Böcker av William Gerhardie

Futility is an astounding, funny, and enchanting novel which mixes eccentric Russian sensibilities with eccentric British brains, both richly possessed by its author William Gerhardie (1895-1977). The novel's narrator, Andrei Andreiech, an Englishman of Russian upbringing, recounts his entanglements with the Bursanov family and his love for Nina, the second of three beautiful sisters. The Revolution destroys the family fortunes, but Nina's father still pins his hopes on his Northern goldmines, gathering dependents who trail him even to Siberia. Andrei also waits, hoping his love for Nina will bring happiness. It is Gerhardie's vivacity and lightness of tone in conducting these meaningful yet ludicrous tragedies of disappointment that marks Futility as one of the great neglected novels of the twentieth century.

To quote William Gerhardie's own synopsis this work is 'a novel about two men treading the donkey-round of paradise deferred, their literary friendship strained to breaking-point by rivalry in love'.

An autobiographical novel recording a true experience out of the body, followed by a London ball at which, against a background of social comedy, the theme is taken up and developed into a passionate argument for the immortality of the soul.

Well known in the 1920s and 1930s chiefly as a novelist (whose books were admired by Arnold Bennett, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others), Gerhardie fell mysteriously silent at the beginning of the Second World War and did not publish another book during the remaining thirty-seven years of his life.

First published in 1936, Of Mortal Love is a simple love story, in the author's own words 'containing fresh love-lore and treating of the succeeding stages of transmutation of love erotic into love imaginative;

The story of My Wife's the Least of It centres on Mr Baldridge, a one-time novelist married to a mad millionairess. Then an early novel of his - Dixie - is recognized as a possibility for a film ... and Mr Baldridge's hard-won philosophical calm is threatened by the endless vicissitudes and absurdities of the film industry.

It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement with an eccentric family of Russian emigres - in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva - and with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove (based on Gerhardie's friend Lord Beaverbrook), who takes Dickin on as a lost cause.

Written with rare candour, this is William Gerhardie's enchanting and entertaining memoir of his early life. Gerhardie writes about his grandparents and parents, and about his childhood in St Petersburg where his father, a British cotton manufacturer, settled in the 1890s.

Teeming with bizarre characters - depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, hypochondriacs, and sex maniacs - Gerhardie paints a brilliantly absurd world where the comic and the tragic are profoundly and irrevocably entwined.

This is the first novel by William Gerhardie, first published in 1922, and it was made famous by H. G. Wells, who described it as 'true, devastating - a wonderful book'.Based on Gerhardie's own experiences as a member of the British Military Mission to Siberia shortly after the October Revolution, Futility paints a picture of contemporary Russian society which deserves comparison with the writing of Chekhov. At the centre of the story is Nicolai Vasilievich, who trails across Russia in the wake of the British Mission in the perpetual and unrealistic hope of seeing his fortunes improve, even though they steadily deteriorate. In counterpoint to Nicolai's comic progression, Gerhardie tells the story of his narrator's hopeless love for Nina, the second of Nicolai's three bewitching adolescent daughters.'William Gerhardie is one of our immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' Olivia Manning'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow