Найти книгу: "Back to Methuselah"

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is revered as one of the great British dramatists, credited not only with memorable works, but the revival of the then-suffering English theatre. Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, left mostly to his own devices after his mother ran off to London to pursue a musical career. He educated himself for the most part, and eventually worked for a real estate agent. This experience founded in him a concern for social injustices, seeing poverty and general unfairness afoot, and would go on to address this in many of his works. In 1876, Shaw joined his mother in London where he would finally attain literary success. «Back the Methuselah» is regarded as Science Fiction, and a sort of commentary on human destiny. It consists of a preface (An Infidel Half Century) and a series of five plays: «In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden)», «The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day», «The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170», «Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000», and «As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920.»

Originally published in Danish in 1910, <I>Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah</I> is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, <I>Kzradock</I> is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism.<br><br>Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is conducting hypnotic seances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.<br><br>When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: “This is a <i>great</i> book, and it speaks a formidable language … This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt.”