Awake

July 1, 2021
This strange novella concerns Pliny the Elder and his drive to catalog all of nature. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and military man, is famous for his encyclopedic Naturalis Historia and for perishing when Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. Voetmann, a Danish writer and translator of classical Latin works, has written a trilogy that begins with this volume, his first book in English, and continues with one on Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and one on the 11th-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmerman. Not beach reads, perhaps. This novel is loosely constructed with brief citations from the Historia, vignettes and observations from Pliny's life, and comments from his nephew, Pliny the Younger. The fluid prose owes much to translator Ottosen. One thematic thread is the contrast between the intellectual effort to rein in nature's extraordinary variety and man's ugly, ignorant cruelty. The great scholar himself is obese and prone to nosebleeds and dictates from a filthy bed. He has the feet of his servant Diocles nailed to a fig tree because he tried to escape. He describes dispassionately an arena entertainment in which the bellies of various pregnant animals and a woman are slit open before an elated audience. In lighter moments, Pliny gives a disastrous public reading. His nephew complains that his wife has replaced "a large portion of my library" with lurid romance novels. Diocles has several comic sections before he falls to screaming at the fig tree. And some of the knowledge Pliny the Elder professes is laughably off the mark to a 21st-century reader--as our own grand schemes may seem 2,000 years hence, if there is a hence. An interesting work and a good introduction to this unusual writer.

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October 4, 2021
Voetmann reimagines the absurd, grotesque, and at times, cruel world of Pliny the Elder in his peculiar English-language debut. Each section of the book starts with a quote from Naturalis Historia, the 37-volume precursor of encyclopedias written by the historical author and naturalist, then continues with musings from Voetmann’s Pliny the Elder and comic comments from his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who every now and then doubts the legitimacy of the recounted events and his uncle’s ability to understand nature as it is (“He is confusing stars with fireflies or something”). Despite being affected by frequent nosebleeds and general malaise, Pliny the Elder tries to produce a “mapping of nature” with reflections on death, the human condition, and various events that shape the world he inhabits (for example, the macabre annual ritual in his native Novum Comum of setting the goddess Laria’s portrait on fire and then raping an enslaved boy or a woman). While this kind of brutality may have been the norm for Emperor Vespasian’s Roman Empire, the descriptions sometimes feel gratuitous in Voetmann’s account. Rather than a plot, this is stitched together with anecdotes and meditations, and it succeeds at rendering the ancient author’s moments of inspiration. For a slim volume, it packs a memorable punch.