Thirst by Amélie Nothomb

I'm pointing out these issues because this is not what will be written in the Gospels. Why not ? I don't know. The evangelists were nowhere near me when this happened. And regardless of what people have said, they didn't know me. I'm not angry with them, but nothing is more irritating than those people who, under the pretext that they love you, claim that they know you inside out.

Thirst is a retelling of the final days of Jesus' life, told from a jail cell in which he is placed in the day between his trial and his execution. This day, as Jesus notes, doesn't exist--the Gospels present a whirlwind between the betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane and the crucifixion--but as a literary conceit it works and is consistent with Nothomb's Jesus who is, let's be honest, a bit prickly.

The best part of the book is the seriousness with which it takes the incarnation, the actual embodiment of Jesus. The central image, that of desire, most clearly addressed in the literal thirst of the title but also illustrated by Jesus' desire for food (he's annoyed at how slowly John eats), physical intimacy (he's in a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, here styled as Madeline), touch (his favorite moment to reflect on from his perch in eternity is the Pieta), and companionship. There's an anti-gnostic flair to the best sections, aggressive pushback at the gnostic idea of the flesh as evil. Nothomb pushes it even further than most, claiming that God was deficient--indeed, that creation itself is deficient--because it is corporeal while God, having no body, is not.

The first half of the book, where Jesus talks about his miracles and ministry, I enjoyed a lot. Jesus didn't, he says, enjoy performing most of his miracles. Only the wedding at Cana was enjoyable, and after that, miracles were necessary but hard, painful. One is reminded, though Nothomb doesn't cite it, of Luke 8:46, when Jesus is touched by a sick woman and she is healed: "I felt power going out of me." Jesus, when healing here, draws on a power he calls "the husk", a strange name I couldn't quite suss out the reasoning behind. Perhaps this Jesus is a bit touchy because he feels, in a way most Jesuses do not, the loss of his power as it is used to heal others but not himself.

The second half, focusing on the crucifixion, was dicier. I tried very hard to put aside any theological irritation, but certain ideas were repeatedly so frequently that they began to grate, especially Jesus' repeated paeans to the love between he and Madeline. In Thirst, transcendence comes ultimately from this relationship, and it makes the story feel small. The Passion as a doomed romance was never going to be a winner for me--is there a single novel about Jesus that doesn't lean on Jary?

Finally, the book ended on a low note, with Jesus referencing "affirmative action" from the cross, stating that, contra the Gospels, he didn't ask God to forgive his killers, and, finally, achieving his great redemptive moment in the realization that the person who really needed forgiven was... himself. Yeah, after a monologue about how badly his sadistic Father has screwed things up, he realizes that he needs to let all his anger toward himself, for spending his life on others, go, and he dies.

There are good ideas, good writing, powerful themes, but ultimately, there's nothing transcendent in Thirst, for me. Jesus isn't someone you'd want to spend time with--and there's a good chance he wouldn't want to hang out with you either--and his life and death really accomplish nothing in particular. On Easter weekend, it just didn't hit right. Novels about Jesus don't need to be theologically rigorous, but I don't understand making Jesus the protagonist of your book if you've got nothing theological to say.

Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck

Jesus gazed up past his brow at Margery. His irises were disorganized blue geodes. He had been crying all weekend--it was Monday morning and he was still crying. He whispered, "I'm so abandoned." He raised his head in sadness and his face held the slow joy of deep sky above the sky.

He stood and turned on the balls of his feet and began to ascend. Margery fell half asleep when she saw the deity turn away. She felt the strongest sensation of her life, a welling of aspiration and desire embodied in the blue of dusty gold, the long smeared shadow of neck and spine, his broad hips, the semicircles of his ass, his long slightly knock-kneed legs. He rotated near the ceiling; she became conscious of the weight of her breasts and the hair down her back. The played tips of his long toes floated past her eyes. He raised his arm as darkness closed in. Later she concluded he was pointing to heaven.

A few years back I took a class on Medieval literature in graduate school; we read part of The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes called the first autobiography in English. Margery was a 15th century Englishwoman who claimed--if I'm remembering correctly, and there's a good chance I'm not--to be married to Jesus Christ. From the perspective of our era we might think that Margery described some kind of spiritual ecstasy, but in fact she was quite literal about it: Margery considered herself the literal, physical bride of Christ, and therefore practiced celibacy with her "earthly" husband. And after all, why not? The Catholic religion is based on the mystery of a real, physical presence.

Robert Gluck's fictionalized version of Margery's story brings that physicality to the forefront: Margery and her husband Jesus enjoy each other's bodies with literal intimacy. He fondles her nipples; she fingers his asshole. Margery gives herself up to Jesus with a physical desire that is an analogue of spiritual ecstasy. Against this backdrop Gluck presents a second story: the story of his desire for L., a wealthy man many years his junior, for whom his desire is also a kind of ecstasy, but also a kind of grief or pain.

"How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete?" Gluck asks. "Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out 'an empty space that I can't fill.'" The juxtaposition between Margery-and-Jesus and Bob-and-L. is sometimes foggy and sometimes quite clear: like Jesus, L.'s appeal is the stuff of mystery, in its religious meaning, a property beyond understanding and accessible only through practices of mysticism. Like Jesus, L. has power; though love forms the structure of divine creation, what power do mortals have to deny it, or withhold their own love? And like Jesus, L.'s diffidence is painful; as Jesus begins to show his boredom with Margery, so L. begins to drift away from Bob. God's love for us, if the word even suffices, may not resemble our love for God. Margery Kempe makes clear how grief and loss, in a cosmic sense, is inextricable from love.

Though Gluck's prose is often brittle and fragmented, I admired the physical language of Margery Kempe: the book is full of asses, cocks, tits, cunts, cumming, shitting, farting, etc., etc. We often project our squeamishness back onto the past; we assume that medieval people avoided talking about sex because we do. We love to think of ourselves as the endpoint of progress instead of what we are, which is the inheritors of a Victorian disdain for the body. It maybe that queer literature, disposed as it is to expose our false notions of the human body and the desire for the human body, reunites us with a medieval sense of the body as real and meaningful. Margery Kempe identifies the body as the site not only of love and lust, but of grief, loss, frustration, despair.

American Jesus by Stephen Prothero

The subject of this particular story of American religion is Jesus, more precisely Jesus as Americans have understood him.  So on its face, this book would appear to fall in the Christian nation camp.  Yet many of the most interesting appraisals of Jesus have emerged outside the churches: in music, film, and literature, and among Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and people of no religion at all.  To explore the American Jesus, therefore, is not to confine oneself to Christianity.  It is to examine how American Christianity has been formed by Christians and non-Christians alike, and how the varieties of American religious experience have been shaped by the public power of the Christian message.  Finally, to see how Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image is to examine, through the looking glass, the kaleidoscopic character of American culture.

It's easy to imagine that the story of American devotion to Jesus has been singular, steady, and monolithic.  I see it when my students transpose their own perceptions about modern Christianity onto older books, a way of flattening and disengaging not only from the text but from modern religious life.  But did you know that the America of the 17th and 18th centuries wasn't very religious at all?  And that Christianity as it did exist was not very interested in Jesus as a figure, much preferring the stern but guiding God-the-father?

Prothero traces the blossoming of a "Jesus culture" in the United States to the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century.  It transformed American Christianity by emphasizing the importance of Christ, but in doing so it unleashed the figure of Jesus onto the American landscape where it could be reimagined and reconceived.  Prothero covers a number of the various incarnations of Jesus in American culture, beginning by contrasting the loving, feminized Jesus of the 19th century with the masculine Jesus of the Teddy Roosevelt era.  He talks about the friendly, hippie-ish Jesus of the Jesus Movement of the mid-20th century, and connects it to our modern megachurches, which he describes, quite accurately, as "mimicking malls, with their large, open spaces, filled with light."

But some of the most interesting chapters cover the versions of Jesus that come from outside of what we might call the mainstream.  There's black Jesus--bringing to mind an argument I had, baffled, with a friend in youth group decades ago who insisted Jesus was black--but also the "elder brother" of Mormonism, as well as Jewish and Hindu versions of Jesus.  I was surprised to see just how important Jesus is in these communities: the first Hindu evangelists in the United States claimed Jesus as one of their own, and the proper Jewish attitude toward Jesus was apparently a huge controversy in the mid-20th century.  This goy had no idea.

Some familiar patterns recur.  From the moment when Thomas Jefferson took his scissors and snipped all the miracles and mysticism out of his Bible, Americans have gone to great pains to distinguish Jesus the figure from the religion he inspired.  Christianity sucks, the familiar line goes, but Jesus himself was the tops.  Prothero argues that this idea shows us just how attached American culture is to Jesus; even when it seeks to reject the Christian religion, America thinks Jesus is pretty much tops.  But the sheer variety and vitality of the different Jesus traditions is perhaps what makes the book so interesting, and eye-opening.  It's easy to get blinkered by one's own tradition, religious or not, and forget what a multitude of perspectives there are.  And there's something admirable, perhaps quintessentially American, about the diversity of Jesuses in our midst.

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected.  Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.  This is a prison, and few men have guessed.  But I know, he said to himself.  Because that is why I am here.  To burst the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain.  Thou shall not muzzle the ox as he treadeth out the corn, he thought, remembering the Torah.  You will not imprison a free creature; you will not bind it.  Thus say the Lord your God.  Thus I say.

The working title for The Divine Invasion was VALIS Regained.  I would have liked that.  As a sequel to VALIS, it's somewhat unsatisfying; it shares no characters, no plot lines.  But the strange central idea of Dick's fictional-universe-cum-actual-philosophy is here: that God was exiled to outer space millennia ago, and that we've been living in an imaginary universe ever since.  The Divine Invasion stages God's return to Earth--something attempted, but not achieved, in VALIS--as a young boy, Emmanuel.

Emmanuel, like Christ, is the product of a virgin birth, this time on a remote planet where people live in pods isolated from one another and separated by an inhospitable wasteland.  The protagonist Herb Asher helps Emmanuel and his mother, Rybys, return to Earth, but malicious government forces attack the incoming ship, forcing the injured Herb into suspended animation.  The crash also inflicts brain damage and amnesia on Emmanuel, who must slowly remember that he is God and recover the true extent of his power.  Like all of Dick's books, there are strange tangents that intersect with the main plot at oblique angles, including a popular diva who sings 16th century English folk ballads.  Also, the prophet Elijah's there, and he's like three thousand years old.

The Divine Invasion is not as satisfyingly bonkers as VALIS, mostly because it lacks the layered biographical irony of that book.  But I did really love the ending, which dramatizes the choice Herb has to make between the God-child Emmanuel and a seductive goat-creature identified with Belial, or Satan:

Gray truth, the goat-creature continued, is better than what you have imagined.  You wanted to wake up.  Now you are awake; I show you things as they are, pitilessly; but that is how it should be.  How do you suppose I defeated Yahwah in times past?  By revealing his creation for what it is, a wretched thing to be despised.  This is his defeat, what you see -- see through my mind and eyes, my vision of the world: my correct vision.

Did I mention the goat communicates by telepathy?  It's weird.  But it also provides an insight into what Dick was trying to do by writing science fiction, and why he so frequently layers his work with false, imagined worlds (like the post-WWII world of The Man in the High Castle, for example).  Belial presents a choice between the "gray truth" and the hopeful ideal world that Emmanuel, damaged and immature, offers instead.  At the end of the book--spoilers here--the goat-creature is killed when someone loves and pities it.  To pity the world of "gray truth" is to imagine a better one, and to kill it by imagining.  I like that.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Conner

The boy didn't need to hear it. There was already a deep and black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

Spoilers abound.

Chris read Wise Blood last year, and it stumped him, to use his words. He talks about it at length in his review, and I can’t disagree with him—this is a difficult book that seems completely packed with ideas, many of which seem strong enough to carry a novel themselves. Tying them all together is quite a challenge.

A summary of the plot: We begin following Hazel Motes, a disillusioned former Christian who would now probably be considered a nihilist. He doesn’t believe in Christ, or redemption, or sin. We meet him on the way to a new town, where he meets the novel’s other central characters: Enoch Emery, an 18-year-old looking for a father figure and some direction, Asa Hawkes, a street preacher pretending to be blind, and his daughter, a teenage girl named Sabbath Lily Hawkes. Hazel hears Asa preaching and, offended by his message of Jesus, decides to begin preaching himself, founding a movement he calls the Church of Without Christ. He also decides to seduce Asa’s daughter to prove his commitment to his new beliefs. After preaching for several weeks without a single convert, Hazel’s ministry is co-opted by The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, which employs a Hazel lookalike. Angered by their cynical co-option of his belief system—they don’t actually believe it and are charging members to join—Hazel attempts to sabotage their work, escalating his attacks until he commits homicide. There’s more to the story, but I’m going to halt the summary there.

Enoch has what the novel calls “wise blood”, a sort of mild psychic ability that shows him the tiniest bit of the future and guides his life. There is no particularly straightforward way to tie this to the rest of the narrative, but here’s what I’ve come up with. Early on in their relationship, Enoch tells Hazel that he doesn’t believe in Jesus much, but that he does have his father’s “wise blood” which guides him. I see parallels between the “wise blood” and Christ—that is, as full of Christ figures as Wise Blood is, the titular blood may be one itself.

There are similarities between Enoch’s “wise blood” and Asa’s “spirits” in that both are nearly irresistible and both give seemingly poor guidance: Asa feels led to blind himself, and upon being unable to do so forsakes his faith entirely; Enoch is compelled to steal a mummy from a museum to be a “new Jesus”, which he does, indirectly leading to Hazel’s shift in belief, which seems to be the point on which the novel turns. Looking at Enoch v. Asa in this way brings up an interesting question. That is, Asa’s decision, which seems reasonable, has only negative consequences, while Enoch’s, which seems stupid, may in fact have led to Hazel’s awakening, if not quite his redemption.

There’s a lot here about identity and honesty. No one in Wise Blood is particularly honest. Hazel at first seems to be telling the truth, but there are hints that he’s deceiving himself when he says he doesn’t believe in Christ. His initial reasoning for rejecting Christ is that without Christ, there is no need for belief. Consequently, there is no way he can commit any sin—there’s no sin without an ultimate moral authority, after all—and, as a result, he doesn’t need redemption from Christ or anyone. This is oddly circular and seemingly sincere until, in the closing pages of the novel, Hazel tells his landlady, who is also not what she seems, that he is “not clean”. Additionally, throughout the novel, characters mistake him for a preacher—perhaps ironically since he later becomes one, however untraditional—and both Enoch and Sabbath are convinced that Hazel rejects them because he “only wants Jesus”.

Then there’s the weird stuff, like Hazel blinding himself, in an inverse parallel with Asa, which I guess proves that Hazel’s late-period belief in Jesus was more sincere than Asa’s earlier ministerial zeal. There’s also Enoch dressing up in a gorilla suit, a fairly brutal murder, and Hazel’s landlady, seeming important but not introduced until the last 20 pages of the novel. I feel like there are some nice thematic parallels in some of these storylines, but this review is plenty long already.

The characters all end up in situations that seem fairly ambiguous: Sabbath ends up in an orphanage, Enoch ends up in a gorilla costume, which Chris discusses in depth in his review, Asa disappears to who-knows-where, and Hazel, the protagonist, dies searching—or does he? In some ways, the end of Hazel’s story recalls the ending of The Power and the Glory, because both deal with a protagonist seeking redemption he cannot find, and both end somewhat unresolved. We cannot know if Greene’s whiskey priest will be received into Heaven in spite of his inability to make confession, and we are not told the meaning of Hazel’s ultimate fate.

His final scene is bleak—spoiler, he dies—but there’s a bit of light, both literally and figuratively. The last line in the book pictures Hazel as a “pinpoint of light”, and “the beginning of something [that we] cannot begin”. O’Conner seems to foreshadow Hazel’s eventual redemption—a character states near the beginning of the novel that redemption, once received, cannot be rejected—but then holds the reality of that redemption at arm’s length, where we, like the landlady at Hazel’s deathbed, can see it only as a possible beginning we cannot begin. Hazel cannot escape Christ, the real thing or the flawed substitutes, and O’Conner’s God, as inscrutable as He might be, never stops pursuing. It’s sort of a beautiful picture in such a bleak landscape.

The White Goddess by Robert Graves

It would be unfair to call the heretical poets 'apostates'. They were interested in poetic values and relations rather than in prose dogma. It must have been irksome for them to be restricted in their poem-making by ecclesiastical conventions. 'Is it reasonable?' they may have exclaimed. 'The Pope, though he permits our typifying Jesus as a Fish, as the Sun, Bread, as the Vine, as a Lamb, as a Shepherd, as a Rock, as a Conquering Hero, even as a Winged Serpent, yet threatens us with Hell Fire if we ever dare to celebrate him in terms of the venerable gods whom He has superseded and from whose ritual every one of these symbols hasbeen derived... So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right to call him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.

I blame my long absence squarely on this book, which occupied for pretty much the entirety of March. It isn't particularly long, but I could only read about twenty pages before I needed to stop and defrost my brain.

The White Goddess is subtitled "A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth"--which, unless you have read it, means either absolutely nothing or something quite different than Graves intends. The term "poetic myth" in the subtitle is particularly duplicitous; for Graves true poetry and myth are one and the same. The thesis of The White Goddess is that all true religion and poetry expressing what Graves calls the capital-T "Theme":

The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious an all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride, and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.

Graves then proceeds to spend 400-odd pages detailing the various ways the Theme shows up in world myth, skipping vicariously from culture to culture drawing parallels in their religious systems. In a single paragraph he may begin in Wales, jump to Egypt, hop over to Palestine, run back through Greece, and perhaps take a stroll into Viking myth as well. Nor does he stick solely to Western religion, though excursions into places such as Mesoamerica and Japan are rare. Much of The White Goddess is an exercise in conflation, as Graves attempts to show how various deities are variations of the same archetype. For example, here Graves identifies just some of the various forms of Apollo:

Apollo himself had reputedly been born on Ortygia ('Quail Island'), the islet off Delos; so Canopic Hercules is Apollo, too, in a sense--is Apollo, Aesculapius (alias Cronos, Saturn or Bran), Thoth, Hermes (whom the Greeks identified with Thoth), Dionysus (who in the early legends is an alias of Hermes), and Melkarth, to whom King Solomon, as son-in-law to King Hiram, was priest, and who immolated himself on a pyre, like Hercules of Oeta. Hercules Melkarth was also worshipped at Corinth under the name of Melicertes, the son of the Pelasgian White Goddess Ino of Pelion.

It's mind-boggling, but it makes sense in respect to Graves' championing of the Theme; by collapsing these religious stories like paper boxes he intends to show that there is only one story. So, put simplistically, the trio of Zeus, Cronos, and Hera become an analogue of Osiris, Horus, and Set, or Odin, Loki, and Freya, or Christ, Satan, and Mary. In turn, these myths--in which the principal male figures engage in ritual, cyclical periods of dominance and submission--map the yearly calendar.

Graves' methodology here is seductive, but not quite overwhelming. In his foreword, he notes that "this remains a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired, or rigidly scientific mind." If you suspect that this an avoidance technique that allows Graves to get away with dodgy scholarship, then, well, this simply wasn't written for you.

The foundation of the book is built on two Welsh minstrel poems, which Graves spends the first third of the book dissembling, reassembling, and interpreting as alphabetic codes beset in riddles, which perhaps conceal a secret name of God. Elsewhere, his methodology is based almost purely upon poetic inspiration, and to reinforce a point Graves on rare occasions offers up an original poem. One chapter takes the form of a discussion between a Greek historian and a Roman governor. While fascinating, these methods do little to allay fears that the premise of the book is absurdly far-fetched. The argument fits together neatly, but circuitously; it is difficult to tell at the end of the book if Graves has presented a proof or merely a semblance of one.

Whatever of The White Goddess is based in reason and not pure nonsense, there are certain politically distasteful conclusions to be made. One such conclusion is that women cannot be "true" poets:

However, woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing. This is not to say that a woman should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, and not as if she were an honorary man.

This is a bit of semantic trickery. Graves suggests that because women cannot be the surrogate of the God of the Waxing Year they cannot write "true" poetry about the Theme. It is kind of him to permit them to write poetry at all, but her poems are relegated to some, less true variety. Homosexuality, naturally, has no place in poetry.

Another conclusion is that many of the world's ills can be traced to a perversion or a denial of the true Theme. Catholicism, which installs Mary as the White Goddess figure, is preferable though it mistakes her character. Protestantism, which devalues Mary, is more insidious:

The Puritan Revolution was a reaction against Virgin-worship, which in many districts of Great Britain had taken on a mad-merry orgiastic character. Though committed to the mystical doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Puritans regarded Mary as a wholly human character, whose religious importance ended at the birth-stool; and anathematized any Church ritual or doctrine that was borrowed from paganism rather than from Judaism. The iconoclastic wantonness, the sin-laden gloom and Sabbatarian misery that Puritanism brought with it shocked the Catholics beyond expression.

And Judaism, which rejects the female divinity completely, is worse:

Yet neither Frazer nor Hitler were far from the truth, which was that the early Gentile Christian borrowed from the Hebrew prophets the two religious concepts, hitherto unknown in the West, which have become the prime causes of our unrest: that of a a patriarchal God, who refuses to have any truck with Goddesses and claims to be self-sufficient and all-wise; and that of a theocratic society, disdainful of the pomps and glories of the world, in which everyone who rightly performs his civic duties is a 'son of God' and entitled to salvation, whatever his rank or fortune, by virtue of direct communion with the Father.

Those who know me even slightly will know that I think this is bunk. I find Graves lacking justification here; it escapes me what is meant to be so evil about this "theocratic society" which values God's equanimity and intimacy. But this highlights a larger flaw in Graves' thesis: He never deigns to tell us what make this Theme "true" while admitting that there are variations, impurities, and digressions. By what rationale does Graves separate the heretics from the orthodox? What value is there in the White Goddess' viciousness and capriciousness? In many of her forms she is wholly unappealing; one wonders why the Jewish God's rejection of her is such a bad thing.

I am unprepared to tell you how much of this book is brilliant and how much is pure, unadulterated horseshit. Perhaps my mind is too rigidly scientific. But I will be the first to admit that it is completely fascinating.

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

Belisarius was far too respectful a subject to argue with his Emperor that he had never done him any evil; and swallowed the reproach. It was his view that so long as a man acted uprightly and according to his own conscience such insults could not harm him. There is a Christian saying, that to forgive your enemy and to return good for evil is like heaping coals of fire upon his head. Justinian's hair was constantly being singed by the warmth of Belisarius's unexampled services... Time after time, Belisarius accomplished the seemingly impossible, and Justinian felt more and more humiliated to stand so heavily in his debt. I shall have more to write upon this head before I have done.

A little historical background: It is common enough knowledge that in the 4th Century AD Rome was besieged by foreign invaders, eventually deposing the last Roman Emperor in 476 and launching the world into what we now know of as the Dark Ages. This is only a half-truth, though. At the time, the Roman Empire was split into two parts, the Western Empire, with its capital at Rome, and the Eastern Empire, with its capital at Constantinople. While the Western Empire was supplanted by barbarian control, the Eastern Empire continued for another 1000 years, twice as long as the "Roman Empire," its citizens all the while calling themselves Romans.

For much of this century-long period, the Eastern Roman Empire, which we usually call the Byzantine Empire, was confined to Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. But for a brief period under the reign of Justinian, the Empire stretched its holdings to Greece, Italy, Spain, and North Africa: almost the sie of the original Roman Empire. A lot of the responsibility for conquering those areas fell on Belisarius, a legendary general in Justinian's service.

In Count Belisarius, as he did for the Emperor Claudius in I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Robert Graves turns a historical figure into a pretty compelling fictitious character. Belisarius' feats as a general are pretty incredible: beating the Persians, the Vandals in Africa, and the Goths in Italy without ever losing a major battle.

One of his more interesting accomplishments is the put-down of the Nika riots in Constantinople. Apparently, in this time, there were two major chariot racing factions in the Empire, the Blues and the Greens. These people took chariot racing so seriously that not only were these factions about sports, but they even controlled local politics, acting as odd surrogates for political parties, but also having some of the traits of street gangs. A riot between these two factions (named after the Greek word "nika!" or "win!") broke out in the stadium which almost cost Justinian the Emperorship until Belisarius bribed the Blues to leave and then massacred the Greens.

The strange thing about Belisarius' story is that time and time again, Justinian, partly because he was jealous of Belisarius' success and partly because he was worried that Belisarius would try to have himself crowned Emperor in Constantinople or King in Italy, treated Belisarius like shit. Belisarius was under constant scrutiny, maligned by his subordinate officers and repeatedly charged with sedition. Ultimately (this isn't really a spoiler since it's FROM HISTORY) one of these charges stuck and Justinian happily had Belisarius' fortune stolen from him and his eyes put out, reducing him to a blind beggar. All the while, Belisarius had never once quarreled with the Emperor or disobeyed him.

At first I though that compared to Graves' depiction of Claudius, Belisarius came off a little flat, and maybe he does. But I think that there is something really interesting going on--apparently the division between the Blues and Greens was so deep that they each took sides on the prevailing religious question at the time, which was an argument about the nature of Christ, whether he had dual natures (the Orthodox Blue position) or just one (the "Monophysite" Green position). Graves does a good job of making these arguments seem very academic and petty. What it took the entire book for me to realize was that Graves was setting up Belisarius as a living, breathing model of Christ--being the single selfless man in the world, enduring unending abuse from everyone around him, while the rest of the Empire argues violently about an essentially meaningless dogmatic question.

I think for many people this review was probably really boring. If that's true, I wouldn't recommend this book to you. However, I did like it quite a bit, so if you're a fan of historical fiction I think you should check it out. Though I would read I, Claudius first.

Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

Also reviewed by Brooke and Carlton.

Salinger continues to amaze me with just how much he can do with so little. The 200-odd pages of Franny and Zooey contain less plot than I think any book I've ever read: Franny meets her boyfriend and they eat at a restaurant, where she collapses. The next day, she is recuperating at home where her mother convinces her brother, Zooey, to have a conversation with her. That's it. And yet Salinger is able to give forty- and fifty-page conversations the unmistakeable patina of reality that writers work for decades to capture.

I think what impresses me most is that the characters are not ordinary--Franny and Zooey are members of the Glass Family (elsewhere investigated by Salinger in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the underrated "Down at the Dinghy"), and as children were noted intellectuals who appeared on a radio program called "It's a Wise Child." As I've noted before, a lot of Salinger's work has a common theme running through it: the tendency of precocious children to grow into neurotic and unstable adults. Franny's collapse is brought on by an obsession with the "Jesus Prayer," a ritualistic prayer meant to be repeated over and over until the heart and mind are in communion with the lips. Zooey is brilliant and physically attractive, as well as a successful actor, but is emotionally distant and has difficulty communicating genuinely with his family.

Salinger's opus is really something to be hold, and though his literary output is small I think that each of his three books that I've read really deepens my understanding of the others--even Catcher in the Rye, itself not about any member of the Glass family, is supposedly written by one of the Glass brothers, Buddy (as well as several of Salinger's non-Glass stories). I think that much of that is probably revisionism, but it neatly supplies a physical thread that excuses the thematic simialrity of all of Salinger's work: when we view Holden Caulfield, who is incapable of dealing fully with the death of his older brother Allie, as the creation of Buddy Glass, brother of a suicide, we begin to understand the depth of Buddy's grief, which is only glanced at otherwise. I can't say that Franny and Zooey is my favorite of Salinger's stuff--in fact I think it suffers severely upon comparison to Catcher and Nine Stories--but I love it for the way it enhances my understanding of those books, and in turn is enhanced by them.

Note: My copy of this book was once owned by Michael Peterson, a wealthy North Carolina man infamously convicted of killing his wife five or six years ago. I left that in a bar and had to borrow another copy from Nathan. Maybe the book is cursed?