A Severed Head

Rating:
Summary: The irrationality of love
Review: What is so special about this book is the way in which it manages to balance the funny with the tragic, and the romantic with the demonic. It is extremely funny to see how the characters are affected by love, and how they are gradually transformed from rational beings into irrational and occasionally ridiculous beings. Some of the scenes are terrifically funny sometimes bordering on slapstick. In this sense "The Severed Head" reminded me of a typical Shakespearean comedy. But as is also known, comedy often, if not always, also has a more serious dimension which is perhaps not as lucid as the comic elements but is nonetheless tacitly present. For example one might question whether it is actually love which drives the characters towards eachother. Is it not rather desire and self-obsession, which is mistaken for love? Are the characters not just looking for something meaningfull, and trying to find a purpose with their existence? At the end of the book love no longer seems to mean love in the romantic sense since almost all of the characters have had affairs with eachother. Here we clearly see a quite serious and contemporary problem, is there such a thing as true love in modern society or is it all just a game without true feelings? For Geordie, one of the female characters in the book it is not all a game since she tries to commit suicide, because her lover, the protagonist of the story, has leaft her. To sum up, it was this blend of the comic and the tragic which for me made the story so good. Although the book is fairly old, it works 100 percent in our postmodern age where doubt and insecurity are some of the key characteristics. As the novel deftly exemplifies this can be treated and observed in many ways and in many modes, and this plurality should appeal to the contemporary reader in many ways.