Saga of Rebellion

...He sees that the particular circumstances of servitude—cruel or compassionate masters, easy or treacherous work— make little difference...

...The topics presented range from Swedish drinking habits to government planning, from the Swedish woman and her drive for independence to the institution of the Ombudsman/'— Kirkus Service Indexed • At all bookstores • $6.50 DAVID McKAY COMPANY, INC...

...The Nineteenth Century smothered this strange saga, and contemporary history has not hurried to revive it...

...And it is only she who fills his reveries while he is waiting to die...

...and as a tormented man seeking to preserve his humanity even as he is being sucked into the tragic vortex he himself creates...

...Certainly he stands out in the barren literary landscape as a man who is quite serious about his craft...

...and while they themselves were being systematically hunted down and given the short judicial shrift then considered fitting to their amphibious status as half-men, half-chattel, a hysterical wave of reaction was washing over the countryside and scores of innocent blacks were being murdered indiscriminately...

...His careful probe of contemporary sources, his awareness of current trends and his discussions with leaders in all areas of Swedish life give the reader the opportunity for an unusual insight into modern Sweden...

...Her swishing skirts and sensual presence madden him...

...In this novel, he does not wrench his protagonist out of the ebb and flow of history, however tempting it might have been to make of him a contemporary ghetto insurgent in slave's clothing...

...This brief, probably distorted chronicle is woven into Nat's long, finely-wrought monologue...

...And in this spirit, even more deeply committed to the consequences of his actions and more intensely human, he readies himself for the gallows and the novel ends...

...The author has lived and studied in Sweden for the past fifteen years, has dug deeply into the make-up of the economy, the structure of the society and the character of the people...

...That is, his work is not the recreation of the life and times of an American slave, but the story of a particular man's way of solving the problems which history bequeathed him...

...10017...

...Styron bases his novel, seven years in the making, on the only document left from the rebellion, a twenty page "confession" which Nat made while awaiting the gallows...

...Reminiscing sporadically, he traces the genesis of the revolution he made to the times when he was growing up, a grinning, petted "house nigger" who could read and write...

...Nat finally admits to himself that he too is capable of love...

...Without any romantic nonsense whatever, Styron shows how the conception of himself as chattel eats away at Nat, finally making him lethal, giving him that madness which is insight...

...It is only she whom he personally kills when the uprising finally takes place...

...as a general intelligence brooding over blackness and over the white world's peculiar institution of slavery...

...750 Third Ave., N.Y., N.Y...

...Styron stipulates in the preface that he is writing "less an historical novel . . . than a meditation on history...

...Styron bears down hard on this eerie historical interlude—instigated and accomplished by a tortured, self-proclaimed holy man who came to see himself as God's black avenging angel—and gives it metaphorical weight as a beginning of the American apocalypse...

...Bloody even by our own jaded standards, the uprising was cataclysmic by the standards of 1831: trying to cut a path to freedom, Nat Turner's desperate band randomly slaughtered fifty-five whites...

...It is this intersection of historical and human crisis which makes The Confessions of Nat Turner a novel of major importance...

...Saga of Rebellion The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron...

...He remembers hearing himself referred to as "that slave," and recalls being sold into slavery over and over again...

...It is a classic encounter in which Nat feels constantly a strong emotion for her but, like everything else in his world, this emotion becomes dehumanized and inverted, manifesting itself in fantasies of hatred and defilement...

...Styron is possibly the best writer working in America...

...The Challenge of a Disciplined Democracy by Frederic Fleisher This is a penetrating study of Sweden as it is today — a study that overlooks nothing in exploring the country's rapid advances governmentally, socially, and morally...

...Reviewed by Peter Collier In The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron reaches into the obscure history of his own native Virginia to retell the story of the man who led the only successful slave rebellion in the ante-bellum South...

...Manacled, unable to pray to his living God, the cold autumn wind whistling all about him, Nat faces a barren time when he must come to terms with the implications of his actions...

...The rest is an audacious act of imagination in which Styron presents a view of the hero which is complex enough to forbid easy moral judgments: We see Nat Turner simultaneously as the quasi-literate, God-hungering apostle of violence which, in fact, he probably was...

...Frederic Fleisher's interesting, well-documented, in-depth study of modern Sweden should go a long way toward dispelling the misinformation and common cliches that exist today about Sweden...

...He also finds a white woman, one of the few people who treat him as a human being...

...Nat finds an abundance of signs from the God who hovers about him to validate and make sacred his aims...

...Thus Nat and the particular insanity forced on him are, above all, humanly understandable...

...Nat relates and re-evaluates his life story in the few days before his execution...

...In the climactic moment of the novel, Nat finally recognizes the quality of her humanity when he realizes, in the stolid presence of the attorney who extracts the confession from him, that if he had everything to do over again he would change nothing, except that she should not die...