Inez Baranay
Auteur de Pagan
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Inez Baranay
Rascal Rain: A Year in Papua New Guinea 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Baranay, Inez
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Australia
- Études
- Griffith University (PhD, Creative Writing)
Membres
Critiques
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 15
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 73
- Popularité
- #240,526
- Évaluation
- 3.3
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 21
The destruction of Eduard von Kronen, to give him his fictive identity, was promising material for a novel, a tragedy of sorts with irresistibly comic elements. ‘Pagan’ falls well short of its possibilities. Baranay’s Von Kronen is aloof and aristocratic in bearing. As a conductor he is coldly efficient; his musical compositions marked by ‘impressive eclecticism without finding a distinctive personal voice’. He is attracted by the Pantheism of Eveleen’s paintings and her unrestrained sexuality: she promises him ‘the one thing he would sell his soul for: artistic greatness, the renaissance of his greatest power…together they could create magic that would make them both great, great magicians, as great as the Great Beast’. He could also be of use to Eveleen, bringing back from his annual London tours, ‘things she couldn’t get in Australia.’ Inspired by Eveleen, von Kronen dreams of writing an gothic opera, based on Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’. Their liberation in the ‘Great Rite’ of occult sado-masochism in the latter half of the novel, gruesome in its solemn excesses, could have been consciously played for laughs. But it is all too painfully serious. Eveleen begins the Rite with a whipping: ‘lashes of the lustrating scourge caress and sting his flesh in arcs of tender pain’. A thousand or so words and several salacious routines later ‘planets spin in the firmament’; there are ‘explosions great enough to create new worlds, he roars like an erupting volcano [and] a scorching river of larva (sic) drowns the earth’. Earth, for her part, ‘heaves great sighs and becomes still’. Fate in the shape of a tip-off from London police and Customs officials at Sydney airport intervenes and von Kronen never gets to write his gothic opera.
Interspersed with the Eveleen and von Kronen episodes is a melancholy tale of an inconclusive love affair between Patrick, a cub news reporter, and a talented young violinist Nora, whose dreams of a European career and an escape from Australian mediocrity with von Kronen as her mentor are dashed by his arrest at Sydney airport.
Pagan gives one the impression of preliminary research notes with incomplete episodes for a novel begun but never finished. The chronology is confused. Characters appear and disappear without explanation. There is a persistent problem with pronouns as they switch between the author’s third person narration, protagonists speaking in their own first person voices and occasionally addressing themselves impersonally as ‘You’. The fragmentary character of the narrative is accentuated in the Kindle edition by fractured sentence breaks. The novel, first published in 1990, concludes with an Afterword written for the Kindle publication that fills in some of the remaining puzzles and provides Eveleen’s second name, ‘Haughton’ for the first time.
Two stars for the general interest of its subject matter and for its fitful evocation of the garish, grimy ambience of Kings Cross in the mid 20th century.… (plus d'informations)