Пути к раю. Комментарии к потерянной рукописи

by Peter Cornell, Петер Корнель, Юлиана Яхнина (Translator)

In his foreword to The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript, the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history, with a particular focus on spirals and labyrinths. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is translated into English for the first time by Saskia Vogel.

Genres: Fiction, Essays, Sweden, Philosophy, Contemporary

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't recall where the recommendation of The Ways of Paradise came from, but Fitzcarraldo Editions are always an easy sell with me. The subtitle 'Notes from a lost manuscript' tells the reader what to expect in terms of format: The Ways of Paradise is a literary homage to The Arcades Project which I happen to also be in the middle of reading. Indeed, it is mentioned several times, initially on page 15. The Ways of Paradise is much easier to impute a narrative to than Walter Benjamin's monumental work. The magic of The Arcades Project is that it's a massive database that never had the chance to become a non-fiction book. The Ways of Paradise cannot equal its scale and ambition, although it is intriguing and elegantly written. While reading I assumed it to be fiction, and that remains my arbitrary opinion because of the artificiality of its construction. However the Fitzcarraldo cover is white which denotes non-fiction, so I've tagged it as both.

The thread I discerned from the fragmentary notes is a search for the centre of a maze. As well as deliberately constructed mazes, whole cities, parks, books, languages, and artworks are framed as such. A little disconcertingly, my favourite phrase from the book was a misreading. Section III subsection 24 actually reads, 'A portion of the word has been torn away'. I initially read this as, 'A portion of the world has been torn away', which frankly I prefer. This detail is emblematic of my experience while reading The Ways of Paradise: it echoed something more powerful. I must return to The Arcades Project, which I haven't touched in a few months but am determined to finish reading this year.

[Gabriella Håkansson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kan vara den bästa bok som någonsin skrivits. Fotnotslitteraturens absoluta höjdpunkt.

[Joseflagerkvist]

Omöjligt att betygsätta och kanske ingen roman, men jag kommer att sakna att bläddra lite på måfå i den nu när jag maxat lånen på bibblan.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ways of Paradise is a cryptic essay based on a series of allegedly found notes summarizing the contents of European references from across the centuries on the concept of “paradise” and its variations and influences on cultural history. Beginning with Eden as its center, paradise, after Adam and Eve’s forced exile, became something that needed to be kept secret, and thus the labyrinth was developed. The center of each labyrinth is a symbolic center of the heavens, which allowed persons during the Middles Ages to embark on representative pilgrimage to Jerusalem (where the Crusades were taking place), understood as God’s chosen place on Earth.

The development of symbolism also began as a notion of joining to disparate halves to form a complete whole (per Socrates regarding men and women as two halves of a former whole, cleaved apart by God). This practice quickly developed into a method for verifying the authenticity of documents that had been torn in half—each owner held a uniquely irregularly-edged fragment that became regular and whole once joined with the other half.

Labyrinths in public parks—or labyrinthine parks—are mimicked by labyrinthine arcades (cf. Walter Benjamin). The wandering encouraged by parks and arcades is reproduced in the automatic writing of the Surrealists. The Surrealists,believed that automatic writing brought forth what was buried by the subconscious, the territory of such psychologists as Freud and Jung. . . From there, we travel to the New World—the New Eden, as it was seen by Europeans—extending to Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” a 20th-century labyrinth.

It's a curious enterprise, The Ways of Paradise, making strange and unexpected historical connections (some more tenuous than others), but it shows (or tries to argue for) how certain ideas and practices can undergird a civilization for so long that those ideas and practices come to be understood as natural, as the way the world is. Revealing those ideas and practices becomes a sort of Jungian exercise in excavating the mythological tropes guiding our experiences.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Ashley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I liked this more in concept than in reality, I think. I love the idea of found fragments pointing to a bigger picture. Sometimes it felt almost too academic in writing style, which I get is the point because these fragments were gathered like research, but just is not a style that consistently holds my attention. I also loved the imagery, but when it got into comparing this idea of hidden paradise at the kind of cosmic center to a woman’s private region and got Freud involved I kind of rolled my eyes. As a woman I don’t really see a mystery in that like a man I guess might. I can’t believe I’ve made this comment for multiple books, but it has too much Freud for me.

I did love the inclusion of various artwork and photos and it is cool to see a thesis come together through gathered concepts.

[Jacob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea

[Beth Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW
LOVE
Whilst I was reading it I was on a ferry………… and when I walked out onto the deck there was a singular spiral shell just lying there………………and there are so so so many spirals

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, boring to read just the notes of an academic paper. That seems obvious?

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

strangest thing i’ve ever read but will be thinking about this for a while !

[gabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

stumbled across it in a bookshop coincidently, read the blurb and thought 'it's like someone wrote a book for me'. free associations of the non-site, circling like drain-water around an indeterminate plug-hole, each shape suggesting a further dimension that may or may not arrive, landscapes sartorial in their folds and crevices, ...runs through various circles, which constantly convey a series of alternate connections, retreats, old paths with new credibility, a demonstration "in spiral fashion". a joke, a fruition, a path we walk and walk and walk

[Lola Stocking · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 this was primed to be a big hit for me but didn’t get there. Some interesting notes and references but it didn’t work as a whole book. At times it felt too disparate and some of the points too isolated

[Camille · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this: a mysterious manuscript of a deceased researcher brought to light. However it felt too disjointed for me, and I simply could not get into it.

[Andrej · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Lord proceeded to show him the ways of paradise and said to him, ‘These are the ways that men have lost by not walking in them.’”
—Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, ca. 100 CE

[Catherine Corman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy…it was said that the Archangel Michael appeared there in the year 708.

-Peter Cornell, The Ways of Paradise

[Matthew Roche · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very, very unusual book, and it is not going to appeal to everyone. It caught my eye this morning at a bookstore on Marylebone in London and for some reason I had to buy it. I am so glad I did.

First off, this is an astonishingly creative non-fiction book. Let that sink in.

The conceit is that a Swedish author spent 3 decades in their national library preparing their life’s work. Upon their death, only the notes were found, a compendium of comments structured like footnotes and commentary for a book that does not exist.

If reading 140 pages of endnotes referring to nothing seems unappealing, let me say that I read it in a single sitting, then picked it up and read it again in the same sitting. It was like a drug.

What is it about? At its core, it is about layers and knowing. Layers of consciousness, of gneiss, and of geological strata, what sits atop and lies beneath. It is a wide-ranging exploration of symbol and referent, of complements and pairings. It explores Gaugin and the geology of his beloved mountain, and of Freud (not shocking).

It delves into the tension between mysticism and inspiration: is that which emerges unconsciously from internal or mystical sources? He plays with surrealist automatic writing and the ramblings of an early 20th century mystic.

In a way it is a masterpiece of epistemological (non-)fiction. Since there is no text, we have to presume it is real, though we can only know anything about it by secondary references, the notes. We have a sense of the text, but only a sense.

All of this explanation, however, obscures the cleverness of the book. The author tells us that each of the notes, which are organized into chapters and numbered by entry, are independent, that they are not formal footnotes and perhaps are even on the incorrect order. But his reliability is suspect (is there such thing as an unreliable nonfiction narrator? Like Sebald?).

We experience them as footnotes, likely because he liberally deploys the notation of annotation - ibid., cf., etc. , and Cornell takes full advantage. Some of the notes could stand alone as essays or historical vignettes, others as short as “43. 4 October 1926.”

The best of them are genuinely, if subtly, funny. 99 pages into the book, after developing themes of maps, mystical, labyrinths, and peripatetic observers, a note states, “Utterly superfluously the author conducts a systematic survey of the theme in Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Robbie-Grillet, et al.” He is thumbing his nose with his tongue firmly in cheek - if you didn’t pick up the references, he is saying, he is not going to waste time explaining it.

That is the genius of the book. He is going to explain some things, and he expects you to know some things. Either you are going to play along or not. He doesn’t care. Cornell is going to explore the texture and fabric of knowing, the responsibility that the conscious has the unconscious, and whether it is better to be Chateaubriand, the one who knows and seeks reinforcement from the world, or Nerval, who wanders in a spiral, a flaneur, and is often disappointed when reality doesn’t match his imaginings.

This is an immensely clever book. It was originally written in the 1980s, and this translated volume has been around for two weeks now. It is fresh because it is so profoundly original, but it is firmly a 20th century book, more comfortable in the world where postmodernism was still productive. It demands a lot of the reader intellectually, but more importantly it demands that they have a sense of fun.

Note: the pub date on Goodreads is incorrect. The Fitzcarraldo paperback edition was released late November 2024.