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alfazed 's review for:
Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
What an extraordinarily wonderful book. I read it first about 15 years ago, and loved it then, but I loved it even more this time. Yourcenar spent more than 20 years working on this book, and at one point she said she needed to have lived longer before she could write it properly, and I feel the same is true of my experience reading it.
The book itself is completely engrossing and exquisitely written (credit must go as much to the translator, Grace Frick, as to Yourcenar herself). Hadrian's external and interior worlds are so finely drawn, that, as other reviewers have noted, I frequently forgot I wasn't reading an actual memoir written 2000 years ago. At the end of the book, after an incredibly detailed bibliographic note, are Yourcenar's random musings on the process of researching and writing it, and these notes are as enjoyable and affecting as the book itself.
I was struck on this reading how Yourcenar depicts Hadrian as very aware of himself as a fully modern man, and of his times as fully modern times (but without any anachronism), and he speaks often of the vast stretch of history before his time. It seems to me that historical novels don't often convey this kind of sensibility, and it was part of what made so many centuries completely disappear.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
The book itself is completely engrossing and exquisitely written (credit must go as much to the translator, Grace Frick, as to Yourcenar herself). Hadrian's external and interior worlds are so finely drawn, that, as other reviewers have noted, I frequently forgot I wasn't reading an actual memoir written 2000 years ago. At the end of the book, after an incredibly detailed bibliographic note, are Yourcenar's random musings on the process of researching and writing it, and these notes are as enjoyable and affecting as the book itself.
I was struck on this reading how Yourcenar depicts Hadrian as very aware of himself as a fully modern man, and of his times as fully modern times (but without any anachronism), and he speaks often of the vast stretch of history before his time. It seems to me that historical novels don't often convey this kind of sensibility, and it was part of what made so many centuries completely disappear.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.