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Rating: "Many times in my life, I have felt the extraordinary sensation that my 'self' was splitting, that other beings lived or had lived within it, in other eras or places."
What to say, where to start if not from the end? Because every end has a new beginning, every death generates a new life, different from the previous one. Imagine if we could remember all our past, and I don't mean our childhood or our first steps, but our past lives, our "selves" that preceded us centuries and centuries ago. Crazy stuff, you might say, and who believes in reincarnation? But if all this were possible, think of what benefits we might find by remembering that we were heroes of glorious expeditions, or what hatred in recalling the times when we were slaves of noble patricians. Thus, we would begin to give a different meaning to our life, it will no longer be unique, but universal, expanding in an ocean of time, and thus we could give more or less weight to good or bad events that happen in our life. This is what Darrell Standing, protagonist of Jack London's latest novel, "The Star Rover," must have thought. A former professor, now a prisoner in San Quentin for murder and about to be sentenced to death, Darrell, during the long straitjacket sessions he undergoes, learns to transcend his body and travel back through the centuries, among his past lives. He remembers being a close friend of Pilate, a priest of the Nile of the early Christian era, a leader of an American pioneer caravan, a castaway on a deserted island, and much more. In the last pages of the novel, Darrell prepares to meet his fate, strongly criticizes the death penalty, "a disgrace to the society that tolerates it," and wonders who he might be tomorrow, in his new life, wishing to inhabit the body of a modest farmer, or better yet, a "vegetative" existence like that of the guard on duty, a primitive being, of very little intelligence, who has never suffered the torments of spiritual problems.
This review is an invitation to recover this novel, ambitious and far from London's more famous works, which is based on a continuous contrast between the harshness of the prison condition suffered by the body and the lightness of the soul that flies through past lives, a novel that only a vagabond like London could have written.
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By piccolojedi1991
The little death isn’t what might seem like an Opium crisis, but he truly returns to being all those people he has been in his past lives.
This book, in short, not only raises awareness of the prison conditions but remains modern and current, a hundred years after its writing, with a beautiful message.
