Stylistic Rhapsody

 title from search on G on iphone, which did not show up on same search here on airbook

Stylistic Rhapsody:  Critics characterize the book as dream-like and plot-nebulous, functioning less as a traditional novel and more as a turbulent, erudite prose poem oscillating between despair and rapture.  

so, I got it.  Long essay in NYRB "His Mystic Way" July 14, 1994 issue  is it worth $10. to read it and 9 other issues?   also a long essay (AI?) on something called Grokipedia, what is that?

Furbank, turns out, wrote the big, key, biography of his friend E. M. Forster, also Alan Turing and "a book on political thought."  it's that political thought that helps me dismiss his terrible treatment of Milosz.  

here is his final harshness "Thus, as the Duke’s bravura tirades begin to modulate into Milosz’s serious mystical theories, the reader, battered and bemused by so much exorbitant phrase-making, can no longer quite silence the whisper at the back of his mind, that what the book suffers from is silliness." 

That seemed so clear the night I scanned it and copied out passages.  overnight and the next day I withdrew my agreement with Furbank.  His severe Judgment against Milosz is typical rational judgmental authoritarian dismissal of the poetic, the rhapsode.  As twisted and irritating as the novel, or "novel," is, it does still have many elements and passages that make it entirely worthwhile, as least as a representative work of the period and time as well as the great inner traditions,  both esoteric and exoteric.