January 2014

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.