The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Being Dead by Jim Crace are two of my all time favorite books. When I saw that both Cunningham and Crace endorsed a new book, I bought it immediately.
The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner is a masterpiece and it is impossible to put down. Based on the basic description (a “vivid portrait of life in Rome” and “a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours”), I thought there might be parts of it that would be like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (not in terms of the narrative, but in the sense that the main character in both books are confronting their own death).
It is not. In general, I liked Never Let Me Go (I wrote about it here), but the narrator in The Uncertain Hour is far more philosophical and his anguish more palpable and so the book forces the reader more fully into the story.
I generally require narrative first and writing second (I learned that from Only Revolutions which I wrote about here), but in this book the reader gets both. Plus, it is filled with numerous excellent quotes so these are just a few of my favorites.
On living and death:
We owe so little time to life, and all eternity to death, so let’s pay off our small debts first, Petronius. (32)
On reputation:
A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. (44)
On civilization:
“When it comes down to it, he thought, isn’t all civilization just an exercise in measuring time, in pacing off the foundations on which to build a model of the universe of oneself?” (138)
On love and empire:
“I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric.” (170)
It is not often that I read a book and have no complaints, but, in this case, I am unable to think of even one.
