Tarr is a classic fiction written by Wyndham Lewis and published in 1918. It is considered his first novel. Lewis is an English painter and writer and is known for his Vorticist movement. He was one of the founders of Vorticism, which disagreed with painting nudes and natural landscapes. Vorticists to some extent preferred abstract paintings.
Lewis's narrative revolves around the story of two men in pre-WWI Paris: Frederick Tarr and Otto Kreisler. Frederick Tarr is an English artist who abhors Germans yet has an affair with a German woman, but only for physical pleasure which goes away by time. Otto Kreisler, is a German artist who is not as successful as Tarr, but his characteristics are opposite Tarr. Both men are interested in the same two women: Bertha and Anastasya. Bertha and Tarr get married but two years later get divorced because Tarr wants to care about his art and his principles. Bertha is also raped by Kreisler.
The novel basically shows the social status of people in the pre-war era, and the differences between English and German thinking. Tarr is said to have the same characteristic as Lewis, and Kreisler is said to have the same characteristics as Hitler, which people said that Lewis extraordinarily predicted.
Tarr received numerous reviews from different sites and news articles. For one, it earned a 3.5 out of a 5-star rating on Goodreads. Len Gutkin from Modernism writes: "Though the novel’s titular character functions partly as a mouthpiece for Lewis’s own aesthetic and social views, the articulation of these views in a compelling novelistic framework lends them a very different valence than Lewis’s views as expressed in the Blast manifestos". Jonathan Bowden from Counter-Currents wrote that Tarr "indicates the tyranny of originality, for all of the characters disconcert by dint of their inability to say anything unoriginal".
