Jaro's first novel comes garlanded with praise from various writers, one of whom goes so far as to compare her to Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar. A strong measure of inventiveness, even audacity, is necessary when writing of a personage about whose actual life little is known, as Robert Silverberg did in Gilgamesh the King, Anthony Burgess in his novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun, or Benita Kane Jaro in The Key, which deals with the Roman poet Catullus. The historical novelist must be prepared to invent, even in dramatizing lives that are well documented, as with Robert Graves' Claudius novels or Gore Vidal's Julian. WHAT ARE the qualities that distinguish a good historical novel - specifically, of that subcategory which dramatizes the life of an historical figure? Fidelity to the available record is not sufficient, nor even necessary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |