Vit Babenco

The title of the novel <i>A Season on Earth</i> is a sardonic allusion to <b>Arthur Rimbaud</b>’s poem <i>A Season in Hell</i>. An adolescent hero of the novel has a strictly catholic upbringing so his thoughts are somewhat tendentiously unscrewed… <blockquote>It was only logical that there were also Catholic and non-Catholic <i>pudenda</i>. Although Adrian had got out of the habit of thinking of such things, he allowed himself to distinguish briefly between a modest shrinking Catholic kind and another kind that was somehow a little the worse for wear.</blockquote> After a visit of a secular priest to his school he decides to devote himself to religion… Now he is exalted with his schemes to sow good, righteousness and holiness for the rest of his life… <blockquote>‘There are three vows – poverty, chastity and obedience. Their purpose is to perfect a man spiritually.’ Adrian was embarrassed, but he offered up his discomfort to God and told himself he was acquiring the virtue of humility. The doctor said, ‘Poverty and obedience too? They drive a hard bargain, don’t they?’</blockquote> So after the summer holidays the boy departs for the junior seminary… There he starts posing as being holier than thou… And he fantasizes of becoming a prominent priest worshipped by everyone… Isn’t it pride? Temptations keep pursuing him… He lives a live of hypocrite… <blockquote>The last of his three temptations had been his scheme for a life of debauchery beginning with his pursuit of female students at Melbourne University. The trouble had started on the beach when Adrian was doing his best to guard his eyes.</blockquote> Suddenly he is grabbed by an idea to join the Cistercians just because the landscape around their monastery presumably looks better… He leaves the seminary… Returning home he at last decides that his soul is too poetic for any religious vocation… Any indoctrination, with the however best intentions, is evil.

Ludwig van Beethoven… There were some who knew him personally… And multitudes of those who didn’t… His sister-in-law recalls… ‘March when he finally kicked the bucket, blooming freezing so it was. Snow on the ground, Ludwig’s apartment like an ice-house, even with all the fires going. What did he say during his last days on earth? I’ve heard so many stories, how he’s meant to have come out with stuff like, “I shall hear in heaven”, or “Applaud, friends, the comedy is over”. Don’t believe what you see in a book – I was there, remember.’ Are those recollections authentic? Are they a hoax? And <i>Assassins</i> is presumably a title of the opera Beethoven began to compose but never completed… The novel tells us about Beethoven’s biographers – real and fictional… The tale is about conspiracies… About clandestine mystical societies… Historical mysteries… And first of all about the music… ‘Knowledge can be an inert jarful of objective facts: the diameter of Jupiter, the strength of its gravitational pull. It can also be the subjective experience of knowing. It was this living knowledge that Sullivan supposed art to communicate, and only indirectly. “Beethoven does not communicate to us his perceptions or experiences. He communicates to us the attitude based on them.”’ The novel is polyphonic… It is full of surprises, unexpected turns and mystifications… Irony rules all the way through… ‘He said people long ago considered music equivalent to astronomy, which is why there are seven notes in the major scale, matching the celestial spheres that give us our week.’ Music is an earthly echo of cosmic vibrations.