- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: NYRB Classics (Feb 22 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1590173473
- ISBN-13: 978-1590173473
- Product Dimensions: 13.4 x 1.1 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #195,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“Since the time of Rousseau we have seen the growth of the genre of the confessional novel, of which A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example. Termer [the narrator], claiming to to be unable to keep his dreadful secret, records his confession and leaves it behind as a monument to himself, thereby turning a worthless life into art.” -J. M. Coetzee
Product Description
Termeer, the narrator of A Posthumous Confession, is a twisted man and a troubled one. The emotionally stunted son of a cold, forbidding, and hypocritical father, Termeer has only succeeded in living up to his parents’ low expectations when, to his own and others’ astonishment, he finds himself wooing a beautiful and gifted woman—a woman whose love he wins. But instead of finding happiness in marriage, Termeer discovers it to be a new source of self-hatred, hatred that he turns upon his wife and child. And when he becomes caught up in an affair with a woman as demanding as his own self-loathing, he is driven to murder.
What is the self, and how does it evade or come to terms with itself? What can make it go permanently, lethally wrong? Marcellus Emants’s grueling and gripping novel—a late-nineteenth-century tour de force of psychological penetration—is a lacerating exposition of the logic of identity that looks backward to Dostoyevsky, forward to Simenon, and beyond to the confessional literature, whether fiction or fact, of our own day.
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Veritable Tour de Force, Mar 26 2011
By J. Conrad Guest "J. Conrad Guest" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: A Posthumous Confession (Paperback)
Termeer is like the train wreck we can see about to happen, there's no avoiding it, we want to look away but can't.Termeer is the quintessential narcissist. A victim of a childhood in which his father wasn't nurturing and the role models his parents presented as husband and wife, he matures into an adult who believes the world owes him; his happiness is not a choice (his), but instead what the world presents him. He is, he laments, what he is, and the world must accept him, glass seven-eighths empty man that he is, as he is. It is a role he chooses and in which he takes much pride, always playing the victim. Yet the happiness given him, in the guise of a woman who initially loves his aloneness, he manages to sabotage.
His young wife, Anna, soon gives birth to a daughter only to die at eighteen months. Termeer, who felt no love toward the child (paying forward the love his father withheld from him), is relieved at this turn of events and is impotent to comfort his grief-stricken wife. Soon after, she moves his bed into another room and they live apart, speaking less and less to one another, with Termeer withdrawing more and more into himself.
Eventually Termeer takes a mistress whom, he is convinced, will provide him the love he so craves. Knowing she is taking him only for his money, he plunges headlong into wooing her at all costs. Eventually he confronts Anna with divorce, suggesting their marriage is based on lies and falsehoods; but his intent is that she take the initiative so that he, again, ends up the victim. But Anna resists, intent on performing her "duty." All of which sets the stage for the tour de force denouement.
Translated and with an introduction by J. M. Coetzee, the narrative is written in first person narrative, which lends immediacy to the story.
A mesmerizing tale brilliantly told and highly recommended.
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