Love and Death: An Imaginary Autobiography by Llywelyn Powys

The writing is beautiful, absolutely ravishing, so much so that at first I was just seduced into revelling in it. But then it just got so... annoying. I can't really describe it, it's not saccharine, but the style is just excessive. Powys spends so much time in joyous Wordsworthian outpourings about nature that after a while, I was hoping that he would run out of things and instances to describe. But having said that, the writing is very powerful and sustained in its mystical, almost pagan beauty. The main problem I have with this book is the treatment of women. This is basically the autobiographical recollections of Powys as he imagines dying of tuberculosis (which he did actually have but did not die of) and he focuses on his 'first love', a fairy-like, 'medieval' girl by the name of Dittany Stone. By the end of the book, I know absolutely nothing about her character or thoughts or emotions or anything at all. This is basically the worst instance of completely disregarding and erasing women. It's the narrator's desires and thoughts and feelings that we see, he doesn't even concern himself with Dittany's, only as far as they produce some reaction in him (such as finding her reticence charming). There is a ridiculous amount of praising of sex, but the only aspect of sex that Powys is interested in is his own pleasure. What I did find very interesting is the reversal of the medieval fixation on death. Love and death (as the title indicates) are always side by side, as they are in medieval literature and art. The narrator thinks of Dittany's beautiful body and then thinks of how it will one day rot in the ground the same way that there was a medieval tradition of giving reminders of death (such as rings with skulls) as wedding gifts. But in the Middle Ages, this was a reminder to think of heaven and the afterlife, while Powys, an emphatic agnostic (as he never tires of reiterating), uses the contrast between love and death to represent the brevity of life and his philosophy of enjoying the immediate moment to the fullest. But he's not even an interesting hedonist (like Oscar Wilde), he's all about the wholesome, pure, wonderful pleasures to be derived from sex, nature, the earth, etc. But wonderful writing and some really interesting, arcane words that I have never encountered before.