Though Agara boasts many world-class authors (both classical and contemporary,) Járosláv Kábölá is, indisputably, the unchallenged champion of Agaran Letters. His works—numerous phantasmagorical, metaphorical novels, poetry, and philosophical letters to friends and acquaintances—take their place alongside such international authors as Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, and the Russian Greats: Tolstoy and Dosteyevsky. His third novel, The Violet Crown is widely considered one of world literature’s pinnacle achievements. The novel is an extended journey through an unnamed, medieval town besieged by political unrest centered on the probable existence of an Apocryphal Prince. A young alchemist is drawn into court intrigue through his secret romantic assignations with a “Moorish” Court Soothsayer. Much of the novel’s narrative focus remains diffuse, revealing apparently random day-to-day events within the town, rather than the more epic—and, indeed, Romantic elements of the story’s overall genre. Scholars of Agaran literature unanimously maintain that Kábölá intended for the novel to be read in a manner similar to the Talmud: each chapter contains echoes and a distorted doubling of events in the preceding chapters. The truncated opening of the novel, and its incomplete final sentence, draw the entire story into a recursive loop, thus creating a single story with endless reiterations. (The novel opens with the closing half of a sentence, and ends with the opening half of that same sentence.) Whether or not Kábölá’s intentions can ever be known, scholars and critics maintain that The Violet Crown was never intended to be read only once. Indeed, like the Talmud, the novel itself is a series of meditations intended to reflect upon and clarify the very nature of life and perception themselves. Though well-received upon its Agara-local publication in 1730, The Violet Crown did not gain any measure of international acceptance until its English-language translation and reprint in 1950. Since then, it has enjoyed a measure of popularity and intellectual importance, rivaled only by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy (The Age of Reason, Troubled Sleep, and Reprieve.) Like the Existentialists to follow, The Violet Crown is (among many things) an exploration of phenomenology: a perceptual method which functions in the presence of an object and recognizes only the appearance of that object and the role that appearance plays in our consciousness . Phenomenology remains unconcerned with the reality which may exist contrary to that appearance. Though refined to a greater degree by the existentialists to follow, the idea of phenomenology, as presented in The Violet Crown centers on the crown itself—a thistle blossom and not a crown at all—and the manner in which the “…crown of violet, tinged with green and with white…” comes to define the choices and actions of every character in the book. That the characters see a crown, rather than a weed-blossom, is a description not of personal delusion, but (ultimately) the expression of personal choice and self-definition. The characters see what they need to see in order to act to the fullest extent of their will. “The world is not what I think, but what I live,” declared Merleau-Ponty, quoting Kierkegaard, though—undoubtedly—it is Kábölá who said it first. * * * This was supposed to be a straightforward photo and dedication to Kate (KateBlack10) on her birthday, and it turned into an exploration of…Agaran literature. How odd. Maybe I should cut back on the Airzona Brand “Sweet Tea.” At any rate: H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y , K A T E ! Click HERE to check out Kate's gallery. Thank you for viewing, reading and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.