Natürlich geht es bei Pompeji letztlich um den wohl bekanntesten Vulkanausbruch der Menschheitsgeschichte, bei dem der Vesuv im Jahr 79 n. Chr. ebendiese Stadt vollkommen unter Asche und Lava begrub. Dennoch geht Harris einen sehr interessanten Weg und lässt eine Handlung entstehen, in der zunächst der Ausbruch des Vulkans nur in Vorzeichen angedeutet wird. Die meiste Energie geht stattdessen in die Erzählung über einen Aquarius (den Bauer und Pfleger von Aquädukten), der sich darum kümmern soll die abgeschnittene Wasserleitung wieder in Gang zu setzen, die von Vorboten des Unglücks unterbrochen wurde. An Nebenschauplätzen werden die Lebensgewohnheiten der damaligen Zeit hervorragend dargestellt - Harris lässt das erste nachchristliche Jahrhundert wieder auferstehen. Und natürlich kommt auch eine Liebesgeschichte nicht zu kurz. Sehr schön fand ich auch den Schluss, der sich die befürchtete Kitschszene ersparte.

Auch sprachlich ist Harris ein wirklich hervorstechendes Werk gelungen, seine Sätze haben die Kraft des ausbrechenden Vulkans. Ebenso ist das Werk stilistisch sehr gut gearbeitet, so setzt Harris Vor- und Rückblenden sehr geschickt ein um der Geschichte den nötigen Pepp zu verleihen. Nebenbei spinnt er auch noch eine Geschichte um das Thema Korruption ein, die für Spannung sorgt. Interessant sind die vor jedem Kapitel angeführten Fakten und Zitate zu Vulkanen, die dem ganzen Werk eine weitere Aufwertung geben, denn um dem Genre des historischen Romans treu zu bleiben erlaubt sich Harris keine Anachronismen, und so muss er moderne Beschreibungen vom Text abtrennen.

Die Charaktere sind sehr gut beschrieben und glaubwürdig dargestellt. Trotz des zwangsläufig am äußeren Geschehen orientierten Handlungsverlaufes, macht sich Harris die Mühe seinen Personen Charakter, Tiefe und Glaubwürdigkeit zu verleihen, eine zweifellos wertvolle Herangehensweise an das Thema. Es gibt keine nennenswerten Ausrutscher oder Schwächen, weshalb man das Buch nur uneingeschränkt empfehlen kann - vorausgesetzt der geneigte Leser erwartet sich nicht Action pur.

Robert Harris – Pompeia

De Robert Harris li recentemente dois livros – Conclave e V2. Se com o primeiro fiquei preso pela forma minuciosa e elegante como descreveu a cúria romana e o ambiente da eleição de um Papa, no segundo, V2, senti-me digamos, traído nas expectativas que, achava eu, tinham sido demasiado altas.

Quando comecei a leitura deste “Pompeia”, publicado em 2003 e com uma primeira edição em português em 2022, fi-lo assim tempestiva e sem a promessa de uma qualquer notoriedade. Foi por isso que me pareceu a leitura ideal a iniciar enquanto cruzava o atlântico a 4.500 pés de altitude.
Na primeira página, nas notas do autor, este descreve de que forma como os romanos dividiam o dia (em duodécimas) e a noite (oito turnos), designações que habilmente usou para dar título aos vários capítulos. Assim, e logo no início me apercebi que se não abandonasse a postura depreciativa e se mantivesse o “pé atrás” rapidamente me arriscava a sucumbir à minha própria desconfiança.
E não demorei muito a baixar a guarda e deixar-me invadir pela clareza da escrita, pelas figuras de estilo, pela elegância do enredo, e principalmente conhecimento que o autor denota tanto dos assuntos da vulcanologia, como dos hábitos da vida mundana dos romanos nesse que veio posteriormente a ser conhecido como o ano 79 d.C.
Pompeia de Robert Harris, não é só um Thriller, não é só um livro ficcionado, é muito mais que isso. É um romance, bem guarnecido pelo conhecimento do autor sobre os hábitos e modo de vida dos romanos do sul da península italiana, da forma como se organizavam e geriam a água com as suas magnificas e resistentes obras de engenharia, bem como sobre a ciência e semiologia dos vulcões. Um trabalho de pesquisa notável.
E se esse deslumbramento não bastasse, brinda-nos Robert Harris nesta história ficcionada, mas plausível – podia muito bem ter sido assim, muitíssimo bem escrita e com muitos e variados pormenores, pormenores que habitualmente só são visíveis em escritores maiores.

Quando aterrei no aeroporto Lisboa tinha apenas lido algumas dezenas de páginas. Este não é um livro para se ler de supetão como se não houvesse amanhã. Como quase sempre nas coisas boas, não é para sôfregos, é para saborear.
Espero que também goste! Bon appetit.

After a day in Pompeii -- my mother claims I walked through every single house: not true, some are inaccessible -- I heard people on the platform of the Circumvesuviana local train talking about this book. I was being fussy about everything else I was reading, so I grabbed this on the Kindle store and kicked back with it (once we eventually got back to Rome, anyway; I read The Map of Time on the Eurostar).

It's a quick read, and reasonably accurate to the interpretations of what happened in Pompeii. Obviously, it invents things, and I don't know nearly enough detail to know exactly what, but what I do know, for example the appearance of the explosion and the details about Pliny, seemed accurate.

Obviously, as other people have observed, there can be no suspense about whether Vesuvius will erupt or not -- spoiler: it did, and Pompeii was destroyed; that's just historical fact, like the sinking of the Titanic. But there can be atmosphere, and there are several subplots -- a romance, civic corruption, the work of the engineers on the aqueducts... These are mostly well handled, though I couldn't believe in the love story -- mostly, I felt it was spoilt by the ending, which was a bit too... easy.

Still, it's enjoyable and a fast read, and not even too fluffy. The detail and research is there.

How do you relate a story around an event that a majority of the readership already has knowledge. You really can't have a story that revolves around everybody dying. That is kind of depressing, so Robert Harris gives us a novel with the leading character being a water engineer who slowly realizes what is in store for the population of Pompeii and the surrounding cities.

I was very much invested in his engineer and his interactions with many citizens of Pompeii, who the end is coming. In this book we meet a former slave who has become very rich but is also very nasty. We meet Pliny the Elder, probably the most famous person who perished at Pompeii, and we even get a romance, which was not completely successfully told. Harris succeeds in making this suspenseful as we the reader counts down to the inevitable.

گمانم دوره‌ی راهنمایی این کتاب را خریدم، از پمپئی همین را می‌دانستم که مردمش سنگ شده‌اند و از همان بدکارانی بودند که عذاب الهی سرشان نازل شده. نمی‌دانم چرا در این سال‌ها سراغش نرفتم و امسال در پروژه‌ی اهدای کتاب‌هایی که کمتر دوست‌شان دارم رفتم سراغش که بخوانمش و بعد اهدا کنم که البته بعد از خواندن نظرم عوض شد.
داستان با مهندس سازه‌های آب مارکوس آتیلیوس شروع می‌شود. تابستان ایتالیا داغ است و خشکسالی هم اوضاع را بدتر کرده. در نهایت آب شهر قطع می‌شود و مهندس برای تعمیر راهی می‌شود.
اوایل کتاب برای من سخت‌خوان بود، مدام توضیحات فنی و توصیف آبراه و دشت و کوه که برای تخیل نه چندان قوی من بسیار خسته‌کننده بود. اما از نیمه‌ی دوم داستان سرعت می‌گیرد و خواندنی‌تر می‌شود. ترسیم فضای رعب و وحشت و حفظ جان بدون توجه به دیگران هم به نظرم خوب انجام شده بود.
اما ضعف‌های داستان هم مشهود بود. شخصیت اول، آتیلیوس در سه چهار روزی که در کتاب توصیف شده مدام کارهای فیزیکی سخت می‌کند و تا آخرین لحظه از پای درنمی‌آید که به نظرم باورپذیر نیست.
نکته‌ی جالب دیگر اینکه بین نقد و نظرهای دیگران در گودریدز من هیچ نقد فارسی‌ای برای این کتاب ندیدم.

4,5/5

This book was just okay for me. I liked the historical side of this. I have always found this story kind of 'sadly fascinating'. I just didn't find 'that' in this book. This wasn't particularly character driven. There was a problem with the water plaguing the area and it focused mainly on that without giving depth to the characters. There was a lot time and detail that went into this problem, but I needed that same attention to detail regarding the people. The historical part felt well done; the fiction part just didn't grab me.

Pompeju pilsētas stāsts četras dienas pirms Vezuva izvirduma un tā laikā. Ar holivudisku pieskaņu - varoņi varonīgi izglābjas, mantrausīgie un ziņkārīgie iet bojā.

Ļoti laba lasāmviela pirms došanās ekskursijā uz Pompejiem. Pilsēta atdzīvojas, tukšās mājas un ielas stāsta stāstu par Romas impērijas spožumu. Un postu.

Un atkal spožumu, jo bez Vezuva izvirduma līdz mūsdienām nebūtu saglabājušies tik daudz arheoloģisko atradumu un līdz ar to arī informācijas par ikdienas dzīvi Romas impērijas laikā.

4.5 stars. Not 5 because there were one or two frankly cheesy bits!

Robert Harris brings the eruption of Vesuvius to life in this account which starts 3 days beforehand when the signs were there for anyone with sufficient knowledge to recognise. Sadly, few were in that position but thanks to Pliny's eye witness account, the knowledge was made available to future generations. This is a fascinating account of the build up to the eruption, with each chapter headed by a quote from a scientific journal explaining what was happening inside the mountain. By the final chapters, we were caught in the showers of rock and pumice battering and burying the population. It then took half a minute or less for those who had survived the rock showers to be choked by a cloud of gas and ash that came rolling off the mountain which is why their bodies were entombed in positions of flight and fear. An exhausting read but an edifying and exciting one. Highly recommended.

Attilius's occupation is an aquarius in the Roman Empire, a job description that nowadays would be "director of waterworks operations and maintenance for the southern district of Italy." As the earth beings to swell and shake in ominous warning in advance of the tragedy that is to come, the main aqueduct cracks and fails and Attilius is sent out to repair it. So this is a historical novel and we learn of life in the Roman Empire around AD 79 at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius. Here are masters and slaves, filthy rich and beggars. We get a little romance as Attilius meets the lovely daughter of a viscous, cunning landlord who used to be a slave himself. We learn a lot about Roman culture: meals, daily life, transportation technology, ships, soldiers, relations between men and women, political and financial corruption, and the unique role of the baths in Roman culture. It's an old fashioned boy gets girl despite obstacles romance story during a fast-paced hectic three-day period between when the aqueduct fails and the volcano blows. We learn about the aqueduct system, tunnels, reservoirs and siltation tanks. We learn of famous real-life Romans such as the general and prolific scholar Pliny the Elder and his nephew, Pliny the Younger.

I wasn’t too far along in this novel before I realized that I don’t like historical fiction. The premise was intriguing, that of a Roman engineer of the aqueduct noticing irregularities in the water supply just prior to the eruption. The intriguing part didn’t last long and it just got bogged down in a melodrama about a rich landowner, his daughter, and the engineer.

What really bogged down the story was the author’s misguided attempt at linguistic verisimilitude by using various names for many of the characters (and they all sounded alike).

I would suggest just thumbing ahead and starting at about page 230 and skipping the introduction. Spoiler Alert: the engineer returns to the city mid-eruption over poontang, or however the ancient Romans called it. I didn’t like this at all which leads me to believe that I won’t enjoy his other Roman novels.

I couldn’t wait to move on to reading a history of the Pompeii eruption and I’ve already begun Mary Beard’s Pompeii which I am thoroughly enjoying so far (although I have some problems).

I'm not that much into historical novels, there are only some exceptions. For example I hugely enjoyed Rutherfurds "London". I also like to read about real historical events sometimes, that's why I picked up Pompeii. Very fascinating how much power nature has. Just imagine a fountain of rock and ashes that is shot into the sky and several miles high!!!!

The (for the most part) fictional story is interesting, imaginable und enthralling to some extend. It's also informative. And of course I had to look up Pompeii on the Internet and my big History Chronicle Book.
I wondered why no one (or almost no one) noticed the warnings of Vesus, the reams of little tremors of the earth that happened before the eruption for example... I mean, they did notice the tremors, they just didn't think much about it because they've never seen a volcanic eruption before. Vesuv's last activity had been almost 2000 years before this disaster in 79 A.D., so they simply didn't know what it's like and didn't know that Vesuv actually IS a volcano.

But thanks to Plinius (a scientist of that time) we all know today what happened in Pompeii on this hot day in August and what a volcanic eruption can be like. He didn't survive, but his record did and therefore he provided the first account of a natural disaster ever (if we don't count the ones described in the bible).