****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Wanted to read it during my flight to London but once I went past the first two priapic pages with Greek terms, I simply couldn't put it down.I don't want to strike a self-regarding note but the book is a feast to the well read. Savoring all the witty allusions, I could see myself as a guest of some urbane Roman in his villa with murals on walls and buxom lasses serving wine. What Estrin does best is to create a seamless overlap between Berkley, California and Plato's academy. The two worlds, ancient and modern do not appear as separate entities. Estrin's narrative like Joyce's and Pynchon's requires an ability to see and hear sounds coming from the past and the present with a simultaneity probably not available to a digitally reared generation.Sometime a single sentence titillates with an intertexuality so brilliant that it explodes like a time bomb.Page 90 "So you have to do something about it, before it Catulluses." One is reminded of what Pound said when Eliot died,'Now there is none with whom I can share a joke.'Page 103, "it happened on his first looking into Classic Comics' Homer."Anyone who can hear the voice of Keats behind that sentence is bound to fall down and roll in the aisle.'Aristotelian categories of the Tupperware collection,' make the narrative scintillate from start to finish. Equally engaging is Estrin's take on Handel's Messiah and its assimilation into Christmas rejoicing.Underlying all that is the stoicism of the aging consciousness 'fastened to a dying animal.'Jay Birjepatil
