Brilliant, unclassifiable, and timeless, William Gerhardie was lauded by authors such as Graham Greene, H. G. Wells, and Evelyn Waugh, who believed him to be a genuine genius. The Polyglots is considered one of the underground masterpieces of English literature and, for William Boyd in particular, the most influential English-language novel of the 20th century. It tells of an eccentric Belgian family settled in the Far East during the turbulent years following World War I. Exiled and impoverished after the Russian ...
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Brilliant, unclassifiable, and timeless, William Gerhardie was lauded by authors such as Graham Greene, H. G. Wells, and Evelyn Waugh, who believed him to be a genuine genius. The Polyglots is considered one of the underground masterpieces of English literature and, for William Boyd in particular, the most influential English-language novel of the 20th century. It tells of an eccentric Belgian family settled in the Far East during the turbulent years following World War I. Exiled and impoverished after the Russian Revolution, they receive a visit from a smug English cousin, Captain George Hamlet Alexander Biabologh, who enters their lives during a military mission and becomes witness to their misfortune. The story is filled with overwhelmingly peculiar characters: manic-depressives, obsessive-compulsives, and hypochondriacs. Halfway between Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 , The Polyglots portrays a delirious, tumultuous world in which the irrational surfaces when you least expect it and the legacy of Babel amplifies the unmistakable sound of man.
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