That too is very rare I don’t forget easily. I was just asking Gudia whose life Irving Stone had written about in The Agony and the Ecstasy, because as far as I am concerned I have completely forgotten.

But I say even though it is only a reflection in the mirror, it reflects something of the real hence I count it. That’s what one feels about his second book.

Everybody does it in their own bathroom, looking in the mirror…. When he wrote The Agony and the Ecstasy he was imitating himself, and that is the worst imitation. When he wrote Lust he was not imitating, he was a virgin island. When you know that you have written a book like Lust for Life, the ordinary human instinct is to imitate oneself, to create something of the same order, but the moment you imitate it cannot be the same. The second book is a little lower, but it is not the fault of Irving Stone. Both are beautiful, but the first is of transcendental beauty. There are hundreds of novels written on the lives of artists, poets, painters, but none of them reaches even to the height of the second book, what to say of the first. Although he failed, the book stands second – not to any other but to his own.

Perhaps Stone was thinking that he would be able to create another Lust for Life, but he failed. It is The Agony and the Ecstasy, again based on another life in the same way. I count it second because it is secondary, not of the quality of Lust for Life. The book is written so beautifully that the possibility that even Irving Stone will be able to transcend it is remote.Īfter that book he wrote many others, and my second book today is also by Irving Stone. It is spiritual in my sense, because to me all dimensions of life have to be incorporated into a single synthesis only then one is spiritual. Lust for Life is not just a novel, it is a spiritual book. Nobody has written so intimately about somebody else, as if he is writing from his very own being. Stone has done such a tremendous work that I don’t remember anybody else doing the same. It is a novel based on the life of Vincent van Gogh. The first book today is Irving Stone’s Lust for Life.

Lust for life vincent van gogh book