A Tragedy, scheming villains who are Iago exaggerated, conspire to bring everyone down. In this, Marx foreshadows the apocalyptic elements of Götterdämmerung. The struggle in Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy, however, does not occur in the twilight of the gods. It remains a contest of irrational human wills with the threat of violence ever-present, set in the world of men and women.
The subtitle, “A Fiction Conspiracy,” reflects the nature of the relationship Marx and I enjoy and best defines the “and” between the authors of Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy. Marx created characters, the crucial dialogue is his, and his work suggests the plot.
Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy should not be read as biographical or autobiographical fiction. That would be a mistake. Naturally, Marx and I cannot prevent you from indulging and wallowing in psychological outbursts of your own insecurity, but you do that at the risk of exposing your own disorders. Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy is not necessarily an account of the interior life of either of its authors—any more than all fiction is biographical or autobiographical.
Nor should this novel be taken as an expression of dislike for Austria and Austrians.
I love Austria and Austrians. I have never been there.
OULANEM
Paul Majkut and Karl Marx
Majkut offers a fresh take on the classic revenge tale inspired by the early writing of Karl Marx.
Only partially completed in 1837, Marx’s verse-drama fragment Oulanem: A Tragedy comprises four scenes and seven characters. Majkut’s slow-burning conspiracy adds to that cast, builds on the scenes and imagines their trajectories, relocating the action from Italy to 19th-century Austria following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Nihilistic philosopher Tillo Oulanem (who sees the world as “a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs”) has accepted an invitation to lecture at Innsbruck’s university. His arrival is heralded by Rudolf Pertini, a seemingly docile civil magistrate who offers lodging to Oulanem and his companion. But Pertini’s charitable demeanor belies his true intentions: He’s been waiting for years to exact revenge on Oulanem. By casting others of Innsbruck as pawns in his scheme, Pertini instigates Oulanem’s undoing. “Now, I set the minor characters in motion,” he says, “and, like grindstones in a mill, they will prepare the flour for my feast…I will set the table, prepare the final banquet, and serve only one guest, who will consume himself.” The pawns provide mostly engrossing story arcs of their own. There’s Albirich, a smug Viennese student of high standing who organizes trysts in an abandoned clock shop; Beatrice, a young woman whose menstruations lead to violent mood swings and, consequently, a laudanum addiction; Oulanem’s protégé, Lucindo, orphaned as a boy and determined to uncover his origins while he fights Albirich for Beatrice’s affections… .These braided storylines produce an image of an insular town consumed by anti-Semitism, infidelity, political tension and superstition… . In a novel written so well, and with such restraint, it’s easy not to feel Pertini’s steadily tightening noose until it closes as all is revealed—to great
satisfaction—in the final act.
An impressive denouement to Marx’s unfinished play.
FOREWORD REVIEWS
CLARION REVIEW
Oulanem
Paul Majkut and Karl Marx
Majkut has done a superb job using Marx’s abandoned fragment to its fullest potential in this highly evocative and chilling narrative.
This unforgettable journey into the creative mind of Karl Marx spotlights what few political analysts have ever examined. Inspired by an obscure dramatic fragment written by Marx in 1837…, this experimental literary endeavor showcases a contemporary author’s illumination of a plot only partially developed yet potent in its caustic social messages.
A gothic tragedy that pits intelligent heroes against conniving villains, Majkut’s story initially focuses on a traveling academic but succumbs to interwoven subplots that attempt to crystallize human motivation… .The result is a series of riveting snapshots… .
Eccentric characters interact in sordid sexual interludes and subtle power struggles, an unusual cast that seems bent on traumatizing one another and seeking self-absorbed aggrandizement.
Filled with dark humor and sarcastic statements, the book reveals much about Majkut’s opinion of his subject—a conceited professor named Oulanem… . Enlightening passages about…“emotional” women and the common practice of laudanum dosing to placate as well as subdue them appear throughout this highly evocative and chilling narrative. Pieces of the past haunt the pages, creating a highly interpretive and innovative work…With language that is both provocative and often amusing, every measured phrase seems to seek a specific response: Scheuermann opens a jar of Sten’s embalming fluid and raises it to just below his flared nostrils, inhales death and life deeply, and knows a solitary pleasure. This stylistic technique has a particular appeal…powerful impressions add to the intrigue.
Though no one will know precisely what Marx may have wanted to express if he had finished the play, Majkut has done a superb job using the abandoned fragment to its fullest potential.
Julia Ann Charpentier
MAJKUT COMMENTS ON HIS NOVEL
I have many criticisms of my own novel, but wouldn't want to deprive you the pleasure of discovering a few of your own. Along the way, you may find a few things you like. I'd prefer to begin with those, but am prepared for sticks and stones.
Just under 6000 words, including the list of characters and stage directions, Oulanem: A Tragedy is a fragment of one complete act of four scenes. It was likely intended as a play of three acts, the standard structure of the time and place.
Marx’ words account for roughly seven percent of the total of the present novel, Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy. Astute readers will recognize brief passages from other of his works placed in characters’ mouths, particularly lines from The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Capital, and The Communist Manifesto, as well as echoes from other poets and dramatists.
The major change of Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy from the original fragment is from verse drama to prose fiction. No words of the original have been removed or changed, though they are rearranged for obvious reasons in the longer, narrative form. The characters keep to the personalities Marx gave them or were suggested by what he wrote, the incidents are the same, and the addition of minor characters is done within the conventions of the time the play was written.
Marx wrote Oulanem: A Tragedy when he entered the University of Berlin in 1837, after difficulties at the University of Bonn. When we met, I too was a university student, though we were not at the same university, not citizens of the same country, spoke different languages, and lived on different continents in different centuries.
You will think these many differences would make communication and joint work difficult, if not impossible, but that was not the case. We soon became fast and lasting friends. We are both garrulous, share a sense of humor that is rooted in morbid sarcasm and irony, and are politically of a mind.
After a great deal of late-night talk over many years, as our friendship grew, Marx allowed that I was free to do what I would with his fragment—or, more accurately, he didn’t object to the story I proposed. He was not interested in completing Oulanem: A Tragedy.
In general, I toned down his rhetorical excess, keeping the intent of the original as a tirade against God. Marx is an angry misotheist and I am an angry Catholic atheist. When Marx wrote, God was not yet dead, just old and sick. Marx joined the growing demand for the Creator’s execution. God reigned as a tyrant to be overthrown. Deicide was in the air. By the time I entered, God’s obituary had been written by Friedrich Nietzsche over 100 years before.
My friend, Louis Althusser, insisted that Marx’s life can be divided into the “young Marx” and the “mature Marx.” The young Marx worked within the framework of German idealism as a “Left Hegelian.” The mature Marx abandoned Hegel and German idealism and created scientific socialism. An “epistemological break” in thought occurred that created an intellectual chasm between the two.
Fortunately, this break was not a problem in the writing of this novel. Oulanem: A Tragedy was written before Marx was either young or mature.
The Marx I worked with on this novel may be thought of as the “immature Marx,” a young man just entering the university, not quite sure what he would study, angry and inquisitive. The intellectual and aesthetic vogues of the time shape his character and thought.
Wisely, in a letter to his father, Marx recognized that he was neither poet nor dramatist. His desire for a literary career soon gave way to history, philosophy, and economics.
Oulanem: A Tragedy is an adolescent work, imitative of the already passé and unfashionable genre, Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”), which was the rage a few decades earlier. The common thread that runs through all of Marx’ life, however, is atheism. It is in Oulanem: A Tragedy that we first encounter this philosophy. A few years later, in his doctoral dissertation, the theme is still alive. “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar,” he proclaims. The themes and histrionics of late 19th-century Sturm und Drang melodrama, particularly Goethe’s Prometheus, still inform his work, and Prometheus, who overthrew the gods, remains Marx’ lifelong hero.
There are seven dramatis personæ in the cast of characters in Oulanem: A Tragedy.
Oulanem, a German traveler
Lucindo, his companion
Pertini, a citizen of a mountain town in Italy
Alwander, a citizen of the same town
Beatrice, his foster-daughter
Wierin
Perto, a monk.
Only five of these characters appear in the one act of the play Marx completed. Alwander and Perto are only names. I graft flesh on them from stock characters of German theater at the time and, above all, from Elizabethan-Jacobean drama.
Alwander is mentioned three times, once in the cast of characters, and twice in stage directions for scene location: “The action takes place inside or before Pertini’s house, Alwander’s house, and in the mountains.” He never speaks and is never seen.
Perto is listed in the cast of characters, but is also only as name identified as “a monk.” He does not appear in the play. Knowing Marx’ fondness for Shakespeare, I preferred the well-intended, bumbling Friar Laurence of Romeo and Juliet to the Mephistophelian Father Ambrosio in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Gothic novel, The Monk: A Romance, though Ambrosio may be closer to the stock character Marx had in mind. In this, both options are legitimate.
For me, Shakespeare’s Othello is preferable as a model not only to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, but to Goethe’s Faust as well. The only deal with the devil I find amusing is in the details. Shakespeare’s example, unlike Gothic writers’ practice, has the advantage of comic relief, a sore failure in heavy-handed German revenge tragedy. Comic relief provides an easy template for the character development of Alwander and Perto.
Oulanem and Lucindo are Germans, though the latter has an Italian name. This allows me to make naming and identity a theme. I make Wierin an Austrian. Lucindo, Pertini, Perto and, obviously, Beatrice, are Italian, though I fashion them as Austrian-Italians. Alwander is a puzzle, so I leave him Austrian. All other characters are my additions.
I have relocated the play in Austria from “a mountain town in Italy,” which I take to be Bolzano, to Innsbruck, separated by the Brenner Pass. Three of the characters who appear as Italian are relocated from Bolzano to nearby Innsbruck. Since Beatrice is the “foster” daughter of Alwander, her true parenthood, like Lucindo’s, is a given dramatic theme.
Sturm und Drang sensibility, if that word can be fruitfully applied to irrational bombast, emotional insecurity, and improbable, hysteric situations, is the soul of Oulanem: A Tragedy. Two-dimensional, stock characters populate Marx’s stage. A hero, his protégé, a villain, a distressed damsel, a doting parent and his friend perform a potboiler that mixes love and death from an unsavory recipe for tragedy.
In Oulanem: A Tragedy, scheming villains who are Iago exaggerated, conspire to bring everyone down. In this, Marx foreshadows the apocalyptic elements of Götterdämmerung. The struggle in Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy, however, does not occur in the twilight of the gods. It remains a contest of irrational human wills with the threat of violence ever-present, set in the world of men and women.
The subtitle, “A Fiction Conspiracy,” reflects the nature of the relationship Marx and I enjoy and best defines the “and” between the authors of Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy. Marx created characters, the crucial dialogue is his, and his work suggests the plot.
Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy should not be read as biographical or autobiographical fiction. That would be a mistake. Naturally, Marx and I cannot prevent you from indulging and wallowing in psychological outbursts of your own insecurity, but you do that at the risk of exposing your own disorders. Oulanem: A Fiction Conspiracy is not necessarily an account of the interior life of either of its authors—any more than all fiction is biographical or autobiographical.
Nor should this novel be taken as an expression of dislike for Austria and Austrians.
I love Austria and Austrians. I have never been there.
June 8, 2014
I like historical fiction and Oulanem delves deep into nineteenth century Austria. It is also a dark revenge tragedy that just gets darker and darker until the end. It is very much like a Shakespeare tragedy with an evil, twisted villain. I am not sure how all the minor characters that Majkut brings in relate to the whole story but they are interesting in themselves. This was a very satisfying book that will stay with me for a long time.
February 15, 2015
If I could give this book more than five stars, I would do so. I received a copy through First Reads and adored it. The writer did an excellent job of elaborating on Marx's work without losing anything. The entire thing is a pleasurable read and maintains a historical feel; the plot and characters are three-dimensional and engaging.
November 12, 2020
A gothic novel with an incredible taste for characterization, all of the characters are just so distinct in personality and are unique and entertaining to see. The topic of revenge and love are the main playing points here, and even though the subject is not original, Karl Marx does an incredible job of making it feel refreshing and authentic with his twist on it. The gothic inspiration is apparent throughout the story, and with it, the book becomes much more complex and exciting to read. Overall, the development of characters, especially Pertini and Lucidino, creates a bold environment where exciting scenarios play out in ordinarily dull and drab situations. Anyone interested in novels and especially more gothic ones should read this. It is, quite honestly, that good.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews