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To the Hermitage
by: Malcolm Bradbury

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Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780330376631
ISBN: 0330376632
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Pages: 512
Publication Date: March 09, 2001
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador
Sales Rank: 316809

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
To The Hermitage is Sir Malcolm Bradbury's first novel in nearly a decade, and its length and ambition provide some clue as to why it has been so long in the making. The novel begins with the arrival of the great Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot at the Russian court of Catherine the Great, who is "drawn to grand ideas and learning; she looks to Paris" and to Denis Diderot, busily completing his Encyclopaedia, the great work of the European "Age of Reason". Bradbury's world of "Then" suddenly cuts to "Now", and the arrival in Stockholm in 1993 of the narrator, a thinly veiled self-portrait of a weather-beaten novelist and literary critic who has been invited on a "Baltic junket", an academic gathering to discuss the Diderot Project, a Swedish-funded enterprise to investigate the life and works of the great philosopher. Bradbury extracts maximum hilarity from the ensuing academic pondering of the assembled scholars, including the wonderful deconstructionist professor "Jack-Paul Verso, in Calvin Klein jeans, Armani jacket, and a designer baseball cap saying I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION". The group's academic sparring takes on added poignancy as footage of the hard-line coup to overthrow Gorbachev and silence Yeltsin flashes onto their TV screens.

Bradbury's novel proceeds to deftly seesaw between the Age of Reason championed by Diderot and the present so-called end of history and "triumph" of global capitalism. It ruefully, but also very humorously, reflects on the perils of intellectual idealism then and now, and explores the ways in which "history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past". Sprawling, messy, hugely ambitious and at times very funny, To The Hermitage is up there with Eating People is Wrong and Rates of Exchange as one of Bradbury's better pieces of fiction. --Jerry Brotton

Amazon.co.uk Review:
To The Hermitage is Sir Malcolm Bradbury's first novel in nearly a decade, and its length and ambition provide some clue as to why it has been so long in the making. The novel begins with the arrival of the great Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot at the Russian court of Catherine the Great, who is "drawn to grand ideas and learning; she looks to Paris" and to Denis Diderot, busily completing his Encyclopaedia, the great work of the European "Age of Reason". Bradbury's world of "Then" suddenly cuts to "Now", and the arrival in Stockholm in 1993 of the narrator, a thinly veiled self-portrait of a weather-beaten novelist and literary critic who has been invited on a "Baltic junket", an academic gathering to discuss the Diderot Project, a Swedish-funded enterprise to investigate the life and works of the great philosopher. Bradbury extracts maximum hilarity from the ensuing academic pondering of the assembled scholars, including the wonderful deconstructionist professor "Jack-Paul Verso, in Calvin Klein jeans, Armani jacket, and a designer baseball cap saying I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION". The group's academic sparring takes on added poignancy as footage of the hardline coup to overthrow Gorbachev and silence Yeltsin flashes onto their TV screens.

Bradbury's novel proceeds to deftly seesaw between the Age of Reason championed by Diderot and the present so-called end of history and "triumph" of global capitalism. It ruefully, but also very humorously reflects on the perils of intellectual idealism then and now, and explores the ways in which "history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past". Sprawling, messy, hugely ambitious and at times very funny, To The Hermitage is up there with Eating People is Wrong and Rates of Exchange as one of Bradbury's better pieces of fiction. --Jerry Brotton

Synopsis:
"To the Hermitage" tells two tales: a contemporary story of our narrator, a novelist, who has been invited to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project, and one set two hundred years earlier in which Bradbury brilliantly recreates Diderot's journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of that powerful monarch, Catherine the Great. ""To the Hermitage" reads like a love letter to the life of the mind from a man who, in his work as a writer, critic, academic and teacher has done much to contribute to that dizzying circulation of ideas which is so richly celebrated here" - "Independent on Sunday". "A charming, engaging, witty, amusing, playful, reflective and informative book by a writer who is in championship-winning form" - "Sunday Express".

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- i love deconstruction!
Malcolm Bradbury's novel, To the Hermitage deliberately binds together different ways of writing to be self-consciously postmodern. He's writing against the totalising concept of Enlightenment Reason, hence the fragmentary nature of the novel, and manages to do so in a highly entertaining way.

The story is an interesting and lively read, working on many different levels. The story of the narrator going to Russia in the Diderot project, is nicely interwoven with the tale of Diderot (then). This break in the narrative is deliberately postmodern, and does little to disrupt the story.

Intertextuality is a strong theme in the novel, 'books breed books', and Roland Barthes' 'death of the author', are a main feature, with ... Read More:

Rating:

- To Russia with reason
One of the outstanding figures of the Enlightenment in France, Denis Diderot compiled the famous Encyclopedia. Malcolm Bradbury's book is also encyclopedic in approach, being a hotchpotch - very much in the spirit of Diderot, actually - of historical anecdotes, tableaux, and light-hearted observations of the world. The 'novel' - which it is not, really - seems unable to decide what it is doing, and the constant switch between the account of Diderot's visit to Russia in 1773, and the current odyssey of a bunch of, mainly Swedish, academics across the Baltic, is of doubtful significance. Some of Bradbury's travelogue humour is amusing, though, and the Swedish penchant for earnestness is keenly drawn.

Rating:

- Pretentious but Interesting.
Like much of Bradbury's humour,this has a strongly pretentious streak to it,particularly in the modern juxtaposition of the academics' cruise through the Baltic.I suppose it was meant to say-"Look how clever we academics are",when really it says,"Look what a waste of time we are."
This annoying trait is however helped by some good humorous passages.
The throw-back to Diderot's time works better.As someone who did not know much about this particular figure or the court of Catherine the Great,I found it educational (if it is accurate?) and interesting.
As with much of Bradbury's fiction,this promised a lot without quite producing the goods.

Rating:

- Overrated & Self-indulgent
Malcolm Bradbury maade a great contribution to post-war British literature, but this isn't one of them. It's a good idea - parallel stories of a modern party of academics travelling to St Petersburg on an enigmatic ventue called the "Diderot Project" and Diderot (a French philosopher) journeying there 200 years before - but it doesn't really hang together. There is some good writing and occasional flashes of humour, but the overall impression is of an overblown shaggy dog story. Half the length would have been twice as good!

The critics were so kind to this, Bradbury's last novel before his recent death, but he has done much better.

Rating:

- Ignore the humour, read the story
This book repays reading if you can get past the barrier of the author's self conscious humour (Look at me: I'm being terribly funny about the Swedes/academic conferences/Russia). If you can manage not to be so put off by this aspect of the book, which is strongest at the beginning, then you will be rewarded by the portrait of Didro (Diderot) and his contemporaries in Russia and France. The alternate chapters set in the present work less well. They enable the author to comment on contemporary Russia, but he doesn't have much to say which is original. He is better on Catherine the Great's court in eighteenth century St Petersburg. By the end his picture of Diderot is quite touching. The whole book resembles a shaggy dog story, where the beginning ... Read More:

Books : To the Hermitage