LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
April 14, 2011
James Wood review:
Casey is an acute historian, but less impressive as a theorist or philosopher of the concept of the afterlife. Curiously for a teacher of English, he neglects most of the literary dimension after Milton, despite the enterprising speculations of many novelists and poets. To choose just from those writers with a pronounced theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the dead watching us as ‘a democracy of ghosts’, sitting in continuous session. Bellow’s work, especially Humboldt’s Gift, was strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, which teaches, among other things, that we can communicate with the dead, who are all around us in the ‘spirit world’.
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Although this is the only reference to VN, Wood's entire review is well worth reading. I would also recommend John Gray's recent book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. It contains no mention of VN but discusses at length F. W. H. Myers and his circle of spiritualists, as well as a host of Russians, both pre- and postrevolutionary, who were also out to prove the existence of--and in some cases to
manufacture--an afterlife. An essay by Gray appeared in The Guardian in early January: John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/08/john-gray-immortality
This was followed by Banville's review of Gray's book:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/29/healthmindandbody-history?INTCMP=SRCH
and also Richard Holloway's review in The Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/30/immortalization-commission-john-gray-review?INTCMP=SRCH
Jim Twiggs