Self Condemned - Voyageur Classics

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Self Condemned, originally published in 1954, tells the story of Professor Ren須arding and his wife, Essie, as they find themselves in Momaco, a fictionalized version of Toronto, following Ren駳 resignation as an academic in London, England. Reduced to a position at the second-rate University of Momaco, Ren頡nd Essie suffer through a bleak and oppressive isolation in a dreary and alien city.

The novel, a devastating, disturbing satire of life in wartime Canada, explores the difficulty individuals face as they struggle to adapt to new surroundings while preserving their sense of wholeness, as well as the bond that develops between people during a shared experience of isolation. .

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A Canadian Tragedy, September 24, 2011

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This review is from: Self Condemned (Voyageur Classics) (Kindle Edition)

While I've always been a great admirer of the eccentric painter and author Wyndham Lewis, I find most of his fiction frustratingly unsatisfying. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels... Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin... is absent from them."

That's not the case with Lewis's oddly gripping masterpiece SELF-CONDEMNED. Here, for once, Lewis tells a story that engages your emotions and involves you with the fate of his protagonist. The plot is simple and terrible. Rene Harding, an icily forbidding Oxford Don, decides that history is bunk and, to avoid becoming entangled in the upcoming war with Hitler, immigrates to an utterly dreary Canadian town with his feeble-minded wife Hester. There they suffer extreme poverty and neglect, which Lewis depicts slowly and remorselessly, in...Read more