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by Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar is known in France as a brilliant essayist as well as a great novelist, but until now her essays have not been widely available to English-language readers. "The Dark Brain of Piranesi" gathers seven of her most important critical essays, essential to the understanding of the searching and remarkably informed spirit of this protean writer. The book begins with an essay on the "Historia Augusta", that chronicles the lives of the Caesars. Next, an essay whose wider subject is human intolerance cruelty in the sixteenth century but whose starting point is the violent Reformation epic "Les Tragiques". Yourcenar's evocation of the unstable life of the the château of Chenonceaux reminds us that we are all playthings of the conjugated powers of politics and money. A masterly account of Piranesi's great series of engraving analyzes the formal motivations of this extraordinary (and imaginary) architecture period. Finally, three great names of modern literature: Selma Lagerlöf, Nobel Prize epic storyteller; the enigmatic Greek poet of Alexandria, Constantin Cavafy; Thomas Mann, and the complex relations of the author to the old and learned traditions of the hermeticists and alchemists. -- From publisher's description.