In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980

Victor Brombert is one of that vanishing breed, the man of letters. His previous books, which include studies of Hugo, Stendhal, and Flaubert, have tended to focus on French literature. But Brombert is equally at home in English, German, Russian, and Italian, and seems to remember almost every sentence he's read, which gives his prose precisely the kind of allusive depth that's lacking in most academic criticism. Certainly his over-the-top mastery of the canon puts him in an excellent position to write In Praise of Antiheroes--a vest-pocket survey of the antihero in literature, ranging over 150 years and 5 different languages.

Brombert traces the birth of the antihero--a "perturber and a disturber," and occasionally what we moderns might call a slacker--back to Georg Buchner's Woyzeck. He then fast-forwards to such antiheroic masterworks as Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk and Nikolai Gogol's nightmare vision of haberdashery, "The Overcoat." These are all fictional or dramatic works, which seem to be the most likely incubators of contrarian victory. Yet the centerpiece of Brombert's book is his chapter on Primo Levi's classic Holocaust memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. The author zooms in on a particular episode, in which Levi tutors a fellow prisoner in Italian by quoting Dante's terza rima reconstruction of Ulysses. In the ultimate antiheroic setting--the dehumanizing black hole of the concentration camps--this pedagogical labor strikes Brombert as a spiritual triumph: "The recourse to Dante's poetry, in order to teach Italian to an Alsatian fellow inmate in a German camp deep inside Poland, where Yiddish is the common tongue, becomes a symbol of universality and of the possible survival of meaning." Whether Levi, who chalked up his own survival to luck, quite fits into this pantheon of rebels and obstructionists is open to debate. But like In Praise of Antiheroes, his last-ditch recourse to Homer reminds us that old-fashioned humanism has plenty of life in it yet. --Bob Brandeis