The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Mario Vargas Llosa's novel shifts between the disintegrating Peru of the 1980s and a period 25 years before to tell the story of failed revolutionary Alejandro Mayta. It is not a secret that Mayta's quixotic campaign to light a socialist spark failed; that much is clear from the first pages. But Vargas Llosa is able to create suspense to such an extent that as the book approaches its climax the reader is actually willing the revolt in the remote mountain town of Juaja to succeed. Mayta's story is told by a novelist who interviews the surviving principals a quarter-century after the events. Memories are unreliable, but the novelist is not necessarily after the truth. He wants to tell a story. Along the way are astute commentaries on the revolutionary mindset and a devastating portrait of the depths to which Peru had sunk by the mid-1980s, when this novel was published. This is my second go-round with The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I suspect it will be just as spellbinding when I read it for the third time five years from now.

Fast Company

Jon Bradshaw's Fast Company profiles "six master gamblers" -- as the cover puts it -- in poker, pool, golf and backgammon. But "gambling," meaning playing a game of chance, isn't the best description of what they do. What they do is find an edge and press it. And money is not the objective; it is simply a way of keeping score. The objective is action and defeating an opponent. Bradshaw's style is sharp but completely transparent, allowing the philosophies and personal histories of his subjects to come through at full strength. His account of the Bobby Riggs-Margaret Court match in 1973 is a textbook piece of reportage, from Riggs's strategizing through the nearly shot-by-shot account of the event itself. Everyone remembers Riggs losing to Billie Jean King later that year; Bradshaw lifts this match out of its undeserved obscurity.

The Biggest Game in Town

Al Alvarez is a poet who has also written books on mountain climbing, suicide, and dreams. This depth is why his 1983 book on the World Series of Poker has achieved the status of a classic in its field. Alvarez's interviews add to the players' two dimensions a third of his own. He is not a phony gonzo reporter; he is a sincere, intelligent, interested outsider who writes in a crisp style and who allows his subjects' quotations to run for long paragraphs, even pages. When Alvarez encountered the World Series of Poker, in 1981, it was a much smaller and more freewheeling event than it has since become. It may be nostalgia to think so, but the players of that time seem more philosophical, or at least more capable of expressing an abstract thought, than the crude celebrities who populate the game today.

Vargas Llosa's Nobel

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize in literature is welcome for several reasons. It is, first, a well-deserved honor for a brilliant, sensitive, and meticulous writer. I have read all of Vargas Llosa's novels at least once, and I have yet to find a false or poor sentence. The technique in which he, seemingly effortlessly, interlaces scenes from periods years apart in the same chapter is but one example of his superb craftsmanship. The novels are made like fine Swiss watches.

The prize will also bring Vargas Llosa's work and his thinking on literature to a wider audience. His Nobel lecture, on the importance of fiction and reading, can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/25tkp82. It gives some of his personal history and illuminates the motivations behind his work. Those motivations are at least as old as Virgil, which is why no matter when Vargas Llosa's books are set they all seem timeless.

St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

D.H. Lawrence's nonfiction has impressed me. But if St. Mawr is any indication of the quality of his novels, Evelyn Waugh must have been correct in being bored stiff by them. St. Mawr is a horse, a magnificent horse, a pulsing, living, arrogantly alive creature. That sentence is an approximation of the Lawrentian style, in which everything is said, nothing is hidden, and all emotions are overblown. A woman falls for a horse, finding it a worthier companion than her mewling husband, then heads off for the American Southwest, with the horse, and renounces men altogether to stare at the desert.

In the second half of this volume, The Man Who Died, Lawrence with a straight face has Jesus say, "I am risen!" when he achieves an erection. The story begins wonderfully, in the spare style of Par Lagerqvist, but declines into travesty when Jesus travels to Lebanon and meets a young woman at a temple of Isis. He is still alive after the Crucifixion because, he says, the Romans took him down from the cross too soon. There is a lot of overheated rhetotic amid the intersection of pagan and Hebrew traditions, and Jesus ultimately impregnates the woman and wanders off. What could have been as striking a tale as Anatole France's Thais falls embarrasingly flat. Lawrence got into a lot of trouble with the censors, who found him unredeemably dirty. I am beginning to think they had a point.

Reborn

Susan Sontag's first volume of journals, edited by her son, spans her years from adolescence to her 30s. The entries reveal an incandescent, questing intellect. There is too much fragmentary material to make Reborn consistently engaging, as Max Frisch's notebooks are, for example, but there are vital passages and epigrammic wisdom on subjects like marriage, homosexuality, literature, and philosophy.

Point Omega

Don DeLillo's prose has an aridity and a metallic tang that is enhanced, I believe, by the fact that his books are set in Electra. Point Omega reminded me at times of the Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, both for its setting and its detached style. If you are looking for a traditional narrative, look elsewhere. If you are looking for ice-cold sentences stacked one on top of the other, it's here.

Outside Looking In

Garry Wills, who subtitled this episodic memoir "Adventures of an Observer," has the qualities most needed in an effective observer: modesty, curiosity, and intellect. While not quite Zelig, Wills has been witness to a number of important scenes, including the one at a Memphis funeral parlor where Martin Luther King's body was prepared for public display. His ideological journey was marked by fearless honesty. There must be other people like Wills writing today; they are just so hard to find amid all the noise.

The Years With Ross

James Thurber's affectionate account of his years working for New Yorker founder Harold Ross is filled with anecdotes that will surprise anyone who thought the magazine was the product of an intellectual. Ross was an ambitious, hard-working, manic editor, but he couldn't be bothered to read anything but pieces for his magazine. He once poked his head into a assistant's office and asked: "Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?" He refused to read A Farewell to Arms because "I understand the hero keeps getting in bed with women, and the war wasn't fought that way." His favorite marginal note on manuscripts was "Who that?" He said there were only two names guaranteed to be recognized by every reader: Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes. A person meeting Ross for the first time at a dinner said that in the first half-hour he couldn't imagine anyone less suited to running the New Yorker. By the end of the evening he couldn't imagine it being run by anyone else.

Buying a Book for No Good Reason

I recently won an auction online for The Bonney Family by Ruth Suckow. I didn't know the book, had barely heard of the author, and really had no good reason for making a bid. When it arrived today I was reminded that although there may be no good reasons for buying a particular book, there are always reasons. Such as:

• The book is a signed, limited edition of the first edition. My copy is No. 39 of 95. Ninety-five is a small limitation, as these things go. If Ruth Suckow ever makes a comeback, my $9.95 will have been well spent.
• $9.95 is about a fifth to a tenth of the going price. I realize a book is worth only what someone is willing to pay, but even as a shelf-filler it will have been worth it.
• The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928. Knopf insisted that his books be well-made and attractive. This one is beautiful, in fine condition, and printed on Borzoi Rag Paper. It makes the books publishers put out today look like junk.
• Who knows? I might read it and find out that I love Ruth Suckow.

If It Die ...

Andre Gide's autobiography is a model of frankness and modesty. But he acknowledges that, as truthful as he tries to be, it is likely that more honesty is to be found in his novels.

The Feast of the Goat

I am re-reading Mario Vargas Llosa's 2001 novel about the Dominican dictator Trujillo and am impressed again by his ability to build interest, and suspense, with a meticulous yet seemingly effortless hand. Vargas Llosa's thing has always been creating a "fictional reality," in essence a spell cast over the reader to make him believe not only that everything he is reading is true but that what is happening could not happen in any other way. A reader is immersed in a Vargas Llosa novel: characters lift off the page, sights and smells are real, and the momentum becomes irresistible. It is a credit to this novel that, knowing what is ahead, I still am eager to experience it all over again.

Pilgrim at Sea

Pilgrim at Sea, the title of the penultimate volume in Par Lagerkvist's series of biblically inspired novels, is both literal and metaphorical. The uncertain pilgrim of the last volume, Tobias, lands on a pirate ship where he meets Giovanni. The story Giovanni tells of his religious training, love affair, and expulsion from the church make up the bulk of the book.

As usual, Lagerkvist is capable of freighting the simplest sentences with larger meanings. For example, when Giovanni explains the lengths to which he and the lover go to deceive others and conceal their affair, he says, "It is strange how much one must lie once one has begun. ... One must lie over trifles, and things that have nothing to do with the real big lie. The original great falsehood may be fateful and fundamental, but the lies it entails can be absurdly trivial." It is simple to take this at face value, but what if the reader journeys a little deeper and thinks about another "great falsehood" that Lagerkvist may be alluding to? Say the divinity of Christ? The great lie, if such it is, is then also followed by "absurdly trivial" lies within the church -- the whole structure of rules and indulgences and ceremonies and penalties said to have been inspired by God but maybe no better than the tawdry tales told to cover an illicit affair.

Or take these lines, when Giovanni's devout mother learns of his disgrace: "She depicted for me all the agonies of hell. ... She reveled in the thought of that torture. ... I was always something special, always the chosen one -- the chosen one of her and god; the one to be presented, given away -- to someone else. To Almighty God, for his use. To Him she had renounced her only child. Now she gave me away to the devil." The nature of the fanatic is coldly, plainly, and horrifyingly presented.

Lagerkvist is a frightening writer because he takes apart everything the reader has taken for granted and exposes it to a harsh light. The illumination is softened at the edges, however, by the author's tremendous humanity.

'The Immortals'

The French and Swedish academies name their literary "immortals," so here is my list of 18 for a hypothetical American Academy. With some, I've read nothing they've written but recognize their reputations. Any writer -- novels, songs, poems, nonfiction, plays -- is eligible. According to the traditional rules, you're in till death, then a replacement is named.

• Edward Albee
• T.C. Boyle
• Don DeLillo
• Bob Dylan
• Joan Didion
• David Mamet
• Cormac McCarthy
• Larry McMurtry
• Toni Morrison
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Annie Proulx
• Thomas Pynchon
• Philip Roth
• Sam Shepard
• Stephen Sondheim
• Gore Vidal
• Garry Wills
• Tom Wolfe

Mornings in Mexico

D.H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico is less a travel book, as the title might imply, than a work of anthropology and metaphysics. He observes the Mexican and American Indian rituals and dances, attends their fiestas, walks their streets, and draws his conclusions. A trip to the market, where he haggles over fruit and sandals, produces the observation that the real purpose of all the buying and selling is not money but human contact. "Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark of exchange. That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone, forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact."

Mocking Desire

The experiences of a Slovene writer on a teaching fellowship in New Orleans make up this sly and comic novel by Drago Jancar. Many of the scenes are impressionistic and dreamlike -- a striking account of Mardi Gras is especially good -- creating a strange world that is both New Orleans and another place, entirely original, out of the author's imagination.

The Death of Ahasuerus

Par Lagerkvist picks up the tale, begun in the The Sibyl, of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Ahasuerus stands in for modern man in his ambivalence toward Christ and his ultimate rejection of God. By reimagining and reinterpreting biblical themes, the author sheds a brilliant, strange light onto ancient questions. He does not, however, write prescriptively. Characters grasp their way in the dark -- sometimes hopeful, more often confused. Ahasuerus's release, his Holy Land, comes at last, and the reader may find comfort that it is through a fate that eludes no one.

Out Stealing Horses

With his well-made sentences, Per Petterson looks with perception at families and their traumas. There are echoes of Faulkner and O'Neill in Out Stealing Horses. Giving an example of his fine writing is probably the best approach:

What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that's what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves toward the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded this week, and no one deserves it more than Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa. He proved in 2001 with The Feast of the Goat that he was still going strong into his 60s; it was easily his best book in years -- harrowing, canny, and poignant. I need to re-read his works from the beginning, but I can say from memory that there are few literary experiences more powerful than The War of the End of the World, an epic masterpiece. On top of it all Vargas Llosa has shown in several novels a sparkling sense of humor. The Nobel is an honor he deserves, and more importantly it would give thousands of new readers a writer to treasure.

Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep is Linn Ullmann's first novel, translated into English in 1999. Like her three later efforts, all of which I've enjoyed, it is worldly-wise and a bit strange (not too much), and filled with the kind of honesty about people and families that is all too rare in contemporary fiction. The story is unimportant; it is the characterizations that are key: of three generations of a family, split between New York and Norway. There are hidden nuggets strewn through the book, for example when Karin Blom, the narrator, says that she "read somewhere" about all the different kinds of thunder: rolling, crackling, echoing, and so on. I am quite certain that she is referring to Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, where those descriptions occur. For someone not so old, Ullmann gives the impression of have seen, read, and lived much. Being the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman seems to have served her well in becoming a novelist.

Strait is the Gate

Andre Gide's novel has moments of great power and beauty, but its earnestness can wear on a reader. A story of human love thwarted by the desire for spiritual perfection, Strait is the Gate presents its two main characters in all their dimensions and frailties, but with barely a lightening touch. Thus a book so slim, and with such elegant writing, feels uncomfortably heavy.

The Ministry of Pain

This novel by the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic examines the lives of exiles without a country to return to: the former Yugoslavia. Set in Holland, a flat land that absorbs pains of the past like a blotter, as the author neatly puts it, the story follows a Croat language and literature teacher and her Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian pupils as they attempt to navigate a limbo in which they cannot be truly at home anywhere. This is the type of novel -- sincere yet knowing -- that reconfirms to me that the best literature is being practiced far from American shores these days.

Scum of the Earth

At the lowest point of Arthur Koestler's account of his confinement in France at the outset of World War II -- he is imprisoned by the French as an alien and then, after his release, goes on the run from the Nazi advance -- he wonders, "Will we ever be on the winning side?" He is speaking of himself and his allies on the Left, hounded from place to place throughout Europe. The Soviet Union was not yet any help, having signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis and calling the war against Germany a fight for "imperialism." It was a bitter irony that those who were the most anti-Nazi in France in September 1939 were those most likely to be punished by France. Scum of the Earth is an indictment of the old men like Petain but also the whole bureaucracy down to the lowliest clerk. Koestler details his days at the infamous Vernet camp, where he and his comrades slept on straw in barracks with no heat. Throughout his entire ordeal, enountering hundreds of Frenchmen, he finds maybe one or two who could be called, at a stretch, admirable.

The Sibyl

In his deceptively simple prose style, Par Lagerkvist reimagines the tale of the Wandering Jew and sends him to meet an old woman, a former pythia, who had been expelled from the temple at Delphi. Her attempt to find god, and the reason for her expulsion, make up the bulk of the narrative. Her god emerges as cruel, jealous of man, and served by mendacious professional acolytes. The Wandering Jew, likewise, saw Christ's cruel glare when He was denied rest on the way to Golgotha. The universality of religious experience was explored by Anatole France in books set in the transition between the pagan gods and Christianity. Here Lagerkvist follows that path to a profound result.

Pornography and Obscenity

This 40-page tract by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, takes aim at the "dirty-little-secret" pornography of the day, those films and novels that no censor touches because of their patina of purity but which serve only to provoke an unhealthy sexuality -- specifically, masturbation. By contrast, Lawrence finds the healthy and open attitude toward sex found in, say, Boccaccio, praiseworthy. He blames the whole destructive attitude toward sex on the "gray ones" of the 19th century, "the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie." And he offers a forceful and philosophical argument against masturbation, an act which produces "nothing but loss." He laments its effects on culture: "The sentimentalism and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our modern literature, is a sign of self-abuse. The author never escapes himself, he pads along within a vicious circle of himself." An exhilarating book.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

In seven biographical vignettes spread over a mere 135 pages, Danilo Kis delivers a wrenching indictment of the lengths to which ideology, in this case communism, can deform the human animal. The oblique form of the stories, in which a narrator grasps at incomplete and inconclusive biographical documentation, serves to deepen their meaning by highlighting the ambiguous motivations of the doomed and the randomness of their demise. Kis's tales are not without a wry humor, which makes them even more realistic and therefore more terrifying.

Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer's novel achieves the improbable by enticing the reader into caring about a callow, shallow character named Luke Barnes. Could Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their ilk have been as repellent in the Paris of the 1920s as Barnes and his pleasure- and love-seeking cohort are in the Paris of the 1990s? Possibly, but the earlier group was more colorful, literate, and creative. Dyer's crew is gray. He carries off, nonetheless, several striking scenes, including the death of a deer and a gang beating. And there is the sex. In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Dyer achieved the near-impossible by writing sex scenes that were neither pornographic nor laughable. Here his scenes are similarly intense and graphically descriptive but in no way gratuitous or titillating -- just meaningful.

Fatuous Jonathan Franzen

On a video clip, the author says he wants to talk, through one of the characters in his novel Freedom, about "the elephant in the room" -- overpopulation. See, people naturally want to procreate, but overpopulation is either the cause or an aggravating factor of all of our problems. Someone should point out to him that the most jam-packed place on Earth, Singapore, is also just about the richest. Poverty is caused by many things, but the Malthusian view that overpopulation is at its root has not been seriously believed for decades. A writer who declares he wants to address "the elephant in the room" is pompous enough, but when the elephant is a dusty, stuffed relic, he makes himself ludicrous.

Horrible Jonathan Franzen

The New York types are falling over themselves to praise Jonathan Franzen and his new novel (cover of Time, rave by Sam Tanenhaus), but if an excerpt I read online is anything to go by, I'll let this parade pass me by. I actually couldn't finish the excerpt; it was that suffocatingly bad. A sample:

"In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture ...

"There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary?"

All of this seems expressly designed by Franzen to appeal to the very people who can logroll his product. It reeks of falsity.

I'll stick with my Honore de Balzac. At 15o years' distance, he knew more about people in the 21st century than Franzen ever will.

Andalusia

If Somerset Maugham went somewhere and wrote about it, it is doubtless worth reading about. His Andalusia, published in 1920 by Alfred A. Knopf, is an affectionate but hardly sentimental portrait of a people he deems both lazy and boisterous, thieving and generous, in a landscape he finds both dazzling and desolate. Through it all he sees echoes of the region's Moorish heritage and cause, primarily aesthetic, to lament its passing.

The End of Sleep

This novel by Rowan Somerville made me hungry for shish kebab. It follows a failed Irish journalist named Fin through a series of misadventures in Cairo. As funny as the telling is, Somerville also captures the sights, smells, and tastes of Cairo with a piquant vividness. Fin's hunt for the perfect kebab is undertaken to locate a Cairene friend in peril. The description of him masticating an aromatic cube of roasted lamb is literally mouth-watering. The book lands among the top rank of those of its type, as impressive as P.H. Newby's The Picnic at Sakkara.

The Driftless Area

A novel that can be read in one or two sittings earns favor. It shows that the author has a clear and direct style and the skill to achieve narrative velocity. This book could have been written by a slightly deranged Sherwood Anderson.

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes is directing and playing the lead in a film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus due out next year. I've been reading the play and watching clips from a 1984 BBC production starring Alan Howard in a literally hair-raising performance as the Roman general Caius Marcius (later Coriolanus). His colossal hauteur and disdain for the mob could strip paint. His mother, Volumnia, played in the Fiennes film by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals her nature plainly when she says that blood

"more becomes a man
Than gilt his trophy: the breasts of Hecuba,
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword, contemning."

Priest or Pagan

This forgotten 1933 novel by John Rathbone Oliver, published by Knopf, mixes Dickensian elements of hidden identity with a dash of the occult as two men -- one a priest, the other a pagan -- fight for the soul of a young man orphaned at birth by the death of his mother. It is a long, twisted tale with a full cast of characters and a good amount of suspense and drama. Oliver (1872-1943) was a psychiatrist who studied under Freud, later a criminologist, and also took religious training. This novel, considered his most successful, is entertaining and worthwhile.

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

This is a review of mine published in the July 25 St. Petersburg Times:

The exotic has its appeal, but the people in William Nicholson's domestic novel don't need to buy a Tuscan farmhouse or wade into the Ganges to find a higher existence. It's right there at the breakfast table or on the train to work.

Set in a southern English village over six days in 2000, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life introduces a large cast of ordinary, middle class characters in short chapters, then connects them in a widening circle that, to the author's credit, seems as natural and weightless as a spider's web.

At the center are 40-somethings Henry and Laura Broad, parents of two children. They are comfortable, mostly happy, yet vaguely unsatisfied. A letter to Laura at breakfast one morning arrives like a thunderbolt: Her first love, Nick, unseen since college, has flown in from California. Their intense affair, along with the crushing pain he caused by walking away, is seared in her memory, making the return both unsettling and a little thrilling. Laura asks herself, "I have security, loyalty, kindness. Am I allowed excitement? Am I allowed ecstasy?"

Nicholson, also a playwright and screenwriter with Shadowlands and The Retreat from Moscow to his credit, has a fine ear for dialogue. His lucid, transparent style gives the reader easy access to the characters. In just a few deft strokes he captures the essence of the summer Laura and Nick spent together 20 years before: "The early evenings were the best time, better even than the nights. The farmhouse was set in a hollow, with only limited views from its deep windows, so they had dragged two armchairs out of the back parlor and up the grassy slope to the edge of a small wood. Here beneath the shade of an oak they sat and watched the sun descend over the hummocky hills and drank vermouth and talked in a drifting inconsequential sort of way. The chairs were side by side, close enough to reach out and touch each other. The evenings were warm. No one else ever passed down the long unmade track that led to their hidden valley."

The return of the old flame and Laura's response is one of several suspenseful strands that Nicholson teases out slowly and cinematically as the characters intersect and confront life-altering decisions. The narrative gathers momentum with nothing more extraordinary to sustain it than the death of dog, a trip to the opera, a parent-teacher conference or an outing to buy a dress. One character's simple possession of a button is made, for example, into something hauntingly sad.

"Beauty lies not in the thing seen but in the quality of the seeing and that comes rarely," Henry Broad muses. Open your eyes to everyday life, the story suggests, and you may be startled, even exhilarated, perhaps devastated.

In this novel Nicholson puts everything plainly on the table: doubts, motivations, desires. You will search in vain for irony or a single smirk. You will find instead a tremendous sincerity. If that comes off as a little old-fashioned, it is also more than a little refreshing.

The Loved One

Coming back to Evelyn Waugh after an absence is always rewarding. This short novel about the death industry in the United States sprouted from a visit Waugh made to Hollywood. It offers sharp insights into American culture that still stand up. For example, a British expatriate observes about Americans: "They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."

There was a film made of the book shortly before Waugh's death, directed by Tony Richardson. It is appropriately weird, but the author was said to have hated it. By 1965, however, Waugh was in an advanced state of decrepitude (despite being only in his early 60s), so his judgment is not necessarily to be trusted.

The Handmaid's Tale

This is the first Margaret Atwood I've read. I have nothing against Canadians: One of my favorite writers is the late great Mordecai Richler. Picking this one up by accident (it was in a stack from a friend to be given away or sold), I plunged into it quite easily. As dystopian novels go, it has all the creepiness and plausibility required. It is skillfully constucted in overlapping flashbacks that slowly reveal the whole horrifying picture. Yet somewhere about page 200, the droning tone and heavy moral sledding brought me to, "All right, enough -- I get it." Seems like it would have made a perfect 30-page story.

A good poem

Late-Flowering Lust
by John Betjeman


My head is bald, my breath is bad,
Unshaven is my chin,
I have not now the joys I had
When I was young in sin.

I run my fingers down your dress
With brandy-certain aim
And you respond to my caress
And maybe feel the same.

But I've a picture of my own
On this reunion night,
Wherein two skeletons are shewn
To hold each other tight;

Dark sockets look on emptiness
Which once was loving-eyed,
The mouth that opens for a kiss
Has got no tongue inside.

I cling to you inflamed with fear
As now you cling to me,
I feel how frail you are my dear
And wonder what will be --

A week? or twenty years remain?
And then -- what kind of death?
A losing fight with frightful pain
Or a gasping fight for breath?

Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust.

The Tango Singer

Tomas Eloy Martinez's novel sends a New York student into the labyrinth of Buenos Aires in the troubled summer of 2001 to find a mythical, and yet real, tango singer whose rare and apparently random appearances may form a pattern worth unlocking. It is a wild ride of politics, history, music and film, magically told. This novel will send me scurrying to two others by Martinez, Santa Evita and The Peron Novel.

Death in Venice

I have been around and around on the subject of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, both the story and the Luchino Visconti film made from it. After several readings and viewings, including watching the 1971 film again this week, it seems that Visconti has taken what is essentially a tale about an old pervert and inflated it with a debate about the nature of beauty. In the film, Aschenbach argues that beauty in art can only be produced by suppressing the natural world and its base instincts. True beauty comes from an elevation of the spirit and mind. But in Venice he is confronted with a human specimen that refutes all this high-sounding theorizing. The contradictions are painful psychically, matching the physical pain of the cholera that ultimately kills him. Visconti's slow, watchful eye is among the film's strongest features. He sets up a scene and then executes long panning shots that offer the viewer a wealth of details. He also uses the zoom to dramatic effect. Art like this requires not only the spirit and the mind, but hard work.

The Tartar Steppe

I am not embarrassed to say that I burst into tears on reading the last sentence of Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe. It is a book of such exquisite melancholy, so well drawn, that the end comes as both a thunderbolt and a relief. It is the story of a young military officer posted to a remote fort on the northern border, facing a vast desert. He and his colleagues await the enemy, and wait, and wait, hoping for glory or at least meaning in their lives. The themes of isolation and hopelessness are explored elegantly, coolly, and without a whiff of sentimentality. There is not a single false note in the book. A paragraph, nearly chosen at random, will suffice to give an idea:

"One after another the pages turned -- the grey pages of the days, the black pages of the nights, and both Drogo and Ortiz (and perhaps some of the other senior officers) felt a growing anxiety that they might no longer have enough time left. Insensible to the wasting power of the years the Northerners made no move, as if they were immortal and it meant nothing to them if they gambled away whole seasons. But the Fort contained poor mortal men, with no defense against the work of time and their final term was upon them. Points in time which had once seemed unreal, so distant were they, now suddenly appeared on the nearby horizon and brought to mind how ruthlessly time strikes its balances. Each time, if one were to go on, one had to work out a new system, find new terms of reference, console oneself with the thought of others still worse off."

The Tartar Steppe is called a modern classic. It is a book that could be read profitably every few years for life.

Chapter the Last

I have tried twice, and failed, to finish Faulkner's A Fable. Is that his fault or mine? Whichever, the book shows what can happen to a writer as he ages, collects laurels, and loses his youthful dynamism. Knut Hamsun gives another example with Chapter the Last, a novel which has been an agonizing read for me. Having sprinted through, and loved, his early novel Hunger, I found this one, the work of a man in his 60s, disappointing and flabby. There are some excellent passages that give hints of the writer he was, but they are long in coming.

The whole thing reads like a cross between Magic Mountain and Ten Little Indians: A group of people at a mountaintop sanitorium start dying or disappearing. In fact I wonder if Thomas Mann read this before or during the composition of his classic. Each character in Chapter the Last (the name a character gives to death) represents a part of the human spectrum of behavior, and as such never takes off as a fully formed being.

The translations of Hamsun that Knopf published in the 1920s have never been reissued and are the only way for an English reader to read the more obscure works. That makes them relatively expensive. I will be reselling this one and using the proceeds to try another, perhaps Benoni.

The Imperfectionists

In The Imperfectionists, the story of an English-language newspaper in Rome, Tom Rachman utilizes a crystalline, lucid style that doesn't call attention to itself. He goes easy on the similes. He ends scenes early, sharply, rather than letting them peter out. For a young writer, he has a grown-up sensibility about men and women. He is funny. And the book's puzzle-box structure does not come off as a device but as an organic part of the narrative. Rachman joins Linn Ullmann on the list of young novelists whose next works I eagerly await.

Conspirata

Conspirata is the second of a planned three-book series by Robert Harris centered around Cicero. In the first, Imperium, Cicero rises as a "new man," without military honors or great wealth but with his wits and oratory. The second volume picks up at the beginning of Cicero's term as consul, which should be a time of great triumph for him. Alas, there are enemies of the republic lurking all around him. Caesar, who appears briefly in the first book, steps forward here as a steely and formidable rival; likewise Pompey and Crassus, the other two heads of the "three-headed beast." Cicero is admirable for his defense of the republic, for his integrity, and for his intellect. But he is not perfect, and Harris colors him, through the words of his secretary Tiro, in many shades. The parallels between Rome of 63 B.C. and the current day should not be overstressed, but it is probably safe to say that nothing that has happened in politics in the last 2,000 years would have surprised Cicero in the least.

Kant vs. Seneca

I picked up a collection of stories by Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer of the early 19th century, which includes a summary of his life. Kleist bought into everything the Enlightenment had to offer -- that truth is knowable, that one's life should have a plan, that progress is possible -- only to be psychologically damaged and consumed by doubt after reading Kant. Coincidentally I am rereading some of Seneca's letters, which make me think that if philosophy had simply stopped at him the world would be a better place. Seneca believed that philosophy should help make you a better person, and that being a better person, by and large, means living in accordance with nature. The letters are full of practical advice on matters like friendship, wealth, death, dress, and so on. Had Kleist never picked up that volume of Kant, his stories would probably not have been be as weird and ahead of their time as they were, but he also probably would not have blown his brains out at age 34.

Dead Souls

Gogol reminds me of Anatole France: He is a relentless caricaturist, but with a kind heart. He presents the panorama of Russian personalities with a wicked grin, not a sneer. There is something of Balzac here, too. What it is, ultimately, is the ability to make sweeping generalizations that appear to be irrefutable. And to make a reader smile, even laugh. That is no small accomplishment, especially when so many writers cannot even bring themselves to try.

In the story, when the townspeople become baffled by the schemes of Chichikov and the rumors are flying: "They decided to meet and air this subject thoroughly, to decide what they should do about him, how they should go about it, what measures they should adopt, and what sort of man he was -- that is, to decide whether he should be arrested as a dangerous felon or whether he was in a position to have them all arrested as dangerous felons."

Nikolai Gogol

I am about halfway through Gogol's Dead Souls and wondering how it is possible that someone can reach the age of 46 and never have read anything by this Russian giant. Dead Souls is a book that will keep a smile on your face for pages and pages with its descriptions of Russian characters -- odd, stingy, rapacious, insane -- and then, in a flash, pierce your heart with a poignant aside. For example, Gogol starts Chapter 6 by stepping outside the narrative to relate a bit of personal history:

"Long ago, during my youth, in the days of my childhood which have flashed by and vanished irretrievably, I felt a joyful anticipation on approaching a place for the first time. No matter whether it was a village, a small town, or some suburb -- my keen eye always discovered much that was fascinating there." He goes on to describe in detail some of the everyday sights which engaged him, then delivers this lament:

"Today, I feel nothing but indifference when I approach an unknown village, and with indifference I gaze at its commonplace sights. To my eyes grown cold, it is uninviting and I am neither excited nor amused. Things that would have brought a lively expression to my face, made me laugh, and set loose torrents of words now glide past me while my motionless lips preserve a detached silence. Oh my youth, oh my freshness!"

Gogol died in his early 40s, apparently insane, shortly after burning the manuscript of the sequel to Dead Souls.

William Nicholson

William Nicholson is a writer whose work I have greatly enjoyed: Shadowlands, especially, but also the play The Retreat From Moscow and his two novels. He has a new novel out in Britain, to be released in July in the States, and the trouble he had finding a publisher speaks loudly to the defects of contemporary literature. Several publishers balked at the book, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, because it did not present comfortable, middle-class characters as malformed objects of derision. Perversion and degradation in the suburbs? Fine. But enlightenment can only be accessed through 98-pound heroin addicts living in Zanzibar. Nicholson was actually told, "We can't publish a novel about a people who drive 4x4s." The book was "not quirky enough." For his part, Nicholson says that "in the little details of domestic life are offered intense forms of existence that aren't often presented in books." I am eager to read it.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

It should have been apparent from the dust jacket blurb announcing that the author of this story collection, Wells Tower, had been published in McSweeney's and the New Yorker (and that he "divides his time" between Chapel Hill and, of course, Brooklyn) that he would be a certain type of writer, I believe the term is hipster fraud, who would not be worth reading, but I once again made the mistake of wasting my time on a new author while shelves of old, proven great books looked on in silent mockery. Everything Tower writes is false. David Garnett's extraordinary tale of a woman turning into a fox is more believable than even the most mundane occurence in one of these stories. Tower piles on the he-man incidents -- hunting, car mechanics, carpentry -- in an attempt at Hemingway, I suppose, but the result is sad impotence. He is a despicable writer whose book I am tempted to burn rather than resell.

Blue Movie

Blue Movie, Terry Southern's 1970 novel about a director's effort to make an artistically valid stag film, is funny and sharp. Southern worked in the movie business, and as outrageous as some of the incidents in Blue Movie are, you get the idea that they aren't the half of it.

Lady Into Fox and A Man in the Zoo

David Garnett's story titles are accurate: In the first, a lady turns into a fox; in the second, a man is exhibited in a zoo. First published in 1922 and 1924, they are tall tales that, because of Garnett's skill, appear plausible and, ultimately, true. And they leave the reader understanding that human nature and animal nature intersect at more points than previously thought.

The Dwarf

Lagerkvist's dwarf is not human, or rather he is but does not see himself as such. He stands apart, serving at the court of an Italian prince, dispensing bilious, cynical commentary on war, human nature, and love. He says: "I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up his head from the depths of their souls." An uncomfortable, piercing book.

The Holy Land

Par Lagerkvist's clean, unadorned style accommodates elaborate meanings in this fable on the trials of belief. Only 85 pages, it is stripped of all unnecessary words, giving a radiant effect.

Liquidation

A brief, head-in-the-clouds novel by Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, Liquidation is tentative, overwrought, and ultimately unsatisfying. But there are moments of shining clarity, mostly in the meditations on the role of literature in life. "Man lives as a worm but writes as a god" comes to mind as one of the lines that repay the two or three hours spent with this book.

The Politician

Anyone who stands in front of thousands of people and pledges to go to Washington to "fight for the little guy" is the worst kind of fraud, yet Americans respond over and over to this Hitlerian pitch. John Edwards is a pathetic human being, as this book by his former aide shows, but he is hardly exceptional.

I'm Not Stiller

This Max Frisch novel of could be summed up in two sentences: "I'm not Stiller. Oh yes, you are." In between are 404 pages of tall tales and psychological drama. Frisch's spring of ideas is so deep that when the book ends, you are left thinking (and maybe wishing) that he could have gone on writing indefinitely.

The Borzoi 1920

This fifth anniversary collection is for book lovers, those who can admire not only the written word but the paper it is printed on, a book's binding, design, and feel. Alfred A. Knopf began his publishing house in 1915 as a mere 23-year-old and was responsible for bringing out editions of some of the most important foreign authors of the time -- Mann, Hamsun, Reymont, Undset, among others. With that accomplishment, he can be excused for predicting in this book's postcript the monumental importance of several forthcoming volumes that proved to be less than epoch-making.

Hunger

As Isaac Bashevis Singer points out in his introduction, Knut Hamsun's novel is startling in its originality and sincerity. Hamsun makes his character smarter than the reader, places him in intolerable poverty, and has him use his wits to finds means of escape, always temporary. The young man has no past, no family, and an uncertain future, but he is dignified and uncompromising. And he is a writer. Hamsun's descriptions of hunger and the lengths to which his hero goes to assuage it (chewing on wood chips or a bloody butcher's bone) are striking. I have read that the hero in all of Hamsun's best work is this same type, a young, iconoclastic, tormented, and intelligent man. That is recommendation enough.

Rahab

Rahab is a biblical prostitute with a heart of gold; Rahab is an agonizingly flaky novel by Waldo Frank. A contemporary review refers to the book's style as futurist, a term dropped later in favor of modernist. Published in 1922, the book shares a birthdate with The Waste Land and Ulysses but was destined never to achieve their importance. Irregularly punctuated, free-flowing, and mystical, Rahab aggressively makes the case for a new literary form. Frank's version of modernism was, however, stillborn. Isaac Bashevis Singer puts it aptly in his introduction to the 1967 reissue of Knut Hamsun's Hunger: "Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression. ... They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity."

A View From the Bridge

I saw this play several years ago in New York with Anthony LaPaglia in the lead and Allison Janney as the wife. Looking through the Web, I am surprised that this was as long ago as 1997-98, and also that Brittany Murphy played the role of the young niece. I remember the performances of LaPaglia and Janney, in particular, as powerful and intense, which only added to my disappointment at the current Broadway production starring Liev Schreiber. While his performance is merely flaccid, Scarlett Johansson is positively inert. There is nowhere to hide on the stage, and this woman simply can't act. Jessica Hecht as the wife puts on an over-the-top accent and is wooden at best. The production is a wheezing, amateurish thing.

Barabbas

Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas speaks to the modern world from the Jerusalem of the Nazarene. Barabbas's central problem, "I want to believe," is only ambiguously resolved, but around him he sees a pure, devotional, ecstatic Christianity that the centuries would partly betray. Austere and dignified, Barabbas is written in the style of the Age of Faith but for the Age of Doubt.

The Borzoi 1925

This record of Alfred A. Knopf's first 10 years as a publisher includes essays by and about his writers, with a bibliography of Borzoi titles. It is a snapshot from which most of the faces, 85 years later, have faded. A few still stand out (Mencken, Mann, Lawrence, Gibran, Cather) but there are many more whose books are, deservedly or not, obscure. I bought a copy of Ladislas Reymont's four-volume The Peasants based on the essay here, and will keep watch for other authors and titles, like Louis Golding (Day of Atonement), Nicholas Bessaraboff (Tertium Organum), David Garrett (Lady Into Fox), Brett Young (The Dark Tower), Thomas Beer (Sandoval), plus anything by the superlatively named and, to judge by the photograph, beautiful Storm Jameson.

Brooklyn's Finest

This film proves that Antoine Fuqua's Training Day was no fluke. To take just one scene: A character is killed on the street at night and the camera fixes on his head against the pavement. Then the shot tilts, the focus blurs, and a pair of car headlights in the distance grow larger as music comes up -- the whole effect is mesmerizing. Fuqua places religious artifacts everywhere, maybe in one place too many, in fact, but the point is that there are things going on which require the viewer's attention, and which repay that attention. There are several scenes of suspense and excitement comparable to Hitchcock's work.

Quiet Flows the Don

The River Don is a silent witness, coming into view now and then throughout this epic film, usually in the background, observing love, stupidity, cruelty, selfishness, bravery, and death. This tale of a Cossack village in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution is a big-hearted feat of filmmaking, beautifully photographed.

Legs

This is the first of William Kennedy's Albany books, the story of Jack "Legs" Diamond as told by his lawyer. The dialogue and characterizations are piquant, and give appetite for the rest of the cycle centered in Kennedy's own little postage stamp of native soil. Gangsters were both loathed and loved in this era, but Kennedy creates a Legs of shades and textures who is no mere symbol.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Evelyn Waugh never wrote about the lower classes -- didn't know them, didn't understand them, wasn't interested. Alan Sillitoe is a Waugh for the rest of England, as this collection of stories shows. His characters have vitality and cunning, and when they demonstrate insight it is theirs alone, not some authorial welfare project.

Babel

If time is the best censor, as Chopin said, then John Cournos is one of its victims. I doubt there are fifty people in the world who read one of his books last year, yet Babel (1922), literature of exile that teems with ideas and the search for meaning in a world turned upside down, doesn't deserve total obscurity. Cournos, a Russian Jew born in 1881, moved to the United States at age 10. His alter ego in Babel has a similar story, and flits around Europe trying to be a writer after spending years in what he calls a soul-deadening newspaper job in Philadelphia. Cournos wrote imagist poetry, and some of his descriptions of London, where the character ends up, are subtle and evocative. Babel's cavalcade of characters includes representatives of anarchism, modernism, futurism, and suffragism; prostitutes and spongers; artists and frauds. It adds up to a portrait of an age, often overheated and over-sincere, valuable more as artifact than art.

My Movie Business

John Irving, a former wrestling coach, writes about his novel The Cider House Rules being turned into a movie and his inspiration for the abortionist lead, his colorful grandfather. He is more charitable with the vile money people and creative lunkheads that infest Hollywood than is usual for this type of book -- Monster comes to mind as one that treated them more scathingly -- but maybe Irving simply had a good deal. Director approval and cast approval were his, plus he worked on the script. While My Movie Business encourages me to see the film, it does nothing to entice me to Irving the writer, who was, by his own account, an excellent wrestling coach.

Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Geoff Dyer won me over last year with his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, so I put his earlier books on my list. This one is a collection of essays that are part autobiography, part travelogue. Dyer can sometimes be guilty of attaching too much importance to the things that happen in his life, but for the most part this series of adventures in Cambodia, Amsterdam, Detroit, and elsewhere is rich in ideas and humor. Dyer is simple and sharp stylist, with a good ear. As jokey and eager to get stoned or laid as he can sometimes be, there is always a humane core -- as when he is genuinely moved at Black Rock City and quotes the line, "No one ever became poor by giving."

Tender Mercies

In a newly released letter, J.D. Salinger writes to a friend, "Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid." That is a notion that Tender Mercies, but not its low-rent cousin, Crazy Heart, takes to heart. The latter impresses in isolation but shrinks to near nothingness when when compared side-by-side with the 1983 film, written by Horton Foote and directed by Bruce Beresford. In Tender Mercies the drunken ex-singer quits drinking and marries a good woman with a young son. We never see how he quits; his wife says he just stopped, but not without falling off the wagon a few times. Crazy Heart inflicts the viewer with 12-step mush. In Crazy Heart there are repellent scenes of drunken, sloppy sex; in Tender Mercies there is one kiss between the man and woman -- one -- that is more powerful than anything said or done in the other film. Crazy Heart gives us a mumbling Colin Farrell; Tender Mercies has Betty Buckley in a superb performance and singing like an angel. Tender Mercies is not perfect; a couple scenes are more corny than genuine. But in its reticence, gentleness, and dignity, it towers above its coarse and blowsy cousin.

Il Divo

Usually I'll watch the supplemental features on a DVD, but Il Divo leaves such a strong impression that there's no sense piercing the mystery by listening to the director or a "making of" featurette. This Italian film about the politician Giulio Andreotti is visually flamboyant, reminiscent of The Conformist, without ever falling into pat patterns. For instance, there is a sequence set to loud music that intercuts Andreotti at the race track with an assassination of a political opponent, but there is also a long, uncut scene in which a stationary camera focuses on a journalist's face as he delivers a scathing indictment of the prime minister. Andreotti appears in the film as a stiff, heavy-lidded, implacable oddball. He takes walks at 5 a.m. and tears a page from a paperback thriller because he doesn't want to know who the criminal is. He appears to feel emotion only on the subject of Aldo Moro, whom he let be killed. When it comes time to run for president, Andreotti says, "I know that I am of average height, but I don't see any giants around." The film is full of these epigrammic moments, and the director effectively uses the chilly music of Sibelius to deepen his portrait of this cold soul. What matters to Andreotti? The final word in the film probably says it: niente.

The Passenger

Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger is a film that can be watched once a year for life. Starkly beautiful, reticent, and ambiguous, it is the perfect antitode to an age that is obvious, loud, and ugly. The denouement is an extended, magnificently choreographed scene with no cuts. "I never knew him," says the main character's wife, standing over his corpse. I like the idea that Borges (I think) had of writing a mystery story with a wrong ending but with a true solution not in the text that only a few readers would figure out. In a plodding, literal-minded culture, surely something like that would never find a publisher.

Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell's birthday today was marked by Google on its home page. That reminded me of a line from the 1922 novel Babel by John Cournos: "Art's effort in the past has been to seduce. Its aim today is to violate." Which is the more worthy goal?

Bashan and I

Thomas Mann is not a writer to skim over the surface of things. In Bashan and I he devotes 247 pages -- admittedly with wide margins and large typeface in my 1924 Henry Holt edition -- to describing his dog. Anyone who is a dog person will feel a pang of recognition when Mann describes the behaviors of Bashan and draws connections between human and animal emotions. But as revealing as the book is about a dog, it is just as useful as an example of Mann's technique of deep, deep detail. He even explains himself in two spots. "But I am moved to add further details to this transcript of Bashan's character, so that the willing reader may see it in the nth degree of vivid verisimilitude," and later, "I am attached to this stretch of landscape and grateful to it, and so I have described it with something of the meticulosity with which the old Dutch masters painted." As to the reason for selecting the Hebrew Bashan to replace the dog's original name, Lux, Mann devotes not one syllable.

From the American Mercury 1927

This volume, published by Knopf on rag paper in a limited edition of 600 copies, collects several representative essays from H.L. Mencken's American Mercury magazine from 1927. The bonbon at the end of the meal is an editorial by Mencken imagining the fate of the first person who harnessed fire (killed by the religious authorities). There is an account of a gang's bank robbery by one of the robbers, advice on how to beat the stock market (think illogically), and a lament about the proliferation of laws in America. In this last piece, the author predicts the coming of an American Justinian to eradicate our plague of laws. Eighty years later, still no sign.

A Twist of Lemmon

Chris Lemmon's mostly affectionate remembrance of his actor father, Jack, suffers from a hackneyed style but wins points for its anecdotes. Lemmon, I think, was at his best as a desperate man. His performances in Save the Tiger and The China Syndrome will stand up for a long while. I never saw Lemmon in Long Day's Journey Into Night, but I can't imagine him coming within miles of Ralph Richardson in the 1962 filmed version.

Georgics

Virgil's Georgics benefits from being read aloud, and the verse translation by Smith Palmer Bovie suits that purpose, being, as a blurb puts it, graceful and musical. It is amusing or depressing, or perhaps both, that Virgil complains in this paean to nature and husbandry and farming that life just isn't the same as it was in the "good old days." For the modern reader, it is more than enough to enjoy the beauty of Virgil's song, but what stands out on closer inspection is the technique of transitioning from nature-loving to philosophy and political science. One of the most moving sections, a denunciation of war, comes at the end of Book One:

So once again the Roman battle lines
Clashed in civil war at Philippi;
The gods saw fit to fatten up once more
The plains of Macedonia with our blood.
And to those places there will come a day
When a farmer drives his curved plow through the earth
And strikes on Roman javelins worn with rust,
Or clinks an empty helmet with his spade,
And wonders at the massive bones laid bare.

Virgil can send chills down two thousand years.

Charlemagne

There is not a single bad sentence in Derek Wilson's biography Charlemagne. The book is a model of lucidity, clarity, and scholarship. Charlemagne "invented" Europe, really Western Christendom, through force of arms, force of will, and an evangelizing zeal. That his empire -- in its boundaries reconstituted as the European Economic Community in 1957 -- dissolved within a century of his death does not diminish his accomplishments, which in fact and in legend were to influence Europe for a thousand years. The emperor who could not write (but who could read) is shown to be a tireless advocate for scholarship and education. By modern standards a tyrant, Charlemagne emerges from Wilson's pages as a giant of civilization.

Ford Madox Ford

In my continuing effort to collect books published by Horace Liveright, I picked up the 1930 first edition of When the Wicked Man by Ford Madox Ford on eBay for $22. No dust jacket, but the cheapest copy online is $95, so I didn't do too badly. A nice copy in DJ runs $300. This edition precedes the English. Ford is someone I've not read, so I'm looking forward to getting the book. I've also been prowling for Knopf titles from the '20s. The books themselves, both Liveright and Knopf, are generally excellently made, with high-quality paper, a pleasure to hold. An eBook could never match the feel.

The Transposed Heads

I read somewhere that Thomas Mann admired Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and The Transposed Heads (1940) evokes that earlier fable. Both are set in India, both are written simply, and both are freighted with life lessons. Mann's story of two friends of different castes who desire the same woman has them changing heads, literally, as a device to explore the divided nature of existence and beauty -- physical versus spiritual. It is an elegant tale, not without humor even as it tells of beheadings and funeral pyres.

The Reformation

A few chapters in Patrick Collinson's history of the Reformation suffer from the enforced brevity of the Modern Library Chronicles imprint, especially the one on politics, which is a dizzying list of names, dates, and wars. The book is much better in its chapters on Luther, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the two at the end on the part played by ordinary people in the religious upheavals and the role of art. Ultimately, Collinson suggests the Enlightenment might not have been possible without the Reformation -- the Catholic Church, after all, didn't acknowledge Galileo was correct until 1992 -- but overall the feeling one has on finishing this book is sadness at the irrelevancy of it all. We are in a post-religious world now, for good or ill, and no matter how you dress up the disputes of the 16th century, they really don't matter a damn.

The Dignity of the Nation

Masahiko Fujiwara's The Dignity of the Nation was a bestseller in Japan in 2005, and reading the English translation by Giles Murray it is easy to see why. The book tells the Japanese what many of them must be longing to hear: that their traditional values are special, that the West is leading them astray, and that Japan can bring the world to a better day. But if there is scant respect here for Western notions of equality and freedom, there is also no ugliness or nationalism in Fujiwara's plea, which goes down with some gentle humor. The author jettisons logic, competition, and globalization in his championing of bushido, the ethics of the samurai. The tenets he outlines, benevolence toward the weak high among them, owe much to Christian ethics. The Japanese love of nature and its fragility, their "sense of pathos," and their love of nation are all being trampled by alien American notions, in Fujiwara's view. He writes to his compatriots, but outsiders might also benefit from standing back from the West's received truths and examining them with a fresh eye.

Stalin's Children

This memoir by Owen Matthews, born in 1971 to an English father and Russian mother, is at its best in its telling of the life of the author's maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, an upstanding and patriotic Soviet who ran a tractor factory in the 1930s only to be accused of Trotskyite tendencies and executed during the Terror. The harrowing tale of Bibikov's two daughters, separated by war but united in privation, who eventually, miraculously, reunite, is also well told. Matthews spends a good deal of the second half of the book on an account of his parents' efforts to reunite across the Iron Curtain, a half-decade epistolary love story that is heightened by extensive quoting from the letters. Matthews' own life, as a journalist in post-Communist Russia, is not particularly remarkable, but even in these sections, as he does in the rest of the book, the author sheds light on the Russian character. Matthews quotes Solzhenitsyn: "The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" In a more prosaic sense, whenever I think of the Russian character, I think of the anecdote I read somewhere that if a Russian is late to an appointment, he will walk slower.

Pompeii

I came to Robert Harris's Pompeii via his novel Imperium, the story of the rise of Cicero. In this book, which covers several days surrounding the epochal eruption in 79 A.D., Harris similarly wears his erudition and research lightly and confidently. The story centers around an aqueduct engineer whose discovery of problems in the system leads him to the top of Vesuvius just as the volcano is preparing to blow. Both Pliny the Younger and Elder figure in the story, which includes plenty of period color and intrigue. The eruption itself consumes the last 100 pages, and Harris carries it off beautifully.

Year of the Big Books

The most memorable big book I've read is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Flicker, a hugely entertaining genre piece by Theodore Roszak, also comes to mind. But for some reason (laziness?) I've generally shied away from books that run much past 300 pages. I started reading a new translation of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov tonight, and it got me thinking that New Year's might be a good time to dedicate myself to tackling some of the doorstops on my bookshelves. If everything was as entertaining as the first 38 pages (of 559) of Oblomov, it would be a snap. Here are some goals for the year (and I might also finish the half-finished, 814-page An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, with the bookmark still stuck where I left it at least five years ago):

◘ The Death of a President by William Manchester, 647 pages

◘ Arabia Deserta by C.M. Doughty, 1148 pages

◘ The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, 900 pages

◘ Kristin Labransdattar (trilogy) by Sigrid Undset, 1043 pages

◘ Complete Works of Rabelais, 841 pages

◘ Boccaccio's Decameron, 655 pages

◘ The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, 520 pages

Why make a point of reading these long-form works? Because it is a revolt, a personal one but not meaningless for that, against all the technology-enabled gabble that assaults the senses. The Web is a sewer, and these books will keep me from wasting time down there, I'm hoping.