Our classic book review takes us this time to the US, the birth country of the great writer Thornton Wilder (1897-1975).
Thornton Wilder was a playwright and a novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize three times. His first was for the novel The Bridges of San Luis Rey (1928). The second and third were awarded for dramas titled Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943).
His hit play: The Matchmaker (1954) was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly! He also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s movie Shadow of Doubt in 1943. Wilder was proficient in four languages including French and Italian from which he translated plays and wrote two operas. He continued to write his whole life and received several awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963).
This week’s novel is called the Ides of March and as the title suggests, the main character of the book is Julius Caesar. What makes this book special is that it’s an epistolary — a novel written as a series of letters.
The letters are exchanged between many famous characters that existed during the lifetime of Julius Caesar: Cicero the lawyer and orator, Catallus the poet, Clodia and Clodius Pulcher the infamous siblings, Caesar’s second wife Pompina, Caesar’s aunt Julia Marcia, Marc Antony the well-known general and Cleopatra the queen of Egypt. Other minor characters correspond as well such as Brutus and his mother Servilia.
The letters exchanged between the different characters outlines a clear picture of Rome during that time including its culture, politics, famous incidents and the daily life of Roman citizens. Different political and social events in the book lead gradually to the assassination of Caesar on the 15th of March 44 B.C. Although the correspondence is totally imagined by the writer, yet the incidents mentioned are real.
For example: the visit of Cleopatra to Rome and the violation of the sacred rites by Clodius Pulcher. Thornton adds a fictional figure: Turrinus — a retired soldier and a friend of Caesar who lives on the island of Capri — to whom various characters write but never receive a reply. What makes the book fascinating and unique are these exchanged letters.
The same event could be narrated and analysed by different characters depending on how closely they’re related to each other and how intimate they are to the main character Julius Caesar. Another interesting angle is Caesar’s own opinion and concerns regarding different characters and incidents — mainly voiced to his friend Turrinus — based on letters and personal documents intercepted by his network of spies.
The novel is divided into four books, each starting earlier and ending later than the previous one. Although his real inspiration for writing the book came after eight months visit to Rome as a visiting archaeology student in 1921, Wilder started writing it almost twenty years later and published it in 1948.
At that time, he met Sartre and was influenced by his existentialist ideas — as well as the work of Danish philosopher Kierkegaard — which set the philosophical framework of this novel. The book I read is the 2003 copy which has extra materials for those interested in knowing more about the writer, the concept behind the book, interview extracts and the impact it had after being published.
The forward is written by a fellow American writer Kurt Vonnegut JR. and the last few pages has original manuscript extracts with corrections made by the writer himself. Although the theme of Ides of March is well known and overly written, yet Wilder’s version remains the best being richly texted and timeless. History fans won’t be disappointed.
Rasha al Raisi is a certified skills trainer and the author of:
The World According to Bahja. rashabooks@yahoo.com
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