Losing Mum and Pup

It may be inaccurate to call Christopher Buckley's account of the death of his parents "breezy," but only just. Easily read in a sitting or two and full of name-dropping anecdotes, it is both blunt and affectionate.

Balzac

Balzac resonates so strongly down the years. From his introduction to Droll Stories:

Bear in mind also, ye wild critics, you scrapers-up of words, harpies who mangle the intentions and inventions of everyone, that as children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out, like the light of the oil-lit lamp. This signifies, that to laugh you must be innocent, and pure of a heart, lacking which qualities you purse your lips, drop your jaws, and knit your brow, after the manner of men hiding vices and impurities.

Madeleine

Andre Gide must be held at least partially responsible for our age's magnification of ordinary life into overheated prose. Although he wrote books about Montaigne and the Congo, much of his work is extravagantly self-obsessed. A line can be drawn between Gide and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In this volume, he recounts his marriage to his cousin, a decent enough woman who mostly withstood his pederasty and tawdriness in stoical silence. An exception was when she told Gide, "I loathe indescretion," to which he self-importantly replied that he hated falsehood more. She also quoted at him a line from the poet Paul Claudel: "Better hypocrisy than cynicism." As is so often the case in relationships like these, Madeleine, the simpler person, was the better one.

An Answer from the Silence

English-language readers are now able, 74 years after its publication in Stuttgart, to read this early novel by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Withheld by the author from his collected works in the 1970s, An Answer from the Silence has tell-tale signs of youth like sincerity and iconoclasm. In this respect it could be classified as a lesser Hunger. But there is more here, such as subtle and lyrical imagery of the mountains, where the young man of the story goes in a search for meaning.

The Possibility of an Island

Michel Houellebecq throws futurism, sociology, sexuality, psychology, politics, culture, and philosophy up against the wall and just about all of it sticks.

Why Books

I went to the antiquarian book fair this weekend and bought two books I'd never heard of (one by Andre Gide, the other by Heinrich Boll), a pair of bookends, and a small bust of Schubert. Digital books don't interest me. I require the artifact, preferably with an attractive dust jacket and on good paper. Alfred A. Knopf made such books for the mass market starting in 1915; he was stickler for bindings, typefaces, and artwork. He also brought important foreign writers to the American public in translation. Horace Liveright's oversized editions, including the Black and Gold Library, are elegant and durable. A wall lined with books brings energy to a room: It is both accusatory (Why haven't you read X, Y, and Z?) and reassuring (as old friends should be). With a book in your hand you know exactly where you are in relation to the end. A digital book is a solution looking for a problem. Digitization goes hand in hand with commoditization. It's bad for books.

What's to Become of the Boy?

Heinrich Boll's brief memoir of his adolescence in Cologne at the outset of Nazi rule is notable for its description of his family living simultaneously "below and beyond" its means. It was a big Catholic family in a time of deprivation. They detested the Nazis, but some accommodations had to be made: Among them, Boll's elder brother Alois joined the Storm Troopers. Boll's opposition to the Nazi Youth was adamantine, and he ducked into doorways when their parades went by. He hauntingly describes a time not entirely devoid of joy, "However, that gaiety was often of the desperate kind seen in some medieval paintings, where the laughter of the redeemed is sometimes akin to the expression on the faces of the damned."

String of Pearls

Priscilla Buckley wasn't exactly Zelig, but she was witness to several important moments in history, as this entertaining memoir of her years with United Press in New York and Paris attests. Decades after the events depicted in this volume, when Buckley was managing editor of her brother's magazine, she was kind enough to drop a note of encouragement to a pompous college student on the occasion of his launching of a right-wing campus newsletter.