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Katherine Rundell

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - A Sunday Times bestseller Hardcover – 14 April 2022

by Katherine Rundell (Author)

88 ratings

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** A Sunday Times bestseller **

'Every page sparkles.' Claire Tomalin
'Crackling with gusto and sympathetic intelligence' Andrew Motion
'A triumph.' Matt Haig
'A wonderful, joyous piece of work.' Maggie O'Farrell

'Blazingly intelligent and witty' Telegraph
'Frankly brilliant' Sunday Times

John Donne lived myriad lives.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love.

*

From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed 'act of evangelism', showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Faber & Faber
Publication date

14 April 2022
Dimensions

13.5 x 2.5 x 21.6 cm
ISBN-10

0571345913
ISBN-13

978-0571345915
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Review

Fascinating and incisive . . . spell-binding. -- John Carey

Rundell captures John Donne's unique vision in all its power, eloquence and strangeness . . . she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. -- Lara Feigel ― Guardian

A wonderful, joyous piece of work . . . with fierce, interrogative intelligence. it is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see. I just loved it. -- Maggie O'Farrell

Blazingly intelligent and witty . . . the biographer Donne has been waiting for ― Telegraph

Frankly brilliant . . . On reading this extraordinary biography you are left concluding that [Rundell's] talent, like that of her hero's, must somehow be super-infinite. ― Sunday Times

Katherine Rundell's brave and detailed new biography of John Donne is just the book we need: the life, family, historical background, religious questions and - best of all - the poetry, are imaginatively researched and subtly treated. The result is worthy of its subject - every page sparkles. -- Claire Tomalin

Crackling with gusto and sympathetic intelligence, Super-infinite places John Donne fairly and squarely in his own times, while making those times feel contiguous with our own. We meet all his closely-entangled selves - wit, poet, lover, husband, soldier, priest - and all of them are cleverly drawn, creating a portrait in which closely-observed details are ingeniously set against a background of long perspectives. -- Andrew Motion

What a Super-Infinite delight is this, this is the rich, textured and excellent biography that I have always wanted to read about Donne - it brings the poet, his poetry, his many lives and his turbulent Elizabethan and Stuarts times vividly to life. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore

Katherine Rundell makes Donne come alive as a remarkable and extraordinary and almost boundless human being. His life was one of despair and joy, the sacred and the profane, deep love and pain, and this book is filled with such infectious passion and fascinating detail that it shines like its subject. A triumph. -- Matt Haig

'Katherine Rundell has a wonderful touch, light yet profound, which perfectly suits her extraordinary subject. The book combines delight in Donne's humanity and his intellect, even as it delves into his metaphysics. Unmissable.' -- Simon Jenkins

This book unravels that knotty, witty, passionate poet John Donne. Completely at home in the middle of this Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Katherine Rundell has produced what is in itself a paradoxical and beautifully crafted work of literature - something much greater than mere critical simple biography. -- A N Wilson

Super-Infinite is a stylish, scholarly and gripping account of Donne's ecstatically divided self, 'hurried by love' and by man's 'inborn sting': a work super-relevant to our own troubled times.

-- Rose Tremain

In Rundell, Donne has an authoritative and sympathetic chronicler ― Observer

What a delightful book Super-Infinite is: companionable, astute, intimate in tone and clear-eyed in judgement, it brings Donne and his milieu to glorious life. I loved it. -- Nick Laird

There can be no better companion than Rundell in a bracing pursuit of John Donne. Throughout this sure-footed and eloquent biography, she encourages us to listen attentively to his many voices, and to the voices of those around him. -- Diarmaid MacCulloch

Book Description

From a standout scholar, a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber; Main edition (14 April 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0571345913
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571345915
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.5 x 2.5 x 21.6 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 5,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 21 in Literary Theory & Movements
- 47 in Biographies on Novelist & Playwrights
- 62 in Poetry (Books)

Customer reviews:
88 ratings

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Ash Raymond James

Ignore the one star review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 April 2022

The one star review stating labyrinthical isn’t a word is entirely false. It is not common or usual but it is a literacy word for labyrinthine. John Donne was born in 1572. There will be uses of words you are not familiar with. Research before you slander somebody’s work.

51 people found this helpful

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gjh

Stunning.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 April 2022

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Will be not just the definitive understanding of Donne of our time, but ought to transform the way author biographies are written. The prose throbs so perfectly in synchrony with the language, texture and spirit of the subject that each sentence not only describes Donne, but enacts him. It's a tightrope walk and a hell of a bold and stylish experiment, one which would I think, thrill Donne himself.

Another reviewer on this site misses the point somewhat when they note, as an example of what they misrecognise as overcooked prose: '[ …] “labyrinthical” does not exist. She means “labyrinthine”.' The word in fact does exist. It first appears in - and most likely was coined by - Donne.

18 people found this helpful

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Felicity

Infinitely Super

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 April 2022

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This is the most surprising, hilarious and inspiring literary biography I’ve read. It makes you want to race off and read everything Donne ever wrote almost as much as it makes you want to read more Rundell. Pure magic!

11 people found this helpful

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David Hugh-Jones

Too like a podcast

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 July 2022

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A good basic test for criticism is, should you read this, or just read Donne himself? Unless you already know him very well, you should just (re)read Donne.

It’s hard to say why. The prose is lively and striking, there’s no academese. There’s a lot of interesting background about London and the period. But you never get a really in-depth sense of the man, perhaps because biographical details are all too clearly sparse; and you never get a really in-depth sense of the ideas in the poetry. So: if you don’t know Donne and wouldn’t appreciate him, this isn’t for you. If you don’t know him and would, then read Donne instead. If you do know him, then you probably want something less breathless and meatier. Overall, this is like those history podcasts where they spend 20 minutes making jokes and 10 minutes giving you the bare bones of their topic.

2 people found this helpful

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Albertine Simonet

Donne for the twenty-first century

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 July 2022

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It is good to have a Donne worthy of the twenty-first century - for those of us who cannot handle a poetic extract much longer than four lines, and for those of us who like our critical judgements in the form of snappy sound-bites (e.g. 'He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote'). I lecture on Donne and tried out some of Ms. Rundell's pronouncements on Donne's intellectual development on my students, to their great amusement- for example, that 'with his fine blue eyes and aquiline nose, Wotton was to prove a true ally'. But, on balance, we learnt more about how Ms. Rundell's mind worked than Donne's, and this was not edifying. In fact, her book rather contradicts her introductory contention: 'In the twenty-first century, Donne's imagination offers us a form of body armour. His work is protection against the slipshod and the half-baked, against anti-intellectualism, against those who try to sell you their money-ridden vision of sex and love. He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought.' I resent having been seduced into buying this book by the extravagant puffs provided by writers I admire. I do wish writers wouldn't scratch each other's backs in this manner. In fact, this is a rather fashionable show-off book which will be well forgotten before the year is out. Academically, it adds nothing to our understanding of Donne and it promotes him in an overblown and distorted manner.

One person found this helpful

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Jeff Kaye

Unravelling the beauty of John Donne's poetry

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 August 2022

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The challenge of writing a biography of John Donne seems not just about the lack of biographical information that is available but also the clear temptation to swim in the sea of his poems and other writings that, after all, are not just his heritage but his afterlife.

I have read biographies of Donne before, notably John Carey's excellent "John Donne: Life, Mind and Art" originally from 1981, which I read in 1990. There is also John Stubbs' "Donne: The Reformed Soul" from 2006.

Here, at last, is a book by someone not called John that promised much and delivered more. Katherine Rundell has written a book that permits the reader some of Donne's lines but not many while bringing Donne alive in so many other ways. As this book resides on the thesis of Donne and his mental wranglings about eternity and the super-infinite, it is a wonderful notion to make him (and those close to him) re-birthed. One feels their presence, their living, their suffering, their day-to-day problems of finding a way to survive while Donne, forever doing the same manages, meanwhile, to be, in my mind, the greatest poet produced by this country, endeavouring to continuously challenge each reader to untangle the contours of his brain that he makes real in ways that ensure the metaphysical is earth-bound.

This is a book that I would have enjoyed to keep reading well beyond its end. It is a book that compels a reader to take up Donne's challenge - to read his poetry and see all things, life, death, marriage, sex, in a way that no one else could but in ways that open up new avenues of thought. His poetry is exhilarating as was this biography.

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Souffee

In places of necessity speculative.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 July 2022

Verified Purchase

In places, although not many, Americanisms creep in. Ms Runnell may well be American, it’s a bit of a jar. As she fully admits records from Donne’s time are scarce so like all writers on history speculation is used instead of hard facts which is fair enough. As long as the reader doesn’t mix it with the truth. Isaac Walton comes in for a bit of stick but hard to tell if it’s justified. I found this personally a bit hard going. The prose is less than crystal clear. A lot of names, mostly aristocracy from the time, crop up sometimes just sketchily but the book isn’t an in depth history of the times.

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