A great work of literature and a profound reflection on state terror from a man who spent forty years fighting one.Tiberius Caesar--a free standing work in its own right--completes Bocheński's
Notorious Roman Trilogy--probably the most important literary work to come out of Eastern Europe since World War II.
After the picaresque volume 1,
Divine Julius (how to overthrow a republic in four easy steps) and the poetic volume 2,
Naso the Poet (how, under tyranny, poetry can get you into trouble), comes volume three,
Tiberius Caesar: a horrifying tale of the second emperor of Rome: the man who normalized political terror. A moral, intellectual, emotional zero whose only skill in life was to grab power and hang onto it. At any cost.
Tiberius Caesar is, on the one hand, a vertigo-inducing look into the great echo chamber of
fear, an insight into the mediocrity who ruled, terrorized, and murdered all his betters because he could and because
they made him do it.
But the book is also a brilliant work of literature, with deeply moving passages of beautiful prose, many of which would stand as independent essays:
- how the police state hires its executioners
- what it is like to read--perhaps better said: to work through--Tacitus in his original Latin
- an evocative (and hilarious) description of a summer night on Capri in 1970
- an imaginary visit to a Roman bordello in AD 16
- a moving and stylistically astonishing scene of Cocceius Nerva reading Cicero's On the Laws
If you enjoy the rich prose of writers like Kazuo Ishiguro or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez, the style of this book will astonish and delight you with its many pleasures.
And if, in your pleasant and secure life in a Western, constitutional democracy you have grown complacent and bored with all the freedoms you take for granted--you should read this as a warning. Because you should be afraid. You should be very afraid. If you lose your democracy, this is what you will have.
This is a very beautiful and a very important book. Don't miss it. Pick up your copy today.Jacek Bocheński (b. 1926) is the leading literary figure of modern Poland, a prolific author, classicist scholar, former president of the Polish PEN Club, former president of the Polish Authors’ Society (SLP), former president of the Intellectual Property Association (ZAIKS), former member of The Citizen’s Committee serving the office of President Lech Wałęsa, a highly-regarded and much-decorated freedom fighter, banned by communist censorship, interned during the Martial Law in Poland (1981-1983), and today widely honored as the Nestor of Polish literature.
