Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light that the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelly's eyes; could the lemon feel the knife? Perhaps it suffered; not that vague vegetable pain lost in the generality and the pain of the world, but the pain of the very moment. Yet in the room no one said "Stop." They all lay back in flowered chairs and ate busily, and with a greedy delight anticipated what was ahead for Dabney...

I felt compelled to revisit Eudora Welty this month, one of my favorite authors who has been absent from my life for some time because I have finished everything she's written. In that she joins Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, who live in the back of the mind like old friends you never see. I wanted to re-read Delta Wedding specifically because I remember it both as something incredible and as a kind of challenge, a book that drops you in a Jim Crow plantation world that's so rich, so intricately peopled, you can easily get lost. The titular wedding is between young Dabney Fairchild (of Fairchilds, Mississippi, if that tells you something) and the plantation overseer, Troy Flavin. The wedding has brought together dozens of Fairchilds and their spouses and children, who arrive at the plantation Shellmound and thicken the scene with their histories and characters.

What do I notice now, re-reading it? Well, despite the fact of the large cast and the whirlwind way that Welty jumps between points-of-view (look how effortlessly she skips from Shelley to Dabney and back again in the paragraph above--they're thinking similar things without knowing it!), there are actually only a small handful of characters whose perspective is explored in a sustained way. There's Laura, the little cousin who arrives at Shellmound having recently lost her mother; Dabney, the bride; Ellen, Dabney's mother; and for a little while, Robbie Reid, the outsider who has married George. The Fairchilds are brutal to outsiders, who have trouble penetrating the family's bonhomie. At the beginning of the book, Robbie has left George because of a convoluted scene in which he puts himself in front of a moving train to save Maureen, a mentally handicapped cousin. What Robbie really objects to, it seems, is the feeling that George would not do the same for her; that she is permanently on the outside. And yet, she's not the only one: Ellen is a Virginian who has had to bend and adapt to the ways of the Delta. And of course, there's Troy, who is of a different class than the Fairchilds, but seems too stupid to feel like an outsider. By contrast, those who are deepest inside are almost inaccessible, like the dreamy George, who is the most beloved of all the Fairchilds, or Denis, the long-dead cousin who was the most beloved before him. (The way George blends into Denis in the book is really fascinating.)

This time, I paid more attention to the Black characters of the book. Shellmound is populated by servants whose labor make the wedding possible. Many of these characters are well-drawn, and come alive through Welty's keen eye for the characters of the Mississippi world in which she grew up, characters like the loyal Partheny or Aunt Studney, who carries a sack on her back everywhere that no one knows what's inside, and whose name seems to come from her suspicious refrain: "Ain't studyin' you." But these characters are undoubtedly at the margin, and a modern reader, if they're like me, quickly becomes uncomfortable with just how marginal they really are. Is Welty as blind as her characters to this invisible labor?

There's a moment I'd forgotten about, though: Shelley comes upon Troy, in his capacity as overseer, pointing a gun at a couple of Black fieldhands. There seems to have been some kind of conflict; what it was, we never know, but we see Troy--who moments ago has been all idiot chuckling--shoot the fingers off one of them. Shelley, who is older than Dabney and has been jealous of her marrying, suddenly sees "the reason why Dabney's wedding should be prevented. Nobody could marry a man with blood on his door... But even as she saw the reason, Shelley knew it would not avail. She would jump as Troy told her, and never tell anybody, for what was going to happen was going to happen." Welty never possesses the undercurrent of rage possessed by McCullers, whose books look squarely at injustice as if to say, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?" But Welty is no fool, and this moment gives us, I think, a momentary glimpse into the dark machinery that keeps the charmed life of the Fairchilds going. How can we go back to the room of the flowered chairs, the wedding cake, the bridesmaids with their shepherd's crook staffs, after seeing this? Of course, like Shelley we know it's meaningless; everyone knows what happens in the fields and they choose not to see. This time around, I wondered what it meant to have someone like Troy incorporated whole into the body of the Fairchilds. Perhaps once they kept that kind of necessary violence at arm's length, but now they have brought it to their heart and embraced it.

I have a high opinion of Welty. I think she does things no one else could even attempt. There are times when reading Delta Wedding that I think she is among the two or three best writers the 20th century United States produced, and I mean that without hyperbole. Perhaps, as she recedes back into that "old friend" corner of my mind, I'll feel differently. But returning to these books leaves me with awe.

I is Another by Jon Fosse

...I go into the main room and over there on the easel I see the bad painting with the two lines that cross in the middle, no, I can't look at it, I can't even take the picture down from the easel and put it in the pile with the other paintings I'm not totally done with yet, that I'm not totally satisfied with, I just can't, I think and I look at the easel and I think that when I look at the easel now, isn't it like, the thought comes into my head, like God is looking out at me from the easel? I think, and now I just have to not go crazy, I think, because it's like God is looking at me from every single thing, I think and look around and it's like God is in everything around me, I think, and like he's looking at me from every single thing, I think and I think isn't the round table clearly saying with its silence that God is nearby? and the two chairs? and the one Ales always sat in, especially clearly, God is so clearly looking at me from that chair, I think, and I think that it's when I'm most alone, in my darkness, my loneliness, because it really is lonely, to tell the truth, and when I'm quiet as I can be, that God is closest, in his distance...

The second part of Jon Fosse's Septology picks up where the first has left off: the narrator, Asle, has dropped his friend, also named Asle, off at a hospital in Bjorgvin where his addictions are close to claiming his life. He has gone home with the other Asle's dog, to confront there the loneliness of the Christmas season without his wife Ales, who has died, and his friend Asleik, who is demanding one of Asle's best paintings this year as a gift for his sister. The stark, wintery landscape of Norway's fjords is full of memory for the narrator Asle, about Ales and about his childhood, his experience getting into Norwegian art school and leaving his family. We finally see the moment where the two Asles meet, introduced by a mutual friend, both as prospective art students. The other Asle is called here "The Namesake."

Is it sloppy reading on my part, or an essential trick on Fosse's part, that the Asle I thought he was talking about for 200 pages was the Asle in the hospital, and not himself? I think the latter, though perhaps an eagle-eyed reader might have figured it out all before. The narrator's memories come sudden and swift, introduced with a simple transition like "I see Asle..." I see Asle with his sister, who died young; I see Asle, having a panic attack over the thought of reading in class; I see Asle, moving away from his parents for the first time to pursue his dreams of art school; I see Asle, giving up on the kind of realistic paintings of Norwegian domestic landscapes that made him popular, etc., etc. And all the time I was trying to find an answer to that essential question--if these Asles are the same, even perhaps to the point of being the same person, or avatars of one another, where do they diverge? Why is one Asle a success and the other a failure? I thought I was finding it, perhaps, in the death of his sister. But with one quick movement, Fosse reminds us that this is the narrator Asle remembering his own life.

Ultimately, I don't think Septology has an idea of why people end up the way they do. On the question of nature vs. nurture, it's agnostic to the point of disinterest. It sets up for the reader a kind of fool's game, forces you to search for the differences and divergences, when really the thrust seems to be that human personality remains a kind of inexplicable mystery. The elision between the two Asles is maybe the most bravura thing about Septology, a project of great skill and subtlety that justifies and illuminates the pale featurelessness of the story and the prose.

And reading this time, I was struck by the novel's interest in grief and the possibility of the divine: the narrator Asle has painted this painting of two lines crossing, one purple, one brown, that he alternately considers the worst painting he's ever done and the best. But the painting is where God enters the scene, and in studying it--pointedly, a cross--Asle begins to see the presence of God everywhere. Perhaps, I began to think while reading I is Another, God is another name for that power of chance or providence that turns a life in one direction and another in another, just as God is the name for what takes away one's wife before her time.

Olav Audunsson: Providence by Sigrid Undset

But he couldn't escape from the childhood memories that arose--including the once secure knowledge that he and Ingunn belonged to each other and would always stay together. The very notion that something might come between them had never entered their minds, and for that reason being together had never stirred their hearts either to joy or astonishment. They had simply taken it for granted. That was how it would always be, precisely as it had been decided for them. Until the summer, that is, when, wrapped in each other's arms, they had tumbled out of their childhood and innocent state, frightened yet also giddy with joy at the new sweetness they had discovered in each other--regardless of whether it was right or wrong for them to surrender it. Even after Olav had roused himself to defy and fear everything and everyone who tried to intervene in their fate, he had been convinced that in the end they would win their case. Such memories would suddenly come upon Olav, and the pain burned like the stab of a knife.

Vows, the first book in Sigrid Undset's tetralogy about the live of Olav Audunsson, ends with Olav killing Teit, the Icelander who impregnated his wife Ingunn, and burning down the shack in which his body lay. I wrote that Olav had left his ornate ancestral axe within the shack, thinking that this would turn out to be the clue that led to Olav's downfall--but this turned out to be incorrect, as a kind reader pointed out: it was just an ordinary axe that Olav left. And I should have known better. This being Undset, author of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, I should have understood that Olav's sin would not be revealed by simple detective work, that it would gnaw at Olav's heart until he was forced to reveal it himself.

In Providence, the second book in the series, Olav finds himself trapped by this secret. He vows to expiate his guilt by bringing Eirik, the child of Ingunn and Teit, back to his manor of Hestviken and pretend that he is his biological son. This presents several problems: for one, Eirik is really annoying. He turns out to be a very fanciful and imaginative child--we are reminded of the playful, reckless Teit--who has trouble distinguishing the real from fantasy. And he talks too much. Secondly, by raising Eirik to the heir of Hestviken, he has disinherited any legitimate son he might have with Ingunn. This is, perhaps, why Ingunn goes through several miscarriages; the one time she manages to birth a son, he withers and dies quickly. Ingunn withers, too; over the course of the novel she is struck by a terrible sickness that seems to emerge from her guilt and the frailty of her soul. It takes from her her sons, and then it takes her ability to walk. Olav keeps the secret for her sake, and yet keeping the secret gives the pair no happiness or joy.

Olav Audunsson, or the first two novels at least, is a much bleaker series than even Kristin Lavransdatter, which is also about living through the consequences of the choices of one's youth. Kristin is rewarded for her unfaithfulness to her father and her fiancee with a marriage to the romantic Erlend, and though it causes her much pain, and they even separate for a time, they are both rewarded with a kind of fiery love that is shared between them. When one reads about the chilly relationship between Olav and Ingunn, how they cling to one another out of duty and obligation but without joy or affection, one wonders, what was it all worth? When--spoiler alert--Ingunn dies at the novel's conclusion, we are left with the bitter sense that all the wreckage and faithlessness of their lives has had very little in the way of recompense.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Olav Audunsson is in some respect an apology for the Catholic model of confession and repentance. Olav knows that he would be doing his duty to God by confessing his sins and taking the appropriate consequences, but the possibility of cleansing is closed off to him. And for good reasons--his obligations toward Ingunn and toward Eirik, who is innocent of his own making--but these are worldly reasons, and not God's, and like Kristin, Olav suffers because he is too frail to trust in God's ideas of what constitute one's highest obligations. At the end of Part II, Olav finds himself without a wife and someone else's son. In a moment of weakness, he impregnates Torhild, the steadfast handmaiden of the household, and though he provides for her and her--his--son, it's not too hard to see that the next two parts of the tetralogy may set up a conflict between these two sons, innocent both of their circumstances, and yet neither of whom quite "deserves" to become the inheritor of Olav's estate. I'm looking forward to reading those, but it'll be next December, when another cold and chilly season rolls around--perfect for Undset's Norway, but also for the the themes of suffering and contrition that are at the heart of these incredible books.

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.

Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen

She sings. Our song. Which is precisely when my heart begins again. Beats once more. It was meant to be. It was meant to be you. It was meant to be me and you. She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent. I only look at her, and the sensation within me is infinite. She takes hold of me and escorts me out of the door, and I don't resist. The spring night is invigorating. Nature has quietly come to life again, and that's all I hear. There's something beautiful in front of me. From Greenland to infinity, and back again... What a day to be alive. She reads the note I have been carrying around for two weeks. The spring night gives me life, and Sara kisses me. What a day to realise I'm not dead. Love has rescued me. And I realise that this is my coming-out story.

'Crimson and Clover,' she says.
'Over and over,' I reply.

Last Night in Nuuk follows a set of loosely associated living in Greenland's capital city: Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivik, and Sara. Their lives, like the lives of people their age all over the world, are taken up with dating, sex, and partying, to different degrees. Fia is left by her boyfriend and, hooking up with Arnaq after a night of partying, discovers she's gay. Inuk knows he's gay, but Arnaq--the hard-drinking whirlwind at the novel's center--recklessly lets slip that he's been carrying on an affair with a well-known right-wing politician. Ivik is dumped by Sara, and discovers that she--he--is trans. There's a lot of self-discovery going on, this one night in Nuuk.

What is most surprising about Last Night in Nuuk, I suppose, is how familiar the lives of the protagonists is. A reader from outside Greenland who turns to the novel to get a glimpse of the unique features of life in the remote island's largest city will no doubt be, as I was, disappointed. Though it must be said that for Korneliussen, to the extent the novel is written for a world audience at all, this must be the point: look, we're not so out of the ordinary up here.

But even as a novel about hard-partying young people, Last Night in Nuuk really falls flat. Mostly, the prose lies at a level of abstraction that veers into cliche. ("She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent... the sensation within me is infinite...") The specific feelings and sensations of self-discovery are in short supply, and without them, the resonance between Fia's discovery of her sexuality and Ivik's discovery of his gender feels manipulative and cheap. Sara's choice to end every section of her chapter with a hashtag is near unforgiveable. Oh well. 

Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this--realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, self-renewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.

Joe Fernwright is a "pot-healer": an expert in repairing ancient ceramics. In the polystyrene world of a Philip K. Dick novel, it's a rare skill, and one not much in need. He scrimps and saves, hoping to save enough dimes for a few minutes phone-call to a kind of robot advisor named Mr. Job. If that sounds pathetic, it is: the world described by Dick in Galactic Pot-Healer is one of his dreariest, and the most familiar. Knowledge has been partitioned off into artificial intelligences like Mr. Job and Mr. Encyclopedia, who parcel it out stingily; the robotic systems that organize human life seem almost intentionally withholding and hostile. In this atomized existence, Joe and many others retreat to trivial distractions like "The Game," a silly pastime in which players are made to guess the titles of classic movies and books that have been translated into and out of English, like "The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed" for The Sun Also Rises. (Remember doing this with, like, Alta Vista?) It's a meaningless pastime for a meaningless life, one whose diminishment of spirit becomes close to death:

The energy and capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game. Contact with others, he thought; through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Suddenly, Joe is contacted by a mysterious presence: an alien life form calling itself Glimmung. Glimmung is something of a divine figure, a shapeshifter who can appear in any form to Joe, but he needs Joe's help, and the help of hundreds of others. On his home world, called Plowman's Planet, Glimmung plans to raise an ancient cathedral called the Heldscalla from where it lay under the planet's great ocean. Joe's pot-healing services are crucial to the cathedral's restoration, and in return for his help, Glimmung promises to bestow upon him a literally inconceivable amount of money. But more improtantly, Joe realizes, he has been given an opportunity to do something non-trivial--to take part, even in a small way, in a great undertaking that might give meaning and purpose to his life.

Any attempt at raising Heldscalla is fraught with risk. Plowman's Planet is peopled by giant rat-like figures who carry around a tome called The Book of Kalends, which is continuously being filled with the dictums of fate, including that of Joe and his new colleagues (like his new bronze-colored alien girlfriend, Mali). The Book of Kalends says that the attempt at raising the cathedral will fail, and Joe and everyone else will be destroyed in the process. But this only means that the raising of Heldscalla takes on a greater metaphorical importance; not only will it mean bringing purpose to the lives of those who raise it, but raising it will mean a victory over the mechanical and deterministic forces of fate and entropy. A sassy robot butler assigned to Joe and Mali explains that all things, even robots, are victims to entropy and fight against it, but there are forces in the world, too, of restoration and recovery, like Joe's pot-healing. The raising of Heldscalla lies at the nexus of the metaphysical and the political: is it more like Christ's victory over Death, or more like the collective seizing the means of production and the path of history?

Galactic Pot-Healer is--well, I guess you can't say it's one of Dick's strangest books, since every book that man wrote seems impossibly strange in its own way. You might say it's his most symbolic. When Joe and Mali descend into the ocean of Plowman's Planet to see the cathedral for themselves--against the wishes of the Glimmung--they discover that there's actually two cathedrals, a black cathedral and a white cathedral. They discover, too, there is a kind of anti-Glimmung who is locked in battle with the Glimmung, and who wishes to raise the black cathedral instead of the white one; this is the image of the eternal agon or something like that. You know, the Manichaean struggle between good and evil, or perhaps, knowing Dick's predilection for Eastern philosophy, something of the yin and yang. The image that will stay with me from this scene, though, is Joe discovering his own dead body, flapping up like a strange fish to advise him on what to do. A lesser writer might feel the need to explain this as a kind of time travel trick, but Dick is content to let the image be just the powerful image it is, a man confronted by the inevitability of his own destruction.

The climax of Galactic Pot-Healer offers Joe the ultimate choice: will he, like the other workers on the project, allow himself to be absorbed into the Glimmung and raise the cathedral with the combination of their skills and consciousnesses? Or will he cling to his individuality and be sent back to his former life, playing stupid word games? How far are we willing to take our dreams of partaking in greatness? I won't say what Joe chooses, but I will say that the novel's final line is possibly Dick's blackest, bleakest joke.

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

It's just winter wheat to the people who raise it, only to me it means more than that. It means all the winter and all the cold and the tight feeling of the house in winter, but the rich secret feeling I have, too, of treasure in the ground, growing there for us, waiting for the cold to be over to push up strong and green. They sound like grim words without any comfort to them, but they have a kind of strength all their own.

Ellen Webb, the heroine of Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat, grows up in the wheat country of Montana. The mountains are not so far away, but not visible; the house her father built lies at the bottom of a remote coulee, and all around them the fields of wheat. It's a scene she treasures, but when her college boyfriend Gil comes to see her, the visit becomes tense and awkward. She sees her life from the outside out for the first time: how lonely the house in the coulee must be, how marked by hard labor and the brutal chance of the weather. Gil sees, too, something she has never really seen, a simmering resentment between her father, a native New Englander who came west to farm, and her mother, a Russian peasant girl he picked during World War I.

After Gil leaves, Ellen overhears her parents arguing, and learns a bitter revelation: her mother had pretended to be pregnant to get her father to marry her and take her to the States. This revelation colors not only Ellen's understanding of her parents, but her understanding of her whole life, and casts a pall over the life that she loves. Suddenly, the Cather-like pastoralism of the novel is tinged everywhere with sadness. Ellen reaches to her familiar wheat to understand every new and unfamiliar thing; at the college she observes that the fried eggs are "like daisy heads with their yellow centers and white petals"; she describes her disconsolate suitemate as resembling a "bum lamb that's going to die." The lovely pastoral prose of Winter Wheat is the kind of thing you might call "a love letter to rural Montana," but Ellen's dislocation from her family and her life shade them with sad and subtle layers.

The wheat harvest does not come in; Ellen's experience at college ends after a year. Instead, she takes a position as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a place even more remote. She becomes close to the father of one of the pupils, and becomes entangled in their own drama of alienation and discontent--the young boy identifies with his evangelical mother and distrusts his father for his (relatively mild) drinking habit. The book is punctuated by a moment of utter tragedy when (spoiler alert) a "feeble-minded" student disappears in the middle of a raging snow storm and is frozen to death. Her attempts to find him are heroic, bordering on recklessness, but she cannot save him, and the death of the boy seems to come at the hand of the same cruel chance that kills the wheat at the root.

I really enjoyed this. I'm just a sucker for Cather, and while she is, of course, the goat, it seemed to me that Walker shares something of that keen eye that sees the fine distinctions in a landscape that might seem featureless to the rest of the world. I thought the story was simple, sweetly sad, and persuasive.

Two Books About Vergil and The Aeneid

No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion, as I would have done long ago if the poet hadn't summoned me into existence. Perhaps I will become a false dream clinging like a bat to the underside of the leaves of the tree at the gate of the underworld, or an owl flitting in the dark oaks of Albunea. But I won't have to tear myself from life and go down into the dark, as he did, poor man, first in his imagination, and then as his own ghost. We each have to endure our own afterlife, he said to me once, or that is one way to understand what he said. But that dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten or reborn--that isn't true being, not even half as true as my being is as I write and you read it, and nowhere near as true as in his words, the splendid, vivid words I've lived in for centuries.

The Aeneid, Vergil's masterpiece about the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a fugitive from the Fall of Troy, was nearly lost to history: as he lay sick at the port of Brundisium, Vergil famously demanded that the unfinished manuscript be burned. The emperor Augustus countermanded the poet, who was his friend and client, and it could be argued that, of all the emperor's most lasting achievements, this is the one with the most persistent and important legacy. But why was it that Vergil demanded his masterpiece be burned? Was it simple deathbed despair, knowing that he'd be unable to shape it in the final way he desired? Or was there a deeper, more profound change of heart at work?

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Lavinia gives us brief glimpses of the poet, lying at Brundisium, tortured by the incompleteness of his work. Vergil appears as a shade--a ghost--to Lavinia, a character in The Aeneid, and, as Le Guin argues, the greatest avatar of the poem's incomplete nature. Through these visits, Lavinia becomes aware that she has no historic reality in the same sense that the poet does, that she is a character in the poem, and she responds with force and insight to the poet who is unable to explain why she has no voice--literally, I think, she never speaks--in his poem. Lavinia is attracted to the dying poet in all sense of the word attraction; throughout the novel she describes him as one of her life's true loves--the other, of course, being Aeneas himself. Her livingness and liveliness are reproof to Vergil, who has enough will left to despair about what he has forgotten to include, but not enough to make the necessary edits that would recover Lavinia's perspective.

Lavinia seems now like a forerunner to a micro-genre that focuses on the "unspoken" stories of women in ancient literature, like Madeline Miller's novel Circe and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, written from the perspective of the captive Trojan Briseis. I haven't read Circe, but I do think Le Guin achieves what Barker only attempts: a convincing version of the "other side of the story." Le Guin does this by making the composition of the narrative the subject of the novel; Lavinia's reflections on her own fictionality are its most persuasive and moving parts. Le Guin has Vergil appear to Lavinia at a shrine, blurring the lines between the writer and the divine. Lavinia accepts the poet's control over her life as she might accept the will of the gods; in this way the novel offers a meditation on contingency and powerless that transcend narrower themes of gender and patriarchy.

In The Aeneid, Lavinia is the subject of the war between the newcomer Aeneas and the Rutulian prince Turnus. A novelist like Miller and Barker might have had Lavinia resist both men, but Le Guin's Lavinia is content to live out the will of the author-god that she marry Aeneas, and her marriage to Aeneas proves a happy one. (You can see the impulse toward a weaker kind of novel, in which Aeneas' heroic nature is subverted, and he's made into a brute or a monster--not here.) Lavinia has no desire to change the story, but she does want to fill in the gaps, and in doing so she becomes an equal to the poet, or perhaps even his superior, because she has a kind of eternal life that he himself can never possess.

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Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harrassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life. And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity--, the simplicity of dying.

Hermann Broch's landmark modernist novel The Death of Virgil begins with the same question as Lavinia: why did Vergil want to burn his masterpiece? Broch's answer is different, but perhaps the same, having to do with incompleteness and insufficiency, not in a narrative sense, but a metaphysical one. Broch's novel followed Vergil in the last twenty-four hours in life, being ferried by Augustus to Brundisium, fighting with the emperor and his literary executors about his final wishes, and succumbing to a raging fever. The fever brings the poet close to death, and close to death he begins to understand the true nature of the world, and the more he understands this true nature, the more he understands that literature grasps at something it by nature can never achieve, and its attempts are perhaps more than fruitless, but a lie.

The Death of Virgil's stream-of-consciousness is no easy read. I couldn't tell you honestly that I understood more than half of it, but there are pleasurable incomprehensibilities as well as frustrating ones, and I enjoyed the rolling, rollicking nature of Broch's writing, which recalls the rocking of the sea on which Vergil arrives at Brundisium. What I did understand is that Broch's metaphysics hinge on the falseness of perception and the seduction of beauty, which substitutes a pleasing falsehood in place of true perception, which might instead reveal a fundamental unity in the universe. Literature is metaphor, and can only point toward the unity, but in doing so it cannot participate in that unity, and so the poet's words, like all words, can only ever be false. I could be wrong about some of the particulars there, but it did seem to me that Broch shares in the general modernist suspicion of the literary project and its ability to describe the world, and like other modernists he reaches back to the literature of the past to try to provide a framework that expresses the growing slippage at the same time that it stabilizes it.

Broch's Vergil passes in and out of lucidity. He's visited by real people, like the emperor and his doctor, and sometimes he's visited by phantasms, including a beautiful servant boy, a mercurial slave, and the likeness of his beloved, Plotia. At times it's not clear who's real and who's a phantasm, but of course, we are asked to understand that such hard dichotomies belong to a world of limitations that Vergil is currently leaving behind. One of the most interesting sections of the book is a long, drawn-out argument with Augustus, who rebukes Vergil for his wish to burn The Aeneid, claiming its importance in expressing the myth of the Roman state. Augustus' resemblance to 20th century European fascism is hard to miss: he claims the superiority of the state over the individual, and claims literature for the state. Vergil's response to Augustus preserves not only the primacy of the individual but the individual as the locus of metaphysics. If the true world is to be perceived and experienced, it can only be done as the individual, and though the literary project can only fail, it must fail on the individual's terms.

Both Lavinia and The Death of Virgil seize on the doubts inherent in the legend of The Aeneid: what was it that so important, so lacking, so insufficient, in a work now considered one of the greatest produced by history? For Le Guin, the answer lies in the narrative itself, teasing out its blind spots, placing the writer and the text in a kind of generative dialectic. For Broch, the answer lies in the failure of literature itself. Both books, I think, return us to the greatness of The Aeneid by enlarging it, rather than diminishing it.

Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber

...my book, I thought, once complete, would be a towering wall of scholarship, difficult to approach, harder to ascend, wholly original in its design, but once admitted, a universe would emerge like a solar flare or the birth of a galaxy, yes, I thought, the birth of a galaxy and sure, only the strong would survive, but deep inside a colossus burgeoned, and just because I envisioned the book but hadn't yet written the book, hadn't in fact even begun writing the book, didn't mean the book didn't exist, I thought, because the groundwork had been laid, the seeds planted, and to conceive hundreds of titles for a book but no book seemed the pinnacle of cruelty.

Mark Haber's new book Lesser Ruins extends over a single moment, not much more than five or ten minutes. The scholar-narrator is trying to begin his book about the French essayist Montaigne, but he has no real material to work from; all he has is a list of titles like The Intrusion of Distraction and The Boots of Stupidity. He finds himself unable to conjure up the kind of slow thinking he needs to really work on the book. Slow thinking, he tells us, is in deep decline, and he blames the damn smartphones, but the truth is that his mind is just elsewhere: on the recent death of his wife after a long struggle with dementia, on his dismissal from the college after what has come to be known as "the espresso incident," on coffee, of which he is a connoisseur who speaks with much more knowledge and passion than he seems to be able to about Montaigne, about a disastrous residency in the Berkshires, about his son, Marcel. It's Marcel, actually, who's calling him to talk about his obsession with house music; the novel takes place almost entirely from the point that the phone rings to the moment when the narrator finally picks up the call and hears Marcel's voice.

You get about a third of the way through Lesser Ruins before you realize something: this guy hasn't really said anything about Montaigne at all. He doesn't seem to be lying, necessarily, or stupid; he quotes liberally from other writers, but there isn't a single scrap of text from Montaigne in the book. The stuff he does talk about is irrelevant, like his association with a Russian duelist or his dandy manservant, details which, if I had to guess, are actually made up by Haber. In a book that is often cruel and sad, the cruelest and saddest moment may be when the administrator in charge of the residency in the Berkshires admits that each year they admit a mediocre non-entity, just in the off chance that they'll be surprised. Our narrator, it seems, is this year's non-entity, but he hasn't surprised anyone, except in the sense that he has been rude and off-putting, and that everyone kind of wants him to leave.

Lesser Ruins is less a book about literature or scholarship and more a book about the desire to produce literature, the yearning to produce scholarship. Just as the legendary painting in his previous book, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, suggests a kind of pretense of Renaissance art but really has nothing to do with it, so Lesser Ruins is not about Montaigne but about the sort of person who longs to write something meaningful about Montaigne. There's a master stroke in this, frankly, not only because we don't want to be lost in the details of the "real" Montaigne, but because it allows us to see the link between the narrator's obsessive inadequacy with his son Marcel's, Marcel who longs to create the perfect "club mix," or whatever. Lesser Ruins, it must be said, knows much more about house music than it does Montaigne, and the ironic contrast is deeply funny. Perhaps the most sympathetic thing about the deluded narrator is that, though he can't stand his son's music, he clearly listens to everything his son says, otherwise how would he be able to regurgitate all the terms that Marcel throws out, like "four-on-the-floor" and "Balearic Disco" and "Four Tet?"

Lesser Ruins is structured in three parts, each as a single kind of stream-of-consciousness without paragraph breaks. The transitions are of the "French door" variety, in which the narrative slips from scene to scene and subject to subject without declaring itself. And yet it's never a challenge to read. Just the opposite: the way it moves quickly from humor to pathos and back again draws you in and pushes you forward. For the narrator, as perhaps for all of us, everything comes back to a handful of obsessions. Some are silly, but some of them touch the deepest parts of us, like the death of the narrator's wife, which haunts the novel heavily. Her dementia, we understand, is not to blame for his distraction or inadequacy--but it doesn't help. And it suggest to us that perhaps there is a link between the kind of obsession with writing, with making music, with leaving your mark, and the black despair of loss and grief. It's important that his wife doesn't merely die, but loses her powers of reason. Our narrator is committed to his writing because, in some sense, he understands how brief and rare reason and creativity are; they are much briefer, in fact, than life itself. And even in the face of their insufficiency, and the frightening prospect that distractions are pulling you away from them at every moment, you plow on, to try to get the words on paper.

Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima

For an instance Takiko closed her eyes and pictured herself holding a baby lightly to her breast and running at top speed. This was the way she had gone on imagining herself, while her mother's crying and her father's shouting echoed around her, ever since her mother had found out she was pregnant. At school she hadn't actually liked running at all, yet now she couldn't stop seeing this image of herself. It was not that she was running away. She just wanted to be tough and free and to move. A state that knew no emotion. To be allowed to exist without knowing emotion.

Early one winter morning, Takiko rises and finds that her water has broken. She gets up and calls herself a cab to the maternity ward while her mother, father, and brother sleep. She is too young to have a child, they think, and the father--a married man with whom Takiko had a brief, passionless affair--has no idea that she got pregnant. Her father beats her; her mother implores her to have the child aborted. But Takiko yearns to have her child. For her, the birth of her son, Akira, is an entrance into a world of independence and freedom, in which perhaps she can become a caretaker rather than a subordinate, driftless and subject to the whims of others. She has vivid dreams of herself on a field of ice, or running through the mountains (hence the title), and yet, in these images of isolation and movement the child is always with her.

What I liked best about Woman Running in the Mountains is the way that author Yuko Tsushima recognized the inherent drama in the everyday experiences of a mother. Takiko is carefully and specifically drawn, unique, and yet her experiences are not so different than those of other Japanese mothers, the kind she often comes into contact with at the maternity ward or the cooperative daycare. Tsushima avoids reproducing certain conservative ideas about the way motherhood ennobles a woman, or gives them purpose, or depicting Takiko as a reluctant mother who must learn to embrace the maternal nature of femininity. Instead, the novel does something quietly powerful in recognizing the possibilities that motherhood provide in fostering independence: it's becoming a mother that ultimately gives Takiko the strength to turn away from her cruel father and overbearing mother. 

As a single mother without employment, Takiko faces a number of obstacles, both practical and cultural. (Apparently, as the notes describe, it's very rare for a Japanese child to be born "illegitimate.") She struggles to find a childcare placement for Takiko; she struggles to find a job. The jobs she do find demand more of her time than she, as a new mother, can afford. Akira turns out to have been born with a hernia, an issue requiring a surgery she can scarcely afford. Tsushima solves Takiko's problems by providing her a job at a nursery whose greenhouses are high in the mountains where her dreams take place. And yet, this job comes with its own obstacles: she falls deeply in love with a gruff older gardener who cannot return her affections. And yet, in the nursery, Takiko herself flowers. It's a job she's pushed toward by her motherhood, a process, Tsushima suggests, by which she becomes more herself.

Fire by George R. Stewart

He slapped at a spark, and in new panic at the thought of spot-fires, stood up to look ahead. Smoke was rising from a spot-fire well in front of him, to the left. But he felt sudden relief when he saw that the closest fir tree was scarcely a hundred feet away. Energetic again with the thought of safety and rest, he plunged ahead, just as a white sheet of searing-hot flame went up from a bush not thirty feet behind him. He burst through the bushes, climbed and walked across them, crawled beneath them. His face and hands, and his bare arm, were crisscrossed with bleeding scratches. He kept his eyes half-closed  to protect them from smoke and from twigs. Almost blindly, in an animal-like intensity to live, he struggled on, keeping direction by the drift of the smoke.

George R. Stewart's Fire is, in obvious ways, a companion book to his novel Storm. Both deal with enormous, large scale natural disasters; Fire only replaces the water with, well, fire. Both take an ultra-wide view, taking as subject hundreds of people whose jobs are to manage the impacts of the disaster. In Fire, that means fire-spotters, foresters, firefighters, weathermen, pilots, ranchers, and more. But there are certain differences that make Fire an interesting contrast to Storm, largely downstream of the nature of a forest fire vs. a storm. The view, which is only as wide as the disaster, is necessarily shrunken, down to a few thousand acres, rather than hundreds of square miles and several states. The result is that the human drama comes to the forefront more easily; instead of distant figures working independently--Storm's linemen and weathermen have nothing to do with each other except the fact that they are working to respond to the same storm--the crew arrayed against the forest fire must work together, in concert and in close quarters.

I really enjoyed, for instance, the tension between the young Supervisor and the section chief, Bart. "The Super" is intelligent and capable but anxious about how he's perceived by his subordinates; he tells people to call him "Slim" but the nickname never takes. Bart is an experienced old hand responsible for the section of the Lassen National Forest that is burned. The Super astutely wonders if Bart is too close to the forest, too sentimental, to exert his judgment properly, but he knows that if he removes the popular man as fire chief, his authority and respect will be undermined. I thought that Fire did a good job of illuminating the ways that disasters are helped along by human limitations: the fire is contained until one of the fire fighters gets spooked and runs, starting a general panic that allows the line to be broken and grow out of control. It's a stark reminder that the systems we rely on are actually made up of people, with all their human flaws.

The book doesn't do very well by one of its more interesting characters, Judith, a young woman who takes a lonely job as a fire lookout for the summer. Judith is a woman in a man's world, and in one sense this makes her thoughtful and interesting, quoting literature to herself in her lonely outpost, but it also means that every male Forest Service employee who comes across her has to remark on how hot she is. There's an interesting connection between the way the novel makes use of Judith's femininity and the paranoid fantasies of Bart, who imagines his section of the forest as a virginal young woman being preyed on by the lascivious fire. In the end, Judith is married off, paired to a shy young man who literally carries her out of harm's way when the fire approaches her lookout. So much for the independent woman in her tower.

But for the most part, I really enjoyed Fire. It's an old book, written in 1948, presumably before much of modern fire suppression technique was created--no one, for instance, thinks about doing a controlled burn anywhere in the forest. But to my understanding, much of the job is the same: people dig big ditches around a fire to keep it from spreading. As in 1948, the coordination and spur-of-the-moment planning must be enormous. The "Spitcat Fire" of the novel ends up burning something like 13,000 acres, a number that seems almost quaint in the climate change era. The Park Fire that burned through the Lassen area this summer torched over 400,000 acres. So perhaps it would do well for us to remember the book's lesson about the human courage, and the human toll, that disasters demand.

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

My parents  had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don't write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say 'We haven't come to Bergamo on a military campaign', or 'Sulphuric acid stinks of fart', and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would allow us to recognise each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they're like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time.

Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon details the life of a middle-class family in northern Italy before, during, and after the advent of fascism. There's Natalia herself, of course, though she sort of disappears in the book, becoming the "invisible eyeball" of the text; her father, a chemist prone to outbursts of comic anger; her more diffident mother; her brothers, many of whom become mixed up to some degree in the resistance movement against Mussolini. It's a family that's unusual but not that unusual. You may not have a father who loves skiing to a fault, or who speaks in nothing but exclamation points, but you may recognize the rhythms of a family who are knit together by a series of phrases and quotations that emblemize, for each one, the experiences of growing up together. We may not have a mother who, as Ginzburg emphasizes, tells the same stories over and over again, but who among us does not recognize their parents by the little linguistic quirks that formed the environment in which we came of age? 

Family Lexicon has a strange relationship with the Mussolini years. Clearly they hit the family hard: many of them spent time in jail, and Ginzburg's brother was forced into exile in France; her own husband, Leone Ginzburg, died in one of Mussolini's prisons. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the advent of fascism is an unwelcome distraction from the true subject of the book, something that must be dealt with as an external force that saps the focus on the inner dynamics of the family and their various friends and hangers-on. Ginzburg's death is, at first at least, dashed off with a single line; only after reading several pages about the family's changing habits do we come to understand that the fascist government has ended; Mussolini has been hung from the Esso station somewhere out of the novel's sight. One result is that the book remains light and comic even in the face of the war, yet it never seems morally compromised, nor does the irony of the distance between style and setting become bitter or unpalatable.

It's hard to shake the feeling, too, that Ginzburg herself represents the same kind of problem for the novel. She manages to keep herself invisible for most of the novel, except by necessity: we learn much about the family friend Leone before Ginzburg lets it slip that they become married. In her preface, Ginzburg makes much of her fealty to the truth, saying that the thought of fictionalizing her family's story repels her. And yet, she writes herself out of the story in a way. We know so little of her desires or conflicts, and yet she manages to communicate powerfully the feeling of being swept away on the current of a powerful family environment.

Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

My brother's stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly--I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the the head with. Not too quiet--you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.

"Tall tales" emerged out of the country's first frontier: the woodlands of the interior and Midwest. Think Paul Bunyan, clearing the trees for civilization. Pete Beatty's debut novel Cuyahoga focuses on a tall tale character named Big Son, whose story is narrated by his brother Medium Son, also known as Meed. Big Son's deeds are legendary: he rastles Lake Erie, fells hundreds of trees at a stroke, and climbs a two-mile ladder to see what a cloud is made of. But Big Son lives, unfortunately, in a world that is becoming less myth, less frontier, and more civilization, and that's an uneasy place for a tall tale to live. Big Son wants nothing more to marry the love of his life, Cloe Inches, but how do you marry a tale? And who will give a myth a real job, and money to live on?

Big is the tutelary spirit of Ohio City on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. The book's larger plot focuses on the controversy between Ohio City and Cleveland over who will build a bridge over the Cuyahoga; Cleveland manages it first and sets the tolls. "Two Bridges or None" becomes the rallying cry of the Ohio Citians, and they enlist Big Son in building a bridge, which he does in a matter of days. But of course, Big's bridge is built more of myth than wood or steel, and it collapses in a grand tall-tale fashion. Big's problem is that once the frontier is gone, the figure from the tall tale is no longer needed. What Ohio City needs is industry, expertise, civilization--it needs, in a sense, realism. Beatty emphasizes this point with a funny aside about Johnny Appleseed, depicting him as a cider-swilling drunk unable to handle the transition from his an economy of small homestead orchards to the mass production of food. Big Son is not alone; the country is leaving its tall tales behind.

I was really impressed by Cuyahoga. It's a little scattershot and rambunctious, but it's shaggy quality well matches that of the tall tales that are its inspiration. Books that puncture the myths of the American frontier, even cheekily or ironically so, are not so unfamiliar, but I don't think I've ever seen someone do such a deep exploration of this particular aspect of American myth, perhaps because the time frame--that doldrum period between the Revolution and the Civil War--looms so little in the popular imagination. More than anything, I was impressed that Beatty is able to keep the bit going, and able to keep it from being just an interesting premise. The layers layer well: the jealousy of ordinary Meed toward his supernatural brother; a subplot about a devious grocer intent on blowing up the Cleveland Bridge; the various tall-tale figures and creatures, like the treacherous "night pigs." Facsimiles of newspapers and bulletins add to the story rather than seeming like empty exercises in period style, and the 19th century voice is just anachronistic enough to feel as if it speaks to modern ears.

What Cuyahoga revealed to me is that American myth didn't disappear; it just went underground. The devious grocer, nicknamed Dog, describes seeing General Washington as a young man: an emaciated, toothless figure. We made him into a god with our stories, Dog suggests, but perhaps we did worse: we sapped the vitality of the man by taking what we wanted from him. Big Son belongs to a passing era, and his tragedy is that he's unable, like the other myths of America, to transform or be disguised, or hide away in a story more appropriate to the cynicism of the day.

Human Acts by Han Kang

Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we're going to exterminate the lot of you. But you've turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slummed shut; you've made sure of that. But that means the way is also closed that might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.

In 1980, the South Korean military brutally put down a student protest at Chonnam University in the city of Gwangju. Han Kang's novel Human Acts focuses on the victims of what's now known as the "Gwangju Massacre," centering on the killing of a middle school-aged boy named Dong-ho. The novel is arranged as a series of discrete stories loosely related to Dong-ho's killing, arranged chronologically so that they move bit-by-bit from the moment of the massacre to its aftermath and the possibilities of its memory; they include an editor facing the censorship of a new translation, a woman struggling with whether to tell the story of her rape and brutalization to an academic, and even Dong-ho's mother, who struggles decades after to make sense of her son's death.

Some of these stories are better than others. My favorite was actually the second chapter, which is narrated by the ghost of Dong-ho's friend, Jeong-mi, as he follows his body as it is disposed of by the military authorities. (Jeong-mi, one might think, would dispute the characterization of Human Acts that it begins with Dong-ho's death; the fact that Dong-ho faces the death of his friend before his own only emphasizes the persistence of the brutality that Han describes here.) Han describes Jeong-mi as only dimly aware of the other ghosts that cling to other bodies, and not able to interact with them; in death he is isolated and alienated, the possibility of solidarity rent asunder, as the military no doubt intends when they move to commit violence against a group of children and youths. Jeong-mi's chapter follows the first, which is set in a large warehouse where volunteers arrange the bodies of those killed so that they might be identified by their family. This, too, Han tells us, is a "human act," this regime of courage and care, as much as the atrocities.

Han keeps her focus tightly on the victims of those atrocities. The brutalizers in the military remain as faceless and nameless as movie stormtroopers, and Han isn't interested in contextualizing their deeds or giving their perspectives. There's a moral logic to that, but it left me wondering how such brutality was sanctioned in South Korean society; left unexplored, for example, is the way the massacre was justified with a familiar kind of red-baiting that associated the students with communist North Korea. In the place of dramatizing these dynamics, I felt that Human Acts lurched into a kind of history-book exposition that isn't entirely redeemed by authorial smoothing ("Through the newspapers, you witnessed the seemingly inexorable rise of Chun Doo-hwan, the young general who had been the former president's favorite...") Han is too skilled and too careful to veer into a sentimentalism about the power of the human spirit, or the importance of social memory, but my lasting impressions of Human Acts remained rather circular: brutality, in the end, is brutal. Oh, and I really hated the second person point-of-view that most of the book uses.

Monnew by Ahmadou Kourouma

Djigui didn't suffer from any illness, or enchantment, or poison, and no accident could vanquish him, finish him off. He had prayed too much, exposed too many sacrifices and offerings against those venal faults, permanently eliminating them from his destiny. Against Djigui there remained only Djigui. He had attained the immunity of those serpents on desert rocks who die only by suicide, by biting their own tails. His end was found in himself, in his fits of anger, his saliva. This truth was accepted by everyone, even the Toubab toubib of Soba. It was s cientifically established that, to prevent him from undoing himself, he had to be spared monnew, anger and shame, and if unfortunately they didn't manage that, the only remedy known on this earth was to bring to the feet of the AgeOldMan the person by whom the monne had come (in the Bolloda he was called the accursed one), on his knees, naked to the waist, hands tied behind his back, and let the AgeOldMan take a big nasty bite in the victim's occiput.

The word monnew means a great and powerful shame. For Djigui, the king of a fictional African country named Soba, monnew is found in the arrival of the white Frenchmen, called Toubabs, who have taken control of the country and made Djigui a vassal. At first, it seems as if Djigui's vassalage may be to his benefit. The French mostly keep away, and their selection of Djigui as king over all the competing groups and tribes of Soba cements his power in a way that his own prayers and sacrifices, his own years of constant warfare, never could. But the French are fickle, and soon Djigui's power is on the wane; they depose Djigui and turn to his rascally son Bema, but they cannot diminish Djigui's status and notoriety as the "AgeOldMan" of his people. Monnew follows the fictional African nation as it becomes more closely incorporated with the French metropole; after DeGaulle confers citizenship upon France's colonial subjects, they are even invited to send representatives to French parliament, but this, too, becomes a political powderkeg with Djigui at his center. By the end of his life, Djigui--who we are told reaches the age of 125--is witness to the the whole arc of African colonial history.

I found Monnew really fascinating. Kourouma, as I understand it, was a Malinke, the same ethnic group as the legendary Mansa Musa and Sundiata Keita, though he was from the Ivory Coast and not one of the West African countries where the Malinke are most associated today, like Mali and Senegal. One of the hallmarks of West African society is/has been the griot, the historian-storyteller whose facility with the oral tradition makes them a kind of poet-slash-official-recordkeeper. Djigui is surrounded by griots who support his struggle against the French by memorializing his deeds and those of his ancestors in their poetry. When his best griot is killed, it is as big a blow for Djigui as the death of his greatest general. The story of Djigui in Monnew is not just a story of continued degradation and shame, but a story of the growth of Djigui's legend; at the beginning, he is a struggling chieftain whose sacrifices seem to be barely heeded by the gods, but toward the book's end, he's been ennobled somehow by his significant place in the larger struggle between the Africans and their French conquerors.

Monnew reminds of Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, another book about the collision of African powers and European colonials set in a fictional African country that is meant to stand in for a huge swath of colonized places and peoples. But Laye's book has the tight psychological focus of modern literature, whereas Kourouma's book reads more like one of those griot-poems: a sweeping epic that covers a lot of time and a lot of ground. The prose is richly ironic (it was an... interesting choice to translate whatever French or Malinke word the people of Soba use to describe themselves with the n-word in English) but it also has the unmistakable tenor of something translated from another language, and another worldview. It's so steeped in the context of pre-colonial West African society that there are many details I didn't quite get; but on the whole it felt like a real window into something that must be quite difficult to communicate to a "Western" audience.

With the addition of the Ivory Coast, my "Countries Read" list is up to 96!

The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

When Mrs. Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madam Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise lounge into Mrs. Trollope's room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It's simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there's the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a plush new armchair, the other must have a cane lounge; if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind.

Christina Stead's The Little Hotel is narrated by Madame Bonnard, the proprietor of an inexpensive hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her charges are more residents than guests, long term visitors who live the life of exiles. They are eccentrics, like the beautiful but dying Miss Chillard, or the wildly bigoted American Mrs. Powell. One madman claims to be the mayor of a city in Belgium; he sends Madame Bonnard and the other residents cryptic messages that are numbered as official documents for recordkeeping--Document 126 says that the coffee was particularly good this morning, etc., etc. I was a little sad to see the Mayor whisked out of the pages early on, to be replaced with characters whose eccentricities are a little more mtued.

Though narrated by Madame Bonnard, the true protagonist of The Little Hotel is Madame Trollope, an aging woman who is traveling with her "cousin," Mister Wilkins. In reality, the pair are longtime lovers, living more or less as husband and wife; though free of their former marriages, Mister Wilkins refuses to marry Madame Trollope or live openly as partners. He prefers the wink-wink artifice of it all, even though everyone at the hotel knows the deal. He also prefers to sponge off of the wealthier Madame Trollope, who, at the hotel, begins to lurch toward a breaking point. Is it possible for her to shake off Mister Wilkins, who really is a smug little creep, when she knows that the alternative is likely lifelong loneliness? What is the cost, The Little Hotel asks, of love?

The Little Hotel really has its charms. At times it approaches the heights of absurd misbehavior that make Stead's best novels so good, as when Madame Blaise complains about how her doctor husband pesters her with photos of diseased children--by producing a stack of the very same photos at dinner. Such is the world of The Little Hotel, where the residents revenge their own petty hurts and slights upon each other. There's something here about the nature of Europe after World War II; though they are nominally all supposed to get along--especially here in always-neutral Switzerland--the enmities of the American, British, and French residents toward Germans and Italians--form a powerful undercurrent. But the enmity that once sharpened the wits and feelings of Europeans no longer does; in fact, it seems to be an image of Europe slipping into a kind of bored senility, where resentments no longer have any national shape, but turn inward, toward the bedroom and the spirit. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. More than anything else it seemed like a pleasant look into one of those communities where people are a little too close, and everybody would benefit from a nap or a nice walk. 

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

Picture by Lillian Ross

The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting--having set up a Huston scene--for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual 'shots' (the abrupt close-up of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.

In 1950, director John Huston set out to make a film adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. He was followed in his attempt by Lillian Ross, a veteran journalist from The New Yorker who wanted to see the process of making a picture from start to finish. If she had only waited a little bit (and had an expense account that would take her to Africa) she might have seen Huston filming the critical and commercial hit The African Queen, but The Red Badge of Courage turned out to be a flop, just as MGM chief L. B. Mayer expected it to be. But it wasn't a disaster, either--although it failed to make back its budget, it received good notices in the press, among a few detractors. It wasn't some big Fitzcarraldo-style fiasco, where the cast and crew were tortured by the grand delusions of an auteur. Though that might have made a salacious and readable novel, what Ross captures here is something much more subtle and enduring: the steady grind of the studio system, and the way that vision sometimes fails when transferred to celluloid.

The star of Ross' novel is Huston, the legendary director. Her Huston is determined and imaginative, but also practical and collaborative; he believes firmly in the movie he's making, even as he takes in the critiques of his entourage, including producer Gottfried Reinhardt and studio liaison Dore Schary. Huston is an artist, but he can speak in dollars and centers. Studio head Mayer is Huston's foil, a inveterate bottom-liner who extols the virtues of sentimental entertainment like Mickey Rooney movies. You want to hate Mayer, because he's so anti-art, but it's hard to come away from Picture unimpressed by his discernment; he knows that Red Badge will struggle with viewers in a way that Huston and his entourage can only admit when it's too late. Ross captures the voice of both characters in a way that makes them feel magnetic and real; she manages, too, to cut through the backlot lingo and give us a sense of the deeper motivations animating these men.

It's an open question, perhaps, whether Red Badge would have done better if Mayer and the studio had supported it or promoted it more. Reinhardt makes a number of last minute moves to "save" the picture from its middling early screeners, deleting some of the scenes cherished by Huston and adding a cheesy voiceover narration from Crane's novel. (Huston, swallowed up by The African Queen, has washed his hands of the whole thing.) I think, in the end, that Mayer was right, that the shapelessness of Crane's novel just wouldn't play for audiences of the time, but the last-minute editing process makes a double tragedy of the film, turning it into something that is both not a moneymaker and not the artwork that Huston had imagined. That's the story of Picture: not a failure, not an underappreciated masterpiece--just a hash and a disappointment.

Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.