"Cyril Connolly made the most acidly perceptive comment about Crowley, for example, when he described him as the man who bridged the gap between Oscar Wilde and Adolf Hitler."
Posted by wolf354 on in 15° : in 18° : dies : Anno IVxvii (Nov 07, 2009 - 02:27 PM)
A fiction novel written about the meeting of Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon that ended with a fake suicide letter from Crowley found in "Boca do Inferno".
Based in real facts, Montserrat Rico writes a pasionate novel that rides between the XIX and XX century, the borderline between reality and the mysterious magical world seems to dilute.
Translated at least to Portuguese (besides the original Spanish)
When I knew about this book, I ran to the bookshop to buy it. There are not many Spanish books about Crowley, and even the translations of his work tend to be quite cheaply made... but expensively priced!
Back to the book: it is not a bad novel. However, it does not add anything new to the Crowley afficionado, it is just another exploitation of his fame as being some kind of human devil; or rather a devil incarnate in a man. It uses the historical fact of Crowley's visit to Portugal, his visit to Pessoa and his fake suicide, to say that the real purpose of his journey was to kill (using some magickal methods) someone who had damaged his interests in his previous incarnation. Well written but certainly not very original!
You will find nothing of Crowley, besides his suposed wickedness and a few of his supposed tricks (invisibility, for instance). Nor you will find a lot about Pessoa. A pity because just the meeting between those geniuses could make in itself a fantastic story, avoiding all those boring clichés and going to the real substance. But this is not the case. Like those thousands of novels about the Illuminati, the Knights Templar or the Priory of Sion, it just takes advantage of a well known trademark (Crowley in this case) to sell books without really wanting to go any deeper.
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: Anno IVxvii (Nov 07, 2009 - 02:27 PM)
