Review Theory of Irony: How Jesus Led to Moon Golf March 18, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval, Modern , trackback
A subtitle like How Jesus Led to Moon Golf promises a swish historical read. Beach immediately, in fact, thought of some of Graeme Donald’s history writing and books like Mussolini’s Barber and other stories of the unknown players who made history happen. This proved naïve. Mussolini’s Barber offers some cute episodes from recent history and Graeme enjoys watching the water go down the plug hole. Erik von Norden, the author of Theory, is rather more ambitious. His intention is to give us the whole shamooz, from Christ to the moonlanding in two hundred and fifty pages. So what is this, you might worriedly, ask: narrative history, just one damn thing after another? Well, yes, but rest assured, dear bizarrist, it is one very strange thing after another.
Von Norden, who has a surname (invented of course) that sounds like he was a bit player in the German general staff between the wars, has decided to put as many curious and weird things as possible on the skewer of his wit. He then recounts them at breakneck speed (there is delirium and marsh fever in these pages), in approximate chronological order with an occasional ‘I digress’ and some autobiographical interludes about coffee and photocopiers.
Beach is aware that were he to read this in a review of a book he was considering buying he might very well at this point, gently close the browser. But actually and against all the odds the combination works: in fact, the pages on photocopiers are perhaps the funniest in the whole book. This is not another 1066 and All That. It is 1066 and All That written by Thomas Pynchon. Erik has good style and has not only an emotional connection to the past, he also has a world-weary enjoyment of human foolishness in the face of an unforgiving cosmos.
Beach read the book quickly: this was a mistake. How Jesus is really a book that you need to (i) decide you like and then (ii) read in gobbits in enjoyable moments (with popcorn, in the bath, when no one is in the house, lying face down among carnations). The ritual criticism? Well the lack of a printed version of the book is a bit of a downer. Beach got his hands on a copy with great difficulty and had finally to have an argument with the local postal mistress: he is now a person non grata in the village postoffice. (She called me ‘polemical’!!!!) A relief and an inconvenience.
Other eccentric books: Drbeachcombing AT Yahoo DOT com
