Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Dover Thrift)
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Beggars belief - This is a gripping read.Poor Quincey is left first to starve by his friends and then becomes dependent on opium in order to relieve the torture of his decayed teeth.What I found most interesting was the way in which opium revived long lost memories from his youth and childhood in extraordinary detail-Quincey himself remarks with astonishment at the brain s hidden powers of retention-something which is more commonly related as an effect of trauma and near-death experiences (as in my life ran before my eyes).Amazingly,despite his dependency Quincey still kept churning out the copy like an old trooper and hung on to his teeth.Thank goodness for modern medicine!
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Anyone looking to read a juicy, scandalous account of opium in the 19th century will be bitterly disappointed. That is not to say that De Quincey s work is not brilliant and engaging. However, his prose style can be frustrating to the reader in search of simple entertainment. It is only towards the end of the book that De Quincey begins to describe his opium visions-- the rest of the narrative is a dense, minutely detailed account of his childhood and the struggles of his adolescence. He takes the reader through various stages in his life in passages which are extremely digressive and wordy. However, If the reader is patient enough to labor through the prose, he or she will be richly rewarded by the eloquence of a brilliant mind. De Quincey s style could be compared to a musical work which moves slowly, yet progresses to a crescendo all the more grand for its deliberation. His stock of knowledge is immense, and he writes with authority on virtually every subject from the poetry of Wordsworth to the etymology of his own name. He seems to delight in the process of memory and its property of magnifying incidents of the past to mythical proportions and setting patterns for the future. He takes a psychoanalytic view of his life years before Freud. To him, opium seems a prism through which to examine the themes of his past, and his narrative is largely a psychological self-scrutiny. In his early life, De Quincey runs away from school, tramps around in Wales, sets off for London, and lives penniless and starving among prostitutes and men of dubious reputation. A highly sympathetic character, he strives to learn from all humans regardless of station. He describes his wanderings in detail, discusses the impact of opium upon his life, and concludes by describing a few of his dreams in passages which approach virtuosity in style. He reveals himself as a thoughtful nonconformist driven to share his innermost perceptions of himself and the world. Alethea Hayter s introduction details his life and works, and the carefully chosen excerpts from his letters and revised version of the Confessions round out the reader s view of De Quincey.