King Coffin A Novel eBook Conrad Aiken
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Inspired by the infamous case of Leopold and Loeb, King Coffin is a chilling glimpse into the mind of a twisted genius
The sun is setting over Harvard, and Jasper Ammen is not impressed. A brilliant student who loathes all that the world has put before him, he gazes with contempt at the beauty of the campus, the intellectual pretensions of his fellow students, and the gaudiness of the sunset, for none of these approaches the majesty of Jasper’s mind. A reader of Nietzsche and Stirner, he is convinced of his own superiority, and has decided to prove it in the most irrefutable manner with the perfect murder.
Ammen will choose his victim at random and commit the unsolvable crime before a host of witnesses who will see what happens but not be able to understand it. Only his closest friends will realize that he has gotten away with murder, and they won’t be able to stop him or see him punished for the ghastly deed.
An intense and disturbing portrait of rationalism taken to a dangerous extreme, King Coffin ranks alongside the works of Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky as a masterpiece of psychological realism.
The sun is setting over Harvard, and Jasper Ammen is not impressed. A brilliant student who loathes all that the world has put before him, he gazes with contempt at the beauty of the campus, the intellectual pretensions of his fellow students, and the gaudiness of the sunset, for none of these approaches the majesty of Jasper’s mind. A reader of Nietzsche and Stirner, he is convinced of his own superiority, and has decided to prove it in the most irrefutable manner with the perfect murder.
Ammen will choose his victim at random and commit the unsolvable crime before a host of witnesses who will see what happens but not be able to understand it. Only his closest friends will realize that he has gotten away with murder, and they won’t be able to stop him or see him punished for the ghastly deed.
An intense and disturbing portrait of rationalism taken to a dangerous extreme, King Coffin ranks alongside the works of Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky as a masterpiece of psychological realism.
King Coffin A Novel eBook Conrad Aiken
This novel is very much worth reading, as long as you are willing to spend your time inside the head of an unpleasant young man who is planning a murder solely for the sake of murder – a supposedly “pure,” disinterested killing to be performed as a sort of “algebra” problem.Reviewing King Coffin in 1935 in The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote: “Mr. Aiken, of course, by keeping his story inside the egocentric consciousness [of the main character], has had to sacrifice all the usual enticements of the novel in the way of vivid objective characterization. I wish I could convey with what poetry and subtle drama, with what pathos in the climax …, Mr. Aiken has compensated the reader. Mr. Herbert Read once wrote of the psychological complexity of James’s world that ‘it was obviously the real world, the only world worth describing, once your course is set that way. Henry James went ahead, fearlessly, irretrievably, into regions where few are found who care to follow him.’ Mr. Aiken is one of the few – which is only another way of saying that he is perhaps the most exciting, the most finally satisfying of living novelists.”
While I wouldn’t go as far in my praise as Greene did, King Coffin is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in some time. Plus, if you’ve ever lived in the Harvard area (Cambridge/Boston), you may get additional enjoyment out of Aiken's precise descriptions of exactly where the action takes place. He even gives the exact address of one character's house, where important events occur -- and you can still see the house on street-view in Google maps.
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King Coffin A Novel eBook Conrad Aiken Reviews
This novel is very much worth reading, as long as you are willing to spend your time inside the head of an unpleasant young man who is planning a murder solely for the sake of murder – a supposedly “pure,” disinterested killing to be performed as a sort of “algebra” problem.
Reviewing King Coffin in 1935 in The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote “Mr. Aiken, of course, by keeping his story inside the egocentric consciousness [of the main character], has had to sacrifice all the usual enticements of the novel in the way of vivid objective characterization. I wish I could convey with what poetry and subtle drama, with what pathos in the climax …, Mr. Aiken has compensated the reader. Mr. Herbert Read once wrote of the psychological complexity of James’s world that ‘it was obviously the real world, the only world worth describing, once your course is set that way. Henry James went ahead, fearlessly, irretrievably, into regions where few are found who care to follow him.’ Mr. Aiken is one of the few – which is only another way of saying that he is perhaps the most exciting, the most finally satisfying of living novelists.”
While I wouldn’t go as far in my praise as Greene did, King Coffin is one of the more interesting novels I’ve read in some time. Plus, if you’ve ever lived in the Harvard area (Cambridge/Boston), you may get additional enjoyment out of Aiken's precise descriptions of exactly where the action takes place. He even gives the exact address of one character's house, where important events occur -- and you can still see the house on street-view in Google maps.
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