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.