The Seducer's Diary

I just had the pleasure of rereading this book that I first read 20 years ago on the recommendation of one of my graduate school professors. It's an impressive statement of belief in the power of the mind over the superficial while playing to a wholly inappropriate (but amusing) chord of self pity and thinly veiled self love. A great perspective on Soren's mind.

...by contemporary pop memoirs like "The Game" and "The System." After all, whatever weaknesses those "pick-up artists" overcame, be it shyness or baldness, they certainly didn't have to deal with having a hunchback or living in a society which elevated prudishness. As a second advantage, Kierkegaard also learned how to write. Don't hate the player...

This was truly, an amazing read! The words that will be written here, can never begin to tell the complexity of this story. Soren tells, of seductive love, and loss of, through Johannes and Cordelia. Was Kierkegaard a scheming madman, or simply a fool...The story is told by Johannes, a man ten years Cordelias senior, who spins a web, to bring this young girl of seventeen, into womanhood through an erotic seduction of the mind. Johannes, a brilliant intellectual, I believe, uses the ripple effect of thought to determine the out come of each move that he plots. For instance, when you drop a stone into water, it sends out a ripple of rings, each one, a different path to take, each with it's own set of consequences. Constantly, he's questioning, thinking, and calculating. Johannes, purposely studies everything about Cordelias' life. Her circle of friends, her family, her daily schedule. Then he makes sure to intervene un-noticed. For example, he knows that at 11am she will be walking down a particular street, he makes a point to walk past her. A day of shopping , to be in the store where she is at. But never approches her, always standing in the shadows. Subconsciously, he's placing his image in her mind. When he discovers that she lives with her Aunt, he sets out to court the Aunt, and befriends Edward, a shy, awkward boy, who's infatuated with Cordelia. But Johannes only uses Edward, to his own advantage of course, exposing Cordelia to the differences between Edward, the boy, and himself, the man. Eventually, Cordelia takes notice, and poor Edward is soon discarded. It's at that point when Johannes askes the Aunt for Cordelia's hand, in an engagement. The Aunt agrees, and Cordelia and Johannes begin their journey.If you have ever been in love, truly in love, you will feel it written within the pages of this book. The kind we may only find once in our lives, if we are lucky enough for fate to expose it to us with open eyes. I believe that Johannes, found the truest, purest love, with Cordelia, but chose to play a game of the mind, instead of listening to the heart. Which in the end, haunted him the rest of his life! This book is filled with visionary metaphors, which only adds to it's beauty. Once you attain the rhythm of the prose, it flows like sweet nectar on the palate.

As most Kierkegaard buffs will know, this novel is actually a small part of the monumental philosophical tract, Either/Or from 1843. Please don't let that fact keep you from reading this delightfully seductive and disturbing novel. In it, Kierkegaard sets out to describe and explore the life of the ultimate aesthete, Johannes, as he targets an innocent young girl, Cordelia, for seduction. Kierkegaard plays with layers of framing and writes such exquisite prose that at least this reader constantly has to struggle not to be seduced by the beauty of it. His aim in writing the text is, at least in part, to show how horrible Johannes and people like him really are, but a surprising number of people just plain don't get the subtlety of Kierkegaard's irony. Hannay's translation doesn't seem to get in the way (I've read it in the original Danish as well), although I'll leave it to the Kierkegaard scholars to determine whether its really a good translation or not.

This reader is torn between joy that this amazing text-within-a text is in print and available to an English-language audience and concern that it is taken out of the context of its intellectual "home," the monumental philosophical work Either/Or. Be that as it may, the Seducer's Diary alone is an entrancing read. The layers of metafiction and seduction are dizzying, the tone and pace wonderfully genteel, but with a hard and frightening core that is guaranteed to give most readers pause. The Diary was written as a supreme example of the concept of the asethetic in the "Either" section of Either/Or. "Or" takes up Kierkegaard's notion of the ethical. Both the aesthetic and the ethical turn out to be pathetic stages on life's way according to Kierkegaard, the only true path being the religious. But don't let the philosophy hamper your enjoyment of the ultimate reflective seducer. Kierkegaard's Johannes makes Don Juan look like a clod.