Review of Natsume Soseki's "Kokoro"

This novel, one of Natsume Soseki’s last and written on the cusp of Japan’s epochal rise to becoming a world power, reflects the author’s preoccupation with conflicting cultural attitudes in the transition from the feudalist Late Tokugawa Shogunate to the capitalist, more modernized Japan it would become during the Meiji Restoration. Of course, this period wasn’t just marked with bureaucratic, political, and military reforms; it also trickled down into the personal lives, families, and friendships, and this intensely personal impact is what Soseki looks at here.

“Kokoro” tells the story of a narrator who sees a man walking down a beach one day; he eventually befriends this man who we only come to know as “Sensei.” The development of their relationship and growing friendship forms the first part of the book’s tripartite structure. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes his own naiveté in contrast with the worldliness and cynicism of Sensei. Sensei is a guarded man who is old enough to work but chooses not to (we never get the impression that this is out of laziness), has few close friends, and doesn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. While the innocent young narrator initially sees Sensei as the stereotypical older wise man, he slowly begins to realize that he has something unique to teach him. 

When the Emperor dies, his beloved General Nogi commits junshi, ritual suicide after the death of one’s feudal lord or master. Being a man of the old Tokugawa era, this act evokes more of a reaction in the Sensei than it does in the younger narrator – another sign that Soseki is telling the story of a generational and cultural divide. When Sensei sees General Nogi kill himself out of loyalty for the Emperor, he realizes that he doesn’t feel comfortable in this new Meiji dispensation, with the “modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.” 

The second part, “My Parents and I,” sees the narrator’s father’s health start to decline, which leaves his future as a very recent college graduate very uncertain. He and his brother are both curious about what the will has in store for them, but the recent manner in which General Nogi died brutally underscores the new era’s selfish interest in material things. The last part consists of a very long letter that Sensei wrote to the narrator before he too decides to commit suicide. We learn of his youth, his family, and an episode during his time as a student (that I won’t reveal here) that ties together all the facets of Sensei’s personality and finally completely reveals who he is. 

Throughout the novel, the prose is spare, sharp, lean, and clear. Even Sensei’s voice, in his extended letter, varies very little stylistically from that of the narrator. This spare quality adds a sense of quiet distance between the reader and the story, which perhaps for more harmonious reflection. The language may just be the product of a particularly good translation, but I found the writing well suited to describing the characters and the Soseki’s themes: human frailty, the inevitability of the culture clash, the unrelenting quality of modernity, and confrontation with one’s troubled youth.

Review of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"

Unless you were attending a university when this book was published, or have a special interest in the general ongoing dialogue we call the culture wars, "The Closing of the American Mind" may not be on your radar. When it first came out in 1987, it caused quite a fracas and became, I'm sure to everyone's (including Allan Bloom’s) surprise, a bestseller. It's difficult for me to imagine a book by an unprepossessing University of Chicago professor on the debilitating effects of Heidegger and Nietzsche on higher education becoming a bestseller today. This may only serve to bolster Bloom's case that the "liberal" attitude of openness has gone a few steps too far.

Or it might be the direct effect of Bloom's "voice" - which is, despite what any of his intellectual confreres say, by turns elitist, rankly unegalitarian, and possibly anti-democratic in content; in tone, he often comes off as the curmudgeonly old grandfather shaking his newspaper at you and telling you to get off of his lawn. I personally have no problem with the elitism or anti-democratic attitudes when it comes to teaching. There are, quite simply, some books that are better than others, and some ideas that are better than others, and having to pretend otherwise is simply to play the ostrich's game of sticking our heads in the sand. The better books should be taught for the moral education of the student body while inferior books should be set aside (surely to be picked up by many people who, after graduating from university and having been introduced to the greats, choose to eschew them and read pulp instead.) I, like Bloom, regret that recent American culture has lost the sense of education as a kind of moral training. Bloom's critics, however, also do him the grave disservice of hitching his tone onto the wagon that is the content of his intellectual argument. Who's going to take this cranky old man seriously - who sees an uncontrollable sexual release in a young teenage boy unashamedly gyrating his hips to rock 'n' roll, who unabashedly and unashamedly blames affirmative action as one of the contributing factors in the decadence of the contemporary American university, and whose explanation of the breakdown of the American family (if there indeed has been such a thing) is, quite charitably, described as "old-fashioned."

Bloom's argument is large and multifaceted; no review of a few hundred words could deal with it in all its complexity. What it claims at its base, though, is that certain attitudes popular in the sixties and seventies - universal acceptance, universal tolerance, the slow erosion of critical faculties - which eventually came to shape the minds of university students and even how university are administered. He claims, after Nietzsche, that we live in a time "beyond good and evil" - that is, where we have ceased not only looking for the differences in good versus bad (he archly points out that we describe nothing as "evil" anymore), but that we don't even know how to discern those differences. For Bloom, the moral education must consist of "a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, and the drama of moral choices." That is, at the very least, an education in critical moral discernment. He argues that this is all but gone.

He claims - dubiously, I think - that he noticed a steep drop in the number of students who were interested in the "Great Books" from the time when he first started teaching in the United States in the early sixties to the time of writing this book. At many stages in his argument, Bloom seems to have counterfactually reimagined a world in which students walked into the university already well-versed in Plato, Homer, Stendahl, and Hegel, Aristotle, eager to be filled to the brim with The Wisdom Of The Masters. I think everyone was exposed to Homer in high school, but how many of us took it "seriously" - what Bloom would call seriously? Were they familiar with the importance of “xenia” and the “oikos” in Homer? (And no, you don’t get translations of those words.) I can speak from personal experience that many of teachers themselves didn't have the intellectual background to teach Homer this rigorously. 

Richard Heffner, one of Bloom’s interlocutors following the popular press cavalcade after the release of the book, suggested during his interview with the professor that being an elitist might mean “thinking some questions are better answered by Hegel than by Joyce Brothers.” By that measure, I would imagine the vast majority of intelligent people are in fact elitists. Knowledge properly used and appropriately fostered quite simply makes you a better person. I think even the most obnoxious paladins of popular culture would admit that there is intellectual territory that Oprah’s Book Club hasn’t yet broached.

You may vehemently disagree with much of what Bloom has to say, or at least how he says it (it would put you in good company), but this comes highly suggested for anyone who thinks that answers to life’s “higher and deeper” questions deserve our most serious consideration. It serves as an honest refutation against the idea a few easy shibboleths of our times: that all answers are equally good, all educations are equally fulfilling and worthy, and all truths are equally valid.

Review of Carlo Levi's "Christ Stopped at Eboli"

This book was recommended to me probably eight years ago by a delightful old woman who worked with me by the name of Eleanor Jordan. I’d never heard of the book before, and didn’t think much of it for several years. One day, I saw it while browsing, picked it up, and just recently decided to read it, intermittently thinking of Eleanor. The title combined with the brief content summary she provided me prompted me to ask, “What is it? Fiction? A travel guide?” She just answered with her usual candor. “Just read it!” she would say. So I finally did.

There are heavily autobiographical elements in the book, so it’s difficult to tell where the memories begin and the actual history ends. Levi was an Italian doctor who wrote against Mussolini in the thirties and was exiled because of it, in the little town Gagliano (not its real name), for about a year in 1935; the next year, he and several other political prisoners were freed under general amnesty. The events in this book take place during that year, and but were only written down several years later, 1943-1944, when he was writing for an Underground resistance paper called “La Nazione del Popolo” in Florence.

The title ironically undercuts the entire book. The people of Gagliano say that “Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli” which means that the people of the town have not grown accustomed to human and humane things: Christian civilization, morality, any kind of historical progress. Levi’s carefully attentive documentation of their life challenges his self-perceived isolation; their life is as full of all the sadness, beauty, and joy that anyone else’s is. Gagliano isn’t the blessed paradise that we hear about from Peace Corps volunteers; it has just as many brigands, self-satisfied bureaucrats, and generation-long family rivalries as any other village where presumably “Christ did stop.”

Eventually, Levi is released as a political prisoner and therefore no longer obliged to stay there – but he finds it difficult to leave, even further testament to the humanity and likeability of its inhabitants. He returns to Florence to work with the Resistance, but never forgets his year-long stay at Gagliano. Like the American writer William Kennedy’s Albany cycle of novels, this book belongs to a rather small class in which a gifted writer goes to some small corner of the world, though his fictive craft makes it magical and wondrous, and then invites the entire world to come and see.

Review of Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion"

Several years ago, I read Jeanette Winterson's “Written On The Body,” which made a tremendous impression on me, and unfortunately I haven't found my way to another Winterson novel until now. What struck me most about her writing then and still what attracts me the most is her command of an innovative, unique style that reminds me of a melange of the best of Robertson Davies, Angela Carter, and Borges. It has a fantastical quality all its own that seems quite separate from magical realism, and in my opinion is much more engaging.

The novel comes in a tiny package, but there's plenty to think about. One of the leitmotifs is the idea of passion in all its forms – war, human love, gambling, the epicurean passions of the sybarite. The character of Villanelle, the daughter of a Venetian boatman who at night masquerades as a man in the Felliniesque casinos of her city, allows the novel just as openly to play with themes of identity and gender – a continuing them in Winterson's fiction.

Henri is a professional soldier in Napoleon's army, fatefully chosen to be the tender of the Emperor's larders as he makes the monomaniacal decision to invade Russia – in the winter, which the characters call “a zero winter.” Villanelle is a fascinating character: married to a vile man, she ends up getting sold into Napoleon's army as a prostitute for community use. Villanelle and Henry meet as Napoleon's army is finally collapsing under its own weight, and Henri has made the decision to desert, along with Patrick, an eccentric priest with a history all his own. During their journey back to Italy, Henri and Villanelle fall in love.

After they finally make it back home, he rescues her beating heart from a Venetian palace, places it back into her body, goes stark raving mad (like Emperor, like soldier), and is committed to a prison where he is forced to see his beloved row by in her gondola every single day. Just like the end of every other love story you've ever read, right?

Villanelle is also a body of paradoxes – a whore and a savior, a man and a woman, a warrior and a lover. Winterson uses religious imagery to highlight her, and successfully manages to make her dialogue with the character of Henri almost kerygmatic. (The passion of the gospels is possibly still another that Winterson is trying to unearth as the story develops.)

While I may very well go back to my old ways and not read her again for another several years, Jeanette Winterson's fiction deserves some serious attention. You can always expect her to be concerned with the mercurial nature of human love (and especially lesbian love), but beyond that, you will never know the set of tropes she will use to explore it – fantastic historical fiction here, physics in “Gut Symmetries,” a post-apocalyptic hellscape in “The Stone Gods,” or memoir in “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” But I hope I’ve learned my lesson and don’t neglect her again for nearly as long.

Book Haul #15

The books I discuss are:

Self and Society in Medieval France, the memoirs of Guibert of Nogent

The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, Georges Duby

Second Skin, John Hawkes

Becoming a Man, Paul Monette

Modern Faith and Thought, Helmut Thielicke

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard, Isak Dinesen

Selected Novels and Short Stories, Patricia Highsmith

Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, Edward Schillebeeckx

Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Marina Warner

Review of David Sedaris' "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

When sitting down to consider the overall experience that I had when reading a writer like David Sedaris, never would it have occurred to me that I would get to show off my knowledge of Eric Havelock or the Parry-Lord thesis. I’ll spare you the details, but I promise the central idea is important: people used to saying things do so much differently than people used to writing things, even when those two sets of things are exactly the same. The example that Parry, Lord, and Havelock were most to cite was Homer, arguably the best-known western writer of pre-literacy. They say that Homer communicates things in such a way that would be very different, and even unnecessary in a literate society, because he simply didn’t have this thing we call “writing.” 

Of course, the Parry-Lord thesis can quickly grow to be much more technically difficult than what I’ve said here, but the basic idea holds. When you’re reading something, the way you experience it is drastically different than from when you hear a raconteur “tell” it (especially a raconteur on the order of Homer). For about a decade, I’ve heard the occasional David Sedaris piece on NPR’s “This American Life” with host Ira Glass, who I imagine to be every bit as painfully awkward and borderline sociopathic as Sedaris is. I’ve never found Glass funny. He is what Philip Roth would have become had he taken up comedy, and one of the words that doesn’t come to mind when I think of Philip Roth is “comedian.” Sedaris, however, got the occasional chuckle out of me. I appreciate a sense of humor that’s off the beaten path, and his reflections on this or that – I somehow never seem to quite remember the content of his stories – did the trick. 

So, I found this in a used bookstore the other day for three dollars (yes, yes, I know it’s a hardback, but even at Goodwill hardbacks are going for three dollars these days), thinking that I would make up for all those times of passing him up in the New Yorker to look at the cartoons. I finished the book yesterday, and if hard-pressed to match the plots of the stories with their titles, I’m still not sure I’d be able to do it – maybe because they hardly ever have anything to do with one another. But I suppose my point is: I find the writing to be incredibly flat, overly indulgent, repetitive, and too autobiographical (if such a criticism can be made). You will hear endlessly that he lives in France, of his international travels, his long-suffering partner Hugh, et cetera. These are incessantly and grindingly shoved in your face, so much so that the book begins to lose the sense that it might have an audience.

The lack of interest in the stories on the page is probably attributable to Sedaris’ whiny, effete voice and overall stage presence. He just so much sounds the persnickety curmudgeon that he can’t help but be occasionally funny. His voice – both its physicality and tender faux sentimentality – are lost on the page. I suppose what I really found funny was his unashamed prissiness, his unmitigated misanthropy – both available, at least to me, only when I hear him reading his stories to a live audience. While even the prissiness and misanthropy can get old after a while, they never even struck me while simply reading him on the page. My reaction to this collection (at least as presented here, in book form)? Eh. I could really take it or leave it. In the future, I’ll probably do more of the latter.

Review of John Williams' "Stoner"

Until recently, I usually begin a book with the same amount of enthusiasm with which I end it. Good books have inviting beginnings, which sustain me through to the end; to be overly simplistic about matters, bad ones can be bad in many different ways (see the first sentence of “Anna Karenina”) but I usually still trudge through due to my half-hearted attempt at self-discipline and genuine belief that To Quit A Book Is A Serious Thing, Indeed. Lately, I’ve been beginning books with one opinion and finishing them with another. “Stoner” was one of those.

It begins as a tight, crisp story, without lingering over any of the main character Stoner’s biographical details too much. Stoner comes from a poor family of farmers and after a few semesters of thinking he is going to get a degree in agriculture, soon finds that his true calling is literature. He pursues an M.A. and a Ph.D. which draws him further away from his family, gets married to a cold, distant debutante named Edith, and has an adorable daughter named – and this is important - Grace. 

As the book and the marriage wear on, Edith becomes more and more inexplicably heartless, tormenting, and cruel, you feel like you’re reading “The Good Soldier” – something Dreiserian in its ability to induce pathos. One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the novels – and it’s really one that should have been explained more carefully – is why a mild-mannered milquetoast like Stoner would have married a total bitch like Edith. Divorce wasn’t completely unheard of a century ago; they certainly didn’t run in social circles where they had to keep up appearances. So, what gives? 

The one thing the story has going for it is Williams’ refusal to romanticize Stoner, his occupation in academia, or any other aspect of his life. This certainly isn’t an Ivory Tower university (not that those are always so cozy either) where he gets paid to spend hours idling over dusty books in the Rare Books Room; he has several undergraduate classes, teaches a graduate seminar about the influence of Latin literature in late antiquity, and is responsible for a spate of graduate students’ dissertations. In addition to this, he also researches and writes to be published (how little things change over the decades). Well, two things: that and Stoner’s implacable dedication to the profession of teaching. 

Williams was once asked in an interview about Stoner’s life, and if he thought it was “sad.” He responded with an affirmative “no,” that Stoner had an absolutely wonderful life. This good life, full of wonder, can only be adjudged to be such against Stoner’s own standards of what it means to be a teacher and how closely he hewed to them. He was a passionate teacher, even though we’re told in the opening lines that “Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the other ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.” 

Let’s be brutally honest here: when all is said and done, the will be said for 99.9% of us. That old Greek wish of being remembered generations and generations hence, which came to easily to Odysseus, just will not come to fruition for most of us. Does that make our lives any less full of wonder, or regret, or even the sublime? Stoner’s life, I think, serves as an answer: “no.” For it is in how we pursue what is most meaningful to us that marks the truest measure of ourselves. As someone more eloquent than myself said in her Goodreads review, “it is about how the inner life redeems the outer.” How simply, and how beautifully said.