the astonishing life of octavian nothing

He loves learning, and he excels in all of his subjects. As such, his is a charmed life: he has servants and he is trained in all of the arts and sciences. Octavian’s mother is a queen, and he is treated as a prince. They burned holes in the air, wrote poems of love, sucked the venom from sores, painted landscapes of gloom, and made metal sing they dissected fire like newts. The men who raised me were lords of matter, and in the dim chambers I watched as they traced the spinning of bodies celestial in vast, iron courses, and bid sparks to dance upon their hands they read the bodies of fish as if each dying trout or shad was a fresh Biblical Testament, the wet and twitching volume of a new-born Pentateuch. Consequently, for the second blog post in a row, we have a surprisingly sophisticated voice telling the story, this one from the 1770s with unstrained floridity. Our young Octavian is being raised by these scholars, philosophers, musicians, scientists, etc.

That’s about all I knew or considered when I took the book to the counter to pay.Īt the beginning of the book, we come to know a strange and yet strangely appealing 18th-century group of rational philosophers living around Boston in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Also, the back of the book compelled me by speaking of some mysterious “experiments.” And, being a Young Person’s book, the price of the volume was fairly low. The 2008 National Book Award (which Octavian won in its year) had recently been awarded, and I like American history, particularly the Revolutionary War. I chose to read this one almost on a whim (a good whim). But it seems that the ones I do pick up are very worthwhile. This suggests my assumptions about this category of books are probably unfounded and need revision - they are certainly unfair. I’ve been surprised in the past to find these books are often more experimental, more provocative, and more profound than much of the fiction I usually read. Well, perhaps I do at least know my own assumptions - potentially puerile content, gimmicky plot structures, facile resolutions, reputation (mine), and, worst of all, the tendency to dwell on the surface with no subtlety as it pushes platitudes into young minds.

I don’t know why I shy away from Young People’s literature.

The astonishing life of octavian nothing