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.