Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Mervyn Peake

 https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/peake Very good

https://unknowing.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/a-little-place-called-gormenghast/
from CS Lewis to Mervyn

Thank you for adding to a class of literature in which the attempts are few and the successes very few indeed. . . . to me those who merely comment on experience seem far less valuable than those who add to it, who make me experience what I never experienced before. I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast. It has the hallmark of a true myth: i.e. you have seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. What one may call ‘the gormenghastly’ has given me a new Universal; particulars to put under it are never in short supply. That is why fools have (I bet) tried to ‘interpret’ it as allegory. They see one of the innumerable ‘meanings’ which are always coming out of it (because it is alive and fertile) and conclude that you began—and ended—by putting in that and no more. If they tell you it’s deuced leisurely and the story takes a long time to develop don’t listen to them. It ought to be, and must be, slow. That endless, tragic, farcical, unnecessary, ineluctable sorrow can’t be abridged. I love the length. I like things long—drinks, love passages, walks, conversations, silences, and above all, books. Give me a good square meal like The Faery Queen or The Lord of the RingsThe Odyssey is a mere lunch after all.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/09/08/wonderland/
The Prunesquallors

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/04/alice-wonderland-illustrations-mervyn-peake
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/15/mervyn-peake-visual-archive-acquired-by-british-library
Steerpike


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