György Spiró - Captivity

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Captivity: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The epic bestseller and winner of the prestigious Aegon Literary Award in Hungary, Captivity is an enthralling and illuminating historical saga set in the time of Jesus about a Roman Jew on a quest to the Holy Land.
A literary sensation in Hungary, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew.
Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening — but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance.
Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
"With the novel Captivity, Spiró proved that he is well-versed in both historical and human knowledge. It appears that in our times, it is playfulness that is expected of literary works, rather than the portrayal of realistic questions and conflicts. As if the two, playfulness and seriousness were inconsistent with each other! On the contrary (at least for me) playfulness begins with seriousness. Literature is a serious game. So is Spiró’s novel.?"
— Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize — winning author of Fatelessness
"Like the authors of so many great novels, György Spiró sends his hero, Uri, out into the wide world. Uri is a Roman Jew born into a poor family, and the wide world is an overripe civilization — the Roman Empire. Captivity can be read as an adventure novel, a Bildungsroman, a richly detailed portrait of an era, and a historico-philosophical parable. The long series of adventures — in which it is only a tiny episode that Uri is imprisoned together with Jesus and the two thieves — at once suggest the vanity of human endeavors and a passion for life. A masterpiece."
— László Márton
“[Captivity is] an important work by yet another representative of Hungarian letters who has all the chances to become a household name among the readers of literature in translation, just like Nadas, Esterhazy and Krasznahorkai.… Meticulously researched.… The novel has been a tremendous success in Hungary, having gone through more than a dozen editions. The critics lauded its page-turning quality along with the wealth of ideas and the ambitious recreation of historical detail.”
— The Untranslated
“A novel of education and a novel of adventure that brings to life ancient Rome, Alexandria and Jerusalem with a vividness of detail that is stunning. Spiró’s prose is crisp and colloquial, the kind of prose that aims for precision rather than literary thrills. A serious and sophisticated novel that is also engrossing and highly readable is a rare thing. Captivity is such a novel.”
— Ivan Sanders, Columbia University
“György Spiró aspired at nothing less than (…) present a theory in novelistic form about the interweavedness of religion and politics, lay bare the inner workings of power and give an insight into the art of survival….This book is an incredible page turner, it reads easily and avidly like the greatest bestsellers while also going as deep as the greatest thinkers of European philosophy.”
— Aegon Literary Award 2006 jury recommendation
“What this sensational novel outlines is the demonic nature of History. Ethically as well as historically, this an especially grand-scale parable. Captivity gets its feet under any literary table you care to mention."
— István Margócsy, Élet és Irodalom
“This book is a major landmark for the year.”
— Pál Závada, Népszabadság
“It would not be surprising if literary historians were soon calling him the re-assessor and regenerator of the post-modern novel.”
— Gergely Mézes, Magyar Hírlap
“Impossibly engrossing from the very first page….Building on a huge volume of reference material, the novel rings true from both a historical and a literary point of view.”
— Magda Ferch, Magyar Nemzet

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Lepers, incidentally, were treated decently; they were not expelled from the community but had a fairly spacious pen designated as their dwelling place, minimal rations were provided, and they counted on tzedakah, or charitable funds, or at least on a charity bowl of victuals for immediate relief, which even the most destitute and needy visitors can count on from a Jewish community anywhere. But because lepers were impure, their family was not allowed direct contact and could only shout to them from a distance, and the afflicted were obliged to smash to pieces the single-use clay vessels provided to them by the community, and, to the great delight of pottery merchants, to bury the pieces three feet underground. That aside, they were free to move around, even go beyond the walls of the Jewish quarter to beg like any other sick person. They too were obliged to go to the house of prayer, but not only were priests forbidden to touch them, they were not even supposed to see them, lest they become unclean themselves, so the lepers had to stand throughout the services in a dark corner that was walled off by planks; they arrived earlier than the priest and left well after. Because there were so few priests, their cleanliness was safeguarded by the most ancient and stringent regulations. As descendants of Aaron, they were sent from Judaea to Rome for the more important festivals to confer blessings, and afterward they would return to Jerusalem. In the course of time they also sent out a few Levites, who could not themselves become priests but could act as priests’ assistants: it was they who blew the shofar, they who did the singing and played the music, they who collected the taxes. The ritual butchers and slaughterers also came from their ranks, so there were more of them in Rome than there were priests.

Apart from their religious activities, the priestly families and Levites had no say in the life of a community. Unlike back East, the rich and respected families in Rome did not cede important decisions, so many of Rome’s Levites asked to be sent back to Jerusalem, and the Roman municipal administration was only too happy to oblige. In their place, others came from the ranks of the lower priesthood and the lower Levites (for it seems that, even there, not everything went so swimmingly for all priests and Levites), and after a bit of administrative maneuvering they were generally allowed into Rome, especially if wealthy Jewish families vouched for their subsistence. The officials of the magistracy could breathe easily, because they would not be obliged to hand out free grain to the newcomers and their families. After all, people like that arrived with family; indeed, that was largely the point of leaving the Holy City and traveling out to the impure Diaspora. But after a few weeks or months, they would get fed up with the climate in Rome and go back to Jerusalem; then either somebody else would be sent to replace them or not. In time, a few Levite families settled down and got rich, mostly through the ritually pure oil and wine that they imported from Judaea and Galilee.

Rome’s non-Jews were not very interested, to tell the truth, in how the population on the right side of the Tiber lived.

There were many small ethnic enclaves in Rome, and outsiders had no awareness into them, and the Jewish enclave was not among the larger and most important ones either: in a city of around one million, it accounted for no more than thirty or forty thousand, the majority of them the gradually liberated progeny of the slaves who were sporadically carried off to Rome. They did have synagogues, however, twelve of them, one of which was on the Appian Way, where they also had an underground cemetery, a catacomb. Counting on eventual resurrection as they did, they did not incinerate their dead like the foolish Latini. Seven of the prayer houses were along the road to Ostia alone, the thoroughfare by which goods delivered by sea reached Rome by land.

The first of the temples, named for Marcus Agrippa, the Roman potentate who had given patronage to the Jews, was built almost a century before and was still standing. Although Uri’s family did not go there, Joseph had shown it to his young boy, telling him the tale of the first convoy of Jewish captives who refused to work until the Roman slaveholders accepted the Sabbath as the slaves’ day of rest; they would follow the law laid down by their religion at all costs, and they wanted their own temple. A number of them were killed on account of those demands, but even still the rest would not relent. Uri clapped his hands in delight at hearing this, and he resolved to be that brave if ever needed.

He also rejoiced when his father related that the lords had paired their males and females off to boost the ranks of their slaves, but the Jewish men would only go along with it if any non-Jewish women with whom they were designated to multiply first converted to Judaism. Later on, to simplify matters, women were imported from the Jewish part of the empire. Herod the Great, king of the Jews and a friend of Marcus Agrippa’s, established good relations with Emperor Augustus and managed to finagle permission to ship women in to Rome. There were prostitutes and thieves and women with the clap among them, but they were Jewish and there was no need to bother converting them.

Shipping them cost money, however, his father recounted, and that is something that no state power likes. Herod the Great and Emperor Augustus realized that, and before long this fount of women dried up.

Under Roman law, the descendants of slaves were supposed to inherit their master’s religion, but the Jews were unwilling to propagate on those terms, so an exception had to be made. Non-Jewish slaves were not granted the same concessions, so they loathed the Jews, which was nothing new; ever since Alexander the Great conquered the East, non-Jews who lived there had always resented the Jews and the special treatment that they demanded, appealing each time to prerogatives that they had won under Persian rule. It was one thing if they all fell, Greeks and Jews alike, under foreign — Persian — dominion, but another thing altogether if the Jews came under Greek sway but for centuries refused to accept it. Since both the Greeks and the Jews had fallen under Roman dominion, the Jews regarded Rome as a Babylon, paying it homage in practice more zealously than did the Greeks. The female slaves, incidentally, were glad to turn Jewish: they knew that Jews, unlike Greeks or Romans, would never abandon a child. There were even some male slaves who converted, calculating that the Jewish communities would contribute to their manumission, and there were indeed some cases of Jewish converts freed in this manner. The only thing that may have given them pause was circumcision, a painful procedure for an adult, and not without danger. The women, though, were not threatened with clitoral resection, since the Roman Jews did not demand it, so there were droves of Syrian, Greek, Arab, Abyssinian, Egyptian, German, Gallic, Hispanic, Thracian, Illyrian, and female slaves of other origins who became Jewish in Rome, to the greater glory of the One and Only God, giving birth to Jewish children in the zigzag ghetto of Far Side. And since the Transtiberim — which was not even fenced in at that time, already considered part of the city by government bodies, albeit unofficially — was inhabited not only by Jews but also by people of various conquered nations, for the surplus daughters who became Jewish converts it was often only a matter of moving a few houses away, so they were even able to visit their parental households, should they so wish. Not that they had much wish to: their non-Jewish families were generally more than happy to be rid of them, and they made that quite clear. In any case, the women became part of the husband’s family forever, with no ties of any kind to their parents’ family — on that score, Roman and Jewish laws were in accord. A girl who converted to the bosom of the One and Only God could only be thankful that her parents had not cast her out as prey for wolves or men, or strangled her at birth.

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