Olav Audunsson: Vows by Sigrid Undset

The unfathomable suffering and agony in her poor eyes--that was what drew his own naked soul up into the light. Gone was everything he had thought and intended and decided. He sensed that great and weighty things had now all but vanished from his mind; he was incapable of holding on to them. What remained was only the latest and deepest cruel certainty that she was the flesh of his flesh and life of his life, and no matter how mistreated and despoiled and broken she might be, it could never be otherwise. Their life's roots had been entwined from the first moment he could remember. And now he saw how death had seized hold of her with both hands, he felt as if he too had barely managed to escape from being torn apart. Then a longing came over him so forcefully that it shook him to his very core--a longing to pull her desperately close, to hide both her and himself.

For many years I have had a December tradition of reading one of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter novels. First, in the older, more archaic Charles Archer translation; then in Tiina Nunally's (superior) modern translation. This year, it felt like time to move on, not from the tradition, but to one of Undset's other books of medieval Norway. (I also read it at the end of November, not December, but it's pretty cold outside, and besides, I'm stuck at home with COVID and really needed something to seek my teeth into.) Vows, titled in other translations as The Axe, is the first of a series named either for its male protagonist Olav Audunsson, or for his title, The Master of Hestviken, and it follows Olav as he pursues the fulfillment of the promise of marriage his father made with that of his beloved, Ingun Steinfinnsdatter.

In many ways, Olav and Ingunn are like the anti-Kristin and anti-Erland. Whereas Kristin seeks to be released from her engagement to good-hearted Simon Darre so that she may marry the impetuous older man, Olav and Ingunn want nothing more than to fulfill the agreement their parents made: on his deathbed, Olav's father entrusted his son to Steinfinn, who would raise him as a son until he came of age, and then marry Ingunn. But plans change: Steinfinn and his wife Ingeborg are transformed by a cruel attack by Ingeborg's former betrothed, which leaves them both vengeful and withdrawn. Steinfinn has his vengeance, but receives a mortal wound in the process, and after his death, Ingunn's uncles are not so keen to fulfill a promise they know nothing about, and want to marry Ingunn to someone who will provide them a strong alliance. Olav and Ingunn force the uncles' hand by sleeping together, thus binding the marriage in the eyes of the local bishop, but theirs is a Norway in a state of constant change, and the power of the bishops is no guarantee. Olav only make things worse when he kills one of Ingunn's brothers in a fit of anger, and becomes an outlaw.

The story of Vows is one of patience and toil: Olav and Ingunn strive and wait for nearly a decade for their rights to be recognized, and for them to be permitted to live together at Olav's ancestral house at Hestviken. It must be said that neither character has the charisma of Kristin, with her preternatural loveliness and purity, or of outrageous Erland. Olav is sullen and sort of humorless, and Ingunn's principle character trait is her psychological fragility: after being separated from Olav, she becomes briefly psychosomatically paralyzed. But there's no doubt that they fit together, as they believe. Olav's single-minded insistence on claiming what's his by right, Ingunn's deep need for Olav's protection, these drive them together as much as any vow or legal status, and the social, political, and personal factors that drive them apart seem all the more horrible and cruel.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Vows only works to the extent that you are really willing to believe in the validity of Olav and Ingunn's marriage, which is cemented only by a promise and--forgive me--a penetration. Over and over again, people in the couple's lives try to convince them to settle for a different marriage, or an agreement to go their separate ways. In practice, this would actually be quite easy, it seems, but you have to believe, as Olav and Ingunn believe, that their marriage is something that exists between them and God, and that it cannot be abolished or supplanted. Undset's novel is clearly on the side of the Church in its skirmishes with powerful landholders like Ingunn's uncles, who resent the imposition of its laws over their feudal ones. And you must believe what a horrible violation it is when--spoiler alert--Ingunn allows herself to be seduced by a happy-go-lucky Icelander in Olav's long absence.

Olav and Ingunn battle heroically against the forces that would have them break their vow. But it is possible, perhaps, to go too far even in protecting one's marriage vows. Olav's killing of Ingunn's brother Einar, for which he ultimately is able to pay the acceptable murder-price, is one such moment. But another comes at the novel's climax, when Olav is approached by the Icelander, hoping that he will release his claim on Ingunn. Olav agrees to ski with the Icelander to the far estate of Olav's friend Arnvid, on the pretense of asking for his support. Then, in a woodland hut--and again, spoiler alert--he bashes the Icelander's head in with an axe. In the novel's final scene, Olav burns the hut down with the Icelander's body inside, realizing that he's left his treasured--and well-known--axe inside, and we are left to wonder if Olav hasn't finally committed a violation of God's law that is too cold, too cruel to come back from, one that will sunder him from Ingunn forever.

The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick

Kongrosian said, "I sent them away. They made it even more difficult for me. Look--see that desk? I'm not part of it and it's part of me! Watch and I'll show you." He scrutinized the desk intently, his mouth working. And, on the desk, a vase of pale roses lifted, moved through the air toward Kongrosian. The vase, as they now watched, passed into Kongrosian's chest and disappeared. "It's inside me, now," he quavered. "I absorbed it. Now it's me. And--" He gestured at the desk. "I'm it!"

In the spot where the vase had been Nicole saw, forming into density and mass and color, a complicated tangle of mass and color, a complicated tangle of interwoven organic matter, smooth red tubes and what appeared to be portions of an endocrine system. A section, she realized, of Kongrosian's internal anatomy.

What is politics but a mass delusion, a lie on a grand scale that is sometimes perpetrated upon us, but also one in which we collaborate, often quite willingly? Philip K. Dick's novel The Simulacra takes that idea to it extreme, most literal form: the president of the United States of Europe and America (renamed when West Germany was admitted as the 51st state) is nothing but a simulacrum, an android. The sham elections that put the simulacrum in place are ostensibly to vote in a new husband for Nicole Thibodeaux, the beautiful Jackie-esque First Lady, who is the real focal point of the American symbolic order: everyone loves her, and that unity keeps the country together. (It's no coincidence, I think, that The Simulacra was written the year of JFK's assassination.) If the country found out that her husband was a simulacrum--and that she herself only an actress, the fourth to play Nicole over many decades--who's to say what might happen?

The thing about Philip K. Dick novels is that they can never be distilled into a single thread, and trying to find the "main thread" is often a fool's errand. Maybe the novel isn't really about Nicole, but the telekinetic classical pianist Richard Kongrosian, who suffers from a mental disorder in which he believe he's become invisible, reduced to a terrible smell. Kongrosian is an integral part of the White House's "bread and circus"-style entertainments, and his mental dissolution represents a political crisis for Nicole. To make matters worse, psychotherapy has been outlawed, and only one therapist, the incredibly named Egon Superb, is left to take on all the book's major characters as patients. Maybe it's those other patients, like the classical jug band of Al and Ian, who want to make it big at the White House, who are the main characters--or maybe it's the group of musical ethnologists who take a trip into the jungles of northern California, looking for Kongrosian, and finding only a group of atavistic Neanderthals. I haven't even found a way to mention the fascist rabble-rouser Bertold Goltz, or the fact that Nicole and her counselors are scheming to bring Hermann Goering back to life.

The Simulacra is a book about falsehoods and persuasions. Where is the line between susceptibility to propaganda and mental illness? Al sells "jalopies," shambling one-way vehicles for immigration to Mars, with the help of a "papoola," a bug-like Martian creature capable of subliminal suggestion. (That the papoola itself is a simulacrum is a classic Dick move--a lie within a lie.) Society in The Simulacra is split into low-class "Bes" and upper-clas"Ges," the latter standing for Geheimnis, the German word for "secret," meaning those who are initiated into certain government secrets, like a kind of Gnostic knowledge. And yet being Geheimnis doesn't make one immune to the propaganda; if anything, it makes one's commitment to believing in the propaganda--in the beauty and goodness of Nicole--even stronger.

Kongrosian's madness is brought on by a "commercial," a pesky gnat-like robot that sneaks into your house or car to convince you about how badly you need deodorant. Is this what happens when you take commercials too seriously? And what if you take political propaganda seriously? At the end of the novel, as the Nicole regime begins to fall apart, Kongrosian begins to pick away at the boundaries between himself and the world. He absorbs the bad guy's gun, and leaves in its place a gun-shaped hunk of quivering Kongrosian-flesh. It's the best scene in a good book, and it's strangely reminiscent of Willie Mink at the end of DeLillo's White Noise, who ducks when Jack Gladney says "hail of bullets." Dick goes a step farther, perhaps, than DeLillo: the madness, the inability to tell the simulacrum from the real, infects not only the psyche but the world at large.

I'm continually amazed by how many masterpieces there are in the deep stacks of Dick's library. The Simulacra is not a book that people read much anymore, not like they do Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Perhaps it's not quite on the level of masterworks like VALIS and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, but it's a book of incredible ingenuity, constructed from innumerable layers, frightening and funny and bizarre. I'm amazed, too, by how much of Dick's greatest books are made up of the same materials: telekinetic "psis," the jalopies, the world governments. These element give the impression of a shared "cinematic universe," but in true PKD fashion, they are more like parallel universes, slight but exclusive variations. And so the unique images stand out: what I will remember about The Simulacra, I think, besides the image of Kongrosian's spleen in the shape of a vase, is the group of Neanderthals gathered in the California jungle, watching the government collapse on television and smiling to one another--knowing that their time is at hand again.

Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

Yet it is also impossible not to be curious about emperors beyond the spin and the stereotypes. Can we get a view of those real-life human being, in all their ordinary human variety and frailty, who sat at the heart of the palace, as they hosted their dinners, greeted the senators at the salutatio, or just chatted to their slave barbers in the morning while they were shaved? And what was it like to be the ruler himself within a court culture of deference, deceit and dystopia? It is easy to understand how flattery humiliates the flatterers, even when it is spoken with knowing irony. We put ourselves more readily in the position of the underdog than of the autocrat. But the flattered are victims too. How did it feel to be the one person who knew that no one could ever be trusted to tell them the truth?

What must it have been like to be a Roman emperor? On one hand, you're so high above everyone else in the Empire that upon your death, you're likely to be elevated to the level of a god. Your face is on every coin, your words etched on buildings a thousand miles away; your likeness appears even on cookie presses, meaning you're devoured by your own subjects. On the other hand, much of your job, if it is a job, is taken up with settling small, petty disputes: as Mary Beard writes in Emperor of Rome, the central authority of the Emperor made him the final judge in all matters, and he spent a huge portion of his day settling disputes that came to him by mail, or were pressed into his hand by supplicants during his morning appearances. Perhaps more important was the emperor as symbol; first and foremost the emperors are called on to perform emperor-ness. Should we be surprised that emperors like Nero and Commodus took it a little too far, seizing the limelight on the stage, or the gladiatorial field?

I enjoyed Beard's SPQR, which sought to explain what life might have been like for ordinary citizens under the Roman Empire. Emperor of Rome, which takes the same methods and strategies but aims that at the top of Rome's social pyramid, left me even more impressed at Beard's abilities. What's so interesting about both books, I think, is that Beard really does manage to reorient one's perspective on ancient history, to see things in a new way, in a genre--let's face it, these are pop-history books; bound for airport tables--that rewards watered-down retreads. The magic is in Beard's simple, non-chronological approach. Instead of going emperor by emperor, Beard organizes the book into sections that deal with different aspects of the emperor's life: imperial banquets, royal palaces, foreign policy, relationships with slaves, relationships with women. The total impression is of a remarkably stable social system, with the emperor at top, that lasts for over two hundred years, before emperors became increasingly taken from outside Italy and power-sharing schemes became more common.

As in SPQR, one of the more interesting aspects of Emperor of Rome is the skeptical eye Beard turns toward our traditional notions of "good" and "bad" emperors. She begins the book with Elagabalus, remembered today--if he's remembered at all--for sexual perversions and cruel tricks. (Although, as Beard notes, there's an increasing acknowledgement of Elagabalus as a proto-trans figure, who implored his doctors to help him become a woman by surgically removing his genitals.) Beard reminds us that Elagabalus was only fourteen when he became emperor and eighteen when he was assassinated--how much of a true tyrant could he have been? The stories about Elagabalus--and Nero, and Caligula, and others--ought to be seen, Beard suggest, less as true indications of their character and rule, and more as stories that serve other interests: to posthumously illustrate the and govern the relationship between the emperor and the empire, or to indemnify a ruler whose claim to inheritance is shaky. Similarly, the stories of the "good" emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, were spread at least in part by their successor who wanted to emphasize the unbroken--and virtuous--nature of their own power.

It doesn't sound all that fun to be emperor. You got to eat a lot of good food, but mostly you had to share it with senatorial guests at banquet to show your largesse. You could build your own house, and make it as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, but in many ways you were a prisoner in that house, and as likely as not it would end up the site of your assassination. You had unlimited power, but the exercise of that power could be dreary, taken up by niggling complaints from your provincial governors and subjects alike. (As Beard notes, there was no such thing as a "grand strategy" or political agenda for most emperors, whose rule was mostly reactive rather than active. Even acts of conquest were mostly meant to project success and achievement "at home," and many conquered lands were barely governed and quickly abandoned.) There was no such thing as a private life; every aspect of your identity, from your family to your sexual preference, was absorbed into the empire. Your own flaws became the empire's flaws, and you'd better keep up performing your virtues, because those are the empire's virtues. You might become a divus when you die, but you could hardly enjoy that while you are alive. Still, it was a life that elevated men to such a symbolic status that we still remember their names today--for better or worse.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

"You haven't said a word of blame, Sarah."

"What sort of word?"

"Well, I'm what's generally called a traitor."

"Who care?" she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss--one can kiss a stranger. She said, "We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You've never betrayed that country, Maurice."

Maurice Castle is an agent with the MI-6 working on African intelligence. He's an ordinary sort of guy, aging but comfortable. When his superiors suspect that his unit has been leaking information to the Russians, suspicion naturally falls on his subordinate Davis, a desperate and hard-drinking man. These superiors decide it would be best to get rid of Davis, poisoning him in a way that will look like the effects of cirrhosis, but--stop me if you didn't see this coming--it's actually Castle that's the leak. He's no Communist, but he owes a debt to the Russians for assisting in his extraction from South Africa years ago with the Black South African woman who is now his wife. The discovery of the leak puts him in a tough position. Getting out would be the only prudent move, but an old South African enemy he's been charged with meeting reveals that the apartheid regime is considering using "tactical" nuclear bombs on the Bantustans, and Maurice finds himself torn between saving himself and his family, and doing what's right.

The Human Factor is maybe the bleakest and most cynical of all of Greene's books. Maurice is, as he describes himself to Sarah, technically a "traitor." But is his country something worth being loyal to? The chummy ease with which his superiors discuss dispatching poor Davis, between kidney pies and pheasant shoots, expose a British intelligence that has no interest in "the human factor" of the title, only saving themselves from scandal at any cost. They collaborate happily with the apartheid regime in South Africa, whose callousness toward Black South Africans is depicted with shocking clarity. When Castle asks his former South African contact Muller about his attitude toward the innocents who would die from these "tactical nukes," Muller replies that he expects they'll have their own segregated heaven. And to be honest, the Russians are no better--it's revealed late in the book that they, too, are happy to use Maurice more or less for their own purposes. The Human Factor makes it clear that you can as loyal as you wish to your country, but your country will never be loyal to you.

Greene could write about Africa well; he did in The Heart of the Matter. But if The Human Factor has a flaw, it's that the life of Maurice's wife Sarah and her (much darker) son Sam, a pair of Black South Africans living in the homogenous London exurbs, isn't really well imagined. There's a telling moment late in the book where Sarah, stoic but bereft at Maurice's sudden exodus to Moscow, finds herself being called "Topsy" by a stranger--the young enslaved girl from Uncle Tom's Cabin. But in habit, in temperament, Sarah might be another Anglo housewife. Still, the final act, in which Maurice is separated from Sarah and Sam, is among the most bitterly tragic moments in Greene's fiction. The novel ends with sad sourness: the Russians' promise to extract Sarah and Sam has been abandoned, and for the first time Maurice and Sarah are able to talk on the phone for a few seconds before the line goes dead. We don't expect that the two will ever be reunited; they are loyal to each other--the country of themselves--but it's the other, bigger countries that will always have their way.

A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Journey by Sybille Bedford

Under the next morning's sun, Morelia does not look like Avila and autumnal Castile. All the same it is very Spanish. A town of under fifty thousand, architecturally homogenous, of long lines of arcades and seventeenth-century facades, compact, grey, handsome, dwindling into mud huts, ending abruptly in unbroken countryside. It is quiet after Mexico City, serene by day and melancholy by night. There is nothing particular to see. From the hotel roof, the view over the plain is enchanting. The inside of the cathedral is decorated to the last square inch in 1890 polychrome. Christ wears a wig of real hair, the Saints' tears are pearly beads, the Martyrs' blood lozenges of crimson wax, and the images are kissed to a high polish. Before independence, Morelia was called Valladolid, Valladolid of Michoacán. Yes, it is very Spanish, but it is not Spain. Like the Puritans of New England, the Spanish impressed themselves on Mexico. Both settle in a part of the continent whose climate and countryside were familiar and congenial. Both established their language, their religion and a style of building, However, unlike the Puritans, the Spaniards did not eliminate the Indians. In fact, the Indians have about eliminated them. There are now supposed to be only some forty thousand whites left in a population of three million pure Indians and seventeen million mestizos, and many of these whites are only whites by courtesy or the use of face powder.

Shortly after World War II, German-English writer Sybille Bedford got tired of the United States and decided she wanted to take a trip to Mexico. She took with her a companion identified here only as E.--in truth, her lover Evelyn Gendel--and spent a year traveling the country by rail, by automobile, by boat, and by airplane. What she found was a country of great natural beauty, suffused with history, and not at all like the fashionable travel destinations of Europe. It's not said, but it may have been that Bedford, who from what I understand was sort of rushed out of Europe by her literary friends when the war came calling, had become disillusioned with Europe as an idea; Mexico, the oldest country in the Americas (as Bedford describes it) seems paradoxically quite new, totally undiscovered.

Bedford's Mexico is a country that has not quite become friendly to visitors: to drive anywhere, you must first go somewhere else in the other direction. Much of the narrative is taken up by travel mishaps, by waiting around for a bus or a boat to appear, which it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn't. An attempt to drive through the jungle to the Pacific coast goes as well as you'd imagine. In one hotel, S. and E. try to return to the lobby only to discover there are no stairs. It's in this environment that Don Otavio de X. y X. y X., the charismatic hacendado who invites S. and E. to stay with him in the book's central sections, wishes to turn his ancestral home into a hotel. There is much wrangling among Otavio and his family about who will invest in the hotel, and what will remain reserved for whom in the hacienda; I didn't quite understand it, but it was funny. The main obstacle for Don Otavio is that a long-promised road around Lake Chapala has yet to be built, so visitors must come by boat. Which is to say that the general disorderliness of the Mexican authorities is only one manifestation of a larger, perhaps spiritual, shabbiness to which S. and E. must accustom themselves.

Bedford comes to Mexico with an intense interest in the country's history. On the long train rides, on the second-class buses where she is crammed next to the chickens, she reads about the ill-fated "Emperor of Mexico" Maximilian, installed by European powers and later killed by Mexican republicans, who didn't take much to the idea of a European leader. Maximilian, as Bedford describes him, was a well-meaning fool, whose reformist ideals were quite different from the conservative powers who invited him to rule, and who thought that would be enough to stave off revolution. In a way, Maximilian is mirrored in the many European and American exiles that Bedford meets at Don Otavio's: the meddlesome Englishman, the German homeopath who locals consider a witch, the poisonously racist Virginian. Perhaps they are all castoffs, fled to Mexico because their idiosyncrasies have made them impossible to deal with in the places from which they came. Next to them, Don Otavio's fecklessness is charming, and seems of a piece with his openness and warmth.

No doubt today's Mexico is not much like the Mexico of Bedford's day. The charming villages are, in many cases, sprawling urban cities. I would guess that there are working roads between, say, Puebla and Vera Cruz, though I can't say for sure. Still, Bedford's travelogue gave me an appetite to see it for myself: the vistas, the volcanoes, the haciendas and churches, the roadside stands of tortillas and beans, the tierra caliente and the tierra templada. 

Henry VI, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

EXETER: Ay, we may march in England or in France,
not seeing what is likely to ensue,
This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forged love
And will at last break out into a flame.
As festered members rot but by degree
Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,
So will this base and envious discord breed.
And now I fear that fatal prophecy
Which in the time of Henry named the Fifth
Was in the mouth of every sucking babe:
That Henry born at Monmouth should win all,
And Henry born at Windsor should lose all,
Which is so plain that Exeter doth wish
His days may finish ere that hapless time.

Henry VI, Part One is not very good. It was one of Shakespeare's first plays, if not the first, and probably a collaboration with others, which may account for how its parts sometimes seem at odds with each other. Then again, "parts at odds with each other" is on-brand for this play, which is all about how internal divisions brought the defeat of English forces under the early reign of Henry VI. Henry VI, Part One is a startlingly jingoistic play, one that depicts the French as a "fickle wavering nation," full of fay schemers, dabbling in witchcraft, relying on a woman--Joan of Arc--to do their dirty work. How in the world, the play asks, did we let these people take back the lands that were conquered under the heroic Henry V? The answer is that only the English can defeat the English: bickering and squabbling between the English powers are what led to military losses.

There are many factions among the English: there's the Cardinal Winchester, representative of the Church, who hates Gloucester, the Protector of the the king, who is not yet of age to rule alone, and thus the true power behind the throne. But these squabbles are minor compared to the enmity that rises up between Richard, later the Duke of York, and the Duke of Somerset, the representative of the Lancastrians. Henry VI, Part One is, among other things, about the birth of the Wars of the Roses: in one memorable scene, York and Somerset's partisans literally pick white and red roses from the bushes of the royal gardens to express their allegiances. It's these squabblers that doom Talbot, the commander in the French field and one of the last remaining icons of English courage and bravery. It's Talbot who gets some of the better lines, railing against Joan of Arc and her forces: "Pucelle or puzel, dauphin or dogfish, / Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels / And make a quagmire of your mingled brains." But these are empty promises: without the material support of York or Somerset, too busy fighting each other to commit their forces to the English cause, Talbot is defeated and killed.

The war stuff, honestly, is very boring. What nearly redeems the play is Joan of Arc, styled as "Pucelle," the maiden, whose language bears the imprint of the Shakespeare to come. Shakespeare's Pucelle is a vulgar braggart who asserts dominance over the French king by the sheer brazenness of her self-promotion. It's Joan who understands better than anyone on the French side what the death of Henry V and the rise of the boy king means: "Glory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, / Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught." She consorts with spirits, who refuse to help her in the final moments of French defeat. Knowing that France is doomed, she tries desperately to save herself, rejecting her own father to continue claiming a noble birth, then quickly discarding her "virgin" reputation by suggesting that she's pregnant to the English forces who would burn her at the stake.

No doubt she's meant to be a representation of fickle, filthy Frenchiness, but at times she seems like the only person worth rooting for. I loved how, when an English commander piles a heap of empty titles on the dead Talbot, Joan cuts through his blowhard patriotism: "Him that thou magnifi'st with all these titles / Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet." This is ugly and vulgar, perhaps, but it's persuasive, and Shakespeare would later elevate a similar attitude to a kind of undeniable humanist dignity in Falstaff. Joan, at least, of all the characters in the play, knows that war is a dirty business.

In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The Point had a double meaning: it was both the point of human life--its goal--and also the point of intersection where its highest attainment, by which he meant its highest experiences, met. And what were these highest experiences? They were two-fold, he explained: one  on the physical plane, the other on the--what do you want to call it? The psychic, the spiritual? Whatever. 'Now what would you call the highest human experience on the physical plane?' he asked his audience on these Saturday nights in the sunken garden. No answer, a hushed stillness except for the incessant splash from the fountain, and the insects shrieking (sometimes a bird woke up and sang by mistake from the depths of some dark tree). 'What, no one knows? You don't even know that? What have I done to deserve this bunch of dummies?' And then he supplied the answer himself: 'The Orgasm, of course--isn't that it? Isn't that the Point of our highest physical experience?' It was, there was no question of it. Yes, Socrates.

Many years ago, Leo Kellerman enter Louise's world like an Adonis. Blonde, striking, and large, he managed to take possession both of Louise's apartment, occupied by her husband Bruno and daughter Marietta, as well as Louise herself. It's from Louise's apartment he began to court followers to his programs of physical and spiritual development. And though neither the sex nor the residency was permanent, Louise has had a kind of hopelessly entangled relationship with Leo all her life, up into old age. In the New York of the 80s, Leo has graduated to a run-down Victorian mansion in the Hudson Valley, where he runs what looks and sounds awfully like a cult. His charisma attracts the young--and young women especially--but those who have known him long can see how fat he's gotten, how shabby, and how desperate.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's In Search of Love and Beauty is, on a structural level, something to be admired. The way she interweaves the now and then, providing a holistic sense of Leo and Louise's lives. To these several generations of family are added: Louise's needy, insecure daughter Marietta; Marietta's son Mark, suave, cold, and gay; Natasha, an adopted daughter whose physical ugliness and shy devotion to Mark conceal the fact that, of all the characters, she's the only one who seems rather at peace. (She is the only one, it seems, on whom Leo's vulgar charms have no effect, because she lacks the the tremendous interior longings on which he preys.) Leo, of course, has no family; Louise is "as close to a wife" as he's ever desired, and it's hard not to feel that he has, in some way, parasitized them. But none of them are really fools; they more than anyone see Leo for what he is, and there is a sense that they attend to him--Mark helps finance that run-down Victorian, for example--out of pity as much as awe. It's a vision of the New Age in the 80s that has curdled, but which insists it's always been in on the joke.

One thing that really interested me in In Search of Love and Beauty was the characters' relationship to India. Jhabvala of course, was born Ruth Prawer in Germany, and married a Persian architect in New Delhi. Many of her books are about India, and she's perhaps best remembered today for her work with the Anglo-Indian Merchant and Ivory filmmaking team, including an adaptation of her India-set novel Heat and Dust. In Search of Love and Beauty is a New York novel, but it's a New York tinged by India: Leo's self-help work is pointedly influenced by Indian mysticism; Marietta goes to India yearly, to travel and be with an Indian named Ahmed with whom she carries on a decades-long affair. She learns to play the sarod, which makes In Search of Love and Beauty, somehow, the second book I've read this year in which a woman learns to play the sarod. Jhabvala's interested in the way that India becomes a focus for the Western imagination, a place whose wisdom we imagine we might turn to when our own has become exhausted. In one crucial scene, Marietta sees that Ahmed has aged terribly after a long absence, revealing, perhaps, that Eastern mysticism can't really keep us shielded from the bare facts of human nature.

In Search of Love and Beauty struck me as one of those books you might call a "real yarn," a story whose chief appeal is a plotty intricacy that keeps you engaged. It's often very funny, as with the section above, where Leo posits to his followers that the point of life is to seek a spiritual orgasm. It's written in an omniscient third person that makes it seem sort of antiquated--an 1880s voice for the 1980s. Its chief flaw might be that Leo, the novel's lodestar, never quite seems as magnetic or appealing as the story demands; his pathetic and rather ordinary nature are clear to us from the very beginning. But maybe that's the point--we even flock to gurus we don't believe in, because unlike us, at least they seem to believe in themselves.

Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren

What now of his vices, and why is it that they have not the sound of vices? None of them is an end in itself--that is their secret, just as Falstaff's character is his mystery. He does not live to drink or steal or lie or foin o' nights. He even does not live in order that he may be the cause of wit in other men. We do not in fact know why he lives. The great boulder is balanced lightly on the earth, and can be tipped with the lightest touch. He cannot be overturned. He knows too much, and he understands too well the art of delivering with every lie he tells an honest weight of profound and personal revelation.

Years ago I set a goal for myself: I wanted to read all of Shakespeare's plays. It helped to have read a bunch of them already, but if you try to stick to one book by an author per year like I do, filling in the gaps takes a while, and soon you find you're down to the dregs: the Henry Sixes, the Pericleses, the Titi Andronici. So for a few years I let it slip. What I needed, I suppose, was inspiration: a Shakespeare-loving voice to bring me back into love with the words again. This collection of essays by Mark Van Doren--professor an father of Charles Van Doren, the Quiz Show cheat--serves quite nicely for the purpose.

Writing a little essay about each play--what a fusty old pastime, with a smell of New Criticism. Bloom had his, but I'm sure he and Van Doren are not alone in having written their little Shakespeare books. Like Bloom, if I remember correctly, Van Doren arranges his by what was accepted as chronology at the time, beginning with the Henry VI plays and ending with Henry VIII. Like Bloom and the New Critics before them, Van Doren is chiefly in love with the words of Shakespeare's poetry: history and historiography, the wrangling of source material, the political and social context of the plays, these are all asides at best. What one gets instead is a lot of words, and though Van Doren says in his introduction that he will keep quotations as brief as possible, he actually loves to stack quotations one after the other, in full pages of text, as if to overpower us with the power of the poetry--or sometimes, depending on the judgment, its lack. Furthermore, Van Doren likes to thread words and phrases borrowed from the plays into his own words, leaving the reader--me--not always certain if a lovely turn of phrase is Van Doren's, an accomplished stylist, or Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare is chiefly concerned with passing judgments. Shakespeare is in control of his genius, or not in control of his genius, or reaching toward genius. He controls his theme, or the theme controls him, or the theme escapes his control and becomes genius. Most of the judgments are as expected, but a few plays come in for surprising disregard--All's Well That Ends Well--while some are lifted surprisingly to the ranks of the greats--like Antony and Cleopatra. It's all sort of an antiquated-seeming exercise, but let's be honest, it's what most of us dilettantes love to do: argue about which plays we love and which ones we don't quite get. It was enough to whet my appetite to dive back into the plays--even Henry VI.

The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

It was not only the baby, the little boy, his child; it was Leila and her mother too. It was the sugar mother family. During the year, because of that impossible thing of having to tell someone something and being unable to, he had been living in two separate worlds, which had now come together. He did not want to give up on his new life, not at all. Plans made by people, from their ideas, often neglected, he supposed, their feelings. There was no planning possible for feelings, for the emotions, as they would be called in a tutorial discussion. It was never, or hardly ever, possible to anticipate how someone might feel. He had never imagined his present feelings as being a possibility.

Edwin Page, a professor of literature living in a quiet Australian suburb, says goodbye to his wife Cecilia, a doctor who is leaving for a year to study in England and Canada. Not long after she heads to the airport, he hears a tapping at the window: his new next door neighbors, a taciturn young woman named Leila and her mother, have been locked out of their house. He lets them in and offers to let them stay the night--and then they never leave.

What are Leila and her crude, colorful mother up to? Jolley keeps them at a distance, but we sense that their objectives have something to do with a plan the mother invents: Edwin will impregnate Leila, then keep the resulting child. When his wife returns in a year, she'll have a surprise three-month-old, and the marriage will no longer be childless.  Leila will be the "sugar mother"--the mother's mistaken interpretation of the phrase "surrogate mother." This is, frankly and obviously, an insane thing to suggest. But Edwin embraces the plan wholeheartedly, his powers of reason having been warped by falling in love with Leila.  As the plan hurtles forward, he finds himself increasingly at odds with Cecilia, avoiding her phone calls, even unplugging the phone in the middle of a conversation, wanting desperately to avoid telling her what he knows he needs to tell her. He grows distant from their friends at home, tasked with keeping him company--as it turns out, they've always been swingers, so "company" has some novel and specific meanings--so that he begins to live a desperate double life.

Jolley is a weird writer. Like The Well, a novel about two women that throw a would-be thief into a well on their property, The Sugar Mother is exceedingly strange at a basic conceptual level. The fundamental idea of it--two women insinuate themselves into a stranger's home--sounds reasonable enough, but Jolley seems to have a talent for wrenching a plot like these just a little askew of reason. How can it be possible that the rational, stolid Edwin gets taken in by Leila's unpleasant mother, or Leila herself, who is as verbal and engaging as carpet? Love, maybe, or simple lust. The Sugar Mother, like The Well, is a portrait of an inner psychology of alienation and estrangement. The new life that Edwin enters into, gulled by his own feelings, is one that's less domestic than entirely internal; the romance he has with Leila is hardly real, rather a fantasy of his own compulsions.

What makes Leila's mother such a frightening character, I think, is the intimation that she has planned the whole thing, knowing just how Edwin--who she seems to have been studying from afar--will react to the insanity of the sugar mother plan. We spend the entire novel gripped with fear and anticipation: what will happen when Cecilia returns home, or finds out another way? Jolley rather cruelly keeps Cecilia from arriving until after the book's end; by that time--spoiler alert--Leila, her mother, and the baby have disappeared, having presumably got what they'd wanted for whatever mysterious reasons they had.

The Sybil by Par Lagerkvist

God is merciless. Those who say he is good do not know him. He is the most inhuman thing there is. He is wild and incalculable as lightning. Like lightning out of a cloud which one did not know contained lightning. Suddenly it strikes, suddenly he strikes down on one, revealing all his cruelty. Or his love--his cruel love. With him anything may happen. He reveals himself at any time and in anything. The thunderstorm that drove me into the cave, the goat that were sent to take care of me, the scorching summer, charged with unparalleled heat, the birth in the goat cave while heaven hurled its lightning at the earth, the queer behavior of the goats, their eager interest in the birth and the baby, the vile, repugnant, inhuman events in the goat cave--what lay behind all that? Something divine? Something cruelly, savagely divine?

A traveler climbs the high, rocky cliff above the Temple at Delphi, looking for a woman he has been told can tell him his destiny. He finds her, aged and isolated, but living with her son, a mute who seems to neither speak nor understand. He is the Wandering Jew, a figure cursed to walk the earth for all eternity for refusing to let Jesus, en route to the crucifixion, rest his head against the side of his home. She is the former Sibyl, once a young virgin and priestess. He tells his story, and then she tells hers, about how she was cast out of the Temple and chased into the mountains after an affair with a young man, who impregnated her. The mute man is his offspring, or at least she once thought so--perhaps, she tells the wanderer, the father is really God, who took possession of her body over and over.

It's interesting, the way Lagerkvist brings together these figures from two different religious traditions: Greek paganism and esoteric Christianity. Both the Wanderer and the Sibyl understand that they are, in a since, like each other, cast out from God's favor, punished by providence. (It's a little funny that the tradition of the near-immortal Sibyl, aged and shrunk so badly she hangs from a jar, doesn't make it into the book--though I suppose that is a different Sibyl and a different Temple. ) The Sibyl may no longer have the gift of prognostication and cannot tell the Wanderer whether he'll ever be free of his curse. Nonetheless, she seems to have lived with her curse much longer than the Wanderer, and she shares with him a kind of wisdom from her experience: to be cursed by God, she explains, is a way of being loved by God, because it bounds one's life up with His irrevocably. The Wanderer may never be free of his curse, but he'll never be free of God, either.

"His cruel love," the Sibyl calls it. The Sibyl brings to mind Lagerkvist's Barabbas, who has no love for or loyalty to Christ, and yet who finds himself impressed into Christ's service the moment Barabbas' life is traded for his. Barabbas calls himself "God's slave," and the Sibyl and the Wanderer are, in their way, God's slaves, with all the accompanying connotations of violence and malice. But the Sibyl has learned that it does no good to hate God for his love, as the Wanderer declares he will forever, because you can't hate "the most inhuman thing there is." For Lagerkvist, God is all-powerful but beyond knowing, and this is alternatingly terrifying and enlivening. The metaphor of the sudden thunderbolt is good, because God is as surprising as he is powerful. I loved the ending of The Sibyl, in which the mute, insensible son--a kind of Christ figure who has no Christian love or interest in redeeming anyone, a Christ as moveable as a clump of earth--disappears from the cave and is taken up, perhaps into God's right hand. Is the Sibyl free? Or has she lost her only companion, God's presence in her life, no matter how inscrutable? Yes, and yes.