James Branch Cabell
7 Bücher
- Ten tales of medieval queens, each built around some quietly heroic renunciation, told in prose so ornate and mannered it's practically embroidery. If you like Cabell's sly irony hiding under all the gallantry (Katharine of France haggling with her heart, for one), it's lovely; if you want plain speech, skip it.
- Cabell takes courtly love dead seriously and winks at it in the same breath, so you get Perion spending decades trying to ransom Melicent while she wastes her youth in Demetrios's household. The ornate, mock-medieval prose is an acquired taste, but the irony underneath is sharp.
- You follow Manuel, a practical fellow who keeps meeting gods, monsters, and beautiful impossibilities while trying to make a life that feels like his own. Cabell’s mock-medieval prose is sly, ornate, and occasionally prickly, so it rewards a taste for fables that keep winking at you.
- You get a sly, deliberately overdecorated fantasy in which Jurgen, a middle-aged poet and pawnbroker, wanders through mythic kingdoms, arguing with gods, wives, and his own appetites. The jokes are dry and the philosophy can feel maddeningly evasive, but if you enjoy ornate language and medieval romance turned inside out, it rewards rereading.
- Early Cabell, before the fantasy, and drier than you'd expect: Robert Townsend narrates his own love affairs so charmingly you almost miss what a cad he is, collecting women as material for his novels. If you enjoy an unreliable egotist skewering himself, this works nicely.
- Kennaston is a middle-aged novelist who dreams his way into his own romances chasing a woman he can never quite touch, and Cabell keeps winking at you the whole time (the punchline of the sigil is worth it alone). Slow, ornate, ironic; lovely if that's your mood.