About this item
Highlights
- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jew and political radical.
- About the Author: Nicholas Mosley was educated at Eton and Oxford.
- 578 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jew and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test.
Review Quotes
"The two things that are extremely impressive about this book are, first, its intellectual energy and rigour and, secondly, Mosley's gift, rivalling Koestler's or Bertrand Russell's, for summarising extremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligible manner." --Spectator
"This is a major novel. I read it barely stopping to eat and sleep. It is the sort of book that one reads again and again, making new discoveries at each reading." --Hampstead & Highgate Express
"Fascinating. . . . The novel achieves grand intellectual drama." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"The most ambitious English novel written in the past 50 years ... an amazing achievement." --Washington Post Book World
"The culminating volume of a series of five fictions called 'Catastrophe Practice' that may be one of the most important extended literary projects of this century . . . Mosley has been feeling his way toward what is ultimately a hopeful vision of the human prospect after having comprehended--in virtually every sense of the term-- the turbulence and torments resulting from this century's fierce intellectual and ideological conflicts." --Chicago Tribune A brilliant literary performance." --Forward
"What makes Hopeful Monsters a successful book is not so much its big ideas but the passionate intelligence through which they're refracted." --San Francisco Chronicle
"A rich panorama of 20th-century politics and ideas and an affecting love story, the novel combines the epic sweep and narrative drive of popular fiction and the intellectual authority of the best of Milan Kundera or Saul Bellow." --Newsday
"Intellectual and emotional history become delicately and provocatively joined in an agile narrative of the wages of hope in a monstrous century. . . . One of the grandest novels of ideas of our time." --Voice Literary Supplement
"Hopeful Monsters's success lies in Mosley's skill at personalizing sweeping historical events and complex theories ... an extraordinary novel." --Boston Globe
"There is, as always in Nicholas Mosley's writing, the pleasure of eloquent ideas eagerly and warmly shared." --Washington Times
About the Author
Nicholas Mosley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread Award. Mosley was the author of several works of nonfiction, most notably the autobiography Efforts at Truth and a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, entitled Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale.
Sven Birkerts is the author of The Gutenberg Elegies and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.