AmosL
07-19-2008, 09:56 AM
Barkan, Leonard. “Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome”, Northwestern University Press, 2006.
A View From the Mind
Amos Lassen
Leonard Barkan is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and he spent a year in Rome researching how during the Roman Renaissance there was a practice of exhuming scripture and he relays to us what went on culturally and personally during that year in “Satyr Square”. He looks at the art and society as well as the contemporary literature he found during that year. What we get is Barkan looking closely at himself and we learn of his attraction to other men. We go all over Rome with him as he discovers the secrets of the city and of himself. The language of the prose is a bit heavy yet beautiful. Rome to Barkan is magical and we see that as Barkan love Rome, Rome also loved him.
The memoir is set against the setting of the universal and everlasting power of Roman art and Barkan explores Rome with candor in order to explore himself in the same way. Do not be misled. However—the book is more than memoir—it is also a culinary look at Rome, literary criticism and travelogue. Anyone who has ever worked in academia knows the scars he must deal with and the cultured halls of universities take a back seat to Barkan’s look at one of the “cradles of civilization. Intellectual life is strange and it can be quite lonely. Barkan finds a sense of family in Rome, learns Italian and falls in love and as the year passes, he loses the love he found and he finds his voice as a writer. He returns to America where he celebrates his life by writing this book. Central to the book are irony, humor and misdirection and mistakes. Barkan has two major struggles—being a homosexual and being a Jew and he can only understand these by rediscovering and reinventing his own intellectual passions.
A View From the Mind
Amos Lassen
Leonard Barkan is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and he spent a year in Rome researching how during the Roman Renaissance there was a practice of exhuming scripture and he relays to us what went on culturally and personally during that year in “Satyr Square”. He looks at the art and society as well as the contemporary literature he found during that year. What we get is Barkan looking closely at himself and we learn of his attraction to other men. We go all over Rome with him as he discovers the secrets of the city and of himself. The language of the prose is a bit heavy yet beautiful. Rome to Barkan is magical and we see that as Barkan love Rome, Rome also loved him.
The memoir is set against the setting of the universal and everlasting power of Roman art and Barkan explores Rome with candor in order to explore himself in the same way. Do not be misled. However—the book is more than memoir—it is also a culinary look at Rome, literary criticism and travelogue. Anyone who has ever worked in academia knows the scars he must deal with and the cultured halls of universities take a back seat to Barkan’s look at one of the “cradles of civilization. Intellectual life is strange and it can be quite lonely. Barkan finds a sense of family in Rome, learns Italian and falls in love and as the year passes, he loses the love he found and he finds his voice as a writer. He returns to America where he celebrates his life by writing this book. Central to the book are irony, humor and misdirection and mistakes. Barkan has two major struggles—being a homosexual and being a Jew and he can only understand these by rediscovering and reinventing his own intellectual passions.