Navigator of the Flood - Softcover

Brelich, Mario

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0910395802 ISBN 13: 9780910395809

Publisher: Marlboro Press, 1991

Synopsis

Mario Brelich, a Hungarian author writing in Italian, was a superb ironist. In his three novels, of which this is the first, he explored central episodes of the Old and New Testaments with unsparing wit and intelligence. In Navigator of the Flood, Brelich's Noah is a man laboring under a burden of responsibility by a Lord who appears from time to time to "correct"--at man's expense--His own foreknowledge and omniscience. If Noah finds God's commands at times cruel or incomprehensible, if he still sees beauty in a life now under threat of extinction, and wonders why he and his family should be chosen to survive while all others are condemned to perish, he remains the dutiful and upright patriarch who submits to the role assigned to him.

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

From Publishers Weekly

Why did Noah, the one just man of his generation, become the first inebriate in the Bible? Insisting on what the perceptive Shepley terms "the unity, as well as the 'intuition' of the biblical legend," Brelich probes the Scriptures to resolve the apparent indecorum of the venerable patriach. In a genre described by Karl Kerenyi as a "novelized essay," Noah comes in for modern-day analysis, the beneficiary of Freudian thinking and depth psychology as well as the author's wit and well-exercised imagination. Brelich's exegesis includes a theory to explain Noah's 500 years of "dogged sterility" but reaches its height in suggesting Noah's torment in being uniquely aware of the imminent destruction planned by God. As he oversees the construction and provisioning of the ark, Noah is relieved that his family and the villagers deem him mad and therefore do not ask unanswerable questions about survival and extinction, the chosen and the damned. After the flood, Noah cannot forget its victims--but he fears that God can. This exceptionally stimulating work was written in 1954 and first published in 1979 in Italy; Brelich, who shuttled between Hungary and Italy from his 1910 birth in Budapest until he settled in Italy in 1946, died in 1982.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marlboro Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0910395802
• ISBN 13: 9780910395809
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 114