Review of John Gardner's "Grendel"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Grendel” is, of course, John Gardner’s wonderful re-telling of the great Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) poem “Beowulf” (c. 675-1025 CE). It is one of the few truly successful parallel novels – the literary form that reconfigures the action of a story that the audience is already presumably familiar with – that I have ever encountered. Gardner was a medievalist by training, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was familiar with the Anglo-Saxon of “Beowulf,” too. The book makes it clear that he has lived inside and with the character of Grendel for a long time, which only results in a richer, fuller reimagining of Grendel’s sense of deep curiosity and existential despair at his own position in the world.

This could have been a simple, straightforward narrative account of the action of “Beowulf” through Grendel’s eyes, but Gardner imbues Grendel with all the philosophical wonder and bewilderment of a human being, which makes him all the more poignant. When Grendel sees the Shaper (a literal translation of “Scop,” the Anglo-Saxon bard who sings in Hrothgar’s mead-hall) sing songs of heroic victory, he becomes incensed at how the Danes contort reality for their own purposes in their songs. “Why do they lie to themselves like this?” he asks. He encounters a brilliant dragon who happens to have a keen grasp of medieval Scholastic philosophy who explains to him that the job of the Shaper is to convince humans that their reality is in fact real. Out of this conversation comes some beautiful revelations about the art of mythopoiesis, the nature of storytelling, and art itself. When Grendel is unable to accept the dragon’s fatalistic view of the universe, he characteristically storms off, angered, confused, and in denial.

Since raw, brute power plays a not insignificant role in the Anglo-Saxon world, it’s no surprise that there is a discussion of political philosophy, too, in which the Hobbesian view eventually wins out. Grendel defends his relentless attacks on the mead-hall by saying that he is the force in their lives which gives them meaning, and therefore it is only his continued carnage against the thegns of Hrothgar’s hall that continues to let the Shaper sing the stories he sings, and therefore allows them to remain human. Regardless of what you think of this rationalization of violence, you have to admit that it has a sheer logical force of its own. To think that those in the mead-hall only feared his strength and size when they should have feared his power of reason makes for a truly formidable monster. Later, there is another conversation on the nature of religion with a priest, which again fills Grendel with a sense of existential dread.

Behind all of these characters rests Grendel’s mother – a minor but wholly compelling figure - holding down the marshy fen as only a protective mother could and whose inability to speak frustrates her son, reminding him of his distance from humanity, yet of the persistence of his reason. 

I waited until I read “Beowulf” to read this, and while “Grendel” would be enjoyable for anyone, it will be more wonderful still to someone who has invested themselves in a careful reading of the original poem; it provides a narrative framework which allows the reader to focus less on the action of the story – really not the most important part of Gardner’s version by far – and instead focus on the tender, passionate humanization of Grendel himself.

Review of Elizabeth Hardwick's "The Simple Truth"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This review contains spoilers.

I originally picked this book up for two reasons: it is a Virago Modern Classics edition which I’ve heard many good things about from several people, and Susan Sontag listed Elizabeth Hardwick as one of her favorite contemporary writers a number of times in interviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t think this novel lived up to either of these recommendations.

It tells the story of two people – Joseph Parks, a well-to-do student from New York who has come to Iowa to study, and Anita Mitchell, the wife of a boring chemistry professor at the same university. These two characters who would otherwise have nothing to do with one another are brought together by the local sensationalized murder trial of Rudy Peck, another local student, who is accused of killing his girlfriend. Even though it seems very clear that Rudy has actually killed her, both Joseph and Anita are rabid partisans in defending him – Joseph for reasons he describes as “Dreiserian” (Peck as a latter-day American Tragedy, a kind of male Jenny Gerhardt) and Anita for more vaguely Freudian reasons which Hardwick never fully fleshes out. 

Much of the novel consists of either courtroom testimony which is all rather uninspired and extended dialogues between Anita and Joseph which try to exculpate him or explain away his possible involvement in the murder. The possibility of riveting testimony could have salvaged this somehow by turning it into a “true crime” kind of novel along the along the lines of “In Cold Blood,” but even these parts fall completely flat and lifeless onto the page. In the end, Rudy is found not guilty, which brings out the most repulsive snobbery in Anita. She wonders how these simple Iowa farmer-hicks could possibly have so much empathy and understanding to see that Rudy might be anything other than guilty. Apparently the whole time she was thinking that they were a band of knuckle-dragging, trident-wielding witch-burners. One person echoes Anita’s bewilderment: “It is really unnerving to live in a world where everyone, just anybody, takes as complicated a view as the most clever people! … There’s no one to uphold common sense.” I finished the novel wondering if people could really be so ignorant. But of course, the unpleasant fact of the matter is they can be – and perhaps that’s Hardwick’s point.

There are fundamental questions that are never answered in the book. For example, why were Anita and Joseph interested in Peck’s trial beyond the simple, flashy headlines? What drew them to him as a person more than anyone else? Something posing as a “novel of ideas,” which this most certainly is, needs to answer these questions but they remain not even tangentially addressed making their dogged attention to the trial seem random and somewhat silly, like impish schoolchildren who have nothing better to occupy their time. Joseph and Anita are badly drawn characters; they never manage to fully become people, but instead remain contrivances to push Hardwick’s plodding, empty story along. 

Ironically, there is remarkably bright and insightful afterward to the novel in this edition written in 1987, some thirty years after it was originally published. It intelligently and clearly explains what she was trying to do with the book. If only she could have written the whole thing as well as she did the afterward!

Review of Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I am about one hundred pages short of finishing the novel, and have to begin writing the review now, not because I don’t want to finish the book, but because I think I will have forgotten too many of the things I wanted to mention. Richard Yates has received quite the resurgence in interest recently, especially from online amateur book reviewers, and judging solely from “Revolutionary Road” alone, it is well deserved. 

The lives of its two central characters, the married couple April and Frank Wheeler, are dripping with tragic irony. (In many ways, it resembles a modern retelling of something from Euripides or Sophocles.) The entire novel is an investigation into the different modes of irony that deeply infiltrate even the most intimate parts of their lives. April and Frank – what two names could better express the blunting dullness of the hope-springs-eternal optimism of the 1950s in which the novel is set? From the very first page, however, Yates is single-minded in his goal to have the reader see that this optimism is simply an illusion. On that first page, we learn that April is an aspiring actress who has been relegated, much to her chagrin, to a suburban amateur theatre group. When her co-actors’ weak performances disappoint her, she goes home to take it out on her husband who at first seems the model of forbearance, putting up with hours of her icy “silent treatment,” but who eventually shows himself to be every bit as cruel and calculating as his wife. To support them, Frank has taken a middle-manager job in the technology company where his father used to work. For whatever reason, and the author never makes it wholly clear, both Frank and April both think that success and everything else they deserve is right around the corner. They have convinced themselves that “these mindless drones working in the sales department don’t think and feel in the same ways we do.” Why should they? “They’re just silly brownnosing ladder-climbers.” They even secretly hold this sense of smug superiority toward their neighbors, who also happen to be their best friends.

Yates is really masterful at describing the profound changes that took place between the time when Frank’s father worked there and now. Frank’s father always worked hard, was always tired – but he seemed satisfied. He was a company man and proud to be identified as one. Frank, twenty years on, does nothing but sit and collect his check; moreover, he’s disgusted by the corporate business mentality that pervades the whole place. Yates wants you to see that the corporate workplace definitely has become more alienating, but I think he also wants to show healthy and unhealthy ways to accommodate it, and that Frank’s attitude of seeing it only as a place where you spend forty hours a week and try to do as little as possible is one of the unhealthy ways. Frank and April either refuse (or perhaps are just incapable) of discovering what they need for themselves.

If there could be anything like one clear, distinct message to be taken away from this novel, it is that meaning – what you want to do with your life, the worth of your relationships, what makes life worth living – is never simply handed to you, an artisan-crafted thing on a silver platter. You have to build it yourself, to make it with your own hands. Meaning is something that we must continually weave for ourselves out of our personal needs, passions, and drives. Waiting for it to arrive means it never will. That, ultimately, is the tragedy for April and Frank Wheeler.

Review of William Beckford's "Vathek"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

William Beckford, the author of “Vathek,” led a rather remarkable life – so remarkable, in fact, that reviewers and critics are left baffled at how to interpret it other than reading it as a sort of fantastic confabulation of his life. He was born in 1760, son of the two-time Lord Mayor of London; at the tender age of ten years, his father died and left him one of the richest men in the entire country. This allowed him to pursue his interests in art, architecture, and travel, all of which he did on grand scales. His tastes were just as spectacular as his wealth, acquiring over the course of his life Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden,” Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” and Velazquez’s “Philip IV in Brown and Silver.” He took music lessons from Mozart. After very possibly having an affair with his cousin’s wife, as well as another with a boy who just happened to be the son of William Courtenay, Ninth Earl of Devon, he exiled himself to the Continent, where he lived most of his life. 

Vathek was written in 1781 or 1782, while Beckford was in his early twenties. It has heavy Gothic influences, but is very recognizable as one of the “Oriental tales” of which the English reading public could hardly get enough of at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Beckford originally wrote the book in French, only later to have it translated into English by Samuel Henley in 1786 and published by Oxford World Classics. 

However grotesque and bizarre the story, two of its central characters are historical. Vathek is based on al-Wathiq, an Abbasid caliph and grandson of Harun al-Rashid, and his mother Carathis is based on al-Wathiq’s mother, Qaratis. That’s where all historical resemblances end, however. Goaded on by his mother, Vathek seeks out occult learning in the sciences, astronomy, and other “black arts” that shock some of his fellow Muslims, including his counselor-vizier Morakanabad and the eunuch Bababalouk. He is tempted by a demon named Giaour who promises him riches beyond belief in a Palace of Subterranean Fire, and does a number of heinous things to please Giaour, including tossing fifty beautiful boys to appease its bloodlust. 

Vathek then meets the kind, pious Emir Fakreddin, and quickly falls in love with his daughter Nouronihar, who is already betrothed to her young cousin Gulchenrouz. Vathek’s infatuation excites Nouronihar, however, and seems equally greedy for the treasures in the Palace of Subterranean Fire. They eventually reach the Palace, ruled by Iblis (the Devil of Islamic mythology), but it turns out to be something that more resembles Dante than any kind of heavenly reward. Carathis soon joys them there, explicitly having abandoned all Hope, one assumes for eternity.

Because of all the action that takes place in an extremely short novel (this version clocks in right at 120 pages), its pace can seem hurried, confused, and frantic. This is understandable since, in several places, Beckford cites having written it in either two or three days. “Vathek” mostly seems to be a vehicle for Beckford to bandy about his criticisms of middle-class English mores and sexual morality (Nouronihar’s love interest, Gulchenrouz, is often referred to as “feminine” and “effete.”) It can just as easily be read as a very young Beckford trying to come to terms with how he sees himself and his ambitions in relation to those of society less forgiving of thoroughgoing aesthetes. Because of its length, I would recommend this for anyone interested in the ever-popular Georgian-era Oriental tale mixed with high Gothic romance. I don’t think anyone has ever accused Beckford of being a great writer – but it is not without interest, even if it is only the interest of the fascinating eccentric who wrote it.

WayWords, Episode #10

Froideur (noun) – An attitude of haughty aloofness or cold superiority; a chill in relations.

In Memoriam | Remembering Seamus Heaney

Review of Edmund White's "My Lives: An Autobiography"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Reading Edmund White, perhaps one of the most heralded gay American writers today, can be a jarring experience. Full of lurid sexual exploits, endless name-dropping of intellectuals with whom he was acquainted, and just for good measure, countless vignettes from the history of French literature, this volume of his autobiography makes for vertiginous reading. In fact, this mixture of a highly personal life with the reflections and insights of an academic make it very much like some of his later fiction (specifically "The Married Man"). 

But we learn plenty of White's earlier life as well, almost as if White is sitting on the therapist's couch "typing" to a therapeutic word processor. This may not be surprising, since we learn that his mother is a psychologist and his father is a loud, abusive drunk. Throughout the entire arc of his life, he reveals to us a deeply wounded, desperate ego. Many may believe that his celerity to tell us about the personal details of his life is a transparent attempt to offset his fragile personality. It is not an unwarranted conclusion. But by the end of the book, it became clear that he was not trying to account for anything in his past. Rather, after a life full of rejection, one more is but a drop in the ocean. I have seen interviews with him, and his discomfort and unease with his physical appearance are visible in his general mien. 

Structurally speaking, this biography is an interesting one. While most are broken down into rough chronological chunks, these chapter divisions are grouped by interests or experiences, from the banal to the more explicit: a few include "My Women," "My Genet," and "My Blondes." In almost all of these, he seems to want to showcase his cynicism and intellectual seclusion. But, needless to say, the innocence which overflowed like milk and honey in "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" runs bone-dry here. 

Ultimately, I cannot recommend this, except perhaps for the odd datum about Genet's masochism or Comte de Lautréamont's uncommonly early death. White is at his best in his biographical writing. His book on Genet is a wonderful psychological portrait, and will continue to serve as a sourcebook for both his life and his work. White's autobiographical writing, at least for me, contains a bit too much treacle and self-loathing. 

Review of Zygmunt Bauman's "Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish-born sociologist in the Marxist tradition mostly known for his thoroughgoing critiques of consumerism, modernity, and cultural memory (especially the Holocaust). His “liquid” books, including “Liquid Modernity” (2000), “Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds” (2003), “Liquid Life” (2005), “Liquid Fear” (2006), and the book presently considered, “Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty” (2006), for the most part seem to be shorter books whose aim is to adumbrate the arguments Bauman has made over the course of his career. 

The focus of “Liquid Times” is a meta-critique of globalization and all of the problems it presents, from rootlessness to the ubiquity of the security sate, with Bauman’s central thesis being that the consequences of globalization have seriously hindered attempts at international justice. The goal of globalization - to eradicate any trade barriers and therefore create “markets without frontiers” - results in the transition from a world where people are subject to the laws and protections of their home countries to one in which radical fear and lack of security are reified and the “fading of human bonds and the wilting of solidarity” reigns. This lack of security results in fear and a perceived lack of control, which in turn perpetuates and shores up the conspicuous shift toward national security that we have experienced in advanced liberal democracies. And so the pernicious cycle goes. In his comparison of cities, the globally located ones (that are able to participate in the fully integrated sphere of globalization) and locally located cities ones (those that aren’t), Bauman says that the job of the city has changed from protecting its inhabitants from outsiders to housing ghettoized populations of peripatetic transnationals and strangers, the “dumping ground for globally conceived and gestated problems.” 

Our new liquid times have also brought about an unprecedented number of refugees, both political and economic. Wars, which Bauman thinks are essentially local attempts to solve global problems, become intractable. The result is an “excess of humanity” – humanity as waste product – completely and utterly divested of property, personal identity, or even a state that will recognize their existence.

Bauman suggests that democracy has ironically become an elitist affair, where the rich protect their interests and the poor continue to suffer from a lack of social safety nets and supportive governmental networks. He is also not terribly optimistic about the chances of gaining a pre-globalized utopia, a word which Thomas More first darkly noted could mean, homophonically, either “paradise” or “nowhere.” While it is still a paradise for some, our world has become too liquid to be anything but the latter for most of us. In the end, Bauman offers in every analysis of globalization the ultimate paradox of modernity: a permanent life shot through with impermanency.

As I pointed out before, at least according to the back of the book, Bauman has taken the time to further detail his analyses in other books. However, from what I read here, I am not sure how many of his arguments are original. Books on globalization with themes of alienation and disenfranchisement are not unpopular in the field of sociology. However, Bauman’s wry wit definitely has me interested in reading more of his work, which I plan on reviewing in the future.

Review of Geoffrey Hartman's "Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Oscar Wilde once declared that “literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apothegm to heart. Closely associated with Yale University for most of his professional life, Hartman is one of the most well-known literary critics in the United States, and often identified with the Yale school of deconstruction, even though no overarching methodology can be applied to the entire body of his work.

First, a word on the audience at which this book is aimed: it will be of little interest for most readers who are not at least moderately familiar with the last fifty years of literary criticism in Europe, and especially the American upending thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the book both is and is not a bit of self-conscious omphaloskepsis: while Hartman does a lot of name-dropping, he discusses many of those names in detail, or at least as much detail as a 180-page book could. Those particularly interested in Hartman’s contributions to Holocaust studies, memorial studies, and digitization will certainly find something interesting. 

Born in 1929 in Germany, Hartman was taken via Kindertransport to England until the end of World War II, when he was able to move to the United States to pursue his education. While he was doing his graduate work at Yale, and later when he was a professor there, he met a number of important people in the field, including but not limited to Paul de Man, Hans Robert Jauss, Derrida, Harold Bloom, Rene Wellek, and Erich Auerbach. Instead of turning his formidable power as analyst and critic toward himself, he looks at their ideas and offers the occasional insight of them as people, including passionate defenses of both de Man and Jauss against accusations concerning their questionable pasts. The book ends with a beautiful tribute to the German critic Erich Auerbach, whose “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” is one of the most important contributions to the genre. 

Beyond these occasional coruscations, we get precious few glimpses into his inner life, which is perhaps what many readers might want. But this wouldn’t be the first time in his life that he bucked a trend. The material in the book is wholly refracted through scholarly apparatus and his contribution to it, and therefore comes across as more aloof and impersonal. Hartman is a gentle, avuncular soul with a capacious intellect. His call for the continued close reading of literature is a vital one, as is his continuing suspicion of literary fads like postmodernism, in its all sundry incarnations. I recommend it for those interested in a meditative account of a life in reading and learning, both of which Hartman does with a considerable joie de vivre.

Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I have a vague memory of reading “The Scarlet Letter” sometime in middle school, and coming away feeling like you would expect after you’d read a novel about Puritan repression (that’s all I thought it was about at the time). “The House of the Seven Gables” was like finding a Hawthorne I’d never known before – one of ghosts, the eternal return of historical memory, and high Gothic romance. This time, it reminded me more of Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis than it did the cold Puritanism that I once associated with Hester Prynne. In this sense, it stood up to what Hawthorne identified most of his longer fiction as, that is, “romance.” 

In the late seventeenth century, the eponymous house (actually inspired by an historical 1688 colonial mansion in Salem) served as the residence of Colonel Pyncheon, who once accused a man named Matthew Maule of sorcery in order to have him hanged, and then stole the land upon which he would eventually build his house. One day, the Colonel keels over at his desk under mysterious circumstances, but his presence and his nefariousness seem to haunt the Pyncheon house in various ways.

Several generations later, Hepzibah and her intellectually challenged brother Clifford come to occupy the house. They are both descendants of the Colonel, but now the family fortune and good reputation have withered away so much that Hepzibah has to open a store in her house to make some extra money, and thinks herself an abject failure because of it. Holgrave, a daguerrotypist, rents a room from Hepzibah upstairs. One day, a distant relation to both Clifford and Hepzibah named Phoebe Pyncheon visits and manages to quickly change the whole tenor of the house: she is able to bring vim and vigor to the Hepzibah’s failing penny shop, and she gives Clifford the companionship and attention that he needs. Just as soon as she appears, however, she leaves again and the house falls into its former dilapidated state.

Judge Pyncheon, another member of the family and a wealthy man about town with an eminent reputation, appears at Hepzibah’s house and announces that he wants to institutionalize Clifford. The Judge claims that Clifford knows the whereabouts of certain documents that will allow him access to vast tracts of land in Maine. While waiting to talk to Clifford, the Judge dies in much the same way that the Colonel did so many generations before. Hepzibah and Clifford head to a train station to leave their outre circumstances. Later, Phoebe returns to the house with only the artist Holgrave in residence, and he admits how he has (admittedly, somewhat predictably) always loved her. Hepzibah and Clifford soon return to live there, with Phoebe having inherited all of the Judge’s ill-gotten land. Holgrave proclaims that he is himself a distant relative of Matthew Maule, so long ago accused of conjury. The House of Seven Gables, so long riven by tumult and strife, is finally exorcised by that ultimate mage, love. 

I read this mostly as a meditation on the transgressions of history and our inevitable tendency to bear them witness no matter how far removed in time we are from them, two of Hawthorne’s pet concerns. Indeed, it’s interesting how the sins of Colonel Pyncheon seem almost to take place in a prelapsarian past while at the same time having such a profound effect on the characters presently at hand. Hawthorne wonderfully blends the oppressiveness of the past with the stark newness of the present throughout the novel: the figures of the Salem witch trials (one of whom was Judge John Hathorne, Nathaniel’s great-great-grandfather, who found many of the “witches” guilty) haunt the novel in spirit, but so do all kinds of (then) modern technologies, from Holgrave’s daguerreotype, to the train that Hepzibah and Clifford use to escape the ghosts of their pasts. Published in 1851 and with the possibility of freedom from the past being central to the novel, Hawthorne might have meant for this to be, at least in some respects, a commentary on the coming Civil War. As Faulkner, another American equally concerned with the onus of history said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

I enjoyed it so much I immediately picked up “The Blithedale Romance,” a review of which will be posted soon. 

Review of Imre Kertesz' "Fatelessness"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

If any novel would have the ability to impress with its insights into the human condition, you would think it would be one about a teenage boy named Gyorgy trying to survive as he is torn away from his family one day, and then randomly shuffled from one concentration camp to the next. Add to this a narrator whose first-person, documental prose discusses everything from his father being transferred to a labor camp to, at the end of the novel, his blasé reaction to his father’s death in the camps. Thinking back on it, this was one of the central problems for me: his reactions, even to the most horrific experiences (like finding out that there were crematoria in the camps), was unconvincingly cool and aloof. 

In one of the last sentences of “Fateless,” Gyorgy says “Everybody will ask me about the deprivations, the ‘terror of the camps,’ but for me, the happiness there will always be the most memorable experience, perhaps. Yes, that’s what I’ll tell them the next time they ask me: about the happiness in those camps.” I wonder what survivors today would say about that sentence; I do not deny that some might find it interesting, but I would be curious about the average reaction that a Holocaust survivor had to it. What I find most disconcerting about this is not that he could have found happiness in the camps. We are forced to find our own ways to survive psychologically, after all. But nothing in the book leading up to that sentence would have led the reader to believe that it was true. As a result, the whole thing ended up feeling false, more like a series of diary entries than a coherent, lucid account of concentration camp life. I use the term “diary entries” here because, while so many people claim that this is biographical or semi-biographical novel, Kertesz has purportedly denied this is true.

But I should note some important qualifications. I didn’t read the novel in Hungarian, I may have been in a particularly non-receptive mood while reading it, et cetera. Another reviewer wrote, “In the end I remained as detached and as unengaged as Gyorgy himself.” I agree. And because of that, I’m afraid it will not stick with me in the same way, say, that Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table” has. 

I was glad this was not, as so much popular Holocaust fiction is, a simplistic story of “good triumphing over evil.” Kertesz never turns the events in the camps into some gratuitous pornography of atrocity after atrocity, leaving us to sanctimoniously shake our heads in disapproval. How true is it? In some ways, I hope I will never find out. But the sincerity of his literary effort and vision are not something I cannot call into question. 

Review of Philip Jenkins' "The Lost History of Christianity"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

To speak of Christianity is almost necessarily to turn our imaginations toward Western Europe, where Christianity flourished for centuries in the midst of religious wars, social turmoil, and even Islamic competition for economic and military power. However, the “thousand-year Golden Age” referred to in the subtitle of Philip Jenkins’ book refers not to the West, but the various Christianities that arose all over northern Africa, the Levant, the Middle East, and the far East. Instead of the Latin that dominated the West, Christianity in the rest of the world was conducted in a number of languages, including Syriac and the Koine Greek of Saint Paul. While Jenkins looks at Christianity in various parts of the East, he largely clumps them together as “Syriac-Nestorian,” referring to the language and Nestorianism, a brand of Christian theology long considered a heresy in the West but that held on in the East.

Jenkins spends most of his time talking about Christianity in different parts of the Eastern world, instead of, as the subtitle hints, telling us “how it died.” This is much more a book, in fact, of how these communities flourished and lived side-by-side with people of other religions. We get vignettes of how, in the East, Christians lived next to Jews and especially Muslims for centuries. Around the thirteenth or fourteenth century, however, Muslims – who almost always were the power-holding elites in these regions – began to grow increasingly intolerant toward religious minorities. Why? Jenkins never really says. He offers a number of explanations, which I believe were meant to be the heart of the book, including the marginalization of certain languages, and the rise of a powerful, political Islam, but he never makes it seem like he is convinced of any of them. 

I found this to be a confusing, or rather confused, book that wasn’t aware of what it wanted to say. It would have been much better with a different (sub)title, and a thesis – any thesis. Instead, the reader gets a mishmash that tries to convey the importance of Christianity in the East and to some extent succeeds. But if you want an explanation of why Christianity survived in the West, but was nearly totally decimated in the East, you won’t find much of an explanation here. I might suggest this to someone for whom the Christian East is a wholly new concept, but there are sure to be better resources out there than what this book has to offer.

Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

After reading “The Scarlet Letter” years ago in school, and now “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance” in relatively close conjunction, there seems to be a common theme running throughout much of Hawthorne’s longer fiction: namely, the deep and abiding mistrust in ideas of utopia, progress or perfectibility, especially of the human kind. Hawthorne came from a long line of Puritans, one of whom even presided over some of the Salem witch trials. Now writing on the cusp of the Civil War, he feels the renewed need for the kind of pragmatic skepticism which, one generation later, an entire generation of American philosophers will call for.

Coverdale, the naïve narrator in search of an agrarian source of truth, discovers Blithedale (the name itself should set off bells of suspicion), a community built around the ideals of Fourier, the utopian French social theorist. Fourier thought that life could be optimized through a kind of rationalistic social engineering, the basic living unit of which he called the “phalanstere.” The hilarious (hilarious in that subtle, dowdy, Puritan way that was uniquely Hawthorne’s) part is that, once everyone in Blithedale is introduced into the mix, tensions, different ideas, passions, and ideologies start to bubble to the surface showing just what a pipedream Fourier’s utopia really is. Hawthorne’s point seems to be that holding rationality primary over contingency and human emotion is shortsighted and silly. Not only is Blithedale a folly, but the very idea of a utopia is a sheer impossibility. I’m sure that Hawthorne would have us remember the clever lesson from Thomas More’s “Utopia” – that it means, quite literally, “no place.” 

I’ll forego a lot of the plot details because I read this several months ago, and wouldn’t be able to do them justice without re-reading it. What I have unpacked here is just what jumped out at me the most. There is a strange woman named Zenobia who always wears a fresh flower in her hair, who turns out being the half-sister of a Blithedale foundling named Priscilla. The novel culminates in a set of philosophical disagreements between Coverdale and Hollingsworth, the ironically patriarchal figure whose presence hangs over Blithedale. I found the plot somewhat contrived and unrealistic, even for Hawthorne, but still very much worthwhile. 

The action is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, a well-known utopian community in its own right, where he spent most of 1841, largely in an effort to save money for his marriage. He would marry Sophia Peabody (of the famous Peabody sisters) in July of the next year.

Review of G. K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This was originally published in 1908 when Chesterton, one of the greatest Christian apologists of the first third of the twentieth century, was still a Protestant. He wouldn’t convert to Catholicism until the 1920s. Yet even as a Protestant, he had managed to do some wonderful writing, including “Orthodoxy,” his classic defense of the inner workings of Christian faith. However, I found this book to be less successful. The characters were so obviously meant to be symbols of something above and beyond themselves that it comes across more as a fable (or, as the subtitle has it, a “nightmare”) than a realist novel.

The main struggle Chesterton presents – relentlessly forced down your throat until you almost can’t bear it anymore – is that of anarchy versus order. Gabriel Syme (paladin of law and order) is a member of the Scotland Yard division that keeps an eye on political anarchists. He meets Gregory, an anarchist, at a party where they discuss what makes poetry poetic. Is it law, rationality, and reason – or disorder and anarchy? Syme suggests that Gregory is only a tongue-in-cheek anarchist, since he rightfully claims that total anarchy would never be able to accomplish its political goals. Gregory counters by offering to take Syme to an underground anarchist meeting to show him that they really do exist.

The rest proceeds almost predictably: we find that one member after another of the anarchist council is also working undercover as a member for the Scotland Yard. In fact, of the seven members (each named after a day of the week), five of them are discovered to be police officers. The first time or two this is surprising; by the fifth time, I was almost rolling my eyes. By the end, we find out that not even the leader of the group, Sunday, is an anarchist. Instead, he too has been a force for good. 

In the end, everything comes off sounding like a paean to reason and rationality, but the message comes off as both heavy-handed and confused, as difficult as that is to imagine. Maybe it was the overt force of the message mixed with the phantasmagoric style on top of the need for Chesterton to turn absolutely into a symbol with some latent meaning. There were just too many things he was trying to do here, and none of them come off with any virtuosity.

Review of Anita Brookner's "Leaving Home"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

After reading a couple of online interviews and other pieces about Anita Brookner, a distinctive personality profile starts to emerge. Professionally trained as an art historian, she taught at the Courtauld Institute and developed a reputation as a rather distinguished academic. She didn’t publish her first novel, “A Start in Life,” until she was in her fifties. She almost never gives interviews, is known among friends as being extraordinarily intelligent, and according to herself, wants nothing more than to be left alone. She has never married, stating “I chose the wrong people, and the wrong people chose me. So it never came about. At the time that was a cause of great sadness, certainly.”

Much like in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, we must only engage in a willful suspension of disbelief when we are asked to assume Brookner’s storyline is more novel than memoir. Emma, the novel’s protagonist, is strikingly like Brookner herself: cold, distant, aloof, and perhaps eager for excitement, but would think it gauche to ever outwardly show that eagerness. Feeling trapped by her suffocating relationship with her mother (who, by the way, also highly resembles Brookner), Emma moves to Paris to study the designs of French palatial gardens, unconsciously thinking this might bring some sort of linearity to her otherwise disordered personal life. 

Once she arrives in Paris, she slowly befriends Francoise Desnoyers, who works in the library where Emma regularly studies. She quickly pegs Francoise as a sort of libertine, only to realize that she too has an awkward, cumbersome relationship with her mother. Instead of the rational progress she envisioned that could be easily transferred from her study of gardens to her personal life, she is stupefied by the similarity of her circumstances. Once Emma is introduced to Francoise’s mother, she is quickly drawn into her family’s circle, with their outré manners and bizarre rituals.

Brookner, much like she has teased herself with the idea of happiness and fulfillment in real life, has done the same thing with Emma here. She meets men, and while she may be open-minded regarding her possible success in a romantic relationship, the reader gets the distinct impression that her overbearing cynicism and willful jadedness will crush any living thing within a mile. The message of the novel, if there is one, may very well be “growing is impossible, and don’t be so naïve as to think there is anything called happiness.” 

Brookner’s style, on the other hand, left a wholly different impression on me. She can certainly write. She does it beautifully. Many of the sentences reminded me of early Henry James, with the kind of formal premeditation for which I have always had a fondness. Other reviews have suggested that “Hotel Du Lac” is a better novel, and it might be. But “Leaving Home” left me tired with its message of intellectual and emotional stagnation and utter pessimism.

Review of E. M. Gombrich's "The Story of Art"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Just a dozen or so pages into this book, I knew that it was one I wish I would have had access to when I was first seriously exposed to art. While in many respects, it is a conservative textbook (being first published in 1950), it is fundamentally meant for someone who has little to no previous formal contact with art history. Of course, if you have some, this can make you seriously engage some of your previously held assumptions about what you like and why you like it, but I got the distinct impression while reading that it was meant to initiate a teenager – a teenager who very much reminded of me of myself – into a whole new world. 

The inclusions and exclusions of certain artists are, of course, always arbitrary. However, Gombrich’s choices do not deviate too much from a standard art history text. What particularly drew me to the book was what I perceived to be its inordinate focus on medieval and especially Renaissance art. Of the twenty-eight chapters included in the book, about five mostly focus on Western medieval images (6 and 8-11). Another six chapters (13-18) focus on the art of the Western Renaissance. Most surveys of art history to which I had been previously exposed paid scant attention to medieval art and they sometimes did not give the Renaissance the space that I felt it deserved. There is no doubt the medieval and Renaissance art Gombrich’s pet periods here (and, admittedly, they’re mine, too.) 

What makes it so special is that, instead of spending the first chapter in an abstract exercise of thinking about what “Art” is, he forces you over and over again to take the art on its own terms. While discussing the various visual perspectives painted by the artist of “The Garden of Nebamun,” he says: “To us reliefs and wall-paintings provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of life as it was lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. And yet, looking at them for the first time, one may find them rather bewildering. The reason is that the Egyptian painters had a very different way from ours of representing real life. Perhaps this is connected with the different purpose their paintings had to serve. What mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle” (p. 60). It is the occasional insight like this that makes the book most worthwhile for a neophyte. After all, how many of us have measured something we saw by the standards of our particular narrow time and place? He really drives home the point that thinking about art seriously means thinking about other perspectives (both literally and figuratively), other preoccupations, and other aesthetic modus operandi. This is a lesson that should be lost on none of us, about art, or about anything else.

Review of Hans Keilsons' "Comedy in a Minor Key"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The premise is simple enough. A married couple, Wim and Marie, decide to take in a Jew named Nico during World War II. In hiding him, the comfortably middle-class Wim and Marie learn what it means to live the precarious life of a Jew in 1940s Holland, in what would have otherwise been a set of rather ordinary circumstances. Soon afterwards, Nico becomes ill and eventually dies in their house, leaving the couple in the unique position of needing to dispose of a body no one can know they had there in the first place. They eventually leave him wrapped in blankets in a nearby park, but soon discover that they might have left a clue to their identity behind. Therefore, in a wonderful turn of irony, Wim and Marie are themselves forced to instantly flee their house for fear of being discovered by the police. 

The title is beautiful and wholly appropriate to the story. Juxtapositions are everywhere: there is the comic lightness of opera bouffe as Wim and Marie try to figure out how to get rid of Nico, but also the crushing dramatic realization of how this has all come about because of how some humans have chosen to treat others; the interplay of the quotidian as the couple go about their day-to-day existences in war-torn Holland with only the audience to find that this will one day be a place of grand historical importance. 

Writer Francine Prose recently wrote in a piece in the New York Times that she has come to include Dutch writer Hans Keilson in her personal list of the world’s “very greatest writers.” On that alone, I took up Keilson’s “Death of the Adversary,” and was just as impressed. Despite Time magazine’s listing it as one of the ten best magazines of the year, aside Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Porter’s “Ship of Fools,” Keilson unfortunately fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world. 

Translator Damion Searls’ revivification of his work is admirable and deserved, even while I found this “Comedy in a Minor Key” to be much less rewarding than “Death of the Adversary.” The former is a small, personal, intimate picture of human identity and frailty touchingly conceived, but it felt underdeveloped to me. Its size, at a mere 135 pages, gave me less time than I would have preferred to get to know Wim, Marie, and Nico. “Death of the Adversary,” however, deals with looming, world-historical forces that are at work in our lives, with bigger, abstracter ideas, and was probably for that reason more compelling for me. My rating of three stars here might be a little low. I didn’t know whether to go with three or four, but I can’t see myself rereading it any time soon, so I chose three. I would recommend to anyone interested in Keilson that they read “Death of the Adversary,” which I found to be truly spectacular.