Nicholas Mosley
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Nicholas Mosley
Set in the 1920s and ‘30s, Hopeful Monsters is the story of two remarkable people: Max, an English student of physics and biology; and Eleanor, a German Jewess who grows up in politically radical circles in Berlin in the ferment that would lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. They meet, love, go their separate ways and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War. The story takes them from Berlin to Cambridge, to Russia, to the Sahara, to a deserted monastery in the Pyrenees—and finally to Los Alamos and the making of the atomic bomb. In the course of their travels they meet many of the century’s giants: Wittgenstein, Einstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Hitler, and several others, making Hopeful Monsters (as one reviewer put it) “a vast work, covering the whole of the twentieth century.”
Startlingly ambitious and profound in its insights, this is Nicholas Mosley’s masterpiece—a novel in which ideas and action combine in a moving and immensely readable narrative.
Nicholas Mosley
“The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one’s hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.”
In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley’s subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that “those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don’t will have to look for them.” The impossible object of the title, “the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three,” is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in “a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world.”
Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.
