The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth (Recovered Classics) - Softcover

Here is the prototype of the 20th-century jetsetter, a fabulously wealthy 24-year-old on a free-for-all Grand Tour through the European capitals. Barnabooth is a naive yet brashly opinionated South American who casts about for a new identity with an almost scientific rigor "€" an intensity all the more humorous for the swings between self-delusion and revelation that are so faithfully recorded in a diary that is destined from the start for publication. Barnabooth is essentially a character from Wilde advanced into the 20th century, full of optimism for the future, scorn for the musty generation just passed, and yet subject to the erosion of confidence that marks the psychologies of the characters of Gide, Proust, and Kafka. This is a book that transforms the "novel of education" with a new persona and employs a "stream of consciousness" interior monologue in perhaps its first modern instance. As Justin O'Brien has noted, "[Barnabooth] suffers a progressive loss of illusions]€] And every time he approaches a decision or a judgment he interrupts himself to dissect his thought and determine just what percentage of vanity, of self-deceit, or of affectation has entered into it."

In France, Valéry Larbaud occupied an important position in 20th century literature. Born in Vichy in 1881, he taught himself six languages at an early age and set out to bring world literature into French. He was the first to translate Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce (supervising the French translation of Ulysses), among many others. A writer of poetry as well as innovative prose, Larbaud had his career unfortunately cut short by a stroke, and he spent his last 20 years confined to his home. He died in 1957. Gilbert Cannan (1884-1957) was himself a noted English novelist, dramatist, translator, and biographer. Of his dozen novels, Round the Corner is generally regarded as having been his best work.