Julian – Gore Vidal

It’s not like I haven’t read a book in three weeks (I wouldn’t dare!), I just didn’t update the blog because we had an action-packed few days in Italy collecting second-hand baby stuff and taking my wife’s growing belly on tour for one last time.

Julian is a book that my mom gave me some 15 years ago and that, like all good sons, I kindly ignored for as long as I could (that is until I realized that having loved Memoirs of Hadrian so much I would have at least “liked” Julian). And, much to everyone’s surprise, I did like it.

Despite the fact that the reader can perceive Gore Vidal’s massive ego even through pages that are meant to have been written almost 2000 years ago, the book has a number of things going for it: the triple narrator makes it more dynamic than Memoirs of Hadrian, the frequent digs at early Christianity are just so much more fun than the ones at contemporary Christianity (seriously, too easy and boring!), and the historical descriptions and not-so-obvious-yet-obvious facts (like that one at that point could become Roman emperor without ever having been to Rome) make it a very interesting read.

Yet, I like a time when man was at the centre of things, between the disappearance of the gods and the appearance of God, better than a time after the appearance of God during which the gods tried to regain their lost territory. So, ultimately, Julian is no match for Hadrian, at least for me. 

The Golden Age – Gore Vidal

This was my first encounter with Gore Vidal – arguably I shouldn’t have started from the last book of his Narratives of Empire, but hey. As a historian of the 20^th century, I had great expectations form this novel. Surely, it does offer an interesting angle to the presidency of FDR, and is undoubtedly very daring when it tries to debunk the myth of one of the most loved presidents in American history.

The problem is that Vidal himself appears to me as a rather awful man: he and his grandfather are portrayed as always the most acute observers, the best thinkers, and, ultimately, the great owners of the world’s truths.

I just hate it when people use their art to glorify themselves, be that Gore Vidal or Julian Schnabel (I still can’t get over the way he portrayed himself in Basquiat – and I also think that Gary Oldman, who played Schanbel in the movie, is way better looking than him).