The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Checking Availibility...Description
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a startling tale of murder and madness set in a time of troubles like our own. Robert Wringhim is a religious fanatic: one of God's chosen who believes himself free to disregard the strictures of morality--a view in which he is much encouraged by the elusive, peculiarly striking foreigner who becomes his dearest friend. Describing the seductive mutual dependence of these soulmates and the way--efficient at first, then increasingly intoxicated--they go about settling scores with their (and of course God's) enemies, James Hogg presents a powerful picture of evil in the world and in the heart and mind. This work of black humor, acute psychological insight, and, in the end, deeply compassionate humanity is one of the masterpieces of literature in English.
About this Author
James Hogg (1770-1835) was born in the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders. When he was seven, his father, a sheep farmer, went bankrupt and Hogg left school hardly able to read; he could only shape letters "nearly an inch in length," he wrote later in his autobiography. For many years, he worked as a cowherd and later as a shepherd. His mother, however, steeped him in ballads and folklore, and his grandfather was apparently the last man to talk with the fairies. Only in his twenties, when Hogg was exposed to books once more, did he begin to write, his first creations being "songs and ballads made up for the lassies to sing in chorus." At forty, he set out for Edinburgh and, after starting the short-lived satirical magazine The Spy, he wrote poems and stories for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, first published in 1824, has long been considered his masterpiece.
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and now lives in the US. She is the author of a collection of stories and four novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, and Eva Moves the Furniture.
Reviews
James Hogg's great novel is set in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, a city of night and shadow, of lurking eavesdroppers and invisible pursuers, of gloomy wynds and crepuscular crannies. The novel splits and doubles itself, its themes, and its characters: two texts, one following the other, are written from two different points of view; narrating the same terrible story, they contradict each other here and there, forming an asymmetrical diptych, all the more compelling for its discordancy and conflicts.
-- Marina Warner
A work so moving, so funny, so impassioned, so exact and so mysterious, that its emergence from a long history of neglect came as a surprise which has yet to lose its resonance.
-- Karl Miller, The Times Literary Supplement
Neglected at first, this brilliant short novel has climbed in the esteem of readers until it is now regarded as one of the glories of English literature--or, for those who like to subdivide these matters, of Scottish literature.
-- John Wain
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
