To See The Sun by Kingsley Amis author of Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html and another seventeen masterpieces 10 out of 10

 To See The Sun by Kingsley Amis author of Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html and another seventeen masterpieces

10 out of 10

 

 

To See The sun is a short story that takes the vampires myth and plays with it, along with offering an alternative to Dracula, using what could be parody, this time the vampire, antihero – or hero for the blood thirsty, or the Dahmer type – is not the infamous count, but a countess, Lukretia Valvazor…what a funny name.

 

Stephen Hillier is the guest who arrives at this place in Dacia – we are not in Transylvania anymore, but just on the face of it, the chosen name for the realm of vampires is in fact the old province, which the Romans occupied after two wars, the last one in 105/106 AD, and this in historical terms the ancient name for Romania, which now has Transylvania, albeit Viktor Orban and some of his more fundamentalist allies wish to have back – where he is invited to stay by the spectacular Countess Lukretia Valvazor.

The descriptions sound familiar, even if we are talking about a century ago – oh, let me tell you that joke we had, if the end of the world will come, the American and Chinese presidents will come on television, or whatever media we may say, and they proclaim that they have the space ships, they can leave the earth and at the same time the president of Dacia aka Romania will also show up to say ‘don’t worry, we are at least one hundred years behind’… a gap that in the meantime has been reduced to just about a few decades, and if we think of Trump, then on the issue of leaders, we have one that is at least one million times better than the ‘very stable genius’ – and there were few roads and motor cars.

 

We now have plenty of cars (too many says one who is riding the bicycle) and the situation with roads is one that most motorists complain about, only g=few kilometers of highway are extant, but to return to the vampires, the countess falls in love with her visitor, who is equally infatuated with her.

Notwithstanding that, outré, bizarre happenings occur and the guest is able to witness a funeral, of uncle Aleku Valvazor…Cantacuzinu and Sturdza are mentioned in the tale and these two are some of the most important names in the history of this country, where there have been some stories with the undead, but if we look at the culture of most countries, we will find the supernatural, the ghosts populating tales.

 

We have a very interesting, scientific explanation for some of the vampirism, accounts of the undead coming to haunt humans, and it has to do with ergot, a fungus that affects rye, finds its way into the bread and then whole villages report that they have seen the dead rising from their graves, in what is mass hallucination…

 

I have worked in the hospitality business some decades back, and had to talk about vampires I am tempted to say all the time…one of the most popular trips clients wanted was the Dracula Castle aka Bran shindig and the we had to discuss the myths and the connection with Vlad the Impaler aka Vlad Tepes, the latter a ruling prince with such peculiar habits as to make him a model for the Vampire King, albeit in his defense, local historians have highlighted that across Europe and the world, punishing with cruelty the enemies was a ritual that knew variations, but they were invariably merciless.

The signature punishment for Vlad Tepes was to impale the ones who have lost his trust, often just envoys, in one particular case, he had asked beggars, fellows with disabilities if they want to end this terrible life and when they said yes, he gave them all a meal and set the place on fire, but coming back, his personal favorite has been to put the wretched creatures on top of huge pointed sticks and then pull them down, thus penetrating their bodies…come to think of it, analysts would have something to say about that.

 

An explanation for the vampire myth was that people would take care of the graves, but found inside that the body they had buried has moved, and therefore we can speak of the ‘undead’ seeing as they are not in the straight, on the back posture they had been entered and that could have been due to an assortment of causes, principally, that they had not been deceased at the time when they have been placed in a hole, maybe due to epilepsy or some other condition that makes others mistake the living human for a dead body.

Hence the habits we know, associated with the vampires, the garlic, stake through the heart, although there are variations that Sir Kingsley Amis mentions in his short story…when I used to take customers around this realm, to Transylvania, and even here, in the southern part, called in the middle ages Wallachia, we used to touch on the places where Vlad the Impaler stayed, was presumed to have passed by – the Bran Castle is supposed to have had him as a guest in the dungeon…

 

However, Vlad Tepes is celebrated as a hero – unde esti tu Tepes Doamne – regretted by populists, misinformed and crazy fellows, there is this myth that still holds Tepes and others like him as saviors,  and not just of this realm, but of the whole of Europe, or most of it, some pompous theory that has been debunked by Lucian Boia http://realini.blogspot.com/2012/07/lucian-boia-istorie-si-mit-in.html in the manner in which Josephine Fey takes a good look at Richard III and comes to the conclusion that the monster that we all knew that has killed his young nephews was in fact no demon, and that infamous story – ‘And now all the clouds that loured upon our skies, in the deep bosom of the ocean buried’ – is what we call today fake news, Richard III was in reality a decent man http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-daughter-of-time-by-josephine-fey.html

http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-russian-girl-by-magister-ludi.html

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