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Strange Genius of David Lindsay by Colin Wilson PDF

Scan of a rare and long out of print book.

A biography of the cult fiction writer David Lindsay, whose classic work "A Voyage to Arcturus" is regarded as one of the major cult novels of the twentieth century.

A Voyage to Arcturus has been described as the major "underground" novel of the 20th century. The secret of Lindsay's apparent originality as a novelist lies in his metaphysical assumptions.[9] Like the gnostics he seems to have viewed the "real" world as an illusion, which must be rejected in order to perceive genuine "truth". In The Haunted Woman, the two main characters discover a room which seems to exist only some of the time; while they are there together, they can see more clearly and express themselves honestly. In The Violet Apple, the fruit of the title is of the species eaten by Adam and Eve, and Lindsay's description of its effects is a startling, lyrical episode in a novel which is otherwise concerned with rather ordinary matters.

Lindsay's austere vision of "true reality" seems to have been influenced by Norse mythology. After being out of print for many decades, Lindsay's work has become increasingly available. In 1971, A Voyage to Arcturus was produced as a 35mm feature film by William J. Holloway. It was the first film to be funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant and has recently been re-released. Harold Bloom was also interested in Lindsay's life and career, going so far as to publish a novel, The Flight to Lucifer, which he thought of as a Bloomian misprision, an homage and deep revision of A Voyage to Arcturus. Bloom, however, conceded that his late-comer imitation is overwhelmed by Lindsay's great original. Colin Wilson was also interested in David Lindsay. He wrote an essay, "The Haunted Man: Lindsay as Novelist and Mystic" that first appeared in the book The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1970), as well as prefaces to The Violet Apple, The Witch and Sphinx.[10]

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