Aura: Last Essays

by Gustaf Sobin

Cultural Writing. Essays. Literary Criticism. Gustaf Sobin's final book of essays continues his meditations on the meaning of archaeological vestiges in the south of France. Sobin's writing synthesizes insights from anthropology, philosophy, theology, and the history of art to produce a spiritual and poetic travelogue through vanished time. Left uncompleted at the end of his life, the present volume would have concluded the trilogy whose first two volumes were published by University of California Press (Luminous Debris 1999] and Ladder of Shadows 2008]). The scope and ambition of Sobin's poetic archaeology can be compared only to Walter Benjamin's Arcades project, also left uncompleted, and which similarly sought to draw poetic and philosophical insights from the remnants of material culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Archaeology

72 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2008

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sobin's longer essays have more heft because they are fully developed. These pieces, his "last essays" according to the book's subtitle, sometimes feel like parts of longer pieces. What's missing by way of elaboration is more than compensated for in the sheer beauty of Sobin's writing. Writing about the castle runis and grottoes at Cales, in Provence, Sobin states, "Drawing what we already have from so much mute vestige, we can readily attest to the fact that the underlying grottoes, like uterine chambers, have long outlasted the turreted splendors they once, under duress, served to generate."

[Michael Kunz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introspective essays by American expatriate poet Gustaf Sobin about Renaissance art and architecture. Subjects include the contract between Enguerrand Quarton and his patron for The Coronation of the Virgin, and how it mirrors the work's marriage of the earthly and the divine. The way paleo-osteopathology reveals differences in lifestyle between maritime and pastoral peoples. The use of church bells for navigation in medieval Europe. And the escalating excesses of France's King Rene. Pretty intetesting, if you're in a reflective mood.