Dear Mr. M

Herman Koch's Dear Mr. M is a tricky, subversive novel that offers a little bit of everything: a mystery, an exploration of the role of the novel and novelist, a young adult novella, and more of the corrosive misanthropy that made The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool so popular. The second of his books in English was a bit of a repeat of the first, but Dear Mr. M successfully strikes out for new territory.

Tribe

Sebastian Junger has written a vitally important book because it explains something that is right in front of our faces but which we do not see: the destruction wrought by the atomization of society. As he details, it is a trait reinforced by genetics over thousands of millennia that humans survive in crises by taking care of one another. Absent crises, in this modern, largely comfortable world, the impulse toward community is short-circuited. The result: depression, PTSD, suicide, opioid abuse, political demagoguery, mass shootings, hopelessness, isolation. 

Days of Wrath

This Andre Malraux novel from 1936 contains elements and themes that would appear four years later in Arthur Koestler's landmark Darkness at Noon. With Malraux, the prisoner is a communist in a Nazi jail; with Koestler, the prisoner is an old communist imprisoned by new communists. Malraux's work is impressionistic and poetic in parts as it plumbs the imagination and memory of Kassner, who is picked up after a routine but heroic act that saves the lives of several of his comrades. The account of his time in prison has parallels with Koestler's work, such as the tapping between cells that becomes a lifeline of communication. Kassner's airplane flight to safety through a storm in mountainous terrain is done in a dreamlike and hypnotic style. Full of philosophy and abstractions, Days of Wrath returns movingly in the end to the importance of the human touch.

Touchstones

Mario Vargas Llosa's wide-ranging interests and lucid thinking are on display in this book of essays published in English in 2011. The literary pieces are signposts to books that the reader can, with assurance, profitably pursue, given the author's impeccable taste. Perhaps most striking in 2016 are two essays on the Peruvian dictatorship, whose main players and attributes have found a sickening echo to the north.

Black Like Me

In 1959, John Howard Griffin tinted his skin and became "black" for several weeks in the South. His account of that experience is as vital and instructive today as it must have been nearly 60 years ago. Perhaps most disturbing was his contact with white men who gave him rides only to pressure him with lewd and offensive questions about the supposed sexual behaviors of black people. The angry glares from white people and daily humiliations are there, too, as well as the simple kindnesses he received from blacks.

The Old Man and the Sea

At one point Santiago realizes there is no room to think; he must simply endure. In this way, this great Hemingway novel makes a companion piece to The Myth of Sisyphus: It is the doing, the daring to do, that reveals the best in mankind. In Santiago's case, he went out "too far." For Sisyphus, the stone was too heavy. But Santiago did not fail, except in failing to preserve his catch. He caught the huge marlin, alone, fought off sharks, went sleepless, and sailed himself back to port. There, he found the love of the boy and the respect of his community. 

Coriolanus

A conflict of power, privilege, and pride, Coriolanus resonates more readily today, perhaps, than others of the tragedies. At first glance a scathing indictment of mobocracy, it is that, but it becomes an examination of family dynamics and the costs of arrogance. In the end, Coriolanus is too extraordinary, in ways good and bad, to be allowed to exist in the world.