Na pastwę płomieni

by William Styron, Bronisław Zieliński (translator)

"Na pastwę płomieni" to pozornie powieść o zbrodni, sensacyjna historia podwójnego morderstwa. Prawdziwy dramat rozgrywa się jednak w umysłach bohaterów, ważniejsze od zdarzeń są motywy działania.
Autor z żarliwą pasją obnaża obsesje i kompleksy Amerykanina lat pięćdziesiątych.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction, Italy, American

508 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 1960

About the author

William Styron (1925–2006), born in Newport News, Virginia, was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. Styron published his first book, Lie Down in Darkness, at age twenty-six and went on to write such influential works as the controversial and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the international bestseller Sophie’s Choice.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Styron was obviously influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald… And although Set This House on Fire tells about the very grim events it is heavy with dark sarcasm. 
The narrator, who has been working for some time in Rome, is a young lawyer… 

I am a realist, and I wish to tell you on good authority that the law – even in my drab province, where only torts, wills, and contracts are at stake – demands as much simple deviousness, as much shouldering-aside of good friends, as any other business. No, I am not up to it. I am stuck, so to speak, with my destiny and I am making the pleasant best of it. While maybe not as satisfying as the role of the composer I once had an idea I might try to play, it is more than several times as lucrative; besides, in America no one listens to composers, while the law, in a way that is at once subtle and majestic and fascinating, still works its own music upon the minds of men. Or at least I hope to think so.

He is invited by the pal from their schooldays to visit him at the villa in the south of Italy… His friend is a rich man… He is an idler and a shameless consumer of all pleasures… He is an incorrigible lecher… And right from his childhood he is a pathological liar…

At any rate, Mason at sixteen was more worldly – or gave the impression of being so – than many young men who look wan and deflated at thirty. He dressed in sleek trim suits tailored in New York, smoked English cigarettes, and though he had never left America his voice was the exhausted querulous vibrato of a man who had savored a score of exotic coasts. Already he had outstripped his own adolescence and was lean and handsome, with a supremely becoming suggestion of whiskers and a horrible turn of mind that could cause him to whisper, as he did to me one morning in chapel: “I try to pray but all I can think about is getting laid.”

The lawyer arrives at the villa on the eve of the dire occurrences and he finds himself in the middle of the vulgarity fair among all sorts of minor celebrities… There he gets acquainted with a head of the poor dysfunctional family who is also a talentless artist and a psychotic drunk… Later the painter recounts the story of his life…   

Now, ever since – well, ever since I’ve straightened out, or whatever you want to call it – I’ve tried to figure out what was happening to me at the time, inside of my body, that is. I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about it, and the only conclusion that I’ve been able to come to is that these – well, these visions I had were not psychic, that is, they weren’t mystical or supernatural or anything except the simple fact that I was a soggy lush-head in whose scrambled brain all sorts of hallucinations could happen – must happen, in fact.

The lawyer, the liar and the lush form a perfect hate triangle…
If one has some pernicious streak in one’s character and lets it dominate oneself then one is destined to be ruined.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

A heinous case of abuse. And by that, I mean an author abusing his readers. Sure, the novel is about rape and murder, but at any point in the book, from the first chapter to the last, you will feel more violated than any of the characters, whether it's due to grown men referring to other grown men as "dollbaby," scenes of alcoholic drunkenness that go on for dozens and dozens of pages, female characters treated as either pieces of meat or helpless elfin fairies, the author's (and characters') logorrhea, and the desperate ennui born of you just not caring what happened in the past or what happens in the present to any of these people.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

So the TV's on, tuned to an early-morning movie I'm not watching. I'm trying to figure out what to read next, six books laid out on the coffee table before me. I eliminate William Styron's Set This House on Fire, figuring I'd wait to re-read that excellent novel next year. I put it back on the bookshelf. The movie catches my eye. It's Naked in New York, which I'd never seen or even heard of. Eric Stoltz points out to Mary-Louise Parker that the man across the room at the party is William Styron. In one of the movie's quirks, Styron's accomplishments, including a list of his books, flashes on the screen. I'd just put the novel on the bookshelf, and there it is on the TV screen, and there is the man himself. Holy crap. Must be a sign, I think. Styron it is.

Nudge from the gods aside, I didn't need much encouraging to dive back into Set This House on Fire, through which I'd popped my Styron cherry about 2000 or so. It's the last of Styron's four full-length novels people think of. Not the jaw-dropping debut with the 51-page paragraph (Lie Down in Darkness), not the controversial Pulitzer Prize winner (The Confessions of Nat Turner), nor the masterpiece that spawned the OK movie (Sophie's Choice). But Styron's writing makes me weak in the knees, and there's plenty of his detailed, evocative, gorgeous prose in this tale of three men and a tragic rendezvous with destiny in Sambuco, Italy. There's a lot of Faulkner influence in Styron. Sentences to spin your head and that you can gorge upon; long scenes with digressions and recollections and speeches upon speeches.

A book that opens with Virginian Peter Leverett hitting a pedestrian with his car on the way to visit a charismatic boyhood friend in Sambuco takes a dark, drunken detour into death, madness and, just maybe, redemption. Leverett narrates, but, as in Moby Dick, the apparent protagonist virtually disappears for long stretches. Leverett, through time shifts and conversations with Cass Kinsolving, the man who lives below Mason Flagg, the dynamic but ultimately cruel heel who will be found dead at the bottom of a cliff after raping a beautiful peasant, takes us on a heady reconstruction of a tragedy. Leverett recounts his school days with Flagg while meeting Kinsolving in North Carolina months after the Sambuco nightmare. And he digs deep into Kinsolving's dark days before and during his time living in the same building with Flagg. Self-destructive, awash in drink, Kinsolving was an easy target for a handsome millionaire like Flagg, "with the hungry look of a man who knew he could own you if you'd only let him." As a movie crew and other partiers buzz around him, Flagg feeds on Kinsolving's humiliation until things finally take a deadly turn.

One feels gluttonous reading Styron's words, particularly in this novel's first half. The self-examination and scenes upon scenes of drunken debasement won't be everyone's cup of wine, but if you're a words-first person, dig in. I feel guilty giving Set This House on Fire only four stars (4.5 would be perfect), but since Styron did better at least once (probably twice), and because the second half isn't quite as great and, ultimately, the book is not for everyone, four it is, I guess. (*Sigh*) But I do love the crap out of Styron.

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce atmosferã luxuriantã, ce aer strãlucitor care m-a izbit drept între ochi şi m-a fãcut sã înaintez prudent-orbeşte în casa domnului Styron! Ce simplu pare sã înţeleg acum cã ne salveazã doar iubirea dintre noi, cã nu trãim unii pentru alții ci unii printre alții! Ce uşor e sã realizez cã în mine/în fiecare zace un amestec de iubire cu urã şi cã trebuie sã pãtrund în mine însãmi zi de zi, clipã de clipã, ca un electrician speriat şi sã repar acest circuit, sã mã agãţ de el ca de ultima scãpare. "Omul trebuie sã se poarte frumos cu demonii sãi" spune Mason, tânãrul reprezentativ al Americii şi eroul spumos al triunghiului camaradesc, deşi el pare cã face exact contrariul. Țipã, se revoltã, iubeşte, înşealã, violeazã, e generos şi bun, e un ticãlos nenorocit cu valenţe de superman când împrejurãrile îi sunt favorabile. Mason = "Dați foc acestei case" = eliberați-vã din existența aceasta egalã cu o detenție confortabilã, iesiți din singurãtatea forțatã şi trãiţi simplu, în farmec şi în delicatețe.
Doar 4 stele pentru intensitatea din moalele capului si pentru bãtãile de inimã atât de rapide încât simteam uneori cã e prea mult.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was young I felt this was Styron's richest, most entertaining novel, and I still enjoy it. But my perceptions have changed a lot.

I read this book when I was an undergraduate years ago. I gobbled up the lush Italian setting, the boozing and the brawls, the colorful supporting cast of millionaires and movie stars and barefoot Italian beauties. The central conflict was a classic man to man battle like MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. The dashing charm of the corrupt boyish American millionaire, Mason Flagg, matched against the primitive male courage of Cass Kinsolving, the tough Southern Marine turned painter.

This was great stuff for me as a young thing. Having said that, however, when I reread the book recently I was shocked at how my impressions had changed. Looking back now, I don't see Cass as a very heroic character at all. His self-pity and sentimentality are much more apparent to me now that I've lived more than 50 years. I've supported myself the whole way, unlike Cass, who drinks and sponges to stay alive. And Mason, who was supposed to be fiendishly evil, in a profoundly disturbing way, now seems to me like nothing more than a one-dimensional villain of the Snidely Whiplash variety. He's yet another cowardly Yankee, and Cass finds "redemption" not by searching his own soul but by passing judgment on someone else.

Conveniently, Mason is a coward, and conveniently, Cass is honor bound to kill a man he already hates for all the wrong reasons. Styron is clearly working off an ancient grudge when the cowardly Yankee turns and runs the minute the southern boy picks up a rock and gives the rebel yell. But in real life, Yankees don't always turn and run(see Pickett's Charge). More than that, a Southerner who is really looking for redemption has got to go beyond the old, soothing stereotypes of sniveling Yankee cowards and fearless southern chivalry. Styron blows his horn all through the novel about wanting to create great tragedy, to shatter materialism, offer redemption, and the like, but in the end he settles for cheap shots at safe targets, creating trite melodrama rather than seeking to ask tough questions.

For my money, this is Styron's best written novel, even if SOPHIE'S CHOICE and NAT TURNER were more controversial. It's just a shame that the booze got to him in the end.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of my Big Fat Reading Project and also because ever since I read Sophie's Choice so many years ago and had my mind completely rearranged, I vowed to read all of Styron's novels. In a way, it's a good thing he didn't write too many because each one is such a heavy dose of human anguish and Faulkner-like rambling complete with long philosophical passages run through some character's mouth. Reading too much Styron in a row could induce suicidal thoughts at least, maybe worse.

In fact, Set This House on Fire does include a possible suicide and an artist trying to drink himself to death. After reading The Bone People just two weeks earlier, another novel full of fall-down-drunk scenes was almost too much.

I am having trouble here writing a coherent review. Possibly a certain incoherence in the novel was contagious. So I'll give a little plot summary and then mention some observations.

Peter Leverett had been doing the ex-patriot thing in Paris (it is the late 1950s and the Marshall Plan created plenty of jobs for Americans in Europe in those days.) On his way back to the States he stops in Sambuco, a small Italian coastal town, to see an old friend from boarding school named Mason Flagg. Within two days, Peter has hit a pedestrian who ends up in a coma; Mason Flagg is dead; Cass Kinsolving, the drinker, is involved up to his inebriated eyeballs in the death of Flagg; and Peter finds himself embroiled as only an innocent bystander can be.

Where Styron fell down is in the structure. Peter Leverett, at the beginning of the book, has invited himself to visit Kinsolving some years after the Sambuco incident, making the entire novel a back story. The intimations of violence and madness hinted at in the first few pages are not fully revealed until almost the end of 500 pages, requiring a large amount of patience in the reader as well as the attention span so missing in our current society.

By the time this somewhat lame attempt at a murder mystery is fully solved (and mind you, Kinsolving, who knows what really happened, was drunk and blacking out during most of the incidents) I hardly cared anymore who had done what. Except that I kept reading to find out.

You see, I just cannot write succinctly about what became a tangled, endless, reflective story involving the examination of so many heavy themes: evil, domination, art, redemption, love, and violence.

Putting Set This House on Fire into the context of 1960 novels, there are certain parallel topics. Irwin Shaw's Two Weeks in Another Town featured an American in Italy mixed up with the movie business. There was a whole side story in Styron's book involving movie business folks.

Another recurring theme that year was young men trying to make sense of the late 1950s drive for affluence, the power of business versus the relevance of art. Two examples are Ourselves to Know by John O'Hara and Rabbit Run by John Updike. As I come to the end of my 1960 reading list, it turns out to have been quite the pivotal year in literature. Styron was clearly immersed in the thinking of the times as he wrote his novel.

One last observation: Peter Leverett serves almost completely as a sounding board and observer. Stingo served that function in Sophie's Choice as did Jack Culver in The Long March.

Despite all these quibbles, not once did I consider abandoning the book. I was impelled by wanting to know what happened in Sambuco even while I felt impatient to find out. Styron made me care whether or not Kinsolving got the redemption he sought. This is in the end a good dark Southern saga, though it probably appeals only to a certain kind of reader, of which I am one.

[Archibald Tatum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eszembe jutott Füst Milán naplójának egy része, Osvát mondja egy regényéről (Szakadék), hogy ezért és ezért „nem hiszi el”. Meg aztán mond róla ott Kassák meg Illyés meg mások is ezt-azt. Ezek egy része illik erre a regényre, mások meg nem, de abban biztos vagyok, hogy ezt az írást darabokra szedték volna.

A Sophie választ előtt jó tíz évvel írta. Ha úgy esik, ezt olvasom előbb, nem veszem kézbe a Sophie-t – ha mégis, lehet, leteszem, mert – érzésem szerint – ami abban „nem jó”, ami abban zavart, az töményen van meg ebben.

Mégis, ez egy vasokos kötet, 37 ív, és én elolvastam. Pedig könnyen teszek félre könyveket. Tetszik, ahogy Styron ír, és tetszik Bartos fordítása.

És mégis-mégis. Először is, van egy mesélőm, aki egy darabig a központi alak, annyira az, hogy azt hittem, ő a központi alak. De aztán elkezd valaki mesélni egy másik alakról, annyit mesél róla ő is és a mesélő, hogy azt hittem, az a központi alak. Aztán meg már minden a mesélőnek mesélőről szól, úgyhogy talán mégis ő a központi alak – hát, itt mintha szétfolyt volna valami. Ráadásul egyes jelenetekről nem tudtam, ki is meséli, az első számú mesélő nem mesélhette, mert nem tudhatott róla ilyen részletességgel, legfeljebb „irodalmi igényű rekonstrukciót” végezhetett volna, de hát nem jelzi, hogy azt végzett, akkor meg ez valami posztmodern humor vagy egy mindentudó narrátor megjelenése – de ezeket sem jelzi Styron. Aztán meg: a szereplők mániákusan önanalizálnak, amivel magában semmi baj – csakhogy nekem már ez olyan mennyiség, hogy nem egyszerűen szétviszi a történetet, hanem leválik arról, felbillen a mérleg, mintha a történések egy-egy analízishez lennének rendelve. Ebben különösen zavaró egy sokadik alak belépése, aki szintén, mintegy bónuszként elemzi nekünk az életét – és ez azt a gyanút ébreszti bennem, hogy Styron számára a vaskos hatáskeltés volt a lényeges, valami robosztus dramaturgiai, történetbeli vagy pszichológia csattanóhoz jutni. Ez pedig ebben a töménységben: giccs.
(Azt hiszem, Styron egy igazi nagyregényt akart írni. Belegondolva: ha három részre bontja, három központi alakkal trilógiát csinál – szerintem jobban járt volna. Szerintem; sacc.)

De, mondom, elolvastam, és élveztem is mindezek ellenére, és aki ártatlanul fejest ugrik a könyvbe, az, mindvégig megőrizve ártatlanságát, élvezni fogja. A Molyon 3,5 csillagra tenném.

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, so in fairness I did quite like this book. However, I did not like its length or repetitiveness and so it is docked a star. Styron essentially spends the first half of the book narrating from Peter's POV and then the second half narrating from Cass's POV. He does a good job of revealing by the end of Peter's section the true nature of the crime and then Cass fills in the details and back story. In theory this would be okay, but the book is 567 pages and each section could have been its own stand-alone book. There is lots of overlap and repetition(obviously since he tells the same story twice), but also Cass's section was unnecessarily long due to several highly detailed nightmares (which are, essentially, the same recurring dream).

The psychology is interesting and Styron follows a bunch of great themes: money and power and sex and whether happiness lies the the acquisition of one or the other (or all three) as well as the nature of guilt and suffering and the struggle with addiction.

My favorite quotes are below:
"I suspected that there was a lust for a kind of ownership in these big gestures of Mason's, I also realized with some shame that my willingness to be owned was stronger than I ever wanted to admit."
"it was Sade's revolutionary concept, his genius, to see man not as what he is supposed to be--an inhumanly noble creature whose nobility is a pseudo-nobility simply because he is hemmed in and made warped and sick in an impossible attempt to free himself of his animal nature--but as he is, and forever will be: a thinking biological complex which, whether rightly or wrongly, exists in a world of frustrating sexual fantasy, the bottling up of which is the direct cause of at least half of th world's anguish and misery."
"You know, if you could turn into tiny bits of--of feathers, ever word said by all men, in just one year, to all women when the men were thinking of something else; when they were trying to be smooth and polite but when their minds were fixed on that single all-compelling goal, you'd have enough hypocrisy to plug up the entire known university with feathers."
"There's no misery more acute on earth than the plain ordinary horniness of a boy of seventeen"
"Art is a silly accident, really"
"the wide-eyed look part incomprehension, part fear, or more exactly that emotion which is perhaps far less fear than the ordinary mistrust engendered by how many overheard hours of their elders' bitter and wrathful and despairing complaints of injustices done and afflictions borne only young Negro children know, and which, reflect imperfectly in small black faces, white men mistake for reverence, or at least respect."
"You live with it even when you've put it out of your mind--or think you have--and maybe there's some penance or justice in that"
"I cannot say it is not sex yet if it were sex pure and simple I would have took her long ago. No there is this other thing. Maybe you could call it love."
"a man he could own completely, and who lay back and slopped up his food and his drink, and who was so close to total corruption himself that he gloried in being owned. But he sensed, tood, that his victim had changed now, had found something---some focus, some strength, some reality---and thsi was a dangerous situation for a man who wished to keep a firm grip on his property."
"he has been rocked to his very foundations. And he begins to believe in the lie he must tell himself in order to preserve his sanity or maybe even his life. He convinces himself that he is in the right, and that whoever it was that he did in had it coming to him"
"I wept out of my own understanding. And that understanding was that this existence itself is an imprisonment."

[Francesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 romanzi 4 pulitzer

il romanzo meno letto di styron qualcuno mi spieghi il motivo

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was exhausting. It took me months to read it. I struggled to gain momentum or find a rhythm as a reader. I really didn't have the itch to make time to read it, until the last quarter of the book, . It was the anti-page-turner, so to speak. But something in me doesn't sit well with starting books and leaving them unfinished. Many times I considered moving on, putting it down, but I kept with it and I'm glad I did. I'm not one to skim much either, but with this monster, I found myself skimming through pages for plot points, events, and dialog - particularly as I moved past the half way point. It's not that the writing is bad, in fact, quite the opposite, it's really good. It's more that there is so little going on in this book. Yes, there were several scenes that were gut wrenching and highly captivating. Many descriptions of events left me satisfied and wanting more, but they were too far and few between the ramblings that should have been edited out.

It was a decent mystery, with a foreign and historical backdrop, and I did feel the characters towards the end. Slowly, I churned through it wanting the last page to finally arrive, and find out how it would shake out. It's a fairly depressing read, deep and dark, which I don't mind much. The main character, Cass Kinsolving, is an alcoholic and it was tough reading through his life of repeated debauchery and self destruction. I don't mind the theme of alcoholism, but in this book, due to length of read, slowness of plot, and small character set, it just seemed to always be there. It became a burden to the reader, rather than an important character attribute woven into the plot. And in the end, not much redemption follows, just a stark climax of human corruption and brokenness- pretty much everyone loses in this one.

I won't be reading this beast again, and I wouldn't recommend this to most. I'm glad it's over. However, I will read another Styron, odd as that may sound, and hope his other offerings found the editors table. Even with all the criticism, I am always grateful for an introduction to a new author.

\\MikeSpike

[Armin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Da der Inhalt im ausführlichen Klappentext hinreichend erläutert wird, beschränke ich mich dieses mal auf meine Reaktionen. Ich habe eine Schwäche für Bücher aus den Fünfzigern, die im Umfeld eines Drehs spielen und liebe Romane, in denen ein gönnerhafter Jugendfreund als manipulatives Arschloch entlarvt wird. Von daher war Styrons zweiter Roman ein Kandidat für mindestens vier Sterne, aber was der spätere Pulitzerpreisträger aus seinen Reiseeindrücken, Vorurteilen und Schuldkomplexen in diesem Pseudodostojewski zusammengebacken hat, ist schlichtweg ungenießbar. Bis zur Hälfte könnte man vielleicht daran herummäkeln, dass das Erzähltempo nicht so recht zum eher komischen Potenzial von Anreise und Ankunft in Sambucco passt, bzw. die Symbolik ein bisschen arg dick aufgetragen ist.
Etwa wenn der längst als impotenter Wüstling entlarvte Jugendfreund Mason Flagg versucht ein Dienstmädchen zu vergewaltigen, während das Finale Erster Akt von Don Giovanni läuft, wo dem Titelhelden von Mozarts Oper sein Verführungsversuch an der Magd Zerlina misslingt.
Aber im zweiten Teil, der weitgehend aus der Säuferbeichte des Malers Cassius Kinsolvig besteht, wuchert der impressionistisch-existenzialistisch überwürzte erzählerische Hefeteig derart unkontrolliert, dass ich nur einen Stern vergeben kann.
Der inzwischen trockene Künstler, der bei mir stark unter Spaltproduktverdacht seht, tischt Styrons offiziellem alter ego Peter Leverett (eine Art bürgerlicher Pre-Stingo), auf 340 Seiten unwidersprochen und maximaler Ausführlichkeit ein derartiges Garn über die Nacht seines Mordes und die Vorgeschichte auf, dass es einem davon schlecht werden kann, zumal gut 100 Seiten reichlich für den Inhalt ausgereicht hätten. Der Gipfel der Unglaubwürdigkeit dieses Garns ist sicherlich Cass Ankunft in Sambucco, wo sich der ohnehin schon schwer angetrunkene Maler mit seiner leer gefahrenen Vespa an einen Lastwagen anhängt und die Serpentinenstrecke anstandslos einhändig bewältigt haben will. Als wäre das nicht genug, gelingt es Cass auch noch während der Rollerfahrt im Schlepptau ein Weinfass auf der Ladefläche anzuzapfen und sich auf dem Weg nach oben unbemerkt einen Liter einzuverleiben. HaHa, im Lektorat von Random House müssen sie noch besoffener gewesen sein, um diese Passage und noch so vieles andere mehr einfach durchzuwinken.
In Cass' Beichte sind sämtliche Frauen erbsenköpfige Geschöpfe, an erster Stelle seine maximal gebärfreudige Elfe Poppy, aber auch Masons riesengroßes Busenwunder La Framboise kommt nur als unterleibsgesteuertes Nullum vor und auch der weibliche Star des Films wird von dem Künstler als Hohlfigur schlechthin dargestellt.
In Peter Leveretts erster Hälfte wimmelt ebenfalls von derartig schlicht gestrickten Wesen, lediglich Masons permanent betrogene Ehefrau ist, soweit es sich nicht um die Vernarrtheit in einen gewalttätigen Blender handelt, eine vielseitig gebildete, angenehme Zeitgenossin, um die der arme Peter seinen Jugendfreund natürlich nur beneiden kann.
An und für sich habe ich kein Problem damit, wenn in einem Roman überwiegend dumme oder böse Menschen vorkommen, so lange das Personal wenigstens einigermaßen die Handlung am laufen hält. Für eine flott geschriebene Tragikomödie hätten Styrons Zutaten im richtigen Verhältnis vielleicht sogar gereicht, aber dieses Genre war dem Autor absolut wesensfremd. Statt dessen quält er seines Leser mit schier endlosen pseudoexistenzialistischen Monologen bzw. Dialogen von Mann zu Mann über Schuld und Sühne, humanistischen Faschismus, das Ende der Kunst, Pornographie als ultimative Kunstform.
Über letzteres Thema gibt es auch einen Essay aus den Fünfzigern von Norman Mailer in Reklame für mich selber. Dasselbe Buch enthält auch eine ziemlich deftige Vermöbelung der literarischen Zeitgenossen, die leider vor der Fertigstellung des ziemlich lange ausgetragenen zweiten Romans Und legte Feuer an dies Haus veröffentlicht wurde. Wirklich schade, es wäre mir jetzt ein großes Vergnügen die entsprechenden Passagen aus Würdigungen einige beiläufige, gewagte kritische Bemerkungen über Talente unserer Zeit über dieses vollkommen verunglückte Werk noch einmal zu genießen.
Fazit: Auf den Spuren seines Namensvetters Faulkner ist William Styron mit Lie down in darkness/Geborgen im Schoße der Nacht* ein Debüt geglückt, das seinerzeit ganz großen Anklang fand. Der Versuch als Romancier auf eigenen Beinen zu stehen, ging ganz entsetzlich daneben. Und legte Feuer an dies Haus ist eine grottenschlechte Lehrlingsarbeit, die allenfalls ein gefundenes Fressen für Mentalitätsforscher sein dürfte, mit einem derartigen Machwerk dürfte William Styron, beträte er jetzt als Jungautor die Szene, inzwischen nicht nur bei der PC-Hochburg Random House Hausverbot bekommen.

* Diesen Verschnitt aus Faulkner, Joyce und eigenen Vorstellungen nehme ich mir im September vor.

[Caroline Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say - I read this a while ago. William Styron is the bee's knees. He makes me feel drunk.

[Russell Bittner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must confess, this wasn’t the book I was looking for when I wandered out into the stacks at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library with my sights set on William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice . (I’d always enjoyed the movie immensely and wanted, finally, to give the author his due.) Unfortunately, my sights were not to be satisfied: Sophie’s Choice was out; and so, I settled for Styron’s Set This House on Fire, a book I’d never even heard of and consequently knew nothing about.

In spite of the rave reviews and blurbs on both the front and back covers of the book, I shouldn’t have bothered.

There are certainly moments and entire passages that let a reader understand why Styron has the reputation he has. But these are too few and far between.

My honest opinion? Styron could’ve told this story much more effectively as a short—or at least as a novella. It didn’t need (or merit) a novel of over 500 pages in small print. And why his three principal characters, all American, insist on inserting the odd Italian word into their dialogue is entirely beyond me. (Moreover, I suspect—though, lacking reference books at this point, can’t confirm—that Styron’s Italian leaves a lot to be desired. Most of it reads like transcriptions directly from the English.)

Will I still hunt down Sophie’s Choice? No doubt. But I’ll now hunt it down with a skeptical eye—and in the hope that Styron will have enlisted the help of a better editor than he had for Set This House on Fire .

RRB
3/31/13
Brooklyn, NY

[Heidi]

A convoluted mess of a book, which was roundly panned when it came out after the incredible debut of "Lie down in darkness". I remember throwing myself eagerly on this book and giving up, totally puzzled, a third of the way through. The prose was excellent as always, but the characters felt totally flat and un-engaging. Fortunately Styron redeemed himself with Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice.

[Beth Pelletier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of all of Styron's books, I just could not get into this at all. Moving on...

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite Styron, but still pretty darn good.

Styron writes well about guilt and its impact on how we live.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

William Styron has crafted an electrifying and deeply unsettling novel of rape, murder, and suicide -- a work with a Dostoevskian insight into the dreadful persuasiveness of evil.-- The New York Times Book Review
That's the first part of the novel -- absolutely brilliant writing.
But, the novel grinds down to an incredibly boring monologue - absolutely unreadable. Couldn't force myself to finish the book.

[Loryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

he's a master framer. a raging alcoholic, an insatiable genius, a gullible observer, a rainbow of beautiful women--they all appear throughout his works, shades of each in the other.

part of it is set in italy.

i love his writing.

[Tyler Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Styron takes on a decidedly purple hue in this gargantua. An additional 100 pages of philosophizing by a cop named Luigi doesn't help. But, when Styron hits, he hits hard. Macho page count, minor novel.

[Lisa Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Human depravity on display. Styron is a master craftsman at the top of his game here.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will only be the 2nd from Styron for me, the first Sophie's Choice, and I wish I could tell you if I saw the movie before I read the story, or not. I think I saw the movie first and I still can picture/see Meryl Streep (that don't look right?) saying "cocksucker" when she means "seersucker".

This one begins:
Sambuco. Of the drive from Salerno to Sambuco, Nagel's Italy has this to say: "The road is hewn nearly the whole way in the cliffs of the coast. An evervaried panorama unfolds before our eyes, with continual views of an azure sea, imposing cliffs, and deep gorges.

Sound like a flyover...vacation time. Onward and upward.

Update
Complete, finished, Tuesday evening, 855 p.m. e.s.t.

I don't know if all of Styron's stories are like this one and like Sophie's Choice...that story that I read in the early 80s, around the time the movie came out, but both of these stories have moments of...enlightenment, or awakening...moments when all that has been assumed are tossed aside and the truth is known.

This is not an easy read--and this is the sign--there are pages and pages of black...columns from one side to the other of black.

The narration is interesting...wish I could remember how Sophie's Choice was narrated, but the few reviews I read about that one indicate that there are similarities there, as well. The story begins with Peter Leverette narrating the story, telling the reader that if there is a hero to this story, it is Cass Kinsolving.

About the 50%-mark...there is a revelation of sorts. The reader is informed, early on by Peter, that Mason Flagg is dead...of an apparent suicide, and that a girl...we later learn she (later we learn her name) is also dead. The story is complicated by Cass's drunkenness, his forgetting what has happened when he is drunk. All of this story, or most of it, is concerned with a retelling of the past--what happened with Mason Flagg.

So we have those three main characters, Peter Leverette, Mason Flagg, and Cass Kinsolving. Peter and Mason have known each other for years and Peter's narration is concerned with a telling of Mason's history, his character, etc. Then, at that 50%-mark, the narration turns a corner and the story is told to Peter, through Cass. They are on a boat in North Carolina.

Mason and Peter are from Virginia, but much of what happened, happened in Italy, where Cass entered the telling.

There is an Italian policeman, Luigi, who is a central figure.

There are a host of other characters, a mass of movie people, and their role in the story I haven't quite figured out. Surely there aren't simply window-dressing?

From that beginning, that Mason is dead, the reader learns, along with Peter, what happened, how it happened. The result.

There's some somewhat profound thoughts here...Luigi, telling Cass that he sins in his guilt. What an idea, hey? The idea that someone who clings to guilt is committing a sin? Surely. There is the idea that we share in the guilt of others, though that one is not spoken aloud.

Another that I add later here is the question about art, raised in conversation between Mason and others, Mason and Cass...mostly those two...but Mason questions if it is art if one sells it, if one contracts with another for a price, is it art? I'm paraphrasing here, badly, but it is an interesting question....say like if the story as a whole is intended to be one of those win-win situations, barf, microcosm macrocosm blah blah blahs....I'm adding this after the remainder of this had been posted...a second addition, evidence enough that the story is one that can't be nailed down to a few points of the compass.

There is a nice use of dreams, nightmares in this one. Many dreams, many nightmares. They add flavor to the story.

There is one description about a Polaroid camera, Peter's fantasy-dream that the picture he took of his friend (Mason) did not develop to reveal the man, but a monster. I have to wonder if Stephen King read this one and that idea germinated into Four Past Midnight: The Sun Dog....the name Mason Flagg easily conjuring King's bad-man, Randall Flagg.

Some nice quotes in this one...I added a question or two dealing with a few of them in the trivia game. Here's a final one:

But to be truthful, you see, I can only tell you this: that as for being and nothingness, the one I did know was that to choose between them was simply to choose being, not for the sake of being, or even the love of being, much less the desire to be forever--but in the hope of being what I could be for a time. This would be an ecstasy. God knows, it would.

As for the rest, I had come back. And that for a while would do, that would suffice.



Cass, at the end...Cass is the hero, surely, and it is he who is and has been running from a past that is every bit as convoluted and ghost-like as....who was it? Quentin Compson in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury? There is much in his telling that is carried forward, into Italy, from the sunny South, things that happened in his past that made him what he is, packing all that guilt.

Here's another nice quote: "Perhaps one of the reasons we Americans are so exceptionally nervous and driven is that our past is effaced almost before it is made present; in our search for old avatars to contemplate we find only ghosts, whispers, shadows: almost nothing remains for us to feel or see, or to absorb our longing."

I read this one on the Kindle...I dunno if maybe reading it between the covers of a book would improve the flavor, or not? Not an easy read, as I said, but there are moments of truth, images and scenes that call to mind memorable scenes from movies I've seen...and truth be told, now I want to read Styron's other stories...

oops...forgot to say: it has been uncanny, lately,the number of coincidences from one story to the next...between Seed and Face there was that nihilism present in both stories, that line about evil, because it can, almost word-for-word in each instance.....and then in this one again, toward the end, I thought I was going to read some downer-line like that again, but instead was presented with the moment of grace.

But before that, as Michele is dying (Michele is Francesca's old man and Cass had been treating him)...but as he is dying, he grabs his root, Luigi's word for it---I'm not trying to be cute--and it isn't a moment of virility....rather, he shoots blood, pisses blood...a word that Styron did not use....but the coincidence is that in Harry Crews's An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings there is a similar happening...a man lies dying, dead, and his inordinately large member is on display there....a parable for us all. I suspect Styron's use is the same?

There's a brief biographical sketch at the end of this one and in those few titles to his name, there sounds like a wealth of humanity worth reading.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm...sophomore slump? This book is nowhere near as good as Styron's stunning debut novel, Lie Down in Darkness*, but it was interesting in a few ways. First of all, it's about writers and drunkenness and being artistically blocked and expatriate escapism, and if one is into those sorts of things (ahem) then one may find oneself folding down multiple page corners, or, if one is forced to get the book via digital e-library because one is in China and can't find a hard copy, highlighting multiple passages in one's kindle-for-PC, not that one is proud of having had to do it this way. Also, the book is essentially a free Italian lesson, and some of us (ahem) are very into that kind of thing as well. I was even about to recommend the book solely on that basis as a way to learn a bit of Italian with zero language-class effort, but then I got to the in-defense-of-the-orgy scene and was suddenly unsure about recommending the book to anyone, for fear of what they might think I was preaching to them about.

Anyway, the book is full of paragraphs that are clearly Styron revealing his rants/deep dark secrets/recollections/theories, and while I am totally OK with that, I would think he could have made at least a little more effort to actually make said rants/deep dark secrets/recollections/theories function as a novel. As it is, it bears more similarity to, say, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael: it offers loads of great ideas to think about but you have to stop and remind yourself every so often that a man is talking to a gorilla. In the last half of Set This House on Fire, pages and pages and pages go by and you suddenly remember this is supposedly one guy talking to his friend about an experience they shared years earlier, but the other guy hasn't said anything for, like, an hour. I mean, I have really interesting friends, too, but still: a conversation does involve two people.

And yet I am in no way turned off and I know I will read more Styron, even though this was weird and some ways less of a novel and more of a manifesto.

*Lie Down in Darkness was my top pick in my original A-to-Z literary blog project: Styron, letter S, was my favorite out of the 26 new-to-me authors I read in that round, and along with 12 others he advanced to the next round, my A-to-Z top half authors, in which I read one more book from each of the 13 authors whose books I liked best the first time around.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see a lot of people here like this book, but I don't get why. The first half is unpleasant though absorbing. Styron seems to think it is interesting for characters to rant eccentrically about whatever is on their mind, but I would disagree, and I soon started skipping all rants. The story is intriguing, and for a while the book was kind of interesting, as we see the naive narrator come to see the truth of his pretentious friend. Half way through, the book becomes fairly unreadable as it changes focus to a different character. This begins with an entire chapter of the sort of rant that I found so unpleasant, and then proceeds through a tedious accounting of an unpleasant and dull tortured artist type. I tried reading this for a while but it was so annoying that I just skimmed the second half to see how everything was tied up, which it was in a perfunctory fashion.

I suppose this is good for Styron fans. I've never read any of his books before and certainly never will again.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was an ordeal, in both good and bad ways, and it took me a long time to get through. The long drunken night (in the book!) persists in my brain as a nightmare that went on and on and I felt the horror and madness in the reading - horrible people, almost all of them, doing horrible things. But outside of that, the writing is delicate and beautiful (a little girl with "legs like flower stems"), the structure is masterful, and despite the despicability of the characters, including Cass who is to some degree Styron himself, and my wish to be done with them all, it had me literally, really, gasping for air by the end. Just have to get through that long night... and it feels like you're coming down the road from Sambuca towards the shining sea at last.

[Sinan Cetin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set This House on Fire plays on the idea of salvation within the framework of crime and punishment. It uses the means of Gothic romance for developing this salvation story of Cass Kinsolving even though it does not follow Gothic conventions step by step. It borrows from the structure of confessional literature for presenting plot within a plot but not limits itself with the inner dynamics. It imitates Greek tragedy while presenting dramatic characters. All in all, it is, somehow, an experimental gateway for Styron’s later works. Tough nut to crack, but worth it…

[Liz Estrada · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must say this book was very reminiscent of William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury". Both books are very detalied-oriented and it takes a while to get into the rhythm of the writing, but once you do, it flows. A novel about good and evil, redemption and grace and, though you know what happens at the end from the very beginning - a violent rape and murder - , the reader needs to read on to understand how and why. 3.8 stars.

[Chris Gager · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not the cover of the edition I read. The one I had was an old paperback published after WS's preceding work. I picked this up because of the author but was not rewarded. Pretty much a total crap fest once the action gets to the Villa/movie set. Some interesting asides such as the depiction of rural poverty in post-war Italy but awful for the rest of it. Why the high ratings???

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well told story, interesting and engaging. But it isn't a piece of work that cuts to your core like Nat Turner and perhaps Sophie's Choice.

The writer's talent deserved a more ambitious story.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I remember about this? Rolling my eyes, yawning, and looking forward to the end. Oh yeah, and there was a tepid orgy scene too.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great deal of philosophical discussion concerning good, evil, and God's Grace set in post-WWII Italy. Some beautiful prose, just far too much of it.