Tiberius Caesar

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>A great work of literature and a profound reflection on state terror from a man who spent forty years fighting one.</strong></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Tiberius Caesar--a free standing work in its own right--completes Boche?ski's Notorious Roman Trilogy--probably the most important literary work to come out of Eastern Europe since World War II.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>After the picaresque volume 1 Divine Julius (how to overthrow a republic in four easy steps) and the poetic volume 2 Naso the Poet (how under tyranny poetry can get you into trouble) comes volume three Tiberius Caesar: a horrifying tale of the second emperor of Rome: the man who normalized political terror. A moral intellectual emotional zero whose only skill in life was to grab power and hang onto it. At any cost.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Tiberius Caesar is on the one hand a vertigo-inducing look into the great echo chamber of fear an insight into the mediocrity who ruled terrorized and murdered all his betters because he could and because they made him do it.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>But the book is also a brilliant work of literature with deeply moving passages of beautiful prose many of which would stand as independent essays:</span></p><ul><li><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: var(--__N4QdCheV6mGo#0f1111)>how the police state hires its executioners</span></li><li><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: var(--__N4QdCheV6mGo#0f1111)>what it is like to read--perhaps better said: to work through--Tacitus in his original Latin</span></li><li><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: var(--__N4QdCheV6mGo#0f1111)>an evocative (and hilarious) description of a summer night on Capri in 1970</span></li><li><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: var(--__N4QdCheV6mGo#0f1111)>an imaginary visit to a Roman bordello in AD 16</span></li><li><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: var(--__N4QdCheV6mGo#0f1111)>a moving and stylistically astonishing scene of Cocceius Nerva reading Cicero's On the Laws</span></li></ul><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>If you enjoy the rich prose of writers like Kazuo Ishiguro or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez the style of this book will astonish and delight you with its many pleasures.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>And if in your pleasant and secure life in a Western constitutional democracy you have grown complacent and bored with all the freedoms you take for granted--you should read this as a warning. Because you should be afraid. You should be very afraid. If you lose your democracy this is what you will have.</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>This is a very beautiful and a very important book. Don't miss it. Pick up your copy today.</strong></p><p></p>