Booknotes et cetera
January 2014
Books Bought
1. Essays of E.B. White
2.
Nick Hornsby, Ten Years in the Tub
3.
Stephen King, On Writing
4.
Anne Lamott, Bird
by Bird
5.
John Eliiot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Books Read
1.
Dennis McFarland, Nostalgia
2.
Ari Shavit, My
Promised Land
3.
Genesis, Gospel
of Matthew
4.
Nick Hornsby, Ten Years in the Tub
5.
Essays of
E.B. White
6.
Dennis Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (part)
7.
Brent Shaw, Sacred
Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine
8.
Paul Elie, Reinventing
Bach (part)
9.
William Faulkner, Light in August
Music Bought and Listened To
1.
Roseanne Cash, The River and the Thread
2.
Joni Mitchell, Blue
3.
Sade, Lover’s
Rock
Movies Seen
1.
American
Hustle
2.
Inside
Llewyn Davis
There is in our bedroom a fireplace we never use, which is
kind of a shame since even though it is a gas fireplace with faux logs, if you
turn it on at night when all the lights are off it is indisputably pretty and creates
a romantic mood that I would normally be all for. Unfortunately, it has only one flame setting,
about halfway between wood-fired pizza oven and thermonuclear meltdown. Even Alba, who was born in Cuba and grew up in
Miami and is about as cold natured as they come, agrees it's a bit much. Happily, the fireplace is not entirely a
white elephant, for it has a redeeming feature in the form of a sturdy,
chest-high 4'x3' top. Before I moved in,
this surface held a chess set and a gorgeous art nouveau glass vase with glass
tulips and a variety of knick-knacks and family photos. The chess set and vase remain, but nowadays
the rest of the acreage, or most of it, is given over to books, specifically
Books I've Recently Bought But Haven't Read Yet. Back in May there twenty or so of these,
occupying an expanse of about two and a half feet. In the eight months since both the number
and length have doubled.
Initially,
the presence of these books was a source of deep pleasure. There they stood, tall and crisp as sentinels,
each promising to entertain or enlighten. Month by month, however, as the row has
lengthened, they've become more like mute, reproachful witnesses, silently convicting
me of the vices of profligacy and sloth.
Hence
the above list of books bought versus books read comes as a comfort and a
pleasant surprise. Both in terms of
purchases and reading, January 2014 was about par for the course. Yet clearly nine is more than five. Ergo, I read more books than I bought. True, those of caviling disposition might
note that two of the nine were read only in part and that counting Genesis and Matthew as an entire book is a bit generous, or even
disingenuous. I’m willing to grant the
former point, though only if I'm allowed to point out that Brent Shaw's
estimable Sacred Violence: African
Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine is a Cambridge
University Press tome of some 806 pages, replete with honest-to-God old
fashioned footnotes, many of them in Latin and most of which I actually read,
and thus could fairly count as two books.
(It also covers its chosen topics—Christian-pagan, Christian-Jewish, and
intra-Christian violence in North Africa from c. 312-450—in such magisterial
detail that could I remember it all—if only!—I would never need to read
anything else on them again.) Two
takeaways among many: the enormous corpus of St. Augustine's writings is both
blessing and curse, making possible an amazingly detailed reconstruction of his
era while simultaneously making it impossible to treat it with anything
resembling objectivity and balance; and, hundreds of years of Roman rule had so
deeply inculcated the habit of settling disputes via recourse to the law courts
and/or petitioning civil rulers that by the time Christianity came along, the
notion of resolving large-scale disputes by any other means was quite literally
unthinkable. (Henceforth I shall read all
controversial patristic literature as essentially law briefs. On counting Genesis and Matthew combined
as a full volume, however, I'm not budging an inch. Together they constitute 120 pages in my
edition of the Bible, or 78 (admittedly rather brief) chapters, and that's good
enough for me.
On the
other hand, it remains the case that row of books has steadily lengthened these
past eight months. Facts are annoyingly
stubborn things.
Of the
books I've read in the New Year, Nostalgia
was the most surprising, My Promised
Land was both awe-inspiring and deeply disturbing, and Light in August was, well, a masterpiece. Nostalgia
was surprising to me because, despite the raft of glowing reviews from
reliable reviewers that led me to buy it in the first place, I had a presentiment
that it would prove overly derivative of War
& Peace + Red Badge of Courage. When it arrived dressed in a dustjacket bearing
a discouraging faux-lithograph of a Civil War battle scene, my doubts
increased. Yet despite the
self-inflicted handicaps of a cumbersome postmodernist structure (fragmented
time, mostly) and a dubious and melodramatic explanation of why the
protagonist, Summerfield Hayes, enlisted in the Union Army in the first place,
it seems to me Dennis McFarland has produced something of a wonder. Nostalgia
does indeed pay frank homage to both Tolstoy and Hawthorne as well as to
the Jamesian strategy of creating suspense out of moral complexity, yet it
finds its own voice. Never, for
instance, have I read a novel that used so effectively the modern freedom to
graphically describe the horrors of war without employing a single overwrought
phrase or everslipping into pornographic gore. McFarland makes revealing and ultimately
beautiful use of Hayes's dreams and fevered hallucinations, not to symbolize or
foreshadow but to reveal character. He
is clearest and most realistic precisely when he is most eloquent; poetic
phrases and deft description, so often show-offy and distracting in literary
fiction, are in Nostalgia the means
of communicating deep truths which cannot be expressed otherwise.
The
subtitle of Ari Shavit's My Promised
Land—the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel—sounds like the kind of thing some
hack publicist would come up with, but in this case it is not only apropos but
perfect. The trick is that he slights
neither side of the conjunction. From
the ex nihilo rise of Israel's citrus
industry, which was born in the 1920s and then prospered even as the world
economy plunged into depression, to the astonishing creativity and prosperity
of its modern tech industries (Israel generates more technology patents than
Germany, with less than a tenth its population), to its nonpareil feat of
absorbing 600,000 mostly refugee immigrants between 1946 and 1954 into a
population of roughly the same number and somehow providing housing, schools,
medical care, and jobs for them all, Shavit demonstrates conclusively and
vividly that Israel is beyond question the
demographic, economic and political miracle of the twentieth century. Yet, simultaneously, he shows not only how
literally de-moralizing the endless occupation of the West Bank has become, but
also how inextricably bound the entire Israeli project is with a past marked by
opportunistic ethnic cleansing.
Finally, and despite a final chapter whose forced optimism strikes the
book's only false note, Shavit demonstrates with merciless clarity just how
quixotic and untenable is the existence of Israel-- a Jewish, westward-looking
island of six million people in a sea of 350 million Arab Moslems, itself
surrounded by an ocean of another billion Moslems. Despite all the doubts and questions Shavit's
book raised, I remain a friend and admirer of Israel. But I closed it with a terrible sense of foreboding.
Light in August limns an altogether
different tragedy: that of race in the American South. Such honesty, such high moral seriousness,
and such epic and biblical resonance are unparalleled in
any American novel of my acquaintance. To
it The Great Gatsby should yield
pride of place in the canon, forthwith.
