A Soldier's Legacy

Reading this Heinrich Boll short novel immediately after Across is like escaping from a fetid room into fresh air and sunshine. It's not that the subject matter of A Soldier's Legacy is pleasant. It is anything but. It's just that Boll is a writer who exudes, along with wisdom, humanity and modesty and the kind of gentle irony last seen in the books of Anatole France.

Across

I'm calling off the Peter Handke attempt. He is simply too arid, academic and, as the English say, "up his own arse" to bother with further. This one is all alienation and angst, touched up with some Kafka. The endless similes and numbing descriptions of nature make it virtually unreadable.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Carlo Levi's account of his political banishment to southern Italy in the mid-1930s reveals a region grindingly poor and full of ancient hatreds and superstitions. Levi, from Turin, is at his best in describing the brutal landscape and colorful characters of the small town of his exile. He neither gratuitously ennobles the peasantry nor blindly castigates the authorities. His honesty and frankness, as well as an elegant style, have rightly earned for this work the status of a modern classic.

Group Portrait With Lady

This novel by Heinrich Boll is a stupendous achievement. Framed as an investigation by an unnamed Author into the life of Leni Pfeiffer, nee Gruyten, born in 1922 and widowed three times by the end of World War II, it encompasses through her circle of family, friends, lovers, and rivals an entire universe of the German wartime experience. The liberating Americans thought the population could be neatly divided into Nazis and anti-Nazis. As Boll shows, paint stroke by paint stroke over 400 pages, the reality was much more complex, and human. A tone of gentle bemusement ensures that, despite the stark subject, the portrait is never too dark. I found myself imagining all the characters' qualities and actions as individual daubs of paint on a vast canvas, with Leni, radiant, in the center. This is a glorious, deeply affecting work of art.

Without Blood

At 87 pages in a large typeface with wide margins, this fable by Alessandro Baricco will not give the satisfaction of a novel. The tale of a girl who witnesses her family's political killing and survives to confront the remaining assailant a half-century later is a slender reed upon which not much can be made to hang.

The Dinner

Dutch author Herman Koch's The Dinner is an international hit, just published in Britain and headed to America in February. Over several courses, the narrator does a suspenseful job of peeling back the onion on two couples, their children, and some awful behavior. What price happiness? To get to the sweet, you sometimes have to choke down the bitter.

Why Read?

Mark Edmundson answers the question of his book's title by first rejecting the detached, sneering, ironic and obscurantist tilt of university teaching. He then affirms that literature can be harnessed to live a better life. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that novels at their best give readers a chance to experience a more concentrated, intense existence. Edmundson puts that to practical use.

What Jesus Meant

After reading Garry Wills on Jesus, I've concluded that the Martin Mull song Jesus Is Easy gets it exactly backwards. Mull sings: "Jesus is easy, just get down on your knees, he's going to listen to your every prayer." But the Jesus of the Gospels as explicated by Wills is anything but easy. His demands are comprehensive. His opposition to wealth, insistence on loving one's enemies and the most wretched, his demand for love above all -- there is nothing easy there for those who want to follow him. Mull may have been parodying the televangelists, in which case: bingo. Reading Wills reminds me of the line (I forget whose) that if Jesus were to return today and see what is being done in his name he would never stop throwing up.