Reviews for Savage God: A Study of Suicide

The average rating for Savage God: A Study of Suicide based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-14 00:00:00 Charles Cummins It must strike us that after all the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything characterize this latter condition are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they are not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure -- quoted from Freud. I'm not sure how to go about writing this review. The above quote and all of the quotes below are taken from this book but are from other writers. This book is about suicide. It opens with the author's personal reminiscence of Sylvia Plath who he was somewhat of a friend of, and ends with the story of his own failed suicide attempt (which chronologically came before Plath's successful attempt). In between these two personal essays the book is split into two sections. The first, and shorter section looks at some misconceptions about suicide and a general way that society views the topic. The second section is a survey of sorts of the way that suicide has been seen in literature from the time of Dante through the 1960's. At the heart of this survey though is the question of what is it about roughly the start of Modernism that made suicide something of a plague among writers. Surprisingly before the 20th century not that many writers ended up killing themselves. There was the Romantics worship of death and the the Werther craze of of the early 19th century but as the century went on different forms of suicide started occurring in greater frequency among writers, Alvarez counts soft-suicide in with the real thing, the people who destroy their lives with deliberate choices and substances, who attempt to kill of part of themselves and keep on biologically living: people like Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Poe. But what was in a way sensational in the 19th century became something of a norm among writers in the 20th century (something meaning that it was more common than it had been in the past, many many writers navigate life to it's natural end, more than end up sadly ending it early). Kafka wrote to a friend: The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as through we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us. (Kafka is viewed by Alvarez as a failed suicide, he attempted to kill himself postmortem through the destruction of all his writing. Max Brod of course foiled the attempt.) Why do I want to read the books that Kafka describes? Why does he eloquently describe what I am looking for in literature most of the time? And who out there can write these books that Kafka says we need without putting themselves in danger? Of the world as it is one cannot be enough afraid. --Adorno Tadeusz Borowski wrote possibly the bleakest first person account of being in Auschwitz. If you haven't read it and you want to have all hope in humanity sucked from you than should go pick up a copy of This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The book is a beautiful testament to the depravity of what humanity is capable of. After he finished the novel, he killed the writer in himself and devoted himself wholeheartedly in Stalinist politics until he gassed himself in his house when he was twenty seven. He held a mirror up for us to look at ourselves in and see that it wasn't just the Nazi's to blame, but all of us were capable of being complicit. That he himself could be engaged in a game of soccer while a prisoner and give no thought, like everyone else around him engaged in the game, to the thousands being exterminated in a building just behind them. If I had to imagine every death that every bomb and missile launched at every civilian in a war to protect my 'freedom' where would my head be at now. Can the human condition as it became in the 20th century be honestly faced without having that old Nietzschean problem with staring into the abyss for too long? And this doesn't even need to be political. Add to the list included in this book Deleuze and Debord. Look at the depraved amorality of Focault in his last years. I'm feeling bleaker writing about the book then when I was reading (secretively, I wouldn't tell anyone I was reading it, it never was on my currently reading list, it never got read outside of my apartment...) it. It's actually a fairly uplifting book to me, there is something affirming about it. You might find it depressing though.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-29 00:00:00 Margaret Hughes If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review. Plath: "The Savage God - A Study of Suicide" by Al Alvarez (Original Review, 2002) "Suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, at the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failure. But it is a decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. There is, I believe, a whole class of suicides who take their own lives not in order to die but to escape confusion, to clear their heads. They deliberately use suicide to create an unencumbered reality for themselves or to break through the patterns of obsession and necessity which they have unwittingly imposed on their lives." In "The Savage God - A Study of Suicide" by Al Alvarez