To the Hermitage

Ian McEwan

To The Hermitage delights with a rare blend of intellectual dazzle and narrative seduction. This wise and playful novel takes us right to the inception of the modern secular spirit.

Independent on Sunday

To the Hermitage reads like a love letter to the life of the mind from a man who, in his work as a writer, critic, academid and teacher has done much to contribute to the dizzying circulation of ideas.

James Shapiro

[T]he one Bradbury novel that transcends its cultural moment and may well attract a coterie of admirers and have a long and happy shelf life. . . . breaks new ground . . . a surprising final turn toward the elegiac.
— New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

Transcends its cultural moment and may well attract a coterie of admirers and have a long and happy shelf life...In To the Hermitage, Bradbury breaks new ground.

Spectator

A sinful feast of reason and whimsy....Bradbury is in top form.

Times Literary Supplement

Bradbury's teasing, winking Shandyism gives a center to...a wise and engaging entertainment.

Washington Times

An exuberant, enchanting literary valedictory.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The late Bradbury (Eating People Is Wrong; Doctor Criminale), a noted teacher and novelist, achieves a striking and effective blend of past and present, literary sleuthing and travelogue in this, his last novel. It weaves two narratives: the first concerns an English professor who goes with a group of fellow academics to St. Petersburg on the Diderot Project (a conference devoted to the great French philosopher and contemporary of Voltaire), just as Yeltsin's countercoup in Moscow is coming to a climax. It is also the wonderfully researched and touching story of how Catherine the Great, ever eager to be thought of as a queen of enlightenment, invited Diderot to her palace, the Hermitage, for daily discussions on the nature of the late-18th-century world. A motley collection of contemporary scholars have their own reasons for their pilgrimage, which is much enlivened by academic bickering and inserted conference papers that venture into beguiling byways of history. The professor encounters an elderly librarian who has spent her life trying to organize the unruly collection of Diderot papers amid the rigors of Soviet life; in her, Bradbury has created a deeply poignant character sketch. The windup of the historical segment is no less delightful, bringing Diderot and Voltaire together and offering the piquant suggestion that the plans for a Russian constitution, which Diderot failed to interest Catherine in, became the basis for our own Constitution. The book is overextended, but it is also lively, thought provoking and, in its portrait of contemporary Russia, vividly chilling. For patient readers of a scholarly inclination and with a liking for the stranger corners of history, this will be a treat; many will unfortunately find the length and density daunting. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The late Bradbury's final novel is a clever dual narrative that compares Denis Diderot's Age of Reason to the postmodern 1990s. The first story follows the French encyclopedist as he travels from Paris to Catherine the Great's court in St. Petersburg. The acquisitive Catherine has just purchased Diderot's personal library. Now she wants to hire him as her librarian. In the second narrative, a British novelist attends an international Diderot conference held in St. Petersburg in 1993, just as the military coup against Boris Yeltsin is unfolding. When an American deconstructionist in a baseball cap refutes the very notion of an Age of Reason, the conference collapses into drunken anarchy. To the Hermitage recapitulates Bradbury's lifelong obsessions, including modern critical theory, academic politics, and Anglo-American relations. The playful postmodern style intentionally confuses historical idioms (e.g., Diderot learns that the king has "prebooked a small suite in the Bastille," should he decide to return to France). This genuinely funny book will be remembered as one of Bradbury's best. Recommended for most fiction collections. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A love letter of sorts to the leading "philosophe" of the Enlightenment, as well as an urbane satire on the pretensions and absurdities of academe. This tenth (and last) novel by the accomplished writer-critic, who died last year at the age of 68, consists of two alternating plots, one set in 1773, the other 220 years later. In the 1993 story, seven latter-day Canterbury pilgrims (including its narrator, an unnamed novelist and teacher who might as well be Bradbury himself) are gathered together for a scholarly enterprise known as the Diderot Project-and travel to Stockholm, then St. Petersburg. The varied group includes an overripe diva, a carpenter, a diplomat, and a skirt-chasing deconstructionist: representatives of Denis Diderot's wide range of interests. Juxtaposed against their misadventures (which begin on the rundown Vladimir Ilich, the ship conveying them eastward) is the novelist's imagined reconstruction of Diderot's own journey to Russia, made at the behest of Empress Catherine the Great (who wants his library)-and of their deliciously witty conversations (presented in play form), in which the philosopher's passionate libertarian views make little impression on the monarch's serene political pragmatism. Bradbury attempts parallel discourses in the contemporary sections-but his oblique lampoons of academic double-talk and Boris Yeltsin's beleaguered tenure are unexceptional (they're in fact the kind of thing he did better in The History Man, 1975, and the Booker-nominated Rates of Exchange, 1983). Still, the best parts of this awfully overstuffed novel are its most discursive moments. Bradbury had a versatile, interesting mind, and there's something quite moving abouthisreverence for the transmission of a broad general culture and his evident belief that the power of an agile, restless mind like Diderot's can have influence far beyond the reach of political expediency. Not much happens in Hermitage, for all its length. But readers should enjoy eavesdropping, especially on the philosopher's attempts to "civilize" the imperturbable Empress. Bradbury's grave and reverend (at times downright farcical) swan song is one of his most assured and entertaining performances.