18 Stories

Heinrich Boll's stories put on display in a concentrated form his incisive understanding of the varieties of human behavior. The idea that flowers could become a necessity in demolished, postwar Cologne figures in one; how a crooked scale cheated peasants for decades features in another. The trick to these is to be wise in the ways of the world but still capable of wonder. In that, Boll excels.

The Middle Ground

To learn what London was like in the late 1970s, a reader could do a lot worse than consult this Margaret Drabble novel. It is kaleidoscopic and drills deeply into the personal and societal challenges of the era. Kate Armstrong, approaching 40, is the central character, and rarely has a person's muddling to get along been invested with such thoughtful perception. As often with Drabble, the plot is not the point; the point is life.

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

To have found Penelope Lively's 2016 book of stories in a recycling bin is another one of those fortunate reading discoveries that come from poking around, like how stumbling on Margaret Drabble's The Millstone in a dusty bookstore in Maine opened me to her incisive mind and winning prose. In these stories, Lively, who is 84, demonstrates a penetrating understanding of human nature and a flair for the dramatic. Such is the intensity of some of them that they provoke a powerful physical response.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

This book, edited by Bandy X. Lee, M.D., is subtitled, "27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President." It evaluates the behavior of the president and its current and potential consequences. Potentially, it is not farfetched to imagine that a person as impulsive, erratic, and pathological as the president could lead the world into a nuclear holocaust. As for the here and now, the book explains how the president's behavior has a damaging effect on the mental health of the population as a whole. 

War and Turpentine

Stefan Hertmans's novel is a tender account of a 20th century life touched by ghastly inhumanity and, ultimately, unceasing grief. The writer's grandfather is the subject, and the tale is told through scraps of memories and, most directly, a diary. An exemplary soldier in Belgium in the Great War, Urbain Martien endures and describes the horrors of that conflict in the novel's central section. The bookending sections tell of his childhood and postwar life, which were colored by his own father's work as a church painter restoring the images of saints. The result is a family saga that is compellingly told, with layers peeled off and secrets effectively withheld until the very end.  

The Edible Woman

Deep in this highly readable and entertaining first novel by Margaret Atwood is a statement that I take to be its thesis: A person doesn't live by principles; a person lives by adjustments. That is true of the protagonist, Marian, a young woman in Toronto on a path toward a "normal" life of marriage and children. Atwood subverts what could have been a dreary domestic novel with a text that is just slightly off-kilter and studded with oddities. The old social and sexual patterns are very much in evidence in this 1969 book, but they are straining to break the leash.

A Sketch of My Life

Written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929, this short biographical sketch by Thomas Mann reveals both the person and the intellectual. Most rewarding are the sections on his youthful school days and the publication and reception of his 1901 novel, Buddenbrooks. His philosophical thoughts are somewhat dense and, I suspect, not made less so by the translator.

Footsucker

Geoff Nicholson's novel reads briskly and contains enough academic information on its subject, fetishism, that the reader is left with something beyond the improbable plot twists. It is a dispassionate, typically British, I suppose, look at a subject that could easily have handled emotively or erotically, and all the better for it.

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh's first novel (and second book, after a biography of Rossetti) finds the hapless Paul Pennyfeather thrown this way and that by forces beyond his control. As such, he stands in for us all, but his story is specifically situated among the upper classes of England, which Waugh uses to great comic effect. Thus, a serious and very funny book.  

Silence

This historical novel by Shusako Endo examines the meaning of faith, the problem of doubt, and the message of Christianity. A quibble centers around the concept contained in the title: The priest who resists apostatizing and who sees Japanese tortured and killed because of his resistance is bewildered by and eventually angry at the "silence" of God in the face of these travails. But isn't this a primitive position for a trained Jesuit, even considering the action takes place in the 17th century? What would the much-desired absence of this "silence" look like? A miracle from the heavens, say a bolt of lightning killing Inoue, a Japanese magistrate? It seems a false choice when silence is framed in this way, with no real answer possible. But elsewhere, the theological dilemmas and the weaknesses (and heroism) of humans are presented in a deeply affecting way.