What I’ve Been Reading

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024

Greeks & Turks

It’s always awkward to read a book adored by a friend (or friends) only to find it leaves you if not cold. as least fairly lukewarm. (Of course, it’s much worse to pass along something you feel passionate about and get the response of “meh”.) So I feel crappy about not loving The Island of Missing Trees. I’m always happy to hear Elif Shafak when she turns up on BBC arts magazine shows—she’s smart and decent and admirable. Yet there’s something predictable in this story of a Greek and Turkish Cypriot cross cultural romance with its fig tree narrator, kindly gay tavern owners, and grumpy young misfit teenager who will learn important life lessons. Shafak’s intentions are more than admirable, but it feels, to me anyway, like someone preaching to the choir. However, what I am grateful to Shafak for here is the last name that she has given to that young girl and her father because it sent me back to my bookshelves to take down what’s left of my collection of books by its most well known bearer, Nikos Kazantzakis, a writer I loved when I was a teenager. Because of the 1964 Michael Cacoyannis movie based on Zorba the Greek, most of his books were available in translation in mass market Ballantine paperbacks at the local drugstore, and I read them all when I was in highschool. (The raising of Lazarus from The Last Temptation of Christ haunts me still.) So it’s been good to dip back into his world, and especially look back on his life in Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters edited by his wife Helen Kazantzakis.

OCTOBER 2024

* Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Katherine Rundell is best known as a children’s author, but she’s also an academic in the field of Renaissance Literature and an essayist/book reviewer. I can’t imagine a better entry into the world of John Donne and his writing than this compact biography; Rundell locates him precisely in the Elizabethan world of Catholic-Protestant tensions and violence, court intrigue, sexualized love poetry, sermonizing, and that period’s obsession with death and memento mori. Her affection for Donne does not blind her to his short comings as a husband, father and political animal; she gives us an extraordinarily fully dimensional portrait of his life, and brief but detailed analysis of his works, poetic and liturgical, sacred and profane. But perhaps the greatest joy in reading her book is her prose; Katherine Rundell is simply a lovely writer.

*William M. Schniedewind’s Who Really Wrote The Bible

The thesis here, backed up by Biblical text and archaeology, is that the Old Testament was written by scribes, men and women who were more tradespeople than writers; the concept of the author as individual came later, with the Greeks. Schniedewind traces the evolution of their texts from the Late Bronze Age, when Canaan was ruled by Egypt, on through the rise of Assyria and then the Babylonian exile. It’s always good to see the Pentateuch and all its kin in the context of their times and in conjunction with other texts. Schniedewind also makes the point that women initially played a more prominent role and that there was “marginalization of women in the final editing of the Bible” (the “Song of Miriam” became the “Song of Moses”, etc). Compelling insights, lots of illustrations and prose that’s a mixture of academia and Dad folksiness.

SEPTEMBER 2024

*More Wendy Lesser

In The Amateur, An Independent Life of Letters, Wendy Lesser writes of how her education, family, friends and various jobs have contributed to her role as “an eighteenth century man of letters.” The first dozen or so chapters are the more autobiographical, the latter eight or nine are a series of essays on various subject from dance (Mark Morris, Tamara Toumanova), to her cat, to friends like poet Thom Gunn and, while everything is interesting, the book loses its drive once she settles into the happy routine of marriage and editing Threepenny Review. I love how she writes about academia and, even when she writes about people or books or artworks that aren’t favourites of mine, there’s lots to enjoy.

*Acadian Driftwood

François and Jeanne LeBlanc were the parents of ten children, their fourth, Joseph, born in 1712, was the great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather of journalist Tyler LeBlanc. He begins Acadian Driftwood with François’ grandfather and grandmother, Daniel LeBlanc and Françoise Gaudet, who arrived in Acadia in the mid 1600s; but the bulk of his book deals with the fates of those ten LeBlanc siblings during and after the Expulsion of 1755. At times the records are sketchy, but Tyler LeBlanc gives us a powerful sense of the various hells that befell them all after the British shoved them into ships and destroyed their homes and farms. It was no simple process of relocation: they were subject to shipwrecks and near shipwrecks, disease, poverty, starvation, and simply being dumped into communities that did not want them. It’s a remarkable little (a scant 183 pages) book that tells an enormous story.

AUGUST 2024

*Olivia Laing

There are a great many wonderful things in Olivia Laing’s newest book, The Garden Against Time—meditations and investigations of gardens and gardeners in literature (Milton, Marvell, Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, the heartbreaking John Clare), as well as explorations of such gardens as Derek Jarmen’s Prospect Cottage, Iris Origo’s war torn estate in Italy, and grand ones (funded by the slave trade) at the Shrubland Hall manor house in Suffolk. Laing starts by telling us a comforting history of the word “paradise” — that it began as a word for garden and was taken from there to its loftier heavenly meaning, and not the other way round. She writes of the enclosure laws, on the history of plantations in the New World, of Eden and colonialism. All of this is very much like what I loved about her books Lonely City and Trip to Echo Spring, that is, that is the pleasure of following a bright, curious writer through an illuminating and quirky inquiry. Her book also contains long sections on her own garden, detailing what she inherited when she and her partner bought their property, what she plants as she restores it during Covid, and on to the various setbacks and glories of fungus and rot and bloom etc. etc. These sections of the book (at times, a good half of each chapter) will probably fascinate devoted gardeners but, for those of us who love gardens and gardeners but not gardening, they can be somewhat of a slog, wading through lists of gorgeous names and wishing for colour photos instead of the four John Craig’s linocuts of her garden season by season.

*Wendy Lesser

It’s been thirty years since I started reading Wendy Lesser; I found His Other Half, Men Looking at Women through Art in The Book Cellar, a Toronto store long gone. The book moves through an eccentric collection of subjects, everything from Degas’ nudes, to Henry James’ women, Hitchcock’s couples, Randall Jarrell’s poetry and very smart writing on Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe.  Next I read her book on murder, Pictures at an Execution, which examined the subject via everything from Jacobean tragedy to Norman Mailer and Weegee. Then, in Music for Silenced Voices, she wrote about Shostakovich and his string quartets. She’s a fascinating essayist, diving deep into whatever seemed to be obsessing her: movies, books, dance, at one point describing herself as “an eighteenth century man of letters”, (her latest book is about Scandinavian noir). When I could find it, I bought The Threepenny Review, a literary quarterly that she founded over 40 years ago when she was 27. On my bookshelf there is, as well, evidence of her work as an editor in a wonderful collection of essays, Hiding in Plain Sight, from Threepenny Review.

Room for Doubt, from 2007, contains three linked and very personal essays: the first is on her feelings for the city of Berlin, the second is about not writing a book about David Hume, and the third is of her rocky friendship with Leonard Michaels. Each of the trio stands alone, but it’s very satisfying when the links between them start falling into place. 

Among the highest praise we can give a writer is that they are a wonderful companion; Lesser is one of the best of them, a writer and editor who makes my world a better place.

*Anti-Semitism

*Philip Slayton published Antisemitism, An Ancient Hatred in the Age of Identity Politics just half a year before the October 7 attacks and the War on Gaza that followed, and even though Middle East politics and the world situation has shifted drastically since then, the book is as relevant as it was when it came out. The horrors of atrocities on both sides don’t really change Slayton’s case. For a book so brief, it’s jammed with extensive and thoughtful research and information. (It’s always a surprise for me to see population statistics and realize how small a percentage of Jews there are in the world—0.2%. There are more Mormons for god sake.) On one level this is an in depth Cole’s Notes length history of both the Jews and antisemitism, moving from the Middle East and around the Mediterranean (Morocco, Turkey, Egypt) to Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas; but it’s also the very personal story of it’s author (he had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother) as he works his way through the material. He’s smart and clearheaded and makes the case that one can be opposed to the politics of Israel and not be antisemitic. He’s also very clear on what the nightmare of antisemitism has meant to Jews over the centuries. It’s a very useful piece of work. 

For those of us of a certain age who grew up with the idea of Israel a land of possibilities, “making the desert bloom”and all that, the reality that it is not a liberal democracy has come had a real moral price. One of the very smart moves of the American founders (who despite being slaveholders are always presented as geniuses) was putting this into the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Is it possible for a state that is not secular to be a liberal democracy?

*An excellent film that fictionalizes an extraordinarily emotional instance of antisemitism in 19th century Italy, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, is now rentable on a couple of platforms. Bellocchio is a great director, too unknown in this country. Steve Vineberg has an excellent review of the movie HERE.

JULY 2024

*Come Back to the raft ag'in Huck Honey

Percival Everett, like Jean Rhys before him, retells a classic from another point of view—Rhys gave us Jane Eyre as told by the madwoman in the attic, he gives us Jim’s version of Huckleberry Finn, turning the illiterate Jim into the cultivated James, and Twain’s Mississippi journey into a slave narrative.  James is a pretty good read, it’s an adventure and it’s gripping, and Everett’s take on the story has more than a few surprises —although the big reveal really feels like a misstep to me. There’s still a bit of the wackiness that I love in his writing, but nothing in this slave narrative is as wild as, say, the stuff in Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Our current shock and dismay at the profusion of Twain’s n-words is answered here with the shocking violence done to the slave’s body. Jim-now-James is clearly the wisest man in the south and has fever dream conversations with the likes of Voltaire, but those conversations don’t really reverberate with the kind of zing you’d expect from this Everett. James feels respectable in a way that the other books of his that I’ve read don’t, and by respectable I mean something along the lines of a book that’s aiming itself at Oprah.

*Schubert

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) didn’t leave a lot of letters or diary entries, but, for someone who died so young, he left a lot of music, and Lorraine Byrne Bodley grounds her biography, Schubert, A Musical Wayfarer, in his scores and the documentation around their performances. Bodley, who is Irish (she teaches Musicology at Maynooth University outside Dublin), specializes not just in Schubert but also in Goethe, so she knows this world very well. It’s s big fat academic work, scrupulously researched and footnoted, with a very useful fifty page chronology and lots of musical examples (and more are easily accessible on her website). Reading it is like taking a course: the music that you might want to listen to is all available online and, if you’re someone like me who can follow (as opposed to being able to read) a score, it’s interesting to tag along with her as she goes off into the musical weeds. She’s very good on detailing Schubert’s youth as a student of Saliari and the importance of Italian partimento training in his pedagogy. She also follows the trajectory of Schubert’s family and social life through his work: much of his early music was performed at home by his father and brothers, and it’s a shock to see the list of his immediate family (fourteen full and five half siblings) and to see that only eight of them lived much beyond infancy. Bodley details his relationship to singer Therese Grob, who premiered many of his early songs, and who he was not permitted to marry because of the Marriage Consent Law of 1815—he was too poor. She also writes about his possible sexual relationships with men, and the fact that we will never know how he contracted the syphilis that ultimetely ended his life. 

I’ve long loved Schubert’s songs, and his chamber and solo piano music, but this book made me pay more attention to the symphonies, to the masses and to discoveries like the vocal quartets, the unfinished Lazarus oratorio, the less successful opera ventures. In the end, the composer remains elusive, but the work, and his relationship to it, is much clearer. 

I love Schubert as much as I do primarily because of the lieder, because of his enormous gifts of melody and a profound sadness that is never maudlin; Die Winterreise and Die Schöne Mullerin are two of the greatest things I know, and I keep going back to them. I know of nothing in all of art that moves me more than this, the delicate and sublime lullaby that the brook sings to the drowned, unlucky in love miller as it carries him past fields and forests towards the sea.

*Self Inflicted

Edith Hall is on BBC Radio a lot, along with Mary Beard she’s a go-to regular for information on Classic Studies and Ancient History. Smart and witty, she’s also prickly; she was on a magazine show the week that Margaret Thatcher died and, while everyone else was pointedly not speaking ill of the dead, Hall was— she made it clear that much of what the PM had done was, for her, an unforgivable legacy. She’s written a lot, and some books, her Greek Tragedy, Suffering Under the Sun, for example, are incredibly useful references. Facing Down the Furies is her latest and the subtitle reveals its personal nature: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, And Me. There was a lot of self murder in Hall’s past: her maternal great-grandfather drowned himself; her grandmother, his daughter, threw herself out of a hotel window; a cousin of her mother’s shot himself. And Hall herself suffered from bouts of depression that made her consider following their examples. What obsesses the book is the lasting effects that suicides have on the family left behind, and what’s most compelling about it is her use of plays from the Greek tragedians to examine and work through her family’s very personal griefs. It’s an excellent book about the role of suicide in those great old plays. 

*Gay

An acquaintance I’m very fond of gave a mutual friend of ours a book for me, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann. I’m assuming it’s because, like me, McCann was gay and roughly my contemporary—the book is nearly twenty years old; McCann died three years ago. He taught creative writing, was on the board of PEN/Faulkner and, when he was a teenager, had a correspondence with Bette Davis. I believe there are only two books, this one and a book of poetry. Mother of Sorrow’s ten linked stories are, perhaps, more than semi-autobiographical; in essays and newspaper pieces, he writes of his parents and they are identical to the characters in this little book. He writes well about being a closeted gay kid (the first story, about dressing up in his mother’s clothes with his best friend, is a gem), and, even as he reveals his parents’ shortcomings and cruelties, he does not spare himself. And that’s where the cumulative effect of the stories starts to fall into a kind of self pity. A bit like a date that starts off well but, by the end, you’re not sure if you want to give the guy your number.

May, June 2024

Turgenev

When I was fifteen my brother came home from university with a trunk full of books, many of which had been damaged the winter before by a serious fire in the house he shared with a couple of other students. Among them were books that changed my young life, and whenever I think of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, my first memory of reading it is sitting in the attic of our house and holding something that smelled of smoke. His copy was the Penguin Rosemary Edmonds translation, on the cover was a 19th century Russian print of four men in hats, crudely drawn, hands hidden in their pockets, walking across a field. It was the first truly great book I read and it’s effect of me was profound. I was so young that I was instantly on the side of the sons, Arkady and his nihilist friend Bazarov; but my alliances shifted as I read and kept shifting. I’d been on an Ayn Rand binge that spring, whipping through those books where good (the tycoons) and evil (the socialists) were characters and concepts as blunt as baseball bats to the head; reading Turgenev changed that forever. The new translation, by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, may be more accurately called Fathers and Children, but I’m still fond of the old title. I liked this translation very much. It is simply a great book and I loved reading it again.

Marina Endicott

The Observer is probably closer to memoir than any other of Marina Endicott’s books; like her, Julia, the narrator, not only has a background in Canadian theatre (a director, a dramaturge at Banff etc.), she is also a writer married to an RCMP officer in rural Alberta. It’s a very sharp book about life in that place, about the frustrations of being an artist where there are next to no peers, and of living with the toll that a mountie’s job (all those deadly car accidents and fights and suicides etc etc.) exacts on him and his family. Although Endicott and her husband lived in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, they were no longer there in 2005 when four mounties were killed when trying to execute a search warrant, but that tragedy permeate the book; there’s the sense something terrible could happen at any time. But Endicott is a writer of great buoyancy and openness; it’s a generous book and one loves spending time with its people.

Pervical Everett

Dr. No is a wacko and savvy quick read about a mathematician, an expert in the concept of nothing, getting hired by a multimillionaire evil genius of the James Bond variety, who, like Goldfinger before him, has his eyes set on Fort Knox. The characters private jet about from one unreal headquarters/palace to the next, people are dropped into shark tanks or shot in the head, and characters as diverse as Trump’s vice president (not called Pence here, but Shilling) and Father Damien Karras from The Exorcist pop up and are gunned down. It’s a very funny shaggy dog story of a book about race, academia, and revenge complete with a one legged dog named Trigo. 

April 2024

*The Art of Bible Translation

I’m always happy to find a new book by Robert Alter and this fascinating and cranky little book is no exception. In addition to his excellent translation of the Hebrew Bible, Alter has written a handful of books about it (The World of Biblical Literature, The Art of Biblical Poetry, The Art of Biblical Narrative, etc.) as well as books on Stendhal, Nabokov and Amos Oz. The gist of The Art of Bible Translation is “my translation is better that all the others and these are the reasons why.” He is kind to the King James and, although he may disagree with some of his choices, he views Everett Fox (Give Us A King!, The Five Books of Moses) as a worthy colleague. For all the other more recent translators and committees of translators, be they Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, he has little but scorn: they add too many words, they ignore the poetry, they bowdlerize, they misunderstand, etc.  They have objectives that all too often interfere with what, to Alter, should be their goals: to render the Bible into an English that is faithful to the art and form of the original. His examples provide introductions to both the writing styles of the ancient Hebrews and to the work of the translator. 

March 2024

*Graphics: A Boy and a Girl: A Memoir and a Biography

Maurice Vellecoop I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together

Maurice Vellekoop is an incredibly talented illustrator, and his big fat memoir is a gorgeous looking thing that tells the story of his Dutch Reform family, his love of television, his difficulties dealing with his sexuality, his boozing, his love of opera, and the immense influence that Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty had on his style. There are lovely drawings of old family snapshots and homages to fairytale illustrators like Edmund Dulac and Kai Nielsen. There are also a great many talking head sessions with the therapist who changed his life.

Bill Griffith Three Rocks, The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy

For aficionados of the sturdy Nancy, her buddy Sluggo and her babe of a guardian Aunt Fritzi Ritz, there is little but joy on every page of Bill Griffith’s book. It’s a bio of Bushmiller, a history of newspaper comics, and a hymn in praise of Nancy, that stocky little white girl with a bow in her Afro and black dots for eyes. A series of fake letters between Bushmiller and Samuel Beckett probably goes on for too long, and there is no mention of Joe Brainard’s appropriation of the character, but these would be the book’s only shortcomings.  A total pleasure.

*Memorials

The Everyday Life of Memorials is a fairly unassuming title for a book that takes in as much as it does. Andrew M. Shanken, who teaches Architecture at Berkley, covers the history and evolution of monuments, starting with how and why the French Revolution completely changed public statuary, then going on to  examine how memorials have related to their immediate surroundings over time, first in churchyards and cemeteries, and then in parks and public streets.   Our changing attitudes to wars, to politics, and to death are some of the many factors in the way we have perceived the purpose of the memorial. Well researched, written with both insight and wit, copiously illustrated, it’s simply a terrific piece of social history.

*Wartime Kisses

Art historian Alexander Nemerov intrigues me. He’s written (amongst other things) a biography of Helen Frankenthaler, and Acting in the Night, a book that is centred on a performance of MacBeth that Lincoln attended during the Civil War. He has also written on photographers Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Lewis Hine, not a surprise, as Nemerov is the brother of Diane Arbus. Wartime Kiss, Visions of the Moment in the 1940s, is a series of five short essays about various images from that decade: the famous Times Square VJ Day kiss photo, Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland having a nap after a picnic, Margaret Bourke White atop the Chrysler building, etc. The links he makes are sometimes wonderful, sometimes pushing it, but it’s an engaging little book and, at times, reminded me of both Parker Tyler and Manny Farber.

Wartime Kiss is an appropriate title for writing about Anne Michael’s novel Held, a poetic sequence of a dozen pieces that move through both time and the geographies of England and Europe. They begin in WWI, meander back to 1908 and ahead to 2025, and are connected by family and friendships, love and death. The writing is lovely, the poetry isn’t precious, it has muscle, even though the situations are extraordinarily romantic (the dead appear in photographs with the people who miss them). Michaels can tease us by making us guess the connections between, say, the lovers in 1917 and the ones in 1980, and at times her characters’ stories and thoughts can seem an excuse to present us with an aperçu (“When we grew eyes did others of our kind believe us mad for what we saw?”), but the book has clearly been written by someone driven to write it.

February 2024

* Back to Babylon

Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh, The Life of a Poem came out a couple of years before the Sophus Helle translation (below, Jan 2022), and it’s a very good introduction to the poem as well as clear look at the myriad translations by both Assyrian scholars and poets working from scholarly transcriptions. Schmidt’s line comparisons of various versions are both interesting and revealing and when I finished the book, it sent me back to my handful of copies to spend more time with this great, mysterious work. Schmidt is interested in the history of Gilgamesh itself and in our relationship to it and how that has continued to evolve over the last 150 years. Gilgamesh is strange and beautiful and, so in many ways, unknowable, and our relationships to it are are current and reveal as much about our own time and place as they do the world of the King of Uruk.

* Poetics

Spending a fair amount of time revisiting and reading about old poets. Started with Helen Vendler’s close readings in The Poetry of George Herbert, and moved on to Peter M. Sack’s The English Elegy.  Sacks is an interesting guy: started off as a poet, wrote this one book of literary criticism and, when he was nearly fifty, stopped writing and started painting. There’s a bit too much Freud in his criticism for me, but it’s a really smart and significant book and was a wonderful guide when going back to Milton and Shelley and the rest.

January 2024

*Last Year’s Nobel Doorstop

Considering that it’s a 600+ page, single sentence that’s divided into seven novels, Jon Fosse’s Septology is fairly easy going; like Knausgaard’s My Struggle, it’s a compulsive read. It’s also probably the most underpopulated epic length book you’ll ever encounter, and so keeping the characters straight is no problem. This even though the narrator, Asles, a painter, has a doppelgänger also named Asles (and also a painter), as well as a wife named Ales (the other Asles’s wives are named Liv and Siv), and a lone adult friend named Asleik whose sister is one of a series of identical women named Guro. Some of the characters appear as earlier or later versions of each other. Time is slippery as well; the action, what there is of it, at first seems to be taking place in a week before Christmas, but that week is quite elastic; the second Asles goes into the hospital on Monday, but by Thursday he’s been there for weeks. Not much happens, really; the narrator remembers events from his own life as well as ones from his namesake. There are quite a few sudden deaths.  And there are daily car trips back and forth between Dylgja and Bjorgvin (about two and a half hours along the coast of Norway). There is a lot of repetition, which becomes fairly hypnotic (if you’re in the mood). Despite the fact that I was never bored and loved reading it, I’m not sure what I’m left with at the end. Like his narrator, Fosse is a reformed alcoholic and a Catholic convert; a great deal of the book feels like memoir. He wants to convey the feeling of grace. There’s a fair amount of Meister Eckhart, and a great deal of God, most of it in the vein of If God is light he also is dark, If he is visible he is also invisible etc. etc.. The writing is plain and unadorned (it feels more Lutheran than Catholic); the very clear translation is by Damion Searls. One of the things that drew me to the book was this quote from Merve Emre (a critic I often like very much) in The New Yorker, “Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine.” Cranky old me is not so easily swayed.

*Reading Writing on the Middle East in a Time of Tragedy

A. M. Klein was a poet who had a profound affect on Leonard Cohen, which is how I first discovered him back in the early 70s when I was Cohen obsessed. Although the first books of poetry came from a very Jewish tradition, his later work (The Rocking Chair and Other Poems) was very tied to Montreal and to Quebec. I’d never before read his one novel, The Second Scroll, which was published in 1951, and came from of his visit to the newly established state of Israel. A very slim experimental book, it consists of five chapters, each named for a book of the Pentateuch, followed by a set of five glosses, and it details the narrator’s journey from Montreal to Israel in search of a missing uncle. It’s an oddball of a book, distinctive and ambitious—a second Pentateuch for heavensake—more academic than emotional engaging. Those glosses (one of them is a fable like play written by the uncle) feel like additions to the story rather than explorations into or expansions of it. The book’s few references to Arabs and to the uncle’s fate have, given current events, taken on a new, upsetting and tragic resonance. It sent me back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

Christopher Morris’ one man show, The Runner, was a critical hit when first performed in Toronto and has since been touring the country. Jacob is a volunteer for Z.A.K.A. (the letters stand for Disaster Victim Identification) an Orthodox Jewish organization that collects the remains of Jews killed in accidents or terrorist attacks, and the play is an expanded moment in which he talks about uncovering a mass grave in Ukraine, his sexual identity, his relationship with his settler brother and saving the life of a Palestinian woman, a terrorist. Recent productions of the play, in Victoria and Vancouver, have been cancelled, an action that’s probably necessary in the current climate, but highly distressing. We need to have compelling complex theatre that makes people think and feel and debate, but, at the same time, one doesn’t want to unnecessarily wound or to be attacked. Christopher Morris is neither Israeli nor Jewish, he’s a playwright who has inhabited a character with dignity and insight, and for this act alone he should be lauded and thanked. Most plays in this country go unsung and unnoticed; it’s heartbreaking when one that actually accomplishes something and goes on to have a second life ends by being vilified, and, often, by people who have neither seen nor read it. The section of the play where Jacob confronts his brother is extraordinary.

*Mid-Twentieth Century New Brunswick

While researching a theatre project, I’ve been looking back at two New Brunswick writers, Mary Grannan and George Frederick Clarke, who both wrote books for children in mid 20th century.  Grannan was the better known, a Fredericton schoolteacher for years, she wrote children’s plays for local radio, and one of her characters, Just Mary, became very popular, and then a second, Maggie Muggins, ended up on national radio and television. Grannan was nearly forty when she was able to leave teaching; she moved to Toronto and had a major career in children’s programming at the CBC. She was known for her extravagant, feathered hats. The characters were much beloved, and her books sold well, but the network had a copyright on the Muggins books. Then, when a new regime arrived at the CBC, she was fairly unceremoniously dumped and ended up back in Fredericton, sharing a tiny house on Brunswick St. with her sisters. After her death, that building was declared an historic site and a plaque was erected. But the building has fallen into disrepair and the plaque has disappeared, as, pretty well, have Grannan’s books. "Just Mary": The Life of Mary Evelyn Grannan by Margaret Anne Hume provides a fairly basic biography. 

George Frederick Clarke was a dentist from Woodstock who was a devoted fly fisher (he wrote a book on NB salmon rivers) and, more importantly, an amateur archaeologist with a deep affection for Maliseet—Wolastoqiyik—culture. He was far from a great writer, but he was an honest one and wrote about first nations from a place of profound interest. What he shared with the Wolastoqiyik was an abiding love for the forests and rivers of the province; he had an obsession with their past and culture, organizing archaeological digs with first nations men. He documented that work in his Someone Before Us: Our Maritime Indians and the thousands of artifacts discovered are now at UNB. His children’s books, Jimmy-Why & Noël Polchies, Their Adventures in the Great Woods, about the relationship between a young white boy and a Maliseet woodsman, are in the vein of Ernest Thompson Seton and, while much less condescending, are very dated by today’s standards. They were, in the 1950s, ahead of their time, but now are very much a part of colonial tradition. There’s a decency to Clarke’s writing that’s striking and admirable.

November/December

• On Writing and Failure

A few years ago I was working with a novice playwright who’d previously written, to my best recollection, a short play or two that had been done in Fringe Festivals. He was an academic, a heterosexual, and working on a one act with two gay characters, a comedy set in the public toilet where the men were having a quickie. The main action involved having the foreskin of one fellow getting enmeshed (for well over half the play’s running time) into the zipper teeth of his companion’s fly. Much merriment ensued. In one of our first sessions he asked me how long I thought it would be before he could start making a decent living writing plays. “Probably never,” was my answer, which I qualified by saying that there was no one in the entire country who made a living as a playwright. We teach or work in restaurants or at radio stations or theatres or wherever anyone will have us, doing whatever we can to pay the rent because there is no decent living to be had. My answer had nothing to do with his abilities as a writer (or lack thereof) and everything to do with the business of theatre in Canada. “My best advice is keep writing and don’t quit your day job,” I said, “You’re really lucky to have one.” Nevertheless, he made a complaint to the board of the organization that had hired me; I had been discouraging, he said, I had set him back, zapped his creativity. I was, in effect, not a very helpful or nice person. When I talked to the chairman of the board later, I said in my defence that I hadn’t said a negative word about the man’s abilities, I’d simply tried to explain the market.

Last week, just couple of days before Christmas, a playwright friend of mine sent me Stephen Marche’s title in the Biblioasis Field Notes series, On Writing and Failure, with a note saying that after she’d read it she ran out and bought copies to send to other writers. “Made me feel a hell of a lot better!” she said in her note. The book is in essence a long essay that pretty much says what I had said to that novice playwright, although Marche talks about all writing: plays, fiction, non fiction, poetry, journalism — the whole shebang. It’s a sobering and hilarious book, with everyone from Samuel Johnson to James Joyce and Margaret Atwood turning up; to quote from it would only rob you of the pleasure of reading it so I’ll limit myself to this: “English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: Submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.”

If only I had been able to provide a copy for young Zipper.

(And speaking of writerly submissions, last week I watched a terrific film about a novelist and his manuscript, Afire written and directed by Christian Petzold. Actor Thomas Schubert very good in this portrait of the artist as a young asshole: annoying, hilarious, and, ultimately, quite moving. Petzold is a director whose work I love very much–his Phoenix is, I think, a great piece of work; he has the ability to make us feel things so deeply that they get into our bones. Trailer.)

* The DNA Memoir

I had an aunt who wasn’t interested in genealogy; “You never know who you’ll find back there,” she cautioned, saying that it was more likely to be an axe murderer than a member of royalty. DNA testing has upped the ante on researching the old family tree; the number of people who have discovered that their parents are not blood relatives has increased so much that a subgenre of memoir has evolved. Kyo Mcclear’s Unearthing is one of these, and her subtitle, A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, could refer to any number of the others. Mcclear had incredibly interesting parents: a Japanese mother who was friends with Yoko before John, and a British father who became a well known CBC foreign correspondent, back in the days when the CBC actually had a strong international news mandate and a budget. Her first memoir (Birds Art Life) was about her father’s decline and a year spent observing birds in Toronto. Most of Unearthing focuses on a year after her father’s death when a DNA test reveals that Michael Maclear was not her true father at all, and that her parent’s marriage was even more fraught than she had realized. It’s very much a book about her mother’s secrets and her mother’s decline. It is also, in keeping with her mother’s passion, a book about gardening. The first two thirds are beautifully written and very compelling story telling and detective work as Maclear looks for answers to the Who-am-I-and-where-did-I-come-from questions. Her gardening metaphors are (to me) less compelling although they do involve a series of charming linocuts. Two afterwards, a Joe Brainard inspired I Remember and a Herbarium of the importance of plants to a dozen or more famous artists, don’t pull the previous pages together so much as they allow the book to peter out.

*Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation

Cynthia Ozick writes beautiful sentences, and the quartet of stories in Dictation are clear evidence of her love for the prose of Henry James. In the first, James himself makes an appearance, as does Joseph Conrad, as well as their respective secretaries (here referred to as the very Jamesian sounding amanuenses). The two women conspire to swap a line from each of their writers’ works in progress into the other’s book. In the second story, a neurotic pompous actor gets his comeuppance on stage, and in the third, a know it all American Catholic in Fascist Italy marries a very young, hopelessly uneducated and superstitious girl. The last, about a young woman’s relationship with her foolish uncle (he’s developed an alternative to Esperanto) is the most satisfying read and has the gossipy energy of a well told tale. Each of the four, in fact, has the quality of a yarn, with revenge, both personal and delivered by the Fates, at its heart.

* Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver admires Charles Dickens both as a novelist and as a spokesman for social justice, in particular for “his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children”. In Demon Copperhead she has taken the characters and plot of his semi-autobiographical David Copperfield and set it in Appalachia in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike, say, director Alfonso Cuarón in his 1998 film of Great Expectations set in Florida and Manhattan, she has more on her agenda than a contemporary update: Demon Copperhead is driven by her anger at the way much of America looks at the southern country people it refers to as hillbillies, and her narrative is both a hymn in praise of good country folk who have been beaten down, and an attack on the ones who are pummelling them: the coal mining companies, the  purveyors of OxyContin, and the ineffectual social nets that people fall through all too easily. The book is filled with desperation, and her young incarnation of David Copperfield (here called Damon Fields, first nicknamed Demon at school and then Copperhead because of his red hair) careens from one unholy mess and set of characters to the next. One of the book’s great glories is her central character’s narrative voice; Demon is completely believable—smart, witty, passionate—and familiar. We’re with him from his “First, I got myself born”; it’s fantastic writing. His story is packed with people living in dire straits and born with every card in the deck stacked against them, but Kingsolver use of Dickens gives her a great deal of leeway—it’s like a magic weapon. On the one hand, it’s fun to see how inventive and playful she is with her source material, to see Mr Murdstone updated to the misery of a stepfather named Stoner, or Uriah Heap returning as Ryan (aka U-Haul) Pyles, etc., and to see how she negotiates the plotting to illuminate the history of Appalachia and the opioid crisis. It also allows her to indulge in old fashioned (and emotionally rewarding) sentiment and coincidence, and get away with the heartwarming goodness of people like Mrs. Peggot, her version of Dicken’s beloved Peggoty. At times, though, she overplays her hand, as when Demon reads Dickens in high school and says, “You’d think he was from around here”, or when the book’s angels (a nurse, an interracial teaching couple) lecture Damon (and us) on the plight of Appalachians or the workings of the OxyContin empire. Overall though, and in a wonderful way, Dickens makes the world of Kingsolver’s Lee County immediate and known; no matter where we come to this book from, we won’t see its people as hillbillies because they aren’t strangers to us. We know and and are prepared to care about them already.

*Such Times

Ever since I heard his Et je reverrai cette ville étrange in concert last summer, I’ve been listening to the music of Claude Vivier, the Quebec composer who was so brutally murdered in Paris forty years ago. He was not yet thirty-five. Barbara Hannigan has championed him, directing his very moving Lonely Child cantata with the Cleveland Orchestra just last month. His story is a heartbreaking one and I’ve been roaming around online looking up information on him and his work. He had a brief relationship with an American writer, Christopher Coe, who died from AIDS less than ten years after he did, and Coe wrote about it in his last novel, Such Times. And so I picked it up. It’s a novel that made me think of so many other writers and books from the 80s and eraly 90s, Paul Monette, Dale Peck, Andrew Holleran, books from a very specific time and scene. Coe’s book is set in that far away gay world of obsessive, masochistic love, of men who cheat, drink negronis in tony restaurants, have sex in steam baths and trucks, talk about the pros and cons of being tested, dot their conversations with old movie references and jaunt back and forth to Paris. Which is where Vivier comes in, as Claude, a composer who the narrator sleeps with but doesn’t exactly fall for. There is the murder, just as there was in reality, but by then the narrator (and, one imagines, Coe himself) had lost interest in the composer. It’s a world of privilege and doom that interests me not at all. I don’t know what I would have thought of the book when it was published (1993) but it feels as dated now as something starring Norma Shearer. Vivier’s music, however, deepens and appreciation for it grows. You can watch Hannigan conduct Greek soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou in Lonely Child here.

October 2023

* The Tchaikovsky Papers, Unlocking the Family Archive

edited by Marina Kostalevsky, translated by Stephen Pearl, compiled and edited by Polina E. Vaidman

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has never been at the top of my list of favourite composers, even though Eugene Onegin is an opera at the very top of that list. So much of the music is swoony and overripe, but it’s also gorgeous and can be very moving. Although always popular, the poor man has often been poorly served in pop culture. Grant (was he gay?) Williams and Richard (as a goose) Chamberlain played him in crappy movies—Pauline Kael said of Ken Russell’s The Movie Lovers, “You really feel you should drive a stake through the heart of the man who made it… it is so vile.” What was bizarre about the Russell biopic is that it managed to be both homoerotic and homophobic. The official Russian stance on Tchaikovsky’s sexuality was always that he was straight and, for a long time (and, I would assume, once again) anything that hinted otherwise was censored and repressed. Marina Kostalevsky’s collection, from materials released in 2009, is in five sections. The first is a series of letters between the composer’s parents from the early 1830s to the early 1850s (Tchaikovsky was born in 1840). The letters, mostly from his father who was nearly twenty years older than his mother, are mostly of historic interest, and fairly swoony and overripe (“I kiss your dear hands, your bright blue eyes, your forehead, your hair, your nose, your cheeks, all of you, and especially your lovely Angelic lips” etc. etc.). The second is a series of letters from Tchaikovsky’s old nurse Franny Dürbach starting the year before he died when she was seventy. She continued to write to his brother Modest until her death. Again, of historic interest, as are the two final sections, one of Musical Souvenirs and another of Key Documents (birth certificate, tributes, last will and testament, etc.) But the main reason to read the book is the third section, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s letters, mostly to his younger brothers Modest and Anatoly. The bulk of them are from the 1870s and what is most remarkable about them is how frank he is about his sexuality: “Only the other day I made a trip to the village where Bulatov lives, and whose house is nothing less than a male brothel. And not only did I go there but, but fell madly in love with his coachman!!!” He’s very candid, often grumpy and neurotic, and always affectionate. There’s lots here for both music and gay scholars to unpack. What’s remarkable is the extent of acceptance on the part of his family. Kostalevsky provides excellent notes, allowing one to have a sense of a very gay subculture in both Russia and Europe in the late nineteenth century.

September 2023

*The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume One, The Path to Power

Robert A. Caro’s mammoth (and still to be finished) bio of LBJ has been on my long “should read” list for forty years now and watching Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, the documentary directed by the editor’s daughter Lizzie Gottlieb, I decided that it was finally time to start digging in. If you’re going to tackle a four (soon, hopefully to be five) volume read (each one a doorstopper), sooner is better than later. Volume One takes us from a history of both sides of Johnson’s family and their arrivals in Texas Hill Country, through Lyndon Johnson’s childhood and college, his first years in Washington, his marriage to Lady Bird, and his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1941. It deals with his ruthlessness in all aspects of political life, starting with college politics, and continuing through his work for Congressman Richard Kleberg, his wooing and ultimate betrayal of men like Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and his shifting stance from running as a FDR’s New Deal liberal and “a friend of labor” to a crafty politician linking unions with communists. Along the way Caro looks at Johnson’s treatment of his father, a much beloved and decent Texas politician, his unfaithfulness to Lady Bird, and the vast ambitions that influenced his every move. Also, his enormous energies at everything from teaching at a rural school for Mexican kids to his campaigning and back room politicking. Johnson’s need and quest for power is both fascinating and despicable, and what keeps the reader from giving up on his life is Caro’s extraordinary research (due in no small part to the work of his wife Ina Caro), the book’s meticulous detail, and the sheer bravura storytelling in each of the many tangents—the history of agriculture in rural Texas, how electricity changed farm life in the Hill Country, how LBJ raised money for Democratic candidates, etc. etc. Not a single one of the books nearly forty chapters is less than spellbinding. The genius of Robert Caro is that he sees The Years of Lyndon Johnson as a story that is much bigger than the man at its centre. 

* Free, Coming of Age at the End of History

In 1992, at an artists colony in the States, I met a young poet from Sarajevo whose life was completely upended during his residency there; the violence that would become the terrible siege began not long after we arrived, and every evening the twenty or so artists at the colony would crowd into a small common room with him and watch footage on the evening news. Before those evenings, Sarajevo had meant two things to most of us: the winter olympics and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Because of the four year siege that was to follow, the Balkans were suddenly on the radar of North Americans in an immediate way. My last memory of him is of a young man stranded, unable and unwilling to return to his home.

To my embarrassment, one of the Balkans countries that I’ve spent too little time thinking about is Albania. North of Greece, on the Adriatic Sea, it was long Muslim until the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha banned religion and created the world’s first atheist state. It was into this, Europe’s last pro Stalinist country, that Lea Ypi was born in 1979, and the first half of her Free, Coming of Age at the End of History describes a childhood of school, games and reverence for “Uncle Enver” whom she so worships that she cannot understand why her parents and grandmother do not display his picture in their house. Then, with the rise of student protests after his death, and in the turmoil following that, her adolescence becomes a period of coming to terms with the fact that the entire world she has grown up in was a fiction and her parents tell her “their truth. They said that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century.” This chapter, “The End of History”, is a remarkable accounting of what was once seemingly true paired with what is indeed truth. There are the first tentative steps towards a new political dawn, but then, at the end of the 1990s, things become truly harrowing: there is a civil war, the family is split, her mother and brother escape by boat, a childhood friend is the victom of human trafficing, and Ypi goes into such shock that she loses the ability to speak.

What’s incredible about this book is Ypi’s ability to convey the sense of her childhood’s happiness in the midst of endless lines for food, spying relatives, disappearing friends and neighbours, and then the chaos of “freedom” and all the miseries that accompany it. It’s also amazing that this engrossing book (you tear through it like a good novel) was written with great humour and affection by someone who is now a political theorist (she teaches at the LSE). Free is simply a great political memoir. 

August 2023

* Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

When poet Shane McCrae was three years old, his white grandparents picked him up at his father’s house for a weekend and never took him back. Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is a memoir of that kidnapping and the thirteen years following before he tracked his father down at sixteen. Thirteen years of racism and beatings at the hands of his grandfather. It’s very much a book about memory and trauma, what we do and don’t remember, as well as how we remember, and the narrative contains significant gaps as well as countless repetitions and scenes revisited from a variety of angles. When did this event happen? How could it have taken place as remembered because the details of the memory are confused and chronologically impossible. His family keeps moving and he’s often the only black kid in the neighbourhood or school. As the title would indicate, it’s very much a poet’s book and, for the first half, at least, is very engaging. But when young Shane discovers skateboarding there are what feels like endless sections on ramps and curbs and ollies and axle stalls and instead of exploring and evoking the workings of memory the book starts to feel fuzzy, out of focus. And when he reconnects with his dad, there’s nothing beyond the one word, “Hello?” when the man picks up the phone.

*The Trees

Although Percival Everett has written dozens of books, The Trees is the first one I’ve read, and it took me back to my first readings of Ishmael Reed four decades ago. Both writers deal with the outrage of Black American history outrageously; The Trees, like Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or Flight to Canada, is crazy funny, a deep and dark satire. In Money, Mississippi, the rural dead end hamlet where Emmet Till was brutally killed, a series of white men are gruesomely dispatched in ways that replicate that infamous lynching; soon a large cast of characters—jackass stupid white crackers, black detectives, activists, and zombie murderers—start whipping through 108 snappy short chapters in the damnedest plot imaginable:  In The Heat of the Night meets L’il Abner. The only pause in the action is a chapter that lists seemingly endlessly the names of the lynched, a chapter that bestows the gravity of Ida B. Wells upon the proceedings. Everett’s trees are not just the ones hanging with Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit, they are the family trees of the white racists who lynched folks like Emmet Till, and the novel exacts a crazed retribution on them. 

*Kairos

By chance, on a bus in East Berlin, not all that long before the Wall comes down, a nineteen year old woman encounters a married man thirty years older and they begin an affair. As their social and political realities undergo massive upheavals, Katharina and Hans move from tumultuous infatuations to a mutually deep love, then on to an insane dependency—the trajectory of a rotten and destructive romance. Although Kairos deals with with seemingly every detail of the couple’s mutual obsession, it’s very much a book about Germany in the 20th century, from Han’s childhood involvement with Hitler Youth to revelations about the involvement of the Stasi in the lives of ordinary citizens. But the relationship as political metaphor trope is misleading: the novel is not so blatant as that, it has great depth and richness. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos for chronological time and kairos, for an opportune moment; in her fiction Jenny Erpenbeck has been preoccupied with both—her The End of Days (see March 2015 below) could easily have had the same title as this novel. Kairos is beautifully written (the translation is by Michael Hofman), Erpenbeck intertwines the couple’s stories and emotions in a masterful way, taking us from the innermost feelings and thoughts of one to the other’s in the same paragraph, often the same sentence, and, at the same time, weaving them into the fabric of history. It’s no small feat to keep us reading about two frustratingly annoying human beings, but they are very much a part of a very big and important story. “And whose job is it to go down into the underworld and tell the dead that they died for nothing?” Erpenbeck writes. Kairos is a romance, gorgeously sad and intellectually rigorous. 

* Mary Ruefle’s New Book

It’s called, simply, The Book, and is a series of short prose pieces, often autobiographical, often very funny, and always slyly wise and packed with charm. Mary Ruefle is a great joy and delight in my life. 

*One Trump to Rule Them All, One Trump to Find Them…

Jeff Sharlet begins and ends The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War with essays on Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays, two old inspirational lefties whose lives and methods he admires greatly; in between are a collection of pieces about the people of Trump, well armed Christians who, for the most part, live in a universe of signs and codes, attend mass rallies and church, and prepare for their deliverance from the hands of the ungodly, namely pedophilic politicians and the lying news media. They are fuelled by a profound sense of disentitlement and rage. At the heart of the book is a long piece about the aftermath of the January 6th death of Ashli Babbitt, who, in the Trumposphere, was a martyr akin to Mae Marsh’s Little Sister in Birth of a Nation, the innocent virgin who leapt off a cliff into “the opal gates of death” to escape rape at the hands of a black man. Over the course of the book Sharlet travels across America, going from arenas to bars to churches, and it seems clear that the folks he talks to are not so much following Trump as creating him in their own image: Trump has become a voice in the wilderness for the disenfranchised and gun obsessed. Some even believe that their vengeful God speaks through him, that their new saviour’s bullying, smug and angry rants are gnostic messages from Above. Sharlet does point out a few bright lights on his journeys—the Occupy Wall St. crowd, a handful of young women in Black River Falls, Wisconsin protesting the Dobbs decision—but, for the most part, despite the passions of those singing bookends, this is one seriously distressing book. Necessary, yes, but depressing as hell.

* Some Hellish

It’s clear reading Nicholas Herring’s first novel that he’s the genuine article: the man loves language and has the literary equivalent of the gift of gab. His metaphors are extravagant, earthy, and take delight in their own humour. This is one very funny book, which is a good thing because Some Hellish is inhabited by people who live by the sea, lobster fishers mostly, whose lives are marked by bad choices, drunkenness, drugs, and a kind of stubborn, stupid selfishness that Herring deals with in ways both straightforward and affectionate; theirs are tough lives and this is quite often a tough book. The main character (also named Herring) and his buddy Gerry are a couple of rough misfits, a fucked up Mutt and Jeff, and there are stretches of the narrative when you’re ready to give up on the both of them. But the writer’s fierce affection for them and for the place they inhabit (southeastern PEI) keeps you engaged. And, after a series of oh-god-no-what’s-next incidents Nicholas Herring is capable of an extravagant plot turn that is simply miraculous. There’s a guileless quality to the writing that gets right into your heart. A deep and abiding joy.

June/July 2023

* Back to Bosch

In 2016 on the 500th anniversary of his death, there was a Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in Het Noordbrabants Museum in s’Hertogenbosch, the artist’s hometown. In the years leading up to the show, the Bosch Research and Conservation Project examined his extant artwork scattered around the globe, determining what was by his own hand and what came from his workshop. Visions of Genius by Matthijs Ilsink and Jos Koldeweij is the the show’s catalogue and is packed with excellent reproductions of the exhibit’s paintings and drawings (Madrid’s Prado sent the Haywain triptych but kept its paws on The Garden of Earthly Delights, miffed because the Project had knocked some of its collection down to workshop status). The drawings were not so well known to me as the paintings, the pen strokes are fluid and quick. It’s a fine catalogue, the notes accompanying each of the plates are lucid and informative in a very academic way. The emphasis is curatorial as opposed to interpretive.

Hieronymus Bosch, Time and Transformation in The Garden of Earthly Delights, on the other hand, is all interpretation. Margaret D. Carroll looks at the central panel of this great crazy painting not in the context of mankind’s terrifying journey from Eden to Hell but as a work exploring our relationship to nature and, for want of a better term, the human condition. Her comparisons of the Garden to the Adoration of the Lamb in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (painted some 70 years earlier) are incredibly smart and useful, as are her observations linking Bosch’s figures to images in illuminated manuscripts. She writes very well about Bosch’s painting technique; he worked wet and often changed his images as he painted (her frequent references to infrared reflectograms are really revealing). Her vision of Bosch is not the isolated hellfire and brimstone crank one usually encounters, but a sophisticated and learned artist deeply involved with his own time. It’s a gorgeous book, lots of illustrations, and her close reading of the images made me look at the painting in a new and fresh way. Ever since I first encountered his work when I was a boy, I keep going back to Bosch, and this last sojurn (thanks to the Yale Press sale) has been deeply rewarding.

* Poetry and Ruins

One evening last month I stumbled upon the Yale University Press half price sale (with free shipping!), a true bonanza; just finished two of the seven books that I ordered before the night was out. 

Sophus Helle is a young (is he even thirty?) and enthusiastic scholar, cultural historian and translator (see his Gilgamesh below, January 2022) and reading his The Complete Poems of Enheduana is like taking a course in the poet, her work and her time (2300 BCE). All her known poems are here (The Exaltation of Inana, The Hymn to Inana, the forty some Temple Hymns), along with excellent notes, three essays, a chronology, glossary and bibliography. Helle has even set up a website to go with. Enheduana was the world’s first author whose name we know (Homer would arrive more than a thousand years later), and she was temple priestess in Ur to Nanna, the moon god. She was also the daughter of Sargon, himself a notable first—i.e. the world’s first emperor. Helle’s enthusiasm for her is infectious, and it’s profoundly satisfying to contemplate her position in the history of writing. One of this things that I find so compelling is the way her language champions Inana (aka Ishtar) in the Hymn as not simply “she who rules/the gods” but in cascading lines of superlatives: “Who can challenge a/queen who raises her/head higher than the/mountaintops?” or “She/splits the blazing,/furious storm, the/whirlwind billows/around her as if/it were a dress.” The championing of one god or goddess above another—those battles for power among deities as described by their worshippers—fascinate to me because, ultimately, they are all part of a succession that culminates in Yehweh’s Second Commandment. Like the emperor Julian, I tend to think that, if humans persist in needing deities, monotheism was quite the misstep. This is a wonderful little book.

In Amongst the Ruins, Why Civilizations Collapse and Communities Disappear archaeologist John Darlinton looks not just at the world of Enheduana (via one of the cities, Girsu, in her Temple Hymns) but to ruins as diverse as China’s Summer Palace, stone circles in Ireland, the civilization of Easter Island, and the demise of Route 66. His examinations fall into five categories: climate change, natural hazards, human disaster, war and economy. The book is a series of engrossing stories (very well illustrated) and ultimately his goal is to show how we can learn from the lessons of history and prevent future disaster. Would that that were so. Missing, perhaps, is a category encompassing selfishness, stupidity and the stranglehold on power by people who already have way too much of everything save basic decency. 

* Quincunx 3, Ring

The fifth and last book of André Alexis’ Quincunx to be published is also the series’ middle book, not so much the central novel in a narrative of five, but the centre pip on the five side of a dice (⁙), the other books being the ones in the four corners. As befits its position, the book is symmetrically structured (two half chapters on either side of a central poem: five sections in all); and its genre, as its title Ring implies, is romance. It’s also a commentary on the romance novel, one that’s both amusing and profound. Alexis plays with the trappings of the genre (his author refers to us as “reader” à la Jane Eyre) and the novel, like much of Quincunx, is a kind of wacky love song to both Toronto, where he now lives, and southwestern Ontario, where he was a boy. Characters from the other books surface, as do neighbourhoods and country towns. There’s nothing else like these books in Canadian letters, they come from a writer who grew up within literature as profoundly as he grew up in the physical world (he was in high school when he decided to read every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature); and these books feel more a part of European tradition than they do Canadian. And at the same time, no novelist is more engaged with his country than he is. Quincunx is one of damnedest bunch of books I know and among the most wonderful.

*Louise Glück’s first post Nobel book, Winter Recipes from the Collective, is about as slim as a book gets, around forty spare pages, and its fifteen poems are a delicate mixture of sadness and beauty tinged, more than before, with the challenges of aging. “This is why we search for love,” she writes, “We search for it all of our lives/even after we find it.”

* After writing a handful of books on Francisco Goya and on Spanish art, Janis A. Tomlinson has published a fairly all encompassing biography, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist. Her research seems fairly impeccable, she has a deep grasp on the politics of the time (revolutions, the Inquisition, Spanish royalty, Napoleon, et al) and she writes very well about painting. A series of personal letters to his friend Martin Zapater are wonderfully revealing. It’s a very satisfying read albeit, as is the case with many academic biographies, a bit of a dry one. There’s lots to learn about the court politics of the time and the politics of being an artist in that court. Lots of illustrations (however you’ll need another source to appreciate the technical beauty of the etchings) and  it’s very satisfying to read about the lives behind those incredible portraits.

May 2023

*Mommie Dearest

What drew me to Stop Lying, the new collection of poems by Aaron Smith, was this interview and the nature of the book, a series of poems about the death of his mother. He talked very eloquently and sadly about how he was able to be with her at the end of her life because he had never told her that he was gay—early on, she had made it clear that if he were, then that would be the end of their relationship. Poem after poem speaks of the unhappiness and disappointments of her life (Smith’s dedication reads, “for my mom, who wanted more from this world than she got”) as well as in his. But who was she? When she died, she didn’t even know that her boy was a poet. What did they talk about? The complex emotional mess at the heart of this relationship is explored, to a certain extent, but after awhile the book’s tires start to spin and we’re stuck inside variations of the same emotion. Sadness gives way to a kind of whining. I guess one could say that he loved his Mom, but there’s little insight into why or why it should matter to us. In the end, mostly what I feel I know about her is that she was the sort of Christian who wouldn’t have accepted a gay son, and I’m no further ahead in understanding what makes these damned fundamentalists tick.

*This Year’s Pulitzer

Citizen Kane meets Gatsby by way of Rashomon. The Herman Diaz novel Trust is in four sections: a novel called Bonds, about financier Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen by Harold Vanner; a memoir, My Life, by Andrew Bevel, the model for Vanner’s Rask, in which the “real” financier wants to remove the tarnish from his reputation and that of his wife, Mildred, the original Helen; a memoir by Bevel’s personal secretary, Ida Partenza, who was involved in writing Bevel’s book; and Futures, an excerpt from Mildred Bevel’s diary. In addition to being a book about money and capitalism, American style, it’s also a really entertaining whodunit. Wonderfully written and researched, it’s very smart and really fun.

*Doris

Cultural critic and journalist Craig Seligman has long been based in New York, but, before he came east thirty years ago, he lived in California where his partner (and now husband), Silvano Nova was involved in San Francisco’s drag scene. Very much at the epicentre of that world of big hair, high heels, drugs and tacky glamour was a transplanted Australian, born Philip Mills in Manly Vale (!), a suburb of Sydney, but known to the world as Doris Fish. Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? is both a biography of Doris and a history of that very significant era, the gay scene that began to flourish post Stonewall and was decimated by the nightmare of AIDS. Back in the Seventies drag was very much an outsider’s world, and, if the mainstream successes of RuPaul and Drag Queen Story Hour seemed inconceivable at the time, the current vicious rightwing backlash to both was all too familiar. Doris Fish came from a Catholic family who accepted and adored him, and he was a sensational performer (you can find snippets of him on YouTube), and an accomplished amateur painter of self portraits. He unapologetically supported himself through prostitution, and unapologetic is an excellent word to describe the world of Seligman’s book as he documents the cultural shift from victimhood to pride through men like Doris who were so visible, so crazy, and so fearless. It was great to read about Doris and think again about that time, about the Cockettes, about men like Sister Boom Boom, the nun who ran for public office. The book’s title is the name of the benefit given for Doris Fish when he was dying of AIDS. He was only 38.

* Snow Road Station

Elizabeth Hay’s novel is connected to her last, His Whole Life, through common characters and landscape, but the tone here is very different, despite the story’s beginnings —a wedding, a birth, the beginning of an affair—it has an aura of endings, of elegy. Lulu, an actor of a certain age, flees a production of Beckett’s Happy Days (she’s struggling with her lines) and heads to the cottage country of her youth. How is she to find fulfilment in the last act of her life? Hay’s novels are so much about time and place, with the state of the nation often clearly in the background. A lovely read from a writer with a very generous heart.

*John Keene’s Punks, New & Selected Poems is in many ways an overview of a career, a collection of poems about being black and gay, about identity and family and history and it took me back to a poet he revers, to Robert Hayden and his 1940s poem about the slave trade, Middle Passage:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,

the dark ships move, the dark ships move,

their bright ironical names

like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth

* Suppose A Sentence

Brian Dillon loves lists of things and this book of essays comes from a compilation of sentences he’s collected, from Shakespeare up through Donne and Eliot (George) to Stein, Sontag, and Didion. A series of essays, each one about a single sentence, a mixed bag, much of which is delightful.

March/April 2023

* Children of Time

Six hundred page sci-fi novels about terrforming planets to make them inhabitable by the remnant population of a dying earth are not my usual read, but I heard Adrien Tchaikovsky on The Ezra Klein Show and he was such a smart and interesting sounding guy that I picked up his first Children of Time novel (as with so many other hefty genre books, it’s part of a trilogy). It has a great hook. Something goes wrong with the seeding of the planet in question and apes do not evolve into creative sentient beings, instead, spiders do, and Tchaikovsky plots out the history of spider civilization from the very beginnings (a kind of insect version of our hominid Lucy) to a culture that’s capable of space travel. What makes his storytelling so compelling is, to a great extent, the fact that, with spiders, females are dominant, often killing and eating the males after mating, so the insects’ path to enlightenment requires an enormous amount of negotiation. The novel moves back and forth between spiders and the fate of a huge spaceship ark containing all that’s left of humanity, the bulk of them in suspended animation, moving towards the planet. The opposite of something like Starship Troopers where insects are monsters, the book is such a fun read because the bugs are more compelling as characters than the people, who are pretty much stock, genre characters. 

*Light and Dark

For the last thirty or so years I’ve thought that the most fateful and dangerous thing human beings have come with it the internal combustion engine; after reading The Darkness Manifesto, On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life, it seems that the electric light bulb is a comparable culprit. Our obsession with lighting up the night has thrown the entire world out of whack, everything from clown fish to moths to trees to bats and, of course, us. Johan Eklöf is a bat specialist, so he comes by his appreciation of the night obviously and naturally. His book is a series of very short chapters detailing with hosts of examples of plants, animals, insects, fish, corals etc. etc. that have had millions of years of evolutionary adaptations screwed up; it’s fascinating and upsetting. Although the ill effects of erasing darkness are everywhere apparent, Eklöf writes his manifesto to help show a way forwards: It’s not too late, he tells us. But it is virtually impossible for human beings to relinquish any comforts or economic gains for the sake of the greater good of the planet. A really admirable and compelling book, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth DeNoma.

*Maeve Brennan

Mavis Gallant, Edna O’Brian and Alice Munro all held Maeve Brennan in high regard, but this New Yorker short story writer’s name is not so well known today as theirs. In addition to the Dublin stories collected The Springs of Affection, she also wrote, under the name “the Long-Winded Lady” Talk of the Town pieces and was a fixture at the magazine until she went mad. She was beautiful, smart and, in the end, destitute. The stories in this collection fall into three groups: a series of brief, charming, clearly autobiographical pieces, and two linked sequences, each about the lifetime of an unhappy marriage. The writing is witty and poignant, and, even though there is a sameness to the sadness of both couples in the latter, there a specificity about the circumstances of their lives that illuminates the stories and breaks the heart. Her prose is beautiful.

February 2023

* The Lifespan of a Fact

In July of 2002, sixteen year old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas. That month, writer John D’Agata was working at a suicide hotline and wondered if he might have talked to the teenager the night before he died.  Three years later, Jim Fingal, a fact checker at The Believer, began working on an article D’Agata had written about Presley’s suicide; he would  nitpick and argue his way through the piece for the next seven years. D’Agata doesn’t dispute that he plays fast and loose with facts (changing times, names, addresses etc.), he argues that as an artist that is his prerogative; he’s writing about Las Vegas, suicide capital of America, and using a teenager’s death as a means to an end, that is, to write about the craziness and corruption at the heart of the city. Fingal believes that the kid’s death deserves an absolute adherence to indisputable facts, and becomes increasingly frustrated and snappy as his “Factual Disputes” list becomes seemingly endless. Their arguments and debates, printed in the wide margins surrounding D’Agata’s draft, are, by turns, annoying, hilarious, bitchy and idealistic, and The Lifespan of a Fact becomes a dialogue on art and writing, fiction and nonfiction. The reader is, by turns, approving and frustrated with them both, although D’Agata’s high minded talk about art, artists, etc. is, to this reader at least, a helluva lot more maddening than Fingal’s pedantry. In the end, it becomes a very moving little book; all royalties “for the life of its publication” go to a scholarship for underprivileged kids, given in Presley’s name, at the Tai Kwon Do studio where he was once happy.

* Susan Stewart

Susan Stewart is a poet, art critic and philologist and The Ruins Lesson, which is about Western culture’s preoccupation with ruins, is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written piece of erudition (it’s also a wonderfully produced object from the University of Chicago Press: generously illustrated and very well bound). Stewart deals with everything from Egypt and Classical Antiquity, the Christian appropriation of pagan structures, the engravings of Piranesi, to the poetry of Blake, Goethe, Wordsworth and Eliot. She also deals with ruined persons (“the stories of the destruction of cities in the Hebrew scriptures, and their legacy in the literature of the Renaissance and the Reformation, abound with metaphors of virgins and prostitutes”), nativity paintings, the Tower of Babel, and 20th century memorials. 

* What time is it, Mrs Woolf?

The surprise going back to Mrs Dalloway after all these years is how much of Virginia Woolf’s book is not about Mrs Dalloway herself but about the people around her as the narrative slips in and out of their heads. Her husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth (with her miserable history tutor Miss Kilman), Peter Walsh, the old suitor, pompous Hugh Whitbread, doomed Septimus Smith, Sally Seton and her kiss. They’re all familiar, Yes, I kept thinking, but not so the way that Clarissa Dalloway herself is absent for stretches (even though she is very much present in the minds of most of the rest); it’s not how I remembered it at all. But then, it has been fifty years (odd to think that this book was nearly fifty years old when I first read at and now it’s nearly a hundred). This time I started with the Francine Prose edited Mrs Dalloway Reader, which, in addition to essays and early drafts by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield’s influential short story The Garden Party, has some wonderful unacademic essays by (mostly) Americans (Sigrid Nunez, Daniel Mendelsohn, Mary Gordon, Deborah Eisenberg etc.). But then, wanting the British edition and not the American, I went back to my old Penguin Modern Classic with the Vanessa Bell painting of a blank faced Woolf reclining in a sling lawn chair on the cover, the spine collapsing as I read. I’d read it first before I read Ulysses and so this time I was thinking of Mrs Dalloway and Mr Bloom both as they walked through London and Dublin, reinventing the novel in the process. Just a lovely, exciting piece of work. 

And I’ve been dipping back into the three volumes of her Collected Essays I have (I’m missing Volume II) that Leonard Woolf edited in the sixties. Yes, she can be snobby and (to our thinking) incorrect and all the rest of it, but she had a great mind and a wonderful facility with language and reading her is a deep and abiding pleasure. 

January 2023

* Szilárd Borbély 

Berlin - Hamlet, Szilárd Borbély’s 2003 volume of collage, quotation and free verse consists of forty-nine poems in five interwoven cycles titled Allegory, Letter, Epilogue, and Fragment, as well as a series of fifteen poems named for specific Berlin locations (Wannsee, Alexanderplatz, etc.). The latter group references his own time spent in the city in the 1990s, the Letter sections are taken, in part, from Kafka’s letters to his fiancee in Berlin. Walter Benjamin and his Arcades are woven into the mosaic as well, and the whole of the little book is a kind of intellectual flâneur’s meditation on the legacy of the Holocaust. The translation, excellent notes and afterward are by Ottilie Mulzet, a Canadian now living in Prague; an interview with her about her relationship to Borbély and his work can be found here.

*Reading Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

The grim legacies of colonialism, CIA intervention, political corruption and religious fanaticism are very much a part of The Colonel, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel written in the 1980s, first published in German well over a decade ago and not yet published in Persian in his native Iran (although an opera, with a German libretto, has been performed by the Tehran Contemporary Ensemble: link.) The colonel and his kin are as tragically doomed as a family in Aeschyles, and the novel is a violent, feverish dream that begins with the Colonel (no other name is given) being taken from his house in the night and forced to bury his teenage daughter, executed as a traitor to the current regime. Although the politics of his children have differed from each other, all have suffered, as both victims and martyrs, and the colonel is far from sympathetic: he is guilty of the honour killing of his own unfaithful wife. Reading the book at this time, in the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini, the ongoing protests and subsequent crackdowns, arrests and executions, is sobering. How is it possible to break with such a grim and tortured legacy? Dark, enlightening, and impossible to ignore. The translation is by Tom Patterdale. 

* Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker

I haven’t read Alan Garner for years, not since Red Shift back in the 70s, when I was spending time with Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising, Le Guinn’s Earthsea, Lord Dunsany, Ray Bradbury and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien. Garner is pushing ninety and still living in the corner of Cheshire where his family has been for four hundred years. He’s steeped in the folklore of the place and his books, including Treacle Walker, which was shortlisted for last year’s Booker, are filled with dialect (phrases like a hurlothrumbo of winter, words like tarradiddles, macaronics, nominies). The characters are a young boy named Joseph Croppock, Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man, Thin Amren, who appears to be (the ghost of?) a bog man, and a series of characters who escape from one of Joseph’s comic books. More novella than novel or children’s book, it’s the damnedest thing, a series of references to old folk tales, magical objects, and historical characters strung together into eighteen compressed (two three or four paged) chapters that are more a series of questions about the world than answers about the plot.

*Beethoven

Spent time the first week of the new year reading Laura Tunbridge’s Beethoven, A Life in Nine Pieces, and listening to the music. Some (like Eroica, Hammerklavier, Missa Solemnis, the op. 130 Quartet) have been a regular part of my life since forever, others, (Fidelio and the Kreutzer sonata) are good to hear again. And then there’s less familiar works like the Choral Fantasy and Septet that are pretty much new to me. For people looking for an introduction to the man, this is fine place start and Tunbridge is very balanced in her dealings with the Immortal Beloved love letter debate, the messy custody case surrounding his nephew, the commissions, the growing deafness, as well as the day to day finances being a musician. He was a genius, sure and an ornery one. She situates each of the nine pieces (and others) into both biographical and historical (the French Revolution, the Congress of Vienna etc etc.) contexts. A pleasure.

*Consciousness Raising

Mariam Toews has based her novel Women Talking on a horrific series of nighttime sexual assaults that took place in an ultra conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia: men were drugging their neighbours while they slept and raping not just the unconscious women but girls as young as three. It’s such horrific powerful stuff and, given that she grew up in and then abandoned the Mennonite faith, Toews seems the ideal writer to deal with the material: she understands what these women believe, what their faith means to them, and what it will cost them spiritually if they abandon the only world they know. The patriarch (aptly named Peter) of this community wants them to forgive their attackers; during the brief time span of the book, the couple of days when the men have gone to the nearest town to post the rapists’ bail and bring them home, three generations of women from two families are debating their three options: to do nothing, to stay and fight, or to leave. The bulk of the book is their debate. Because they are illiterate, they’ve asked August Epp the local schoolteacher to document it, and so this novel about the evolving sexual politics of an incredibly oppressed group of women is narrated by a man. 

I admire the book, even though to my ears, it seems out of kilter. Because he’s writing down the dialogue, translating it from Plautdietsch to English as he goes, and commenting on the action as well (and, presumably, writing cursively, as opposed to in shorthand), there is the sense that poor August must be frantically scribbling away. How logical a narrative device is it, in the end? It sets up a distance between the reader and the women; we observe them instead of getting under their skins. There’s a detachment. Because we know them through August (as in Augustine and both schoolteacher and saint have mothers named Monica), the horrors they experienced are, as in Greek drama, offstage. And so powerful and complex characters, like Salome, who was so angry she attacked the men with a scythe, and Ona, impregnated by a rapist, are diminished. I do understand that Toews wants the focus to be, as the title states, on the women talking, but I can’t help but feel that the device of August Epp robs them of agency.  At the two thirds point, another man arrives, a husband, and there’s real menace; the stakes are suddenly very high.

December 2022

*Szilárd Borbély

I happened upon this Hungarian poet’s Final Matters, Selected Poems 2004-2010 online and ordered it. Halfway through reading it, I ordered his one novel, The Dispossessed, and half way through that, I ordered the two remaining books of his that are available in English (Berlin-Hamlet and In a Bucolic Land— all are translated by Ottilie Mulzet). I can’t imagine any of these books having much of an audience in North America (it’s poetry for one thing), but his depiction of poverty and his profound investigations of trauma have grabbed me, and it’s been deeply meaningful to spend time with his work.

Szilárd Borbély (1963-2014) grew up in a north east corner of Hungary, near the borders of Ukraine and Romania, in the tiny village of Túrricse; the novel, which is set there, is probably his best introduction for an outsider like me. The Dispossessed, narrated by an unnamed boy, is a series of present tense recollections of childhood in loose chronological order, as well as stories about family and village life told by his mother, father, aunt, and grandfather. We’re in the late 1960s world of a corruptly run collective farm, but it’s also an ancient landscape of folklore, prejudice, inbred bitterness. My closest encounter with a similar world would have been with Béla Tarr’s Satantango (based on the novel by László Krasznahorkai), one of those films from Central Europe worshipped by Susan Sontag that is so long (seven hours) and slow (shots lasting up to eight and ten minutes) that, despite whatever grudging admiration I might have for it, falls into the category of arse-acher. Borbély’s novel/memoir is a whole other story; the violence and poverty are there, but filtered through the a boy’s eyes (I thought of Jim Grimsley’s Winter Birds, a novel I love). The boy’s father’s family has Jewish roots, the village is rabidly anti-Semitic, and at one point the man is banned from the village and has to sneak back at night to see his family (because he’s drunk often and violent the boy doesn’t complain about the expulsion). The mother, constantly depressed, constantly complaining about her lot and threatening to throw herself in the well, is also a tower of strength. Her description of what the narrow minded villagers will do if they “notice that some kid is dreaming” is like hearing of an evil curse from a peasant in a Bosch painting (“when the child is already very tired, can’t even be shaken awake, they bring in a black cat. A kitten is best. They they sew the cat very tightly into a little bag so it can’t wriggle around, and next to the ear of the sleeping child, they beat it to death..”). It’s the end of the Soviet empire via the world of the brothers Grimm.

Borbély had promised his father that he would not write about their family and village life, but tragedy changed all that; two days before Christmas in 2000, thieves broke into his parents’ house, violently killing his mother in her bed and sending his father unconscious to hospital. The first three sequences of poems in Final Matters all stem from that nightmare: the first deals with Holy Week, the second, a set of sonnets with references to the Greek legend of Amor and Psyche, and the third, with Anti-Semitism through the works of revered 18th and 19th century Hungarian rabbis and the unspeakable evil of SS officer Otto Moll. The poems in the fourth sequence, To the Body, Odes and Legends, are in the voices of women and deal with specific forms of their physical and emotional trauma: birth, miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion; in some way all of these voices reference the violence done to his mother. 

There’s precious little to be found about Szilárd Borbély in English. In one translated interview from 2009 he talks of the aftermath of that Christmas attack on his parents (the accuser was acquitted): “Those were truly tough years, but then our little daughters were born, so the grimness was mixed with the wondrous.” I can find no other reference to those daughters or to his wife online. In 2013, breaking that promise to his dead father, The Dispossessed was published in Hungary to great acclaim; the next year Borbély ended his own life.

* Life Between the Tides (aka The Sea is Not Made of Water)

Adam Nicholson has written books on (to pick a handful of examples) the King James Bible, Homer, hiking, puffins and Renaissance England; the last book of his I read was about Wordsworth and Coleridge at the end of the 1790s (see below November 2020). Life Between the Tides begins on the Atlantic coast in Rubha an t-Sasunnaich in northern Scotland, just before the start of Covid with the construction of a tide pool and examination of the relationships among these five as they arrive to populate it: sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs and anemones. In this small liminal world they form a fine and violent balance. Crabs prey on the winkles, for example, and the winkles survive because it’s the young that are sacrificed for the good of the general population. Nicolson compares this to “the clan civilization of the Highlands…the herder-warriors of Central Asia…the nineteenth century rekindling of chivalric ideals…In all of them, young adults suffer so that others do not.” His method is very much like William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand” and is completely fascinating. Anemones, it turns out, can tell us something about xenophobia. The second section of the book looks at tides and rocks historically. The third looks at the populated landscape under the headings Sacrifice, Survival and Belief. There are writers one loves spending time with; I was crazy over this book.

* Nietzsche Is Peachy

Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer and other endings is about all sorts of people and things as they wind down, depart, grow old, shuffle off, die out, etc. etc. Dyer writes about tennis, jazz, literature, Burning Man, Dylan, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Martin Amis, Ellington, Coltrane, Covid etc. etc. and always from the perspective of being one of the cool kids, albeit one who is aging and (hence) writing about endings. Some things here really did interest me a lot (connections made between D. H. Lawrence and J. M. W. Turner, say), some things not so much (tennis, tennis), and lots made me giggle (while skewering the earnestness of Terry Tempest Williams he quotes Don Peterson’s “prayer is really the lowest form of literature”), but there’s a sort of one damn thing after another shapelessness to the pensées of various lengths (180 of them in them in 3 sections of 60 each, plus a postscript) that starts to drag. There’s also a fair amount of casual and not so casual name dropping.  According to Dyer, “people go not to see Bob Dylan but to have seen him” and his I-was-cool-enough-to-have-been-there persona (hanging out with surfers, doing DMT, going to Jim Morrison’s grave, to Wimbledon, to raves, etc. etc.) permeates the book. Still, it’s fun and smart.

November 2022

* Less by Andrew Sean Greer 

Minor gay writer Arthur Less is a character in the manner of Updike’s Bech and Nabokov’s Pnin; that is, he’s part bumbler, part foil, often a loser, but a charmer in the end. In other words, he’s a tad autobiographical. As Less avoids both his fiftieth birthday and his ex’s wedding by globe hopping from one idiotic literary gig to the next, the book skewers the world of letters (agents, publishers, festivals, residencies, etc.) and, although not written in first person, its narrator operates along similar lines as does Alice B. Toklas in her The Autobiography of. The book is quick and amusing with, at times, amusingly goofy prose.

* Olive Kitteridge X 2

Although Elizabeth Strout’s two Olive Kitteridge books (Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again) have been kicking around the house for a couple of years, I’ve avoided reading them for no good reason other than the fact I liked the HBO adaptation of the first one with Francis McDormand and didn’t feel the need to go any further. A former junior high math teacher, opinionated, brusque, no nonsense, Kitteridge is a great character, both pushy and compelling. McDormand got Olive’s prickliness, but, reading the books, its clear that her physicality was all wrong: Olive Kitteridge is big, McDormand is not, and Olive’s size is a significant part of her character; she take up a lot of space, this woman. In the end, it was good to put a few years between miniseries and reading, to not have the actor so clearly in my head, and to read both books as one. Still, it’s impossible to not hear McDormand’s voice whenever Olive says something like, “Hells bells”. 

Each book contains thirteen short stories, all pretty much set in the fictitious town of Crosby, Maine; Olive is central to perhaps half of them, in the others she makes an appearance, sometimes significantly, sometimes in a cameo as brief as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s walk ons. I thought at times of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, both books deal with the everyday, with families, with discontent and disappointment, with unhappy marriages, regret and loss. Olive herself can be a straight shooting downer (when someone refers to her as an “that old bag” you know why), but she’s plucky and good company. Strout is a fine writer, the stories are well constructed, and Crosby and its inhabitants very real and visible to us. After awhile there does tend to be a kind of sameness to the townsfolk stories—there appears to be as many cheating spouses in Crosby as there were murderers in all twelve seasons set in another Maine community, Murder She Wrote’s Cabot Cove—and Olive’s stories usually involve her learning a bit of a lesson or having an epiphany (“Her son had married his mother”), but the stories, like Olive, have a fierceness and, given how emotional the situations are, a remarkable absence of sentimentality. Strout, who is not yet seventy, is especially good when it come to old age, dying and death.

* Scandinavia

1. Every time international literary prizes get handed out, Norwegian Jon Fosse appears on someone’s he shoulda been a contender list. The prolific writer of a some thirty books and more than a couple of dozen plays, he’s often compared to both Ibsen and Beckett (a recommendation for some but not all of us), and, rather than start with his seven novel Septology sequence, I opted for the novella Morning and Evening. In the short first section, a child named Johannes is born and we witness this from the perspective of his father Olai; in the second section, the bulk of the book, an old fisherman named Johannes dies, and we see this from his perspective and, briefly, from his daughter’s. There’s a slighting reference to Johannes not getting along with his father, but Olai is not a significant figure in the Evening section of the book. Although there’s no mention of heaven, there is an afterlife, or, at least, the transition to death is a kind of afterlife through which Johannes travels, a bardo, if you will. Fosse will switch points of view from the old man’s to the daughter’s within a sentence and the result is not confusing, but not totally convincing either. In the transition state Johannes visits his old friend Peter, who is both living and dead, and there’s a dreamlike quality that, at times, had me thinking of parts of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a film I love. The book has a delicate quality, but it felt slim in more ways than one. I’m still curious about Fosse though, and am keen to look at his plays. Morning and Evening was translated by Damion Searls.

2. Marit Kapla’s Osebol, Voices from a Swedish Village, has to be the quickest 800 page read in history; you can easily whiz through it in a day. Fosse’s book is set on the coast; Osebol is a village on a river in the forest near the border with Norway where, up until recently, the primary economy was lumber. Kapla interviewed most of the forty or so folks who live there, and edited the interviews to the bone; the villagers’ texts are distilled, laid out like spare blank verse. At the bottom of each page is the speaker’s name and dates (some of the subjects have died since Kapla spoke with them), and each interviewee is also linked to a page with the same pattern of small random squares, like a trail of confetti, which you realize is the sole element of a map of the town, its houses—no roads, no river, just a placement of buildings. On each map the tiny square where the speaker lives is in bold. After hearing Kapla interviewed, I was really curious to read her book, but, sadly, found it remarkably unremarkable. What she’s done by distilling those texts is the opposite of what, say, a playwright does. No one is individualized, everyone—male, female, old, young—has pretty much the same voice (the voice of Osebol?). And we don’t learn a lot about how these people relate to each other, it’s really about their relationships with the village, whether they were born there or have moved there from another town or country. It’s not that it’s an un-compelling read, but it’s dry and a bit airless. We learn that logging is not what it once was, that the chipboard factory disappoints, that a bridge across the river is closed. There’s something academic about it; what it lacks is the quirkiness of human conversation. (It was an interesting contrast to scroll through the village on Google Earth and see the bridge, pick out the various houses.) The translation is by Peter Graves. 

* Tracking the Caribou Queen

Margaret MacPherson was a toddler when her family moved to Yellowknife; her father taught school there and her mother worked in the hospital. Young Margaret, here called Margie, and her siblings grew up in a house with running water, electricity and an indoor toilet, basic necessities that she came to realize were not available to everyone else in the town, and Tracking the Caribou Queen is a coming of age story about that growing realization. What she is tracking is, in great part, an understanding of her white privilege. What we understand is that her memoir is being written from the perspective of time and age, as well as from within the current climate of examining what has long been hidden or ignored, that is, the treatment of Canada’s indigenous peoples. The subtitle of the book, Memoir of a Settler Girlhood, would not have made sense even a decade ago; up until fairly recently the word “settler” was rarely if ever used to describe a white Canadian in any century after the 19th (for many of us, it’s primary association still lives in the world of log cabins and pioneer bonnets). A real triumph of the book is the degree to which MacPherson inhabits the consciousness of young Margie; the instances when we sense the moral editorial hand of a middle aged woke Margaret are few and, for the most part, necessary. Margie is believable in her curiosity, her adolescent selfishness, as well as in her infatuation with the exotic otherness of the world outside her own. She writes about her relationships with indigenous kids as honestly as possible; her high school crush on Lawrence and their haphazard dating is poignant and moving. Because we believe in her flaws as well as her spunkiness, Margie is, I think, a compelling character in the vein of Harper Lee’s Scout. This isn’t a book written to instruct, it comes from a genuine affection for family and place, and it looks as honestly as possible at our complicity and culpability. It doesn’t hurt that MacPherson clearly loves Yellowknife and the land around it. She’s an adolescent mooning over the dreamboat mop heads in Tiger Beat who also loves being out on the bush. It’s a very fine needle that the adult Margaret is threading and in so doing has given us a very significant, and very Canadian, Bildungsroman. 

October 2022

*Strongman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat

In the past, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has chiefly written on Italy and, in particular, Italian Fascism. Strongmen, first published two years ago and now in paperback with a post January 6th epilogue, is subtitled Mussolini to the Present, and in it she takes the patterns of fascist politics, working her way through a series of leaders, from Il Duce and Hitler, through Franco, Gaddafi, Berluscini, Mobutu, Pinochet etc. to Putin and Trump, moving back and forth among them, illustrating how each of them employed nationalism, propaganda, virility, corruption and violence to maintain power. It’s a clear and sobering read, and never more so than this week when Bolsonaro has yet to respond to his narrow defeat in the Brazil elections and, in the US, with the midterms looming, after an eighty year old man was attacked by an intruder with a hammer, cracking his skull, his wife’s political opponents are treating it like a joke. “Although we often hear that strongmen are genius strategists,” she writes, “Their real talents are those of the street fighter and the con man.” She doesn’t downplay America’s history supporting despots (she dates the start of this to American banks brokering a $100 million loan from the US government to Mussolini in 1926, and Kissinger makes more than one appearance), and she reveals the extent to which America was caught off guard when they elected one of their own. (“George W. Bush had no frame of reference for Trump’s 2017 inaugural address and described it as “weird shit,” although it was perfectly normal in the context of authoritarian history.”) When Trump was first elected there was so much prattle in the press that once he assumed the role of office he would become “presidential,” as if the mantle of office would somehow elevate his being and he would no longer be a corrupt real estate tycoon and reality TV laughingstock. Ben-Ghiat makes it clear that his “weird shit” wasn’t so unusual. He started out an outsider to the Republican party and then became its entire being. Politicians who shunned and ridiculed him now pay him fealty; he’s still the TV bully saying, “You’re fired.”

Here’s a compelling quote: “He channels his brutality into humbling [his most faithful collaborators’] pride, crushing their freedom of conscience, diminishing their individual merits and transforming his supporters into flunkeys stripped of all dignity.” 

It could be Trump, but the quotation, by Curzio Malaparte, predates his birth by fifteen years. Malaparte’s next sentence is “Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise.”

People forget the “unpresidential” origins of most strongmen. In 1946 Mussolini’s wife said, “My husband appeared to be a lion, but instead he was a rather sad and small man.” We’ve spent much of the last seventy five years talking about Adolph Hitler as if he were an inhuman demon, something supernatural like Voldemort or Sauron, when, in fact, was no less human than we or our neighbours. 

Ben-Ghiat’s section dealing with violence is really tough going, and the Pinochet sections of that (tortures, rapes, hideous abuses to women’s bodies) are a grim read. I couldn’t help but think of Margaret Thatcher’s indignant opposition to the arrest of Pinochet, how she sent him fine whiskey when he was detained with the note, “Scotch is one British institution that will never let you down.”

This is yet another political book that one wants to label necessary. And there is real clarity to be gained from her analysis. But, oh god, this week, this month, this year, it just all seems so grim.

* Guston

There’s a genuine sweetness in the relationship between writer Ross Feld and painter Phil Guston that comes through in Feld’s Guston in Time, his memoir with letters.  In 1976 Feld wrote a positive piece in Arts magazine about Guston’s later paintings, those big, crazy cartoonish works that were so divisive in the arts world back then. When Guston abandoned abstract expressionism to paint goofy shoes, Klansmen, eyeballs is floods of red waves and the like, the reaction among his peers was not unlike the folk singers who came down on Dylan for going electric—How dare you? Strange to realize now that people saw the new paintings as a betrayal of a Cause; his friend, composer Morton Feldman never spoke to him again. Critics like Clement Greenberg may not have been impressed, but Feld loved the work and Guston loved what he wrote about it. The two became pals, their wives were happily copacetic, and the two couples loved being together. Guston in Time is a lovely little book, with some okay (not great) colour plates in the middle. The friendship was brief; Guston died in the spring of 1980.

August/September 2022

*Elizabeth Hardwick and Her Circle

While they were living, Robert Lowell’s status as a poet eclipsed that of his friend Elizabeth Bishop, but, artistic yardsticks changing through time as they do, hers is now the greater. Her published poetic output was slim, his was vast, and both were prolific, and wonderful, letter writers: Words in Air, containing the 459 letters they sent each other, is 800 pages long. (One Art, the volume of her selected letters, runs more that 600, and her published New Yorker correspondence, another 400). A fourth doorstopper, just shy of 500 pages, was published a couple of years ago; The Dolphin Letters, 1970 - 1979 deals with the events surrounding the end of Lowell’s marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, and the sonnet sequence he wrote about same, consisting of poems about his new love (Caroline Blackwood), Harriet, his and Hardwick’s daughter, the birth of his son, and Hardwick’s response to it all. He famously (infamously?) used her letters to him, changing them without her permission (see Sleepless Nights, last May below). All four of these books are compelling (One Art is simply some of the finest letter writing you can find), but the drama of The Dolphin Letters gives it the drive of a novel. Excellently edited by poet Saskia Hamilton, you can compare letters to the Dolphin sonnets derived from them, and, more importantly to me, you can get to see what makes Hardwick tick. Her impatience with Lowell is clear, but so is her affection for him. He died in the taxi that was bringing him back to her. (His corpse was holding a portrait of Blackwood painted by her first husband, Lucian Freud.)

As with the other Elizabeth in Lowell’s life, Hardwick’s status as a writer is now greater than his, and growing stronger by the year. Her Uncollected Essays (edited by Alex Andriesse) have just been published (her Collected came out in 2017), and it’s a wonderful mixed bag of pieces, things from Vogue and House & Garden written for money, and book reviews, many of them political, from the NYRB. Many of the latter are simply great: they cut to the chase (and the quick) of what’s at the heart of the nation. In “Mr. America,” her 1968 review of Marshall Frady’s biography of George Wallace, her description of what drives Wallace voters is heartbreakingly descriptive of our current moment with You-Know-Who (rhymes with chump) and his base:

“The white man comes home to his payments on the car, the mortgage on his house in the blank development, to his pizzas and cottony bread and hard-cover pork chops, to his stupefying television, his over-heated teenage daughter, his D-in-English, car-wrecking son: all this after working himself to exhaustion. He is sore and miserable and there is never enough money—and yet he is torn by feelings that what he has is of immense value and privilege. Everything tells him the car and the house and the pre-cooked dinner and the narcotic television are the glories of mankind and that he, himself, is the lord of creation, who will not take any lip from the Commies, the French, the UN, the Viet Cong. In an Alabama version, in Frady, of these conundrums of existence, a judge after listening to Wallace says, “Well, goddamn. We at the bottom of everything you can find to be at the bottom of, and yet we gonna save the country. We lead the country in illiteracy and syphilis, and yet we gonna lead the damn country out of the wilderness….”

Her literary essays are sharp and astute, but it’s these political pieces, which reveal an understanding of the world around her, that keep me coming back for more.

*Storm Stayed 

Hatches battened down, hurricane blowing out the power: the end of last week was the perfect time to escape into A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, the first two book in Ursula Le Guin’s cycle of a half dozen or so books set in a world of lone islands, archipelagos, inner and outer seas. What she brings to the the fantasy genre is not simply her narrative skills and her ability to fashion complex societies, but a profound moral centre that searches as opposed to instructs. She was raised by anthropologists (her father studied with Franz Boaz) and her mother was also a psychologist; you can see the legacy of both. Wizard is an adventure in the tradition of Tolkien, its roots in northern sagas, and fairy tales with dragons and hoards, but Tombs of Atuan is a remarkable book about religion (as opposed to faith), a world of ritual and control. So much of fantasy comes off as nostalgia for worlds that never were; Le Guinn uses it to come to a deeper understanding about the world we inhabit.

* The Man Who Understood Democracy, The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America and its writer have been, to me, one of the great unknown knowns; that is, I’ve known about Tocqueville and his book forever without knowing much of anything in detail about either one. Born shortly after the French Revolution, he was an aristocrat whose great-grandfather, grandparents, and aunt and uncle had all been sent to the guillotine. By temperament Tocqueville was a liberal, although, in his mid-thirties, he would come to support the French colonization of Algeria.  Ten years before, at twenty-five, he travelled to America with his friend and collaborator Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly to research the republic’s penitentiary system. The nine months they spent travelling there were the genesis of his most influential book (in addition to Democracy, he also wrote on the Ancien Régime and the Revolution). What’s most compelling to me in Olivier Zunz’s biography is a deeper understanding of the times in which Tocqueville was writing. France, and England as well, were in the midst of figuring out how they should be governed; the nature of democracy, the end to slavery, the role of the monarch—it was a time of enormous change and debate, and, looking at it from 2022, when faith in democracy is at a low ebb and demagogues strut about, is enlightening and sobering. The arguments against ending slavery (i.e. “We can’t afford it”) were pretty much the same ones we hear now about ending a dependance on fossil fuels, economy trumping both morality and sanity.

It’s interesting to see what Tocqueville really understood about the new republic and what he missed entirely (the role of evangelical Protestantism, say) or got very wrong (the treatment of Native Americans). Olivier Zunz, who was born and educated in France and is now history professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, has a profound understanding of both countries. He has edited much of Tocqueville’s work in English translation; his biography has a profound clarity.

July 2022

*Also a Poet, 

Frank O’Hara, My Father and Me

After Ada Calhoun found a drawerful of cassette recordings of 1970s interviews from her father’s abandoned bio of Frank O’Hara, her ensuing attempt to complete his project gradually shifted gears into a memoir; the result is a breezy read, but not a glib one, and a pretty interesting look into what it’s like to be the child of very smart, hip parents who knew all the right people and talked and partied into the night way too much. Given that her father is Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker’s art critic (and a former poet), and her mother, actor Brooke Alderson, the adults Calhoun grew up with were a damn interesting crowd, mostly the poets and painters at the heart of the New York art scene, a fairly druggy, drunken lot, by times. It’s no surprise, as she points out, that so many of her peers grew up and became anything but poets or painters (a lot, she claims, are now lawyers). And it’s no wonder that she’s became such a no nonsense hard working journalist. It’s clear who she likes and does not from that scene (she really hates Larry Rivers) and she is very frank about her complicated relationship with her dad; parenting was not, to put it kindly, his forte. There’s a certain amount of poor me-ing going on, but also a great deal of soul searching and a respect for her father’s career that is not grudging in the least. You end up liking them and a lot of the people encountered over the course of the book (Larry Rivers being the key exception, for reasons like this ). Schjeldahl abandoned his book because of pushback that he was getting from O’Hara’s kid sister, who became executor after his tragic death, and Calhoun is convinced that she won’t make the same mistakes her father did in dealing with her. But the blessing she hopes will come with the arrival of Maureen Granville-Smith is more like the one Maleficent delivered after blowing into Aurora’s christening. But the great relationship at the heart of this book that is not fraught is the one that both father and daughter have with the life and works of Frank O’Hara, who comes across, more than anyone, as the person you would most wanted to know. The loss of O’Hara at the age of 40, and the greatness of his gifts, as poet, as friend, as lover, permeates Also A Poet. As soon as I finished reading I went straight to the Collected Poems.

* Church and State

Like so many others, I’ve been obsessed with the theatre of the January 6th hearings, with the strange sensation of being grateful to certain people (Liz Cheney) whose politics make me crazy. When the devout Rusty Bowers, graduate of Brigham Young University, and Speaker of the House for Arizona, explained that he had stood up to Trump and not broken his oath because “it is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired” lots of things went through my mind, most of them variations on These people are all fucking crazy. So much for the separation of church and state. It seemed high time to read an old Gore Vidal novel I’d picked up in a second hand bin a few months ago, the 1964 Julian, his take on the Roman emperor who tried to stop Christianity in its tracks and bring back the pagan gods. Rusty Bowers comes across as exactly the sort of fellow who would have made Vidal decide it was time to think about empires and religions.

Vidal’s premise is that Libanius and Priscus, two pagan philosophers and confidents of Augustus Julian, have gotten their paws on his dictated memoirs; the novel, which came early in Vidal’s string of historical fictions, consists of that memoir along with both men’s sometimes contradictory, often bitchy marginalia. Well researched and plotted, it’s a fine read. And a very interesting take on the evils of the Christian religion which, to Julian (and Vidal) is nothing less than a death cult. What is the point of a religion that claims the afterlife is more important than the life one is living here on earth? Thanks to the increasing hold that Christianity has on contemporary America, Vidal’s death cult theory is all the more prescient today than in early 60s.

As if on cue, the next book that came into my hands was anthropologist Marshall Sahlin’s final book The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, in which he makes the case that living in a world where objects are inhabited by the magical makes greater sense than one in which all the magic is in the sky. From Mesopotamians to contemporary Inuit, the book is packed with research and stories of societies in which the supernatural is immanent rather than transcendent. It’s compelling that at the end of his life (the book was completed by Frederick B. Haney Jr. after his death), after looking at a lifetime’s worth of research, Sahlins did not throw his hat in the ring with monotheism.

June 2022

* Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus a Biography by Lisa Jarnot

Although there are a couple of his poems (“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” “My Mother Would Be a Falconress”) that mean a great deal to me, my interest in Robert Duncan stems from his life: from his early friendship with Pauline Kael (see below, “Well, screwface, I must close” October 2018), his essay, “The Homosexual in Society” from1943, his involvements with writers as diverse as Anaïs Nin and Denise Levertov, and his involvement with the West Coast poetry scene (in San Francisco and Vancouver) and its poets (Jack Spicer, James Broughton, Thom Gunn and George Stanley), as well as the experimental film crowd (Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage) and the artists connected to his longtime partner Jess Collins. God knows, Duncan’s life was not dull. His adoptive parents, Edwin and Minniehaha Symmes, were Theosophists who believed he had previously lived on Atlantis, and, although he had an early failed marriage, he was sexually involved with men from the get go, and, amazingly, was out and upfront with the world and with mom Minniehaha from the start (Edwin Symmes died when Duncan was 16). He exchanged marriage vows with Jess in 1951 and, although Duncan was anything but monogamous, the two men were together till Duncan’s death in 1988. Lisa Jarnot’s biography is long and well researched but, after a couple of hundred pages, it starts to feel like an expansion of Duncan’s daybook, an endless series of workshops, classes taught, lectures and readings delivered as he crisscrossed the US and Canada as well as trips abroad to Australia and Europe. There is some analysis of the poetry, but not as much as one would wish from a poet biographer. There are accounts of friendships and fallings out (most significantly with Denise Levertov), but the heart of the story often seems absent. There’s no sense, for example, of what led to his separation from Kael or what their friendship was about (both were lifelong fans of the Oz books) even though Jess famously painted murals throughout Kael’s San Francisco house in 1956 . Duncan must have been around for part of that time, but the murals and their execution are never mentioned (they aren’t in Brian Kellow’s biography of Kael either), and, sadly, Jess comes across more as a wifely figure than as a fully formed artist. What Jarnot does give us is a strong sense of how complicated Duncan was, charismatic and annoying at once. When George Stanley was in his mid twenties, forty year old Duncan propositioned him. “I didn’t much enjoy the sex,” wrote Stanley afterwards, “but the attention, being a favourite, yes!” Oh, those confounded narcissists! This, from Duncan’s1981 notebook:

It came to me in passing that when I die, “my” death is not mine at all: for it is those who have cared for my life who must suffer the death. In dying, one is incapable of inheriting the act. In this unlike writing, in which one may be among the readers of the writing.

* Mothers and Daughters 

Fierce Attachments details Vivian Gornick’s relationship with her mother Bess in a series of digressive stories that begin with conversations and arguments as the two women walk about Manhattan. That they love each other is as clear as the fact that they are always at each other’s throats. Bess was a dyed in the wool Communist Jew with a powerful sense of justice, and red diaper Gornick would write a biography of Emma Goldman as well as the seminal 1969 Village Voice essay, “The Next Great Moment in History is Theirs.” Fierce Attachments is a rowdy book, wonderfully observed. The latter sections deal with the grown up Gornick’s first relationships with men and, quite often, readers might realize that they have the same opinions of her choices as her frustrating mother. It’s a fair and balanced accounting and a joy to read.

* Three Rings, A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

Alan Williams is primarily known as a character actor in British film and television (he’s turned up in Father Brown, in The Crown, and he’s the head of the KGB in Chernobyl), but in the 1980s he was living in Winnipeg and Toronto and known for his one man shows like The Cockroach Trilogy and The King of America. What was extraordinary about those plays—besides the fact that they were incredibly smart and funny and Williams was a joy to watch—was the way his characters would go off on tangents, meandering often far from their starting points, and then, as the plays reached their conclusions various narrative threads would loop back and be pulled together in extraordinary ways that seemed almost magical, as if the storylines themselves were saying, “Ta-da!” The other thing that amazed me was that Williams was often not working from a written text, and the digressions, the plots, and the loopings around kept evolving during the runs of the plays.

I kept thinking of Williams and those shows as I was reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s  Three Rings, A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate which is, in large part, about ring composition, that is the narrative structure (originating, like Alan Williams’ plays, in the oral tradition) in which stories circle round to their starting points. The book consists of three essays, originally three lectures, each beginning with a stranger arriving in a strange place and all loop back to Odysseus arriving in Ithaca. The three are Edward Auerbach, who wrote Mimesis in Istanbul after fleeing the Nazis, François Fénelon, who was banished for criticizing Louis XVI in his The Adventures of Telemachus, and W. G. Sebald , self exiled from Germany in England. The trio are linked by their exiles and writings as well as by Mendelsohn’s own writing, specifically, The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million, about his family and the Holocaust and his memoir about his father and the Odyssey. It’s a clever book, part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and, like those Williams’ monologues, deftly circles back to its conclusions. All in all, an excellent story about storytelling.

May 2022

* A Pool Of One’s Own

The Equivalents, A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty

In 1962, poet Anne Sexton went to the Newton Public Library to get a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; it was in the stacks, had been since 1929, and she was the first person to ever check it out. It seemed, to her, very much a sign what was wrong with the world. That year, Sexton was part of an experimental program at Radcliffe College: fellowships had been awarded to women to further their educations, the requirement was a PhD or “the equivalent.” Back then, too many women graduates were getting married and spending the rest of their lives as wives and mothers—homemakers. Mary Bunting, Radcliffe’s president (and a microbiologist), decided an alternative that would give women a chance to reconnect with their career aspirations was in order, and so she created the Institute for Independent Study. At the centre of Maggie Doherty’s account of that founding are a handful of women who called themselves “the Equivalents” because of their entry status; three were writers, Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Tillie Olson, and two, Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda, visual artists. These five became extremely close friends, inspiring and nurturing each other’s work. The book looks at their relationships in the context of the beginnings of second wave feminism, and it’s a terrific read. Doherty is clear on how and why things like Bunting’s Radcliffe experiment, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the creation of NOW were very much products of the white, middle class. Tillie Olsen, the oldest and most working class of the five, really helps provide perspective. Sexton is very much at the heart of the book and she’s a troubled figure: passionate, loyal, suicidal; one understands why she was both charismatic and maddening. (Affluent as hell, she used a huge chunk of her Radcliffe money to install a swimming pool in her back yard, which then became a meeting place for the Equivalents and their families) Doherty doesn’t shy away from the messiness of it all. It took me back to my first readings of the confessional poets, and to Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, and Germaine Greer, to the excitement of the sexual politics of the time.

*Origin, A Genetic History of the Americas

When white people arrived in the Americas they didn’t know what to make of the Indigenous folks already living here. Who (or what) could they possibly be? There had been no mention of them in the Bible—were they even human? (That idiotic sense of “Biblical” texts is still with us—e.g. Judge  Alito and the US Constitution.) When those old white guys first saw a construction like the Alligator Mound in Ohio they couldn’t figure out how something like that could come to be: the local “savages” certainly were’t capable of building it—surely there must have been a vanished white civilization, perhaps even one of the lost tribes of Israel? Speculations on the “history” of the first peoples of the Americas was off to a grand, racist start. 

Anthropologist Jennifer Raff wants to set records straight as well as bring us up to date on the latest research with Origin, A Genetic History of the Americas. For anyone who’s read into this field there’s a fair amount of rehash here: the Clovis First hypothesis, the debates about timing of first arrivals (16,000 years ago? 30,000?), the land bridge across what is now the Bering Sea, the ice corridor. the possibility of boats down the West Coast, etc. There’s always the danger of getting lost in the weeds when archeologists and the like start in on various elements of spear points and how they were formed. What’s most interesting here is the combination of archeological and genetic research. New to me is the idea of the Bering Land Bridge as not simply that but of Beringia as a homeland that would have existed for generations (much like Doggerland [see below March 2019] in Europe). The chapters on DNA links between First Peoples of the Americas and East Asians and North Siberians are the most compelling. Raff is very aware of the often uneasy relationship between Indigenous peoples and scientists (aspects of the Kennewick Man story from less than 30 years ago go right back to the racist tropes of that vanished white man civilization bullshit), and she’s very respectful. Occasionally, when describing a tooth or a piece of bone in situ, she speculates on how that artifact might have come to be there and these scenarios are a tad sentimental. But, by and large, this is a very good introduction to the subject.

*Jeremy Denk

During my first stint at the Banff Centre, back in the mid eighties, György Sebök  was giving masterclasses in the music department, and, although I know that I went to hear him play, what I remember more clearly was his daily presence in the dining room. He seemed ancient to me then (at nearly ten years younger than I am now), and his never absent cigarette holder seemed both dapper and effete (I also have him in a beret—but this could be a trick of memory). Larry, a fellow playwright, quizzed him in the bar one night about Nadia Boulanger and, finding Sebök’s opinions wanting decided that he was a fraud. What did we think we knew about old Hungarian pianists? I realize now that Sebök was used to dealing with callow, pretentious young artistes, had enough of them in the music department, and saw no need to make an impression on anyone in playwriting. 

Pianist and MacArthur “genius” Jeremy Denk presents his younger self as a fairly callow fellow throughout most of Every Good Boy Does Fine, his bildungsroman memoir; at once cocky and insecure, he’s an overconfident nervous wreck. He’s a charming writer, but what makes him such a likeable subject is his love for the pieces (from Bach to Ives) as he studies them. His subtitle, A Love Story in Music Lessons, is an accurate description of the shape of the book. Starting with the music teachers of his childhood, and working his way, via both piano and chamber pieces, through adolescence and high school to the Oberlin and Bloomington music departments, his lessons culminate with György Sebök, who meant everything to him, and who, in the words of the book’s dedication, saved him from himself. The whole thing is a series of discoveries. Denk writes amazingly well about the insights his mentors help him to understand; his lesson structure works because he does not write like the callow pedant student he portrays. I loved reading it.

And the book has affected me on a very personal level. My brother was a pianist and, because John was eight years older, his student years took place in another world from the one I shared with him. Denk gives me an insight into more than practice rooms and competitions, he opens up a deeper understanding into the complicated relationships involving musician, score, and composer, relationships that involve discipline, rigour, time and epiphanies.

I’m also grateful that he’s made me think of Larry in those long ago days. I was so smitten with him, and he, like Denk throughout this book, was not exactly accepting of his sexual self. We were friends for a time, and then drifted apart and then, a handful of years ago, reconnected on the internet briefly. He had a partner, a solid gay life, and his writing on HIV/AIDS was the opposite of callow.  We didn’t exactly reconnect and then, this morning, I went online to find him. He had died, a year ago this week.

Time and epiphanies.

*Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the first woman and the first person of colour to be the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, and I became aware her last Fall on The Ezra Klein Show (here) talking about The Right to Sex, Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, her book of six essays that grew from her initial writing on Elliot Rogers’ 2014 misogynistic rampage in Isla Vista California. Rogers’ “involuntary celibate” manifesto was, for many of us, our first awareness of the incel phenomenon, that is, young men whose inability to have sex has made them not simply angry and misogynistic but lethal. Starting with incels and with the widespread idea (in certain circles) that, in the aftermath of #MeToo, women are out to “get men” Srinivasan writes about sexual politics in the current decade while constantly looking back to the second and third wave feminist movements. Because she’s very much a part of academia, her pieces “Talking to My Students About Porn,” and “On Not Sleeping with Your Students” are, in the light of the ongoing mess at UBC, of particular interest. A compelling and necessary book.

* Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote for Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books (she was one of its founders), and was a fine and perceptive critic, the sort who is labelled “fiercely intelligent” (meaning, writers were terrified of having her review them). It’s no exaggeration to say that her sentences are among the best written in America in the last hundred years. She was married to Robert Lowell, and dealt with his very serious bouts of mania (he was bipolar), but was, ultimately, betrayed very publicly when, after twenty years of marriage, he not only left her, and their daughter, for Caroline Blackwood, he also used Hardwick’s anguished letters to him in poems, rewriting them without her permission. (His great friend Elizabeth Bishop, knowing the hurt The Dolphin would cause, urged him not to publish it, writing, famously, “But art just isn’t worth that much.”) Hardwick’s response, in a way, was to write Sleepless Nights, a fractured novel/memoir, slim as a pencil, deep as a well, a book that reset her place in American letters. She had previously written two novels that were respectably received, but were not as significant as her essay writing; Sleepless Nights became her most significant work and, for writers like Sigrid Nunez, Maggie Nelson and Joan Didion, a kind of touchstone. It’s a series of portraits and remembrances— her parents in Kentucky, eccentric friends, people as unknown as women in service and as famous as Billie Holiday—along with scraps of letters to friends like Mary McCarthy, bits of plot, tangents, a summoning of “those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.” This little book is at once dense and light, a kind of wonderful bedside companion. The sleepless nights themselves come from that lost marriage, but, remarkably, while the book is a rumination on an entire life, Lowell himself is mentioned obliquely and never by name—class act or a magnificent piece of literary passive aggressiveness?

*Rebecca Brown

Also in the When is a Memoir not Just a Memoir Department: You Tell The Stories You Need To Believe is a lovely fusion of memoir and almanac, a very personal Book of Hours, comprised of four essays that move through both the seasons of the year and those of a life. Rebecca Brown’s book is personal in a very inclusive way, as well as bring  concerned with the patterns of the natural world and the stories we have been telling each other for eons about those gods that arrive with the seasons. Her prose, as always, is unadorned and lovely; a secular breviary.

* Cesare Pavese

One reads The Moon and the Bonfires with the knowledge that not very long after it was published Cesare Pavese ended his own life. He was 41 and distraught because American actress Constance Dowling had broken up with him (former mistress of Elia Kazan, she made a handful of B pictures and ended up married to producer Ivan Tors. One of Pavese’s last poems was dedicated to her, “Death Will Come and She Will Have Your Eyes”). The book’s narrator, like Pavese, comes from the Piedmont region; he returns home from America after the Second World War (unlike Pavese, who, while loving American literature—he translated Whitman and Melville—never went to the US). A nameless orphan who grew up in servitude, known only by his nickname, Eel comes home to see what the years of Fascism and resistance have done to his village. The novel is very much about place, and tradition, about the lives of villagers, in particular his old friend Nuto and a boy, Cinto, who he sees as suffering under an unwanted status similar to his own when he was young. He also is concerned with the fates of a family of sisters who waste a considerable amount of time mooning over an unworthy suitor (echoes of his own mooning, perhaps). The village itself, that community of people shattered by the politics and war, is the core of the novel, and Pavese’s politics provide him with a profound and clear understanding. His final novel is heartbreaking and, unfortunately, has as much to tell us of today’s political moment as it does 1930s and 40s. The translator is R. W. Flint.

April 2022

* Otherlands —A Big Deep History of Our Planet

These days huge numbers are mostly tossed to describe the net worth of men like Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin, so it’s good to have a sane perspective on what a million can mean in a reasonable context. Starting 20,000 years ago in the Pleistocene, palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday moves us backwards through time, jumping millions of years between chapters and moving about the earth as oceans and continents emerge and shift, until we are 550 million years in the past and looking at the very beginnings of life. As we move further and further from the world that we know, we come to have a greater understanding of that world, and it has never been clearer that the story of evolution is not one plotted to end with the glorious arrival of the human race. The subtitle for Otherlands is Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems, and Halliday describes a scene from each one (Jurassic, Devonian, Cambrian etc.) that makes the distant past vividly present. It’s a brilliant construction (and no surprise that there was a bidding war for the book); we see the first flowers, the emergence of birds, the beginnings of sex, the aftermath of a colliding 10 kilometre long meteorite, the arrival of backbones, and all while we are following the earth’s shifting plates and tracking the movements of mountains and seas. Well written and with great clarity, although most of us will want to be looking up things as we read—what does a Repenomanus look like, exactly, or glass corals, or Asteroxylon or the Beipiaosaurus? It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to the last half billion years. In a word, indispensable.

* Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories

Thirty some years ago, a friend of mine was in Paris with Mavis Gallant and, on their way to or from lunch, they went into a store where he found my Christmas present—what can best be described as a New Wave Daybook. The size of a French paperback, each week, Lundi to Dimanche, was laid out on facing pages, interspersed with head shots and lobby cards from old movies, and, in the upper right hand corners, a series of tiny pictures of Fred and Ginger: they danced when you flipped the pages. For the next few years, until my friend and I had a profound, albeit temporary, falling out, Mavis Gallant would go to that store each November, buy the next year’s copy and mail it to him to give me. “How lucky am I!” I would say every Christmas, “Mavis Gallant buys my Daybooks!”

I’ve revered Gallant’s writing from the first time I read her, which would have been, I think, in the late sixties with My Heart Is Broken; she was one of the first writers whose sentences thrilled me as much as the subjects of those sentences did. She was so precise and her prose was so beautiful. I don’t crave short stories the way that some writers do; it’s hard for me to sink my teeth into a book of them the way that I can a novel. And a book of stories by a magnificent writer like Gallant is hardly something to devour. There’s just so much to take in with each one. Her characters are extraordinarily varied—is there anyone whose skin she cannot get inside? She possesses an amazing focus, is intimate with her characters while maintaining, to a certain degree, an amused detachment. She burrows into the lives of others in order to reveal them to us, but also, one thinks, so she can more keenly understand them. She exposes them, not so we can like or dislike them, or see that they are fools, but understand that they, like their creator, and much like you and I, are deeply flawed. She can deliver an amazing amount of information and time in a couple of sentences:

“For his wedding to Barbara, Tremski had bought a dark blue suit at a good place, Creed or Lanvin Hommes, which he had on at her funeral, and in which he would be buried. He had never owned another, had shambled around Paris looking as though he slept under restaurant tables, on a bed of cigarette ashes and crumbs. It would have taken a team of devoted women, not just one wife, to keep him spruce.” (Forain)

And, without being needlessly unkind, can be so wry and dry:

“If he weren’t so pressed with other work, he might write something along that line: an essay of about a hundred and fifty pages, published between soft white covers and containing almost as many colored illustrations as there are pages of print; something a reader can absorb during a weekend and still attend to the perennial border on Sunday afternoon.” (Scarves, Beads, Sandals)

Paris Stories (edited by Michael Ondaatje) has a lovely Afterward by Gallant written a decade or so before her death in 2014. My friend was a generation younger than she, and had died a dozen years before her, a decade after he’d given me my last Journal de la Nouvelle Vague.

*Gravel Heart (Nobel’s Gurnah again)

Late in Gravel Heart, Salim, the narrator, returns to his native Zanzibar from London and is talking with his father about how they had both come to know the wider world through books, through writers like Graham Greene. “That was how people like you and I came to know of so much of the world,” he says,“reading about it from people who despised us.” For a reader like me, the opposite is very true with Abdulrazak Gurnah: I come to have a strong sense of Salim’s world—a world of unknown communities made vivid and present, of colonialism and its unending evils, of exile, of heartbreaking familial devotion and betrayal—through a clear eyed writer of enormous generosity. The title is from Measure for Measure (“Unfit to live or die: O gravel heart!”), and the novel is a riff on the premise of that play; it’s also a compelling piece of storytelling, wonderfully plotted and written with sharply drawn characters. Intelligent, deeply moving, and a satisfyingly great read. 

March 2022

* Elegies X 2

1. In The Lateness Of The World

I’ve known of Carolyn Forché as a poet of witness and knew a bit about the time she spent in El Salvador, but I hadn’t read a book of hers until now. In The Lateness Of The World is her first collection of poetry in nearly twenty years, and the day I began reading it was the day Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine. The poems here refer to loss and remembrance, to migrations and exile, and, as well, to the beauty of the world. Her title is from a Robert Duncan poem about poetry—

       a call we heard and answer

in the lateness of the world

       primordial bellowings

from which the youngest world might spring,

—and her poetry is anchored in this, in finding both hopefulness and beauty despite the sadness of the now. Many of the poems are elegies, memorials to poets and friends, and there’s a lovely sequence dedicated to her young friend Ilya Kaminsky, born in Odessa, now living in America. In “Exile” she tells him:

If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you

his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk…

You take the tram to a stop

where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks

with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand. 

2. Deaf Republic

The annexation of Crimea haunts Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic even though it is set in the imaginary town of Vasenka. The book is a series of poems in the form of a two act play containing sign language illustrations. (Kaminsky himself is deaf, the result of a misdiagnosis when he was a child). In “Gunshot”, the first poem of Act One, a soldier from an invading army kills a deaf child; as a result, the entire town becomes deaf. It’s a beautiful, tough book, angry and witty, with an urgency that’s been profoundly intensified by the events of this month. Life in an America haunts the book as well: the poetry play is bookended by two poems, “We Lived Happily During the War,” about life in America when there are conflicts elsewhere and, “In A Time Of Peace,” about a boy shot by the police and left lying in the street for hours.

We see in his open mouth

the nakedness

of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch

others watch.

The body of the boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy-

It is a peaceful country.

And it clips our citizen’s bodies

effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.

Back in 1968, Ingmar Bergman released Shame, a movie about an invasion and the effects of war of a couple living in the countryside. At the time, the premise seemed to be, What if Viet Nam were here, what if we were being invaded. It’s haunted me more than any of his other films and I thought of it while reading both of these poets, both for its subject and the beauty of its vision. I thought as well of the end of Pauline Kael’s old review of it, and I pulled her book off the shelf to get it right: “Treating the most dreaded of all subjects, the film makes us feel elated. The subject is our responses to death, but a work of art is a true sign of life.”

* Mary Shelley’s Doctor in the Age of the Bomb

In When We Cease To Understand The World, Chilean Benjamín Labatut describes a series of 20th century mathematicians and scientists, all men (Marie Curie makes barely a walk on appearance), linked by their need to understand what used to be called “the secrets of the universe.” The book, in five sections that read like four short stories and a novella, starts out as fact and becomes increasingly fictitious as, one after another, these men of science (Haber, Grothendieck, Schrödinger et al) are driven to madness by both their inabilities to solve profound mathematical equations and theories, and by the revelations that consume them when they do crack them. The book shifts in tone from entertaining biographies to something creepy and dystopian; the longest section, set largely in a sanatorium, reads something like Kafka’s version of The Magic Mountain. The whole thing is a very compelling, dark ride. The translation is by Adrian Nathan West; the Spanish title is Un verdor terrible, a reference to the greenish colour of the gas used in chemical warfare.

* A Fresh (and Very Old) Start

The standard wisdom for the eons leading up to where we are now as a species has been that we started out as apes who eventually evolved into hunter gatherers, who then evolved into farmers who settled down in cities run by kings and despots, who then fought with other cities run by other kings and despots, and so on and so on until we get to Capitalism and the 21st Century.  But what if this is not the right story? This is the case that David Graeber and David Wengrow put forward in their mammoth The Dawn of Everything. Graeber, who died just before publication, was an anthropologist and an activist (notably at Occupy Wall Street), Wengrow is an archaeologist, and what they are writing, in the words of their subtitle is a A New History of Humanity based on the latest findings in both their fields. It’s a big, brave, exhilarating read that spans human history throughout the earth, looking at ancient sites in both “new” and “old” worlds, putting indigenous cultures in the Americas on a par with Mesopotamia and Rome. They evidence that we moved back and forth between hunting and farming, between settling and roaming, and lived lives that were not necessarily of the “nasty, brutish and short” variety. Of particular interest is their analysis of three primordial freedoms: the freedom to relocate, the freedom to disobey commands, and the “freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.” Given the present moment’s level of despair about the future of the planet and the role we are currently playing as a species (fairly Hobbesian, it would appear), this is a splendid and optimistic work. It’s an amazing piece of scholarship and, one hopes, the beginnings of a new and rigorous analysis of, well, everything. Emma Goldman would have approved.

February 2022

* Noah’s Ark

Depending upon one’s disposition, Irving Finkel presents as either incredibly charming or fairly annoying. He resembles a fairly scruffy version of Albus Dumpledore, not simply looking the part of an Assyriologist, he looks like a 19th century Assyriologist. He’s all over YouTube in lectures and demonstrations and clearly enjoys displaying his eccentricities; a little of him could go a long way. He’s the cuneiform guy at the British Museum, and he’s on a mission to make us all interested in his work. I knew of him through my interest in Gilgamesh, but hadn’t read him before and, having picked up The Ark Before Noah, I can’t imagine a better introduction to the objects of his passion. In addition to being a history of writing in Mesopotamia, of the various versions of the Flood story, of boat building in the ancient Middle East, Finkel writes eloquently on religion, gods, ghosts and necromancy. The reason for the book is a fairly recently translated tablet containing plans and measurements for a huge boat to save man and animals from an apocalyptic flood, and there are chapters (with photos) of the building of same. So, in addition to being a very accessible course in Cuneiform 101 it’s also, as Finkel would no doubt express it, a ripping good yarn.

* Listless

Kate Zambreno’s Drifts is an autofiction about her inability to write a book that she’s contracted to write, a book called Drifts. And, indeed, this book does drift along: she frets a bit, she whines about teaching, she’s bitchy about neighbours, she writes about her periods, her dog, her partner (about whom we learn surprisingly next to nothing),her readings of Rilke and Walser, her respect for artists like Chantal Akerman, all in a kind of aimless way. There are quite a few crappy looking reproductions of black and white photographs of her dog, her bed, etchings by Albrecht Dürer, etc. Unlike Sheila Heti’s autofiction about her inability to write a commissioned play (How Should A Person Be), it’s not a frustrating read, but the only things that gives it any shape or purpose at all are these: just past the half way mark, a man breaks into her apartment, stealing her laptop and notebooks, and, at the two thirds mark, she gets pregnant and then delivers a baby (and a manuscript) at the end. Her lack of interest in the man who breaks into her house is telling—she just drifts away from the incident. She clearly can write, and the book is no chore to read, but it doesn’t have a writer’s deep curiosity about lives other than her own. One of the things about Knausgaard’s autofiction, and Maggie Nelson’s, too, is a desire to tell us something or figure something out. There’s a listlessness here that makes much of the book feel like an assignment, like filler. The world of Drifts comes straight out of the creative writing programs of academia (interestingly enough, there’s a display of resentment towards others in that world who are getting bigger advances and MacArthurs—Ben Lerner, unnamed, yet clearly fingered); it’s objectives feel like a student’s rather than a writer’s, and, once the reader has put it down, it pretty much drifts away.

* Lost & Found

No autofiction this, Lost & Found is a memoir composed of three journalistic essays—on Lost, on Found, and on And. In Lost, Kathyrn Schulz writes simply and movingly about grief after the death of her father. “In the lane behind my house, there is a tree where I once saw an owl; now every time I pass it, I look up automatically. That is something like the nothingness left behind after death: the place in the tree where the owl is not.” Found is an extended love letter to her wife (like Schultz, a New Yorker staff writer). And is about, among many other things, what is possible, what might happen, what the word “and” could lead to. An intelligent and optimistic book by a writer from a happy family who’s in the process of helping to create a happy family of her own.

January 2022

* Elegies, New & Old

Apart from the fact that he lived sometime in the 6th century and knew Boethius (c.477 – 524), we don’t know much about the Roman poet Maximianus (also called Maximian)—we’re not even sure that was actually his name. The fuzzy biographical facts are these: he might have been Etruscan, and, late in life he may have been a diplomat in Constantinople. Because he lived after the fall of the Empire he has been called the last Roman poet, and is remembered for his six Elegies which deal with old age and sex, deal so profoundly with sex, in fact, that it’s a surprise to realize the extent that they were taught to Christian schoolboys in the Middle Ages. (e.g. “she started fondling my burning prick by hand/and she aroused me with her fingers too” Elegy 5, 57/8) He’s not exactly a household word today, but Auden was a fan and, a couple of years ago, a modern translation by A. M. Juster, The Elegies of Maximianus was published (with the Latin original on facing pages); he has also written excellently clear and thorough notes, and the book has a very good introduction by Michael Roberts. The elegies vary in length from nearly 300 lines (Elegy 1) to 12 lines (Elegy 6), and form a continuous whole: the poet looks back on his life and the women in it from the perspective of decrepitude (“Death is now rest, my life a punishment” is the fourth line, and the final couplet is “Morose, I rise now as if mourned by my last rites/I think I’m living partly dead this way”. My Latin is not so much rusty as completely corroded, but it’s clear that Juster’s translation is a beauty, accurate and contemporary. He’s an interesting guy: Juster (a pen name) the Classicist and poet, he’s also the lawyer, Michael J. Astrue, a Republican who isn’t crazy (thirty years ago he successful argued the first civil rights enforcement action based on HIV discrimination), although I assume that we wouldn’t agree on a great deal politically. A conservative poet is a rare bird these days.

I came to Maximianus not directly, but through British poet and translator James Womack who has published a long (70 pages) poem, Homunculus, that’s a combination translation of and extended riff on the Elegies (it’s easily twice as long). Homunculus, set in our contemporary world, emphasizes the end of empire world of the original and gives it a new weight. It’s a very compelling formal exercise, smart and funny, and it’s been interesting to read a young (40-ish) poet’s take on the Elegies’ aging narrator:

I’m past the stage of thinking, when I wake

in the middle of the night, oh this is better

than not waking in the middle of the night.

I realized that a part of me was thinking, What does he really know about being old, this kid? and for a while I was as annoying as those scolds who claim that you can’t write about something that you’re not (a position that would, of course, condemn me to writing about nothing but old, white, queer Canadian men). But the poem holds up, and reading both books in tandem has been a joy. Womack’s updates are clever, at times even smart ass, but Homunculus (his name for Maximianus) is a vibrant and consistent voice, and the poem is all of a piece. 

To end on that note of translating old age, Womack ends his poem with, “My prick may be dead; my poems live still,” while Juster, in his commentary, says, “My reading is darker than most other translators, who translate this line as an affirmation of immortality through poetry. I understand the desire to translate the line in this fashion, but in my opinion that interpretation is inconsistent with the bleak Lucretian view of the universe offered throughout the eulogies.” He translates the end of Elegy 1:

Recalling bygone joys is quite rugged for the sad,

and from the highest peak their plunge drops harder.

Juster, in his mid-60s, seems more in line with the poet in Borges’ A Yellow Rose who realizes as he’s dying that:

“[his writings] were not—as his vanity had dreamed—a mirror of the world, but rather one more thing added to the world.”

* Gilgamesh, A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

It’s impossible for me to resist the epic of Gilgamesh. For one thing, there’s the character of Enkidu, created from a lump of clay by the goddess Aruru, a wild beast of a man, raised by gazelles, who becomes human after a priestess of Ishtar fucks him for a solid week. Then there’s Enkidu’s profound relationship with King Gilgamesh (which crosses over into the physical, even the sexual), and their adventures together, where they often behave less than admirably (as in when they level a cedar forest after killing its guardian). When Enkidu dies, the grief Gilgamesh experiences sets him off on a journey to understand death and immortality. All this plus a flood story that predates old Noah’s. Over the years I’ve read a handful of editions, some by poets working from translations (David Ferry, Stephen Mitchell), others from scholars working from the original cuneiform texts (Andrew George, Stephanie Dalley), and they all have compelling variations to offer; the new translation by Sophus Helle has the advantages of both. Helle, working from the Akkadian, had previously translated the text into Danish with his poet father Morten Søndergaard; his work here is contemporary in clarity and tone, and totally grounded in the original. He conveys an understanding of how the the Akkadian text works (things like alliteration and punning), and he does an excellent job of looking at it through both modern and ancient lenses. The five essays that follow his translation provide a wonderful introduction to the epic and its various versions, and to Babylonian culture. There’s an extensive bibliography. All in all, this version has given me a stronger understanding and appreciation of the work than I had before.

* Criminal Law

My late lawyer friend Dianne Martin believed passionately in our justice system; it was flawed, she said, but it came out of what was best in us as human beings. She used to rail against the opening of Law and Order, with its “two separate, yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate the crimes; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the criminals.” For her, criminal lawyers were to be considered as the third and equally important arm of that system and sidelining them implied that there was no perception of innocence until proven guilty.  Marie Henein has interested me for the last few years; when she was attacked for defending Jian Ghomeshi, she spoke very eloquently about the system that mattered so deeply to my friend. The best parts of Henein’s memoir, Nothing But The Truth, are her chapters on this: she shows the levelheadedness and passion that make her such a formidable lawyer. She’s clear, she’s fair, she wants us to know why ours is a decent justice system, and she wants to be equally clear about the dangers and pitfalls of listening to the Twitter crowd, dispensing opinions from their uninformed armchairs. It’s the section of the book with which she seems most involved. The half preceding it is an immigrant’s memoir (parents coming to Canada from Lebanon and Egypt, beloved grandmother, loving uncle, etc.) and contains few surprises. The writing is perfectly fine, but it’s not enough to make the material feel fresh or particularly revealing; in substance, it’s stuff we already know. In part this is because she’s a lawyer, not a writer, but she’s also,I think, guarded; even when she’s writing about her beloved Uncle Sami and his death from AIDS. The writing doesn’t dip too far below the surface. As befits someone in her profession, I suppose, she hasn’t written a book in which she spills her guts. Not surprisingly, she reveals more of herself in the interviews you can find on YouTube.

* Natalia Ginzburg X 2

Family Lexicon is the damndest thing: a memoir in the form of a novel that deals with Natalia Ginzburg’s family, the Levis, before, during and after the Second World War. Set mostly in Turin, it revolves around Ginzburg’s blustery scientist father and her mother, the queen of the personal adage (he’s Jewish, she’s Catholic, neither is devout), as they preside over a constant flow of children, grandchildren, cousins, neighbours, and friends that resembles nothing so much the household in a Preston Sturgess comedy. This deeply affectionate book was written in England in the early Sixties and, while it’s practically frothy in tone, it deals directly with the nightmares of fascism, arrests, bombings, and death. When the Fascists send her and her husband Leone Ginzburg to Abruzzo, their situation is similar to their friend Carlo Levi’s in Aliano, yet her version of internal exile is nothing like his in Christ Stopped at Eboli. When read alongside her collection of personal essays The Little Virtues, written between 1944 and 1962, it’s clear the degree to which Family Lexicon was conceived as a novel, and how deftly it’s written. Although many of her essays are fun (as, say, when she lambastes British cuisine), the narrator’s voice from Lexicon is completely distinct from her own as essayist. She’s never sentimental, but there’s perhaps more darkness and frustration in some of the essays. Family Lexicon is matter of fact in surprising ways, as when she writes about the death of her husband, “Leone was the editor of a clandestine newspaper and was never home. They arrested him twenty days after our arrival and I never saw him again.” Then, with barely a pause to examine this, she’s back to the foibles of Dad and Mom. It’s extraordinarily life affirming, without any of the sappy baggage that usually accompanies that term.

In both books she writes very movingly about her friend Casere Pavese who committed suicide in 1950. In The Little Virtues he’s the unnamed subject of Portrait of a Friend and, in Lexicon, she lingers on his death a few seconds longer than she did on her husband’s. “And sometimes when I think about him now, his sense of irony is the thing I remember best about him and I cry because it no longer exists. There’s no trace of it in his books and it’s nowhere else to be found except in the flash of his wicked smile.”

The translations are by Jenny McPhee (Lexicon) and Dick David (Virtues).

* The Tenants of Moonbloom

I knew of Edward Lewis Wallant only as the guy who wrote 1961’s The Pawnbroker, which became a Sidney Lumet movie three years later—the first American film to deal with a concentration camp survivor, it was also the film that reignited Rod Steiger’s career and gave him one of his greatest roles. But by that time, Wallant was dead, felled by a ruptured aneurism; he was only 36. The Tenants of Moonbloom, published posthumously the next year, is a wacko glory of a book; it details the travails of one Norman Moonbloom, poor schmuck rent collector working for his rotten landlord brother, and is basically an account of a few of his weekly rounds, slogging from one decrepit apartment to the next, collecting rent, writing receipts, and listening as the tenants, a collection of fairly desperate cranks and crazies, gripe and spill out their guts. The tenants are a broad cross section of downscale New Yorkers, and their stories range from the hilarious to the truly desperate. Wallant was a rising young Jewish novelist, contemporary of Malamud, Roth, Mailer, and this charmer of a book points to what was lost by his early death.

December

*Memoirs and Grief X 2

1. I didn’t expect Michael Frame’s Geometry of Grief, Reflections on Mathematics, Loss and Life to be a self help book (and sure didn’t want it to be one), so was disappointed to the extent that it is one, sort of. For some reason I thought it would be an elegant book that, well, I wasn’t quite sure what it would be. Frame taught Geometry at Yale and is probably best know for his work with Benoit Mandelbrot in fractal mathematics (they co-authored Fractal Worlds: Grown, Build and Imagined), a subject about which I am clueless. The sections on fractals were the most interesting to me; the grief, not so much, although he does write very modestly, and movingly, about the onset of “cognitive troubles” that influenced his teaching. The book more or less boils down to this: occupying yourself with something you love doing (e.g. geometry) can help you work your way out of a profound grief. Frame comes across as a very decent man, quite sweet actually, an excellent teacher, and, god knows, there’s as much for me here as there was in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (which, with its I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-to-me tone seemed as much about privilege as it did about grief); but the misery of grief is that it can so knock the shit out of you that you can’t occupy yourself with anything else. I do love, however, Frame’s comparison of the never to be repeated eureka moment of comprehension (of, say, a beautiful math solution), with the experience of irreversible loss.

2. In 1977 twenty-eight year old Howard Norman is in Churchill, Manitoba interviewing Mark Nuqac, an Inuit elder who tells him a series of stories, all variations on this plot: Noah and his Ark arrive in Hudson Bay and deal with the indigenous locals. The stories, which are charming, bawdy and funny, take up a sizeable chunk of the book, as does the writer’s relationship with Nuqac, but both are a backdrop to the real matter here. In Fond Remembrance of Me is a memoir about Norman’s friendship with Helen Tanizaki, a Japanese linguist who is also in Churchill to transcribe the Noah stories. She’s ten years older than Norman, much more experienced in the fieldwork, and is dying of cancer. Because they have rooms in the same motel, they end up spending a fair amount of time together; they share a profound love for the wildness of the North, share an affection for places that are not their own (she was born in London and raised in Japan; Norman is from Ohio). In a sense, the book is simply a My Most Unforgettable Character story, and a very moving one, as well as a coming of age as a writer story. Written more than twenty years afterwards, it’s a middle age writer’s take on an experience formative to his younger self, and an account of his feelings for a friend who died before she had a chance to enter middle age. It’s deeply affecting—Ethnography of Grief.

*Katie Kitamura, Intimacies and A Separation

Both of these slim, cleanly written novels are narrated by a nameless woman in an unfamiliar environment. The narrator of A Separation (2017) has travelled to a small village in the south of Greece to track down her missing husband; in Intimacies (2021), the narrator has recently moved to The Hague to begin work as a translator at the international court. The first narrator is a translator, too, a literary one; she and her writer husband have separated but no one knows this yet, know one, that is, apart from the old friend of her husband’s with whom she’s started an affair. The Hague court translator is involved with a married man (he’s recently separated) and she’s unsure of where she stands with him; she isn’t totally sure of her relationship with her closest friend either (a woman who works in the Mauritshuis art museum); but her greatest uncertainties arise when she’s assigned as translator to a man accused of heinous war crimes, a former president, unnamed, like herself. Read back to back, Katie Kitamura’s themes and obsessions, as well as her writerly quirks and tricks, start to emerge.  A Separation doesn’t feel as completely its own thing as Intimacies—the first section is a bit like something from the world of art house suspense cinema (L’Aventura meets Patricia Highsmith)—but both are terrific reads. The newer is the more interesting and compelling: The Hague is a more uncommon setting, for one thing, and translating testimony for a genocidal politician is a darn sight more dramatic than translating short stories. Translation is a sort of interesting element in the first but is an indispensable and profound element in the second. There are times when Kitamura freezes the action in a scene in order to fill in a past event, or engage in a bit of psychological analysis of a character—sometimes, especially in A Separation, this can feel like an assignment (“Write a brief paragraph expanding upon this theme…”), but more often than not she can stop the action in a way that opens the narrative up to deeper and deeper levels: a six page encounter with a 1631 painting by Judith Leyster during an opening in the Mauritshuis is a wonderful example of the latter. Kitamura writes of a world that’s cosmopolitan and, to many of us, fairly well heeled, and she’s more interested in exploring complicity than she is in exploring rot; she has something to say and she says it with lovely prose that’s without excess.

* The Deserters, Pamela Mulloy

It’s always good to discover a writer from New Brunswick who writes about the place. Pamela Mulloy is originally from Moncton, but her first novel is set on the other side of the province—no place names are given, but we’re somewhere west of Fredericton near the Maine border. Eugenie, married and unofficially estranged from her husband (he’s working in Europe) is trying to make a go of her grandmother’s old farm; early in the book she encounters an American camped out in her woods. Dean, like the VietNam protesters a generation ago, has slipped across the border, a deserter from the US Army, he’s suffering from PTSD after a grim tour in Iraq. She hires him to help her with the farm, and it isn’t too long before she realizes that times have changed, that deserters are no longer as welcome in Canada as they once were. They have an affair—it begins pretty abruptly and ends a little to neatly (dramaturgically speaking), but the early days of it—their need for each other—is the strongest part of the book. My biggest wish is that New Brunswick would have been less a generic rural setting and more of its own complicated self.

*Tove Ditlevsen

Childhood, the first book in poet Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, is set mostly on Istedgade, the rough street in a working class neighbourhood where she grew up, where her father is perpetually out work, her mother is an unhappy witch on wheels, and very few people seem to have any kind of future. Her best friend is a little thief and one of her favourite neighbours—a woman she and her mother have morning visits with—is a prostitute who is eventually driven out of her building by the neighbours. Threaded through this little book is Ditlevsen’s love of poetry, first the poems she loves and then the verses she writes and she keeps hidden so her family won’t make fun of her. In many ways it’s a story we know all too well—the hopelessness of poverty, the salvation of art—but it’s not so cut and dry here. One of the things that’s remarkable is the way she writes about childhood as a physical object, with attributes, boundaries, geographies; it’s “long and narrow, like a coffin,” she writes, “and you can’t get out of it on your own.” Of course she’s writing from the vantage point of adulthood, but the book is immediate, as if a very wise child were speaking to us directly from the trauma that surrounds her. This translation, by Tiina Nunnally, first appeared in 1985 (the book was published in Denmark in 1967), and this year the trilogy has come out in a single volume in English to great praise. It’s no wonder why; it reads like a classic.

November

* This Year’s Nobel: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Desertion

Although it’s great when a writer one loves gets the Nobel (Alice Munro, Louise Gluck), it’s even better when the award opens a door to the work of someone unknown. For many of us that’s the case this year with Abdulrazak Gurnah. Born in Zanzibar, he came to the UK as a refugee more than fifty years ago, and his work deals with colonialism, displacement, migration, racism and—if this novel from 2005 is any indication—in ways that are quite personal. The first half of Desertion is set at the end of the 19th century and is about the love affair between an Englishman, Martin, and Rehana, the Muslim woman he will eventually abandon. The second half, which takes place two generations later, concerns the family of Rashid, the novel’s narrator: his brother’s affair with Rehana’s descendant, his sister’s secret love, and Rashid’s own exile and abandonment in England. Colonialism is the backdrop for Part I, while events in Part II are driven by the end of British rule in Tanzania, the violence that follows and leads to the devastation of their world and the tragic conclusions of their parents’ lives. Some aspects of the novel, no doubt, stem from autobiography (Gurnah writes vividly and movingly about being an expat, a person of colour, a foreigner, in British academia); the book is infused with both the wonder and excitement of first love and with the loss and melancholy of exile. He evokes a time and a place that’s so unknown to me (the east coast of Africa, decades ago) and makes it immediate and familiar. The book is so satisfying—very well drawn characters and compelling storytelling in a structure that keeps pulling you back to look at it all from yet another angle—and makes one yearn for more from his backlist.

* Days By Moonlight

Each novel in André Alexis’ Quincunx project is of different genre (animal fable, pastoral, quest) and this travel adventure—part Divine Comedy, part Gulliver’s Travels, part Monty Python—is, in my books, the most purely enjoyable of the four I’ve read. (Ring, the middle one, a romance, is up next) It bears a resemblance to Alexis’ play, Lambton, Kent and Other Vistas (in which an anthropologist from Africa lectures on Southern Ontario customs), and is both a love letter to and a satire of small town Ontario. Alfred, narrator and botanist, recently orphaned, and Professor Bruno, academic and friend of his late parents, are on the road researching an elusive, perhaps deceased, poet, and the people they meet and the places they go are as strange as the ones Gulliver encounters in Brobdingnag. There’s the town with an annual house burning contest, the town with its Canadian Museum of Sexuality (with a “Pierre Trudeau: Angel of the Erotic” display), and another where townspeople dress up as the Fathers of Confederation and are driven down Main Street to be pelted with tomatoes by other townspeople (whites only) at the annual Indigenous Parade. Oh, Southern Ontario and her myriad summer festivals. Days By Moonlight is laugh out loud funny and is also an extraordinary book about grief and the loss of love. Characters (human and canine) from other Quincunx books make their appearances, and the puzzle of the five books becomes more fun as it deepens. Alexis’ project, unlike anything else in Canadian letters, is profoundly, intensely Canadian.

* The Three Arched Bridge—Ismail Kadare

Immurement isn’t something I think about a lot, but in the last little while I’ve encountered it more than once, first in Marco Bellocchio’s 2015 Blood of My Blood, and now in Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s 1978 The Three Arched Bridge, which was published in English in 1997 in a translation by John Hodgson. In the Bellocchio film, a young nun accused of consorting with the devil is walled up in her convent in the 17th century; in Kadare’s novel (set in the 1370s), a mason is walled up in the bridge he has been building. He’s suspected of sabotaging the construction, but his immurement is also an act of appeasement to various river deities. Both acts are rooted in suspicion and faith, and Kadare’s narrator, a monk named Gjon, also tells the legend of the building of Sckodër Castle and how the young wife of one of its builders was entombed alive into one of the walls. The political backdrop for Gjon’s story is the rise of the Ottoman Empire and its impact on the Balkans and, although it does read like a parable, there isn’t an ounce of preciousness in it, and its sense of dread, and the climate of suspicion surrounding the building of the bridge, make Kadare’s book—despite its elements of fable—very contemporary. 

* Faulkner in Winter, Part 2

The short stories that would become The Unvanquished began to appear in popular magazines (Scribner’s and The Saturday Evening Post) in 1934, two years before the publication of Gone With The Wind, and four years before William Faulkner edited them into his novel. This slim book of seven connected stories, all narrated by Bayard Sartoris (son of Colonal John Sartoris who is off fighting Yankees for the bulk of the book), shares a fair amount with Mitchell’s bestseller in terms of Southern perceptions of the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War; both writers look at notions of gallantry, the role of strong women, the violence of Reconstruction, etc. Rosa Millard, Bayard’s Granny, who hoodwinks the Yankees in order to help friends and neighbours, both white and black, is the moral centre of the book, and there’s a real shock at her story’s conclusion. And Bayard’s relationship to his violent war hero father (who, like Margaret Mitchell’s defeated aristocrats, becomes involved with the Klan) is at the heart of the book and becomes increasingly complicated; the young boy admires and adores his father but, in the end, moves beyond him, rejecting a cycle of vengeance. The most significant relationship in the book is the friendship between Bayard and his exact contemporary and closest friend, Ringo, a family slave; they are together from childhood, joined at the hip until their twenties, and the fact that Ringo, the wiser of the two, cannot possibly have the opportunities of young Sartoris isn’t lost on the narrator. Young Ringo is the one who most clearly expresses the ongoing situation once the battles are done and Reconstruction is upon them: “This War aint over,” he tells his former master, “Hit just started good.” What’s always interesting in Faulkner is how incredibly perceptive he can be on race, while, at the same time, how his circumstances, his birthright if you will, like that of Bayard Sartoris, can limit him. 

October

* Colm Tóibín’s Thomas Mann

I’m a bit hot and cold with Tóibín; at the two extremes, I wasn’t a big fan of The Testament of Mary (book or play), but I couldn’t possibly have loved The Master (his novel about Henry James) more than I did. The Magician isn’t the same kind of novel about a writer, it covers the full span of Thomas Mann’s life while The Master concentrates on four or five years in middle age after James’ failure as a playwright preceded the three great novels he published early in the 20th century; what both books have in common is the sexuality of their subjects: both are about men who were attracted to men, and Tóibín’s understanding of those attractions is central to the conception of both books.

In some ways, The Magician reads like a kind of sequel to Mann’s own Buddenbrooks: taking the family story from 19th century Lübeck into mid twentieth century Los Angeles. Its three generations span two world wars, and it’s a wonderfully satisfying book to read as a portrait of a marriage, as the story of a family with members perpetually at odds personally and politically, and as the private life of a very public figure—it has, in short and in spades, the sweep of history. And, because our present moment is rife with threats to democracy, the sections involving the rise of Nazism and its aftermath, which occupy well over half the book, have a frightening immediacy. Tóibín handles all of this very well, much of the family intrigue could have come across as melodrama, but none of it ever does. Suicides are rampant—making me think, at times, of the family of another German artist, Charlotte Solomon, who would have been the same age as Mann’s youngest children.  At the centre of it all are Thomas Mann and his wife Katia; the book is as much about their arrangement as it is about his life as a writer and they come across as fully rounded characters in a big, fat historical novel. Mann is lauded as a great man (awarded the Nobel in 1929, courted by both East and West after the War), but he’s actually a very ordinary one; wary always, almost timid at times, he played things pretty safe, getting out of Germany when the getting was good and ending up in Lotus Land USA. A good provider, he was a distant and disappointing father. He took his biggest chances in his work, as in, say, the character of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. One comes away from The Magician with a grudging respect for Mann, and a desire to go back to his work. The surprising character here is Katia who, according to Tóibín, was capable of managing just about anything life could throw at her. A terrific piece of writing.

*Francis & Claire: Zeitgeist Girls

Conversations with Friends & The Listeners

Because the zeitgeist has always eluded me, I’m always fascinated by the writers who instinctively find themselves there, either through luck or by scrupulously reading its tealeaves. Now that Sally Rooney’s three books have established her as, more or less, a principal literary voice of her generation, a look her way was overdue, so I’ve been gazing into her first novel, Conversations with Friends, the first person narrative of Francis, a performance poet in Dublin, her former lover and now best friend, Bobbi, and the stylish older couple, Melissa and Nick, with whom they become involved. Involved, meaning Francis and Bobbi spend time at the couple’s summer place in France, and she has an affair with Nick, who, just happens to be a devastatingly handsome actor in an unhappy marriage. Illicit love, glamorous people, the Continent. The writing can be sharp and smart, the book moves right along, and it made me think of this sentence from Pauline Kael’s 1969 piece in Harpers, “Trash, Art and the Movies” that I didn’t fully appreciate when I was eighteen:

“It’s almost painful to tell kids who have gone to see The Graduate eight times that once was enough for you because you’ve already seen it eighty times with Charles Ray and Robert Harron and Richard Barthelmess and Richard Cromwell and Charles Farrell.”

As the title indicates, Rooney’s book has lots of dialogue, both spoken and texted; there’s a ton of dialogue as well in Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, which makes sense because up until now he’s been principally known as a playwright. The narrator here is Claire, a housewife, mother and high school teacher in a nameless American suburb, who hears a Hum, a mysterious noise from somewhere in the environment, that ends up shattering her marriage, starting her off on the path to tragedy with one of her students, and getting her involved with a kind of cult of like minded listeners. As an examination of life in the Trump era it’s amusing and fun for a while, but, in the end, doesn’t quite bear up to the weight of its aspirations. 

The characters in both books do feel as if they come more from the worlds of movies and TV than actual life. Of course, being both elderly and, often to my surprise these days, a complete fart, I am, undoubtedly, completely mistaken about both.

*Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

The focus of Suzanne Simard’s book is her lifelong research into the complex relationships among old trees, young ones, seedlings, fungus, etc.—a network of support and sustenance that is at odds with traditional forestry methods, the capitalist philosophies of governments, and logging and chemical industries. All of what that gang perceives to be her tree hugging wackiness must be, to their annoyance, scientifically based and, chapter by chapter, she cites her sources. She’s a great guide through all of this as she traces the evolution of her research over a few decades, giving us a series of awesome discoveries that have the ability to profoundly change the way we look at the natural world. For some reason I hadn’t expected the book to be as much memoir as it is and, mostly, it works as a way of looking at how one set of findings leads to another as her career advances. Where it’s less satisfying is in direct parallels between her own life (telling her children of a cancer diagnosis, say) and the role of a mother tree—some of these parts do feel more than a bit huggy. A quibble (but a big one).

In addition to that incredible interdependent warp and weft of species, what’s really wonderful to read about is her relationships with various colleagues and students; there’s real excitement in their research and a cause for hope as well. 

*Fathoms, The World in the Whale

Rebecca Giggs is an Australian nonfiction writer who writes about science and the environment; Fathoms is her first book. She’s a gorgeous writer of real clarity and this investigation into the study of whales—past, present and future—is, as a book about ecology in this day and age needs be, deeply engaging and troubling. There are an extraordinary series of facts and statistics—the distance a whale’s song can be heard underwater (1615 miles!), the unholy contents of some whales’ stomachs (an entire greenhouse!), the length of some whales’ internal parasites (26 feet!)—and a pressing desire to research, to find out, to understand. A compassionate book that never falls into sentimentality and always respects the otherness of its subjects. 

August / September 2021

*A Short Stack of Small Books Obsessed With Marginalia in Old New England

or Susan Howe (Part 2)

Susan Howe continues to fascinate me, and I’m finding her prose more compelling than her poetry. 

Her 2020 Concordance has three sets of verse: the Concordance of the books title, which is one of her smudgy/collage poem suites that looks like clippings from bird guides, various indexes, tables of contents, nineteenth century texts, etc that have been artfully pulled from a printer’s paper jam; Since, a personal prose poem, often obscure, with references to her childhood, Oliver Wendell Holmes, lawyers, (it also, contains amusing puns); and, my favourite, Space Permitting, about the aftermath of the death of journalist Margaret Fuller in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850, a series of poems culled and arranged from notes that Thoreau sent to Fuller’s friends when he searched the shorelines for her remains as well as the manuscript for her history of the Roman republic, both, alas, lost. (Two of Howe’s puns from Since made me giggle: “My Antononasia” and, after referring to herself as “a relic of the typewriter generation”, “Oh brave new world that has [no paper] in it.”)

Spontaneous Particulars, The Telepathy of Archives relates to her ongoing work on Emily Dickinson and her passion for manuscripts. The book began as a lecture with slides and includes not only Dickinson’s writing on envelopes but also Jonathan Edward’s prayer in Mahican, his crazy/magnificent Efficacious Grace circular manuscript, draft pages from the likes of Noah Webster, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams and 18th C silk embroidery (because “the English word “text” comes from the Medieval Latin textus… literally “thing woven”.”) A tiny, wonderful volume, it occupies a liminal space—at once poem, essay, and art book.

In her love and obsession for marginalia, Howe owes a dept to poet Charles Olson’s 1947 Call Me Ishmael, a book length essay on Melville that is as eccentric and wacky as Moby Dick itself. Olson went through Melville’s library, noting the marginalia in his copies of Shakespeare’s plays and looking at how profoundly the playwright influenced the final draft of the Moby Dick. He’s terrific on Ahab, “the American Timon”, and Ahab’s (Olson’s caps) HATE, “huge and fixed upon the imperceptible” that leads to a “a collapse of a hero through solipsism which brings down a world.” This strange little book is a treasure.

Olson’s influence on Howe is clear in The Birth-mark, unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (now nearly thirty years old) with its essays on marginalia (Coleridge’s influence is strong here, too), Dickinson, of course, as well as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson. It’s a terrific collection, looking deeply into the lives and works of early New England writers of poetry, sermons, and memoirs. It’s not everyone who can make you think, “Oh, maybe I’ll take a gander at Cotton Mather’s sermons,” but Susan Howe does. I think she’s an incredibly significant point of reference for a deeper understanding of 18th and 19th century American letters, and the role that patrimony has played in their evolution. No one has put more thought into the relationship a writer has to her pen and paper, and to her relationship with the world those objects come from.

* Natalia Ginzburg, Family and Borghesia

Each of these two very short novellas contains as much plot and as many characters as your average 19th century Russian novel; people meet, have relationships, break up, act selfishly, argue, cheat, rat on each other, move in, move out, get cats, lose cats, feud, continue on as if nothing happened, all at what can might be called a kind of leisurely breakneck pace: everything happens; nothing happens. The writing is very funny until it isn’t. No matter what their ages or occupations (or lack of) nearly everybody seems to be living the sort of slapdash life familiar to undergraduates. Ginzburg gives her readers a thrilling ride and when we come up for air are often surprised at how deep she’s taken us.

July 2021

*Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World, by Christopher de Hamel

Impulse buying at its best. I picked up Christopher de Hamel’s book a year and a half ago, just before the pandemic hit, and it has sat on the growing to-read pile since then. Maybe I won’t get around to this one, I thought last week—after all, a 600 page book about twelve medieval manuscripts is hardly pressing. But, a couple of days ago, I picked it up and, really, never put it down. De Hamel, as befits a palaeographer, is more than a bit of a manuscript nerd and, for a few pages, I thought he might drive me a little crazy (his jokes can be corny); but he won me over pretty quickly. He’s an excellent guide and, ultimately, his book is not just erudite, it’s a fun read. Each chapter not only describes its manuscript and lays out its provenance, it also introduces us to various libraries and museums around the globe (the Bodleian, the Morgan, the Getty, etc.) and to the people who work there. There are clearly ones that he loves (the woman at the National Library of Russia in St., Petersburg, say, who spoke no English but plied him with chocolates) and ones he rolls his eyes at (the snooty, well heeled staff at the Pierpont Morgan in New York). The manuscripts are a varied lot—Books of the Hours, Chaucer, The Carmina Burana, The Book of Kells—and his stories and descriptions not only tell us a lot about them individually, they also provide histories of bookmaking, bookmakers and book buyers, from kings and dukes to capitalists and Nazis. From the sixth century on these books inhabit the world of the very rich (de Hamel worked for Sothebys). Somehow, I hadn’t expected this to be the social history that it is. And it’s just packed with interesting stuff: e.g. books have evolved into the shape they are because of the shape of the skins that became parchment: “Most mammals are oblong,” he writes; or the assertion that land was granted to the abbey at Wearmouth-Jarrow in 692 “in order to provide sufficient pasture for an increased herd necessary for making the bibles.” There are hundreds of colour illustrations and, as befits a book about books, the whole package is beautifully conceived and designed, and so well bound that those double page pictures open like a dream. Splendiferous, in a word.

* Old Labrador

It’s been good to return, after nearly thirty years, to The Afterlife of George Cartwright, poet John Steffler’s novel about colonialism that began with his reading of Cartwright’s Journal (first published in 1792 when the explorer was in his early fifties). Cartwright was in the English army in India and in Europe, but, in Steffler’s telling, it was in Labrador that he found a geographic and spiritual home. A compelling character, often pigheaded and inept, he is drawn to rawness of the north and to its Inuit inhabitants. All too late, he realizes that his relationships with them, no matter what his intentions, are tragic. The book’s premise is that, after his death on May 19, 1819, in Nottinghamshire, Cartwright is stuck in that very terrestrial limbo (Cartwright in the Bardo, we’d now call it), continuing to exist as time moves ahead without him, going over the events of his life until he is finally able to give up the ghost. The prose is lovely (it’s a poet’s book without being excessive), and he’s an interesting, maddening character; this is a significant book about the tragedy of pigheaded colonialism and its eternal legacies. The story of Caubvick, one of the Inuit Cartwright brings to England, is profoundly moving. 

* War is Hell 

The original title for David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black is Frère d’âme, which, in English (Soul Brother) implies a very different world from the one of the novel, which is that of a man from Senegal fighting for the French in WWI. It’s a novella, written very much in an oral tradition, with frequent repetitions, as if we were reading a spoken text. (In addition to the sentences and phrases that keep returning, “God’s truth”—a variation of “I swear to God”—turns up once or more on nearly every page). The war stuff is grim—there’s the usual Great War trenches, infinite mud, and pointless slaughter, but there’s also machetes, severed hands and colonialism; the second half, which takes place in Africa before the war, is the more interesting because it’s less familiar. Diop, along with his translator Anna Moschovakis, received the 2021 International Booker.

* Liquid Days

Philip Hoare has written biographies of the likes of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward and he’s also an obsessive cold water swimmer who has written on whales. His Risingtidefallingstar, from 2018, subtitled In Search of the Soul of the Sea, is a series of linked essays that, in great part, explores various writers’ and historical figures’ connections to that seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface. While Hoare goes to (and swims at) P’Town, Southhampton, Portsmouth and the like, he writes about a wide variety of folk, from Shakespeare (The Tempest) to David Bowie. Some of the to-be-expected are here—Byron, Shelley, Melville, Virginia Woolf, Lord Nelson—but there are also surprises: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilfred Owen. At one point I thought of John Cheever’s Neddy Merrill making his wet way home from pool to pool, but Hoare’s swimmings through various lives and seas are anything but grim—he’s exhilarating and bracing, even as a lot of what he writes about is more than tinged with mortality. There’s enough memoir here to make us interested in his pursuits, but not enough to overpower what he has to say about others. An intelligent and pretty juicy read.

June 2021

* 3 by Anne Simpson

Anne Simpson received this year’s Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize for her novel Speechless (which I’ve yet to read); I’ve gone into her extensive back list and read her second novel, Falling, her fourth poetry collection, Is, and Experiments in Distant Influence, a book of essays and poems published last year by Gaspereau. The latter is illustrated with her line drawings (she studied at OCAD) and has more the feel of a notebook than a collection of essays. She writes eloquently about bees, clearcutting, writers retreats, the woods and shores she loves (she lives in Antigonish NS), and the illness and death of a photographer/collaborator/friend. One comes away with the sense of Simpson as a writer committed to the natural world around her, inquisitive and knowledgeable, a good friend and citizen. The strongest essay is the last, Palaces of the Brain, about the extraordinary medical drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (he was awarded the 1906 Nobel in medicine) and her daughter’s diagnosis of MS. It’s a very moving piece of writing and, probably, a significant inspiration for the family story at the heart of her second novel.

Falling is a very generous book about mortality and loss that begins with the accidental death of a young woman, no more than a girl, really, on the shore near Antigonish; it then moves through the subsequent months as we see the ways in which her death impacts her mother, her brother, uncle, and their relationships with people who will never know her. A powerful, yet soft spoken book about the loss of a very young person written unsentimentally and with enormous heart. The bulk of the novel is set in Niagara Falls in the summer months following the death, and is a strong evocation of family upsets and tensions, against the background of long evenings in a tourist town. A book with warm, complicated characters and no easy answers.

It’s with her poetry that Simpson’s writing is most distinctive. Mortality is at the heart of most poetry—it is, arguably, the reason for the existence of poetry—and Is starts with the poems she wrote as part of an exhibit with her late photographer friend, poems on cells and cell division, then moves through poems referring to Betty Goodwin drawings and prints, Vietnam war photographers, and ending with a long poem named for, and shaped like, a double helix. In Boat of Dawn, Boat of Dusk, a poem both long and sparse, written in memory of another friend, a woman lies in a hospital slipping in and out of consciousness:

She journeys. Goes in and out of her body,

  through a different door each time.

It’s very, very fine writing

* Russia, Past and Present

Happily waist deep in Russia this week: the opera I wrote with composer Linda C. Smith is on in Moscow (link here), and I’ve been reading poet and journalist Maria Stepanova’s novel/memoir/essay collection In Memory of Memory. Four hundred pages of family stories, descriptions of photographs and memorabilia, essays on poets, artists, histories of persecutions—it’s an idiosyncratic Russian Jewish family saga that made me think at times of Moby Dick, that is, a big crazed double handful of book, alternatively maddening and thrilling, that you either love or want to send to an editor. You don’t just read it: you take a course in it. I was crazy over much of it. 

* How the South Won the Civil War, Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

There isn’t an ounce of fat in Heather Cox Richardson’s 200 page history of America, which, amazingly, moves from pre Revolution to Trump, and in which she does what she does so well in her Letter from an American newsletter and her Now&Then podcast with Joanne Freeman, that is give a deep understanding of today’s news by putting it into a deep historical context. History doesn’t repeat itself, she says, it rhymes; and this book provides a series of them as she points out similarities between the words of 20th and 21st century politicians and antebellum slaveholders. Cox Richardson, who lives in rural coastal Maine and teaches in Boston, is, for me, at this point, an indispensable resource and source of information. And listening to her talk with Freeman is a great pleasure.

* Bodily Fluids

“This is a female text” is how Irish poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa begins and ends A Ghost in the Throat, and there’s no doubting it. A memoir from a young mother who not only loves being pregnant, she also loves the turmoil, the work and confusion of a houseful of toddlers; she also writes more about lactation (nursing, breast sizes, nipples, pumps, milk banks) than anyone I’ve yet to encounter. She writes very compellingly about her ill fated medical studies in a chapter called “The Dissecting Room”—this also happens to be the second memoir I’ve read this year by an Irish writer containing a harrowing account of her daughter’s brush with death (Maggie O’Farrell’s being the other.) But the book is only in part about the joys and perils of her own motherhood, it’s also about her obsession with Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill (1743—1800) who wrote The Lament for Art O Laoghaire, a thirty-six stanza keen for her murdered husband, a poem which contains the unforgettable image of Eibhlín Dubh rushing to find his corpse and not wiping the blood but scooping it up in her hands and drinking it. Ní Ghríofa’s translation of the lament ends the book, which also includes accounts of her journeys to libraries and historical sites as she researches the poet’s story. A more interesting character for me than either Eibhlin Dubn or Art O Laoghaire is Ní Ghriofa’s own husband (if he is named, I missed it), who seems patience personified and who, ultimately, wins the argument with his wife and has a vasectomy.

May 2021

* Susan Howe

I’m just discovering Susan Howe after reading an obit in the Times for Benita Raphan, an avant-garde filmmaker who died, not yet sixty, last January. There was a link to Up To Astonishment, her short film about Emily Dickinson which has Howe on the soundtrack. One thing led to another: the local library had Debths, Howe’s 2017 book of poetry, and I ordered her 1985 My Emily Dickinson online. Susan Howe has a love for language, for 18th and 19th century American men and women of letters, and, to my delight, her writing speaks directly to me. Debths (the word is from Joyce’s Wake) is in five parts, among them an essay/memoir Forward, a series of poems using Paul Thek’s artwork and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum as starting points, another that starts with Moby Dick’s Pip, as well as smudgy collages of bits from old English tales (Tom Tit Tot)—her work can be vague and rigorous at once. The Dickinson book is amazing, a beautifully structured 140 page close reading cum collage of the 1863 poem My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—. She’s interested in Dickinson as reader and thinker and dives deeply into the writers who influenced her: Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, John Donne as well as New Englanders like Fenimore Cooper, Mary Rowlandson, and Jonathan Edwards. It’s a thrill to accompany Howe as she works her way through the Dickinson poem, gathering skeins from the various words, objects, and characters of those influencers (Catherine and Heathclilff, Browning’s Childe Roland, Edward’s spider, Deerslayer’s gun) as well as from the politics and philosophies driving those things (Calvinism, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Civil War) that were very much part of Dickinson’s world. The book is a crazy, breathtaking thing and Howe is both poet scholar and romantic modernist; at this point in time, I can’t get enough of her.

* Owls of the Eastern Ice, A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght

If you have a hankering to spend some time north of Vladivostok in the forests of Russia’s Primorye Province, Jonathan C. Slaght’s book might give you pause: those woods are inhabited by (often starving) deer, dangerous wild boars, and tigers; most of the people he encounters doing fieldwork for his thesis on the remarkable Blakiston’s fish owl are living lives like the folks in an Andrey Zvyagintsev film, that is to say, fairly desperately. It’s a bleak and hardscrabble existence; more vodka is consumed in this book than in any other nature book ever written. A lot of the story is the trial and error of the project—finding the birds, figuring out how to successfully trap them, how to attach tracking devices etc. and it entails pretty vivid descriptions of a very male world of misfits and hermits living in grubby villages, small towns and shacks in the woods. The fieldwork is often done in winter, driving snowmobiles along precariously slushy rivers, sleeping in filthy cabins and tents, as the miraculous huge owls are located, caught, released, then recaught and rereleased the next year after retrieving their data. Slaght’s passion for the work is clear, he cares deeply about the owls, and is obviously into the travails that are very much a part of his time in Russia (he lives in Minneapolis). But it’s his frustrations and affections for men in Primorye that make this such a strange and compelling read.

* New Brunswick before the Equal Opportunity Program by Laurel Lewey, Louis J, Richard, and Linda Turner

In the 1960’s Premier Louis J. Robichaud changed my home province forever with a program of social reforms that rescued so many of its desperate communities from endless poverty. This book, by social workers, shows the evolution of the systems that he worked so hard to demolish—notably the Poor Laws that had their origins in Elizabethan England and arrived in the province with the Loyalists—and it looks at how those laws directly affected citizens. Before Equal Opportunity, taxes were collected and monies for education, hospitals and the like were administered by counties; rich counties had better services and poor counties—which were more likely than not Acadian—were taxed to death. The book gives a clear picture of the workings of institutions like poorhouses, of pauper auctions, of the treatment of the mentally handicapped, of a hundred social ills. It also contains a fascinating series of brief biographies of social welfare workers in the province from 1925-1966.

April 2021

*The Book of Unconformities

I liked Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia very much (see below, October 2020), but it didn’t prepare me for The Book of Unconformities, Speculations on Lost Time, which, simply put, is a treasure. Its genesis was the death of his youngest sister, in childbirth, closely followed by the suicide of his older one. An odd and glorious book, it’s a series of essays on various rocks and minerals (marble, sandstone, iron etc.) from a series of (mostly) islands (Manhattan, Orkney, Iceland, Greenland etc.) that are also meditations and memorials not just for individuals but for whole cultures as well. An unconformity is a break in the geological record, “a material sign of a break in time”; in Hugh Raffles’ hands the unconformities are both subject and metaphor. This is a great, crazy book of time and stories dealing with geology, personal grief, history and genocide. The essays have their own crazy logic: the piece on Manhattan marble begins with Spuyten Duyvil Creek (which became the Harlem Ship Canal) and a geological history of the island, then moves on to the Lenabe peoples (who were driven away, ultimately to Oklahoma) and ends with the story of Raffles’ friend Vince, dying of AIDS, going AWOL from a hospital in New Jersey “escaping to Manhattan to die where he belonged.” It is, remarkably, all of a piece, as is the whole enterprise. His essay on Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, with its abandoned whaling settlements and Soviet coal mines, contains a history of whaling as well as an admiration for people who are “seized by an uncontrollable longing for remote places.” His final piece, the longest, on Robert Peary’s theft of the great iron meteorites from Greenland and the tragic story of the Inughuit (four adults and two children) who he brought to be studied at the Museum of Natural History, brings the larger narrative of the book back to Manhattan.

The prose is clear and rich, sometimes with breathless sentences running through dozens of clauses (and punctuated by dozens of semicolons) that can make the heart quicken. And the footnotes! If you wander into them, you could happily stay for hours. There’s also a couple of hundred pictures, maps on the endpapers—it’s a storybook that’s as deep as the sea. Eons of history, heartbreak, adventure, all in the company of a wonderful traveller and guide. Who could ask for more?  I cannot imagine a more ideal book.

*Animal, Vegetable, Junk, a History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman 

There are a quite a few recipes from Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything that I thank him for pretty much weekly (e.g.Braised Chard with Olive Oil and Rice); his approach to cooking is straight forward, simple as possible, sane, and very tasty. But his interest in food goes far deeper than the market and the kitchen: Animal, Vegetable, Junk is a fairly quick and thorough journey through the entire history of it from the pre-agriculture days of hunter gatherers to the bullying dominance of factory farming. Humans were healthier and worked less before settling down to farm and domesticate livestock, but it was with unchecked capitalism that things really went dangerously to hell. For the bulk of the book Bittman chronicles the disregard for crop rotation, escalating use of fertilizers and insecticides, the rise of monoculture farms, the cruel and immoral treatment of animals—I could go on and on, but will stop there: his point is that, in our current culture, the purpose of food is no longer nourishment. (“Reflect, for a second,” he writes, “on the existence of the frozen entity called Lean Cuisine Casual Cuisine Wood Fire Style BBQ-Recipe Chicken Frozen Pizza.”) I was reading the book while my partner and I were driving into the city; every couple of minutes I’d read him yet another interesting tidbit (“Did you know that a third of all fish are caught at unsustainable levels?” “Did you know that thirty percent of American farmland has been bought up by non-operators who lease it to large-scale farmers?”) “Everything is so upsetting and appalling,” he said, “and none of it is a surprise.” But, despite those grim facts, the book is an invigorating read and a necessary one. Bittman brings the same clarity and sanity to history as he does to Braised Chard with Olive Oil and Rice. It’s book that should be on high school curriculums in the way that, tragically, Pepsi and Cheetos have long been in their cafeteria vending machines.

* How To Be Animal: a New History of What It Means To Be Human 

Melanie Challenger begins with, “The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal. And the future is being managed by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.” She goes on to write what’s probably the sanest book I’ll read all year. It’s brief (a little over 200 pages, with over three dozen photographs), reasonably dense, and eminently readable. Challenger locates us in a necessary perspective: she looks at how we got here, that is, how we came to see ourselves as a species that’s somehow situated above the rest of the animal world (or, according to Hebrews II, “Thou madest him a little lower than the angels” ), and that, these days, often thinks of itself as a computer like intellect that’s been slapped onto an inconvenient piece of meat that ages, sickens and dies. She makes the case that our hearts, our livers, our guts are as integral to who we are as our brains, and examines the multitude of ways that distancing ourselves from the world has been disastrous for both earth and us (her earlier book was On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature). The tech brainiacs who want to relocate their superior geniuses in outer space or into an eternal heaven of fleshless bell jars are committing follies as selfish and near sighted as the men who slaughtered whales for lamp oil and girdle stays. What’s amazing is that this isn’t an angry book (although it will raise your hackles), she’s too in love with the world and its possibilities; she’s smart enough to know that screeds of rage aren’t going to get her anywhere (although they seem to have worked for the nearsighted folks who would oppose her, Trumpers and the like). A heady mixture of history, science and philosophy, it’s a very necessary book.

March 2021

*Sempre Sontag, A Memoir of Susan Sontag

Sigrid Nunez worked for Sontag, had an affair with her son, and ended up living with the two of them for a time; her slim memoir (you can read most of it during a long soak in the tub) is an informative treat. Nunez’s respect and admiration are clear, as are her frustrations and her very honest assessments of Sontag as essayist, novelist, intellectual, mother, daughter, partner, companion, celebrity—she covers pretty well all the bases. When they met, Nunez was 26 and Sontag, 43; the book deals with the years following Sontag’s first cancer and mastectomy, and you really get a sense of how driven she was, how demanding (of both herself and the rest of the world), and how she could be inspirational, exhausting, a colossal pain in the ass, and (the surprise to me) a great deal of fun. One trivial thing I feel stupid not to have realized before: Sontag lost all her hair during those first cancer treatments and when it grew back, it was white: that streak in the front was “the only part that was its true color.”

I encountered the woman only once: she was a panel member onstage at a symposium; David Hockney was demonstrating the use of the camera lucida by old masters, his thesis being that painting and drawing had changed radically after the invention of lenses made it possible to project images on paper or canvas. Sontag would have none of it; the very idea that an artist she revered (Caravaggio, say) would trace an image was an affront to her. Although she didn’t come across as a harpy, quite, she seemed curmudgeonly closed minded, which surprised me because Hockney’s theory made sense to every, single visual artist I know—they found it liberating. What’s wonderful about Sempre Sontag is the perspective that Nunez provides.

*The White Road, Journey Into An Obsession

I loved Edmund De Waal’s memoir about his family The Hare With Amber Eyes and can’t recommend it highly enough; this, his second book, is both more personal and less immediate: it doesn’t have the narrative drive of the first, it’s more fragmentary, scattered. De Waal travels about the world (Jingdezhen, Dresden, Plymouth, Cornwall, etc.) researching the history of porcelain, porcelain production, and the politics and economics driving the market for its beauty. In addition to being a fine writer and historian, he’s a very big deal ceramicist, and a significant part of this book focuses on preparing for and installing various exhibitions, as well as on a series of meditations on art, money, power, and beauty. Porcelain is composed of two kinds of mineral: petunse and kaolin; after taking us through a thousand or so years of trial, error and alchemy on the part of the powerful and the people who worked for the powerful as they search for the secrets of making this translucent pottery, De Waal takes us to 1940 and the Nazi run Allach Porcelain Factory in Dachau. Not only is The White Road a journey through the history of porcelain, it’s very much a book about art and morality.

* A Legacy, Sybille Bedford

I picked up A Legacy on a whim because Brenda Wineapple wrote the Introduction to the NYRB reprint; she knew Sybille Bedford, met her when she was researching her book on Janet Flanner, and became her friend. Bedford was an interesting case: a German Jew who managed to escape the Holocaust by marrying a gay Brit, she hobnobbed with writers (e.g. Aldous Huxley), with the wealthy (she was often dependant upon them), and didn’t write her first novel, this one, until 1956 when she was in her mid forties. It was so worth the wait. The narrator of A Legacy has a family history very much based on her own and the novel is the story of households, Jewish and Catholic, in the years before World War 1, the years leading up to the narrator’s birth (Bedford was born in 1911). It’s very much a book about class, about European society post German unification, about monied people in the age of Monet; it’s incredibly perceptive, sharp, ruthless at times, and very, very funny. The narrator’s father travels about with his pet chimpanzees trashing the railway dining car’s china (it’s like something dreamed up by a Prussian Preston Sturges), but the story of his brother, the girl’s hapless uncle, and the comedy of errors leading to the poor man’s death, give the festivities a weight. 

* Marrow and Bone

Walter Kempowski wrote Marrow and Bone in 1992 and it’s set just a few years before that; it’s both a prelude and a coda to his later All for Nothing (see below, April 2020) which was set in 1945. In this earlier novel, Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in Hamburg, takes a break from his crappy relationship with a museum worker (she’s working on an exhibit of cruelty in the visual arts) and heads off to Poland to write a travel piece about the route of an upcoming car rally for a high end car company. Although he’s never been before, his family’s roots are in Poland, or, more accurately, in what was previously East Prussia, and his family could have been one of the many on the road in All for Nothing. His picaresque journey, which is hilarious and moving, is a homecoming and a reckoning. A really smart and insightful novel about the legacy of the Nazi years, it’s a profound joy to read. 

February 2021

* “Don’t Tell Lota!”

Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

One night back in the mid nineties, I was sitting around after dinner at the MacDowell Colony with a group of artists, mostly writers, middle aged and younger, and one very frail, fairly formidable old woman. Louise Talma was in her late 80s, very smart and often disagreeable; a composer (she’d studied with Nadia Boulanger), she had written, she told us more than once, an opera, The Alcestiad, with Thornton Wilder, who she clearly adored. Because we were both smokers, I would sometimes end up walking her back to her room at night because she was unsteady on her feet in the dark. According to the staff, who she frustrated because she refused to stop smoking in bed, when she arrived each year one of the first things she would always do was unpack a photo of Wilder and put it on her bedside table. He’d been gone for twenty years but she still carried a torch. On that night, she was quiet, sitting smoking and listening to the rest of us talk about writers we admired. Elizabeth Bishop’s name came up, and one of the younger poets said something to the effect that it must have been so difficult “back then” for her to have to be secretive about being a lesbian. Louise Talma stiffened, “I knew Elizabeth Bishop,” she declared very loudly, “and she was not a lesbian.” (Poet Irene McKinney was sitting a short ways away from us with a glass of wine and a book; without lifting her eyes from the page she said dryly, “Don’t tell Lota.”)

Jenn Shapland’s memoir/bio of herself/Carson McCullers brings that moment back to me; her book is all about setting the record straight by showing that the people who say McCullers was not a lesbian (her biographers, scholars and people who work for the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians) are old fashioned and wrong. She’s had a residency in the house where McCullers grew up, and she’s worked in the archives at the Ransom Center and had access to such first hand documents as the existing transcripts of McCuller’s therapy sessions with Mary Mercer (the woman who Shapland very much wants us to know became McCuller’s lover)—in short, she knows a lot about her subject. And I sure don’t disagree with her; I read Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter forty some years ago and it seemed pretty clear to me then that when Carson and Reeves McCullers married they were each hiding from something queer they couldn’t face in themselves. And, bottom line, McCuller’s novels are so queer; they were a godsend to me and lord knows how many other gay teenagers because simply reading about her misfits made me feel that I could belong somewhere. (“They are the we of me,” Frankie says in Member of the Wedding, and I knew instinctively what was behind that desperate yearning.) So I’m all for the thesis of this book; it seems crazy to pretend that McCullers was straight. But as I read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, I became less and less engaged; there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that’s new in here, that is, nothing that helps me to see McCullers or her work in a new light. In the end, even though McCuller’s story takes up most of the book, it is much more about Shapland’s own coming to terms with being queer herself. I can’t say I was misled: her terrific title is utterly accurate. Of course Shapland seems very young to me—she probably wasn’t even ten years old that night my poet friend said that it would be easier now for someone like Elizabeth Bishop to be gay and out. But although times have changed, things are still difficult for lots of people: Shapland had a hard time accepting her own queerness, and discovering McCullers helped her to do that, something I certainly understand. I know that she now has a partner, but I can’t say when I put the book down that I know much more than that. She gives us only the basics about her family and where she comes from and why coming out was so painful. About a third of the way into the book she briefly describes a horrible episode with her mother; she’s home at the end of her freshman year with a girlfriend when mom embarrasses them both by reading from the notebooks she’d found while snooping in Shapland’s old room. Both Shapland and her friend are traumatized and move deeper into the closet. But that’s pretty much the end of it. What happens with her mom? What was her father’s reaction? What is her relationship to them now? Shapland has her own secrets, which is fine, but so did Mary Mercer, which is why she destroyed some of her correspondence with McCullers and wanted some things left unknown, much to Shapland’s dismay. If we don’t want something known, we try not to leave it behind. When Shapland is staying in the McCullers’ house (which seems more than a bit of a shrine), she examines and documents the writer’s old clothes as if she were taking her cues from James Agee rifling through the sharecropper family’s bureau drawers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the effect isn’t as intimate as one might expect. And is there a parallel to her mother’s snooping around in her bedroom? (“It was her house, she insisted; she had the right.”) If Shapland were to dig deeper into fetishism as therapy, would I have been happier? Probably. Although what writer wants their clothes analyzed? It’s the sentences and paragraphs that matter. There are writers and books I love because their work helped me in a way that I would call certainly therapeutic (and one from my adolescence would be Member of the Wedding), but as it stands, for me, this book, which has such a strong start, more or less peters out during the last third. Perhaps, simply, I’m too old for it. Am I entering my Louise Talma years? Oh god. Don’t tell Thornton.

* Marian Engel: Sarah Bastard and Bear

It’s great that there’s been a burst of new interest in the 1976 Bear, even if it did start because of a post about the Bantam Seal cheesy nudie Cosmo girl paperback cover that Marian Engel hated. When she started writing in the late sixties, there wasn’t much of a Canadian Lit scene and second wave feminism was shifting gears; Engel was a messy breath of fresh air. Her 1968 No Clouds of Glory (rereleased as Sarah Bastard’s Notebook) is a revealing look at that time; rereading it makes me remember how exciting things were—and how new it all seemed. She arrived just after Centennial Year which, for a lot of Canadians in the arts was a time of self discovery and declaration. My friends and I were a scant generation younger than Engel and she spoke so directly to us, especially to my women friends who read her as someone writing from the front lines. Engel was writing about and for smart young women who wanted more than was traditionally offered and who battled with family, argued with their peers, shot off their mouths (hilariously, often), slept around, struggled with abortion, drank too much—were alive in ways that women in Canadian literature had not been before. Her Sarah (Bastard) Porlock was an academic unhappy with academia, a smart woman fed up with the double standards of sexual politics. When I think of Engel, the word that keeps coming back to me is messy because that seems to be at the heart of it all—but messy in a burgeoning, creative way: like a paint strewn studio. Engel was messy herself—she was about as far from that stupid book cover as you could get—but she wasn’t self destructive, in fact, her anger could be very constructive: she didn’t simply rail against the dismal situation of writers in this country, she became a founding member of the Writers Union and its first chair. She wrote about how hard it was to be patronized and, after she had kids, how glorious, fraught and messy parenting (and single parenting) could be, especially on a writer’s income. Her early death from cancer (she was just passed fifty) is as profound a loss now as it felt then. If you want to look a what those front lines looked like back then, Marian Engel’s books are a fine place to start.

Bear can still shock because of the ease with which Engel moves you so surely into a place that is as crazy as it is mythic. Like Atwood (Surfacing, 1972) she was writing about the country itself, about wilderness and history, and that was deeply tied to her feminist politics. Lou, the book’s central character, is, like Sarah, intelligent and stuck in a job she’s supposed to be grateful for; when she goes north to catalogue the contents of a historic house on an island in Algoma, she’s heading out to face all these things. This is one smart book; it seems as fresh an audacious to me as it did the summer I read it, the summer I turned twenty-five and Engel was renting a house in Cape Traverse and coming into Charlottetown on weekends to stay with friends, eat, drink, laugh and argue. She was one of the first real writers that I knew, and could not have had a better introduction to, well, the messiness of my own future. What’s still exciting in Bear is the way that Engel maneuvers Lou’s journey of self discovery through not just rough landscape and awkward human encounters, but with that very animal, stinking matted bear. Therapeutic beastiality without anthropomorphism is a pretty nifty trick. 

Spending time with her books lately has been great. There was a recent CBC Ideas about Bear that can be accessed here. It’s lovely and sad to hear her voice again, and listening to Peter Gzowski interview her makes one nostalgic for CBC radio arts magazine shows that weren’t so much about pop singers and American celebrity but, like Engel, were asking questions (sometimes celebratory, sometimes messy ones) about who we were, where we had come from and where we were going. (I rarely run into a writer who doesn’t curse the reality show format of Canada Reads; what was stuck on the cover of that Bear paperback to grab your eye—cheesy, glib, superficial—is what often passes for content.)

* Travels in Vermeer, A Memoir

Looking for relief from an acrimonious divorce and custody fight, poet Michael White leaves Wilmington, where he teaches at the University of South Carolina, to spend his Spring Break in Amsterdam; when he goes to the Rijksmuseum he is so deeply affected by its four Vermeers that he decides to spend subsequent vacations at all the galleries in America and Europe that house the artist’s thirty-one other paintings. That’s the genesis of both White’s 2014 poetry collection Vermeer in Hell and this brief memoir in which he details his pilgrimage through the world of the baroque painter, as well as the personal history that led to it: that is, his fraught childhood, his alcoholism, AA meetings, therapy sessions, the death of his beloved first wife, his unhappy marriage to a former student, the birth of his daughter, as well as a couple of stories about Match.com dates that didn’t pan out. His notes on the paintings are, as befits a teacher of creative writing, as engaging as close readings of poems, and, although personal, they are perceptive and compelling. White has a very good eye and can write descriptive prose; he clearly loves Vermeer and he worships his little girl, but after awhile—and not all that long after unsuccessful Date Number Two—a certain amount of middle agey self pity starts seeping in between the canvasses.

* Autumn is the first book in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet and, when it first came out, parts of it must have read like the morning’s news: she’s documenting Brexit in real time and parts of the book have immediacy and zing. The main relationship is between century old Daniel and thirty-something Elizabeth; their bond was formed decades before when she was the kid who lived next door to him. The book takes sideways moves into the stories of 1960s artist Pauline Boty and Profumo girl Christine Keeler: it meanders, and fairly pleasantly.

*Manuel Puig

My affections for Manuel Puig go back a fair ways: my now yellowing copy of Betrayed By Rita Hayworth is an Avon paperback that cost me a dollar and sixty-five cents; as I read it again, the pages detach from the spine. We weren’t the same kinds of movie fanatics (Puig was much more into the glamour of old stars) and his small town of General Villegas in the Argentine Pampas was nothing like my small town in New Brunswick, but our frustrations at our respective hometowns’ limitations and boredoms were similar and our local movie houses gave both of us a means of escape and, to a certain extent, a future. I read pretty much everything as it came out in translation—as well as the one book, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, that he wrote in English. In the early eighties, I saw him read at Harbourfront; he seemed slightly uncomfortable but was charming. I had little or no money back then and could afford only one of the books that was for sale; when Puig asked me who he should inscribe it to, I gave him the name of the man I was crazy over and seeing at the time. The book became a gift that would probably never be opened, let alone read, one small detail in a messy affair that, not long afterwards, would have a melodramatic conclusion; a few years later, the man would die of AIDS. My one moment with Manuel Puig was very much a Manuel Puig moment.

He’s been dead for three decades now (and not of AIDS as many of us thought at the time, but from a heart attack after gall bladder surgery); when I came across his biography by Suzanne Jill Levine, it seemed high time to get reacquainted. Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman, His Life and Fictions is a treat to read: Levine was his translator and his on-again-off-again-on-again friend; not only has she done excellent research, but as someone who knows both sides of the story, she’s wonderfully objective. There’s lots here I didn’t know—his time spent at in Rome at Cinecittà, his friendship with Nestor Almendros, his various encounters with his beloved movie icons—as well as things that come as no surprise: his love of camp, his blind adoration of movie queens, and the deep relationship with his mother that superseded all else. It’s no surprise that he had no use for William Hurt’s false gay turn in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Levine quotes Pauline Kael’s “Hurt as Molina is like having a basset hound playing a Chihuahua”), and Puig’s bitchiness about it is understandable. But it is a disappointment to read about the bitchiness that made Puig throw Nestor Amendros out of his apartment in the middle of snowy night simply because his friend said that Lana Turner was a lousy actress. At times, the “Get Her, Girlfriend” camp becomes tiresome, as it must have in life, but Levine never lets us lose sight of its significance as a lifeline for the mamma’s boy who grew up in gaucho land and whose life was threatened by the state. Puig turned out to be an all too loyal son—his dedication to his mother meant that he put her comforts ahead of his own health: being a mamma’s boy contributed to his early death. His was rich but all too short life, and Levine’s book provides a wonderful context for his fictions.

* Poetry and lives lived—Two books

1. Kathryn Scanlan, Aug 9—Fog

Scanlan’s elegant little Aug 9—Fog began with a five year diary found at an estate auction; the diarist made her first entry in 1968 at the age of 86. Scanlan edits and plays with her words, arranging them into brief entries in five seasonal sections (from Winter to Winter). It’s so very spare (one of the longest pages reads in its entirety, “D. & I out to cemetery decorating. Cemetery looked bad, no mowing. Lightning terrible last nite. Burned out little bed stand light. Vern took treatment on lump in front of ear.”), but it’s jampacked with a strong sense of place, of family and community, of a life lived. In her introduction Scanlan writes, “…I have possessed this work so thoroughly that the diarist has ceased to be an entirely unique, autonomous other to me. I don’t picture her. I am her.” Although I don’t quite buy this, I do love her book and the voice of the woman is clear and quirky and moving. (On the copyright page we learn that her name was Cora E. Lacy, which sent me immediately to the internet where I found her grave in Knoxville, Illinois; she lived five years longer than the last year of the diary.) Aug 9—Fog makes me think not just about a woman’s life but about the presumptions we have as writers when we either take things directly from people or when we imagine to know how other people thought and felt. And it makes me think about how moving the work can be when we succeed. 

2. Edward Hirsch, Gabriel, A Poem 

Grief and death are as big and as deep as you can get, driving forces behind religion, literature, art and just about anything else you can think of, subjects we can’t get enough of because they effect us all at our cores. After Edward Hirsch lost his troubled, twenty-two year old son, his anguish combined with rage and his poetic drive, leading him to shape this extraordinary seventy-five page work, Gabriel, A Poem, each page containing ten stanzas of three lines each, no punctuation, forming an intelligent and emotional elegy that combines raw despair and intellectual rigour in a piece of astounding clarity. Once you start, it has such a strong narrative pull that you can’t stop reading; it’s the story of his son’s all too short, all too confusing life, as well as an accounting of other poets’ griefs (Akhmatova’s, Rilke’s, Rückert’s), and an unbeliever’s howl of rage and loss. Poetry is so soaked into Hirsch’s bones that the writing feels effortless and unforced, as if the whole piece had poured from him in an unbroken stream. A deeply affecting and moving piece of work.

January 2021

* Patrik Scensson The Book of Eels, translated by Agnes Broomé

In this ecological memoir, chapters of boyhood stories of Scensson fishing for eels with his father in rural Sweden alternate with not simply a biological study, but a history of our relationship to the fish from Aristotle on. The story of how we came to understand the eel’s life cycle and migration patterns is anything but dull. All North American and European eels swim from inland brooks and rivers to spawn and die in the Sargasso Sea, an odyssey that may not always have been as arduous as it is now: they evolved so very long ago that the shifting of continents has actually lengthened the journey. Because eels, for most of their life span have no visible sex organs, theories about reproduction have been wild and wooly—did they simply evolve from mud? or by rubbing against rocks to produce regenerative particles of themselves? In 1876, in Trieste, a19 year old Sigmund Freud, his hands covered in slippery eel ooze, dissected hundreds of them in an unsuccessful attempt to determine their sex (and we can only imagine how this slimy job influenced his later theories on psychosexual development…). Patrick Scensson’s relationship to his father is a useful anchor for the book, but not as compelling reading; the autobiographical sections feel slightly padded because the real story is our fascination with a creature that lives in the dark so mysteriously that it’s incomprehensible and mythic. (Rachel Carson, who slightly anthropomorphized the story of one eel in Under the Sea-Wind, emerges as a more memorable character than Dad.) In the end, it’s a modest book and a sobering one: although we’ve learned a lot about them, eels continue to remain mysterious and Other and in all likelihood we’ll drive them to extinction before we do fully understand.

*Judith Schalansky (translated by Christine Lo), Atlas of Remote Islands, Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

This is a short book, less than a hundred and fifty pages—fifty of them maps drawn by Schalansky (who also designed and did the typesetting); the format is simple: on the left hand page, the island’s name, pinprick location on a small globe, longitude and latitude, sizes in both square kilometres and population (if there be any, many are uninhabited), along with a historical graph (two of three dates on a 1500-2000 timeline), and a brief narrative. On the opposite page, the island’s map, scaled 1:125000. What makes this book completely marvellous are those narratives, beautifully written, which range from adventures of exploration to stories of slavery, nuclear detonations, self declared kings, earthquakes, mating rituals, murders, would be utopias and sundry other activities on islands made of rock, phosphate, sand and lava, both visible or hidden by fog or ice. On Tikopia, which is barely 5 km across, 1,200 people are able to survive because their methods of strict population control includes both coitus interruptus and of infanticide (“Let us kill the child, for if it lives, it will have no garden.”) On Amsterdam Island, inhabited by wild cattle and sea mammals, the 25 human residents at the French research station, all men, get together each night in a small theatre, each with a row to himself, to watch porn movies; as the “loudspeakers emit grunts and groans…the air is heavy with the musky scent of bull seals.” On Pukapuka there is no word for “virgin” and having a bastard child makes a woman a desirable marriage candidate because she has proved her fecundity. This book made me think of both Jules Verne and Borges and I loved it. 

*I Am, I Am, I Am, Seventeen Brushes with Death

Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir is a set of short essays, each labeled with an impersonal noun (Neck, Lungs, Abdomen, Bloodstream etc.), moving back and forth throughout her life, all of them dealing, as her subtitle indicates, with mortality. A near drowning, a threatening stranger, a childhood illness—the scrambled chronology builds thematically to the final piece, Daughter, the longest of the seventeen and the most moving and heartbreaking. Sometimes books arrive at opportune times. A friend gave me I Am, I Am, I Am not long before my brother died; I read it shortly afterwards and, a few days after finishing it, my friend’s husband was suddenly in hospital, his future uncertain. Reading O’Farrell’s seventeen clearheaded pieces on this most emotional of subjects says a great deal about the comfort of books.

*Images and Texts

1.Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, The Art of Joseph Cornell is a lovely set of reflections on Cornell and his boxes, a series of short pieces—prose poems, paragraph long essays, quotations—that attempts in words what Cornell did with images and objects. There’s no doubting Simic’s deep affection for the work, and there’s also no doubting that the verbal and the visual affect us in very different ways.  Once you start to try and pin down the meaning of a Cornell box, you realize you need to do it aslant, which is the poet’s aim here.

Perhaps Simic’s most profound observation is his linking of Cornell and Dickinson, who “are both in the end unknowable.”

2.Mad Enchantment, Claude Monet and the Painting of the Waterlilies 

Ross King’s book is about old Monet going blind and painting his ephemeral yet massively scaled waterlilies during the Great War and the decade following (Monet died in 1926); but the heart of his story is the relationship between the painter and politician George Clemenceau, and it gets at the whole notion of legacy. It’s well researched, well written, and not really a long book (around 350 pages plus notes), still, before reaching the end, things started to seem slightly padded and I was wishing it was something along the lines of a long New Yorker piece instead of an entire book (a criticism that says more about me than about Ross King). I realize I would have been happier looking at a beautiful art book with lots of illustrations and bare bones text. Which is one of the reasons I tracked down a documentary about this subject, Water Lilies of Monet—The Magic of Water and Light in which Ross King makes an appearance. Directed by Giovanni Troilo and starring actress Elisa Lasowski as a glamourpuss presenter/clothes horse, it’s practically all padding (of the second rate art house variety), with not nearly enough footage of Monet’s canvasses (and what there is is not all that great). There’s way too much nonsense involving sequences with an actor dressed as Monet on a lurid set that looks like a Kon Tiki Lounge version of Mrs. Venable’s greenhouse in Suddenly Last Summer. Despite glimpses of Monet’s magnificent estate (often shot as if patrolled by drones), and smart commentary from people like Ross who know what they’re talking about, Troilo has fashioned an incredibly annoying, self serving movie.

*Eudora Welty and Ella Fitzgerald

The Optimist’s Daughter started off as a New Yorker story and grew into the short novel that was given a Pulitzer in 1973. Laurel comes home to Mississippi from Chicago to care for her ailing father and has to deal with Fay, her father’s new wife, who comes from a crass Texan family of the No Neck Monster variety. Soon they are two widows dealing with what they’ve lost in very different ways. If Fay is practically a cartoon, so are the cultivated hometown ladies Welty refers to as “the bridesmaids”, women who know how much better they are than redneck Fay. Like much of Welty’s short fiction, the novel is anchored in both the South and a world of folklore and myth, most beautifully in the section where, in a miraculous way, Laurel remembers her mother’s family roots “up home” in West Virginia. 

Eudora Welty was in some ways the Ella Fitzgerald of writers: both women possessed great natural gifts and were artists of wit and intelligence, as much beloved for themselves as for their work. Both radiated such deep warmth that they continue to draw us close, but in both Ella’s singing and Welty’s fiction there was barely a trace of sex. Ella was married at least twice (the son that she raised was her sister’s); Welty was very much the plain spinster lady, which is not to say that she wrote like your old maid aunt—witness her terrifying short story Where Is The Voice Coming From? written in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Medgar Evans; she was as fully grounded in the grit and gravel of the Mississippi life as Fitzgerald was in her world of jazz. But there is something about how the absence of sex helped to define them and their work, enhancing their individual uniquenesses. In some ways both retained a freshness, a sort of child’s view of the world. When Ella, well into her sixties, started to skat and swing, she was still the Tisket a Tasket teenager who loved to sing with Chick Webb. When Welty’s Laurel goes back in memory to her childhood and, further, into stories of her mother’s, we are taken into a story version of the South as filled with darkness and wonder as the Grimms’. There, in a beautiful lost place where pure white strawberries grow wild in the woods, the optimist’s daughter finds and understands her adult self.

December 2020

* The Color of Water, A Black Man’s Tribute To His White Mother

There’s no denying that Jame’s McBride’s mother was a remarkable, frustrating, laudable and complicated woman. Born Rachel Shilsky in Poland, she came to America with her desperately unhappy family, growing up in a household where she was molested by the rabbi father who treated her mother, crippled with polio, like shit. When she left home and changed her name to Ruth, she abandoned not only her name, but her family, her Orthodox faith, and her race as well. She fell in love with a black man (or men, there was a second after she was widowed), lived first in Harlem then in the projects, became a devout Christian, starting a church with husband number one, and had a dozen kids who, even though they lived hand to mouth, all made it through university. McBride interviewed her and edited her narrative which he intercuts with his own much more familiar (how a bad boy come to see the light) story. She’s something else, a great subject and, even though he doesn’t skip over her flaws, he does tend to humorize them and, like so much else in American popular culture, he shapes the narrative as if building to a standing ovation.

* Faulkner in Winter

Five of us were returning from a chilly beach walk and talking about (as is too often the case these days) Trump—this time, his blathering on about Confederate statues and the names of armed forces bases. I could tell that my friend was exasperated in the way that so many Canadians are when we get fed up with the constant din of self obsession from the US of A. We’re stuck with America’s loudmouth politicians, its relentless self importance, its domination of our culture—does its past have to take precedence over ours as well? She put the question to the one American in the group. 

“Why do Americans continue to obsess about the Civil War?” 

Without a beat, he answered, “Because it isn’t over yet.”

At the very beginning of the American Experiment, slavery was locked into the economics and structure of the nation, an original sin, and its aftereffects continue to permeate American society long after emancipation. Can they be separated from the country’s DNA? They a certainly a part of America’s cultural life.

One of the first great American movie directors was D. W. Griffith—he helped to establish an entire grammar for film and co-wrote and directed the greatest, craziest movie of them all, the 1916 Intolerance; but before that he made The Birth of a Nation which advanced possibilities for the movie form at the same time that it was directly responsible for the resurgence of the KKK and the deepening of a false narrative romanticizing the Old South. In many ways (sentiment, plot, action) Griffith was a Charles Dickens of the cinema, and there are sequences in his work that remain thrilling (just take a look at something like Richard Barthelmess rescuing Lillian Gish from an icy death in Way Down East); there’s no denying he was a terrific director, and there is also no doubt that he was a racist. And, like so many other racists, he didn’t believe that he was one. He claimed to have been so upset that people thought Birth was racist that he made Intolerance—which, significantly, dealt with class and religious intolerance but did not deal with race at all. Birth of a Nation is, I think, a great and significant film, and it’s also a profoundly racist one, a dichotomy that seems particularly American these days. I’m crazy over Intolerance but as an answer to the critics of Birth, it’s a dud: Griffith wrestled with nothing within himself—he didn’t face his demons because he wouldn’t acknowledge having them. As he might have put it, he “didn’t have a thing against negroes” (and he would probably have used a much more patronizing and racist word). Birth of a Nation paved the way for movies as we know them, but it also greased the path for the Klan, for Jim Crow, the moon and magnolia lies of happy slaves and benevolent slave owners, the lie that black men are a constant threat to white womanhood, and lynch mobs. Books and movies like Gone With The Wind followed, along with statues and armed forces bases dedicated to heroes of the Lost Cause. What do you do with an artist like Griffith, who is so significant, who gave us so much, and who will always be guilty as sin when it comes to throwing fuel on the fires of racial intolerance? To what extent should American culture be looked at through the perspective of that war that has yet to end?

No white American writer in the last century was more concerned with race than Mississippian William Faulkner; his books are steeped in it. Michael Gorra teaches English Lit at Smith and has edited critical editions of Faulkner’s novels; the genesis of his The Saddest Words, William Faulkner’s Civil War was a combination of love for the writer’s work and his reaction to the 2010 election that substantiated the rise of the Tea Party. Gorra sees in Faulkner a means to examine the clamour and anger of whites who feel disenfranchised, who believe themselves to be the victims still of the glorious Lost Cause. In his new book, he looks at the whole of Faulkner as one huge work—a world—encompassing all of the people and places in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi through the lens of the Civil War. Which is to say, through race. Lately I’ve been itching to reread Faulkner in the way that I yearn to go back to Moby Dick (it’s not just the remembered pleasures of Melville’s and Faulkner’s language, it seems to have something to do with the onset of winter and the shortness of days); Gorra’s book was an excellent place to start, to reacquaint myself with Yoknapatawpha and dive in. The Saddest Words is a significant piece of work illuminating not just Faulkner but America as well; it’s a lovely and ambitious piece of scholarship. What Gorra wants us to understand is that William Faulkner, who was (like D. W. Griffith before him) a white son of the South and a racist in many ways in his private life, was able to tackle issues of race in his work, and to rise above his own self through the writing. Gorra’s book a fantastic place to start looking at the work.

I hadn’t forgotten how difficult The Sound and the Fury could be—especially the Benjy “tale told by an idiot” section—but I had forgotten how frustrating it often is. In part, it’s because Benjy’s stream of consciousness narration makes little sense to me, and by that I mean that this isn’t the way that this mentally challenged boy-man’s mind would work so much as it is the way that modernist fiction time shifts work. I don’t quite buy it, and, these days, those connections and time shifts seems tailor made for academic nerds to mansplain on YouTube. Which is not to say that Benjy isn’t believable as a character, he is, and profoundly so, and the story of the fall of the Compson family is a true tale of the repercussions of a belief in the Lost Cause of the Old South. After Benjy’s section, and then his brother Quentin’s fractured narrations in Cambridge leading up to his suicide, it’s such a relief to get to the third section, the Jason section, and the knock down drag em out battles between Jason and his niece (also named Quentin). What Faulkner gives us through Jason Compson is a deep illustration of that poisonous combination of anger and entitlement that goes along with that Lost Cause (as a character, he’s Trumpian). It’s a frustrating novel and a thrilling one; Faulkner’s love of language and his excitement at playing with form carries you through even when the experiment seems to overwhelm the book itself.

Amazingly, the same year he published The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying, in, he claimed six weeks. If Samuel Becket had written a version of the Joad family’s journey in Grapes of Wrath it might read something like the Bundren’s trek to bury their matriarch. This is a bleak joke of a novel in which the misadventures of a white trash family approach the dimensions of Greek drama through Faulkner’s fractured telling (short narrative chapters, often monologues, from over a dozen characters); the form gives the story richness and texture and makes its grimness bearable. (Steinbeck used sentiment; Faulkner, not at all.) Anse Bundren, the appalling and toothless widower father, perhaps the most passive aggressive, selfish sonofabitch in American letters, drags his family through hell mostly so he can get himself a new set of teeth, and the whole book leads up to his final remark, a punchline, that works as if the whole novel were one, long, sick shaggy dog story. It’s heartbreaking.

A little over a decade later, during the Second World War, Faulkner published the novel that I love more than any other of his. Go Down, Moses was originally considered a collection of short stories (from The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, etc.), but it’s a novel in the way that Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde is a symphony, and its seven sections look specifically at race, mostly through the life of Isaac McCaslin, Uncle Ike, who is born just after the Civil War and lives half way into the next century. The various sections move around in time and reveal a history of not just McCaslin and his kin, but his grandfather’s slaves and their kin, and, in a profoundly moving way, it’s a biography of the land as well. The centrepiece of the book, and a third of its length, is The Bear, which, for my money, is one of the greatest things to come out of American literature. Ike’s boyhood hunting experiences in which he joins his cousin McCaslin, old Sam Fathers (part Chickasaw, part black), Major de Spain, Boon Hoggenbeck and the rest as they keep going back deep into the woods year after year to hunt a huge bear that has become a myth. It’s a grand, exciting adventure story that gets to the heart of the idea of the wild and uncorrupted wilderness becoming tamed and ruined; Faulkner manages to tie together the exploitation of the land and the sin of slavery. When Ike ultimately looks at the family account books, we discover that his grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, fathered a daughter by his slave Eunice and then sired that daughter’s son. Original sin doubled and then doubled again. The fourth section of The Bear, a long complicated dialogue between Uncle Ike and his cousin that leads to Ike’s renouncement of his heritage is, I think, a seminal moment in American literature, and the writing of it the sort of act that is necessary to begin the ending of the Civil War.

November 2020

* One Election/Two Books

1. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicholson looks at the year that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth lived near each other in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, influencing each other’s writing and changing the the course of English poetry. Beginning with their meeting in June of 1797 and ending in September of ‘98 when, separately, they went to Germany, Nicholson looks at their daily lives (lots of walks with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy), their collaborations, their visitors (Hazlitt, Lamb) and gives close readings of Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abbey. While working on the book, he was in Somerset himself, walking the same routes with artist Tom Hammick who completed a series of woodblock prints (the wood coming from downed trees on the property the Wordsworths had rented) based on both the poets’ friendship and their work. Even though the text is much more satisfying than the dozens of prints—all decently reproduced on glossy paper—their relationship no doubt was a boon to Nicholson’s exploration of landscape, text and biography. His own text is a thing of beauty, very finely written and revealing. There probably aren’t whole lot of us who regularly go back to these poets (although many, like me, of a certain age can probably still recite lines from both: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…” “Water water everywhere…” “Five years have passed; five summers with the length of five long winters…” etc. etc.)—they seems very much from the world of old high school textbooks and English literature classes—but it was a joy to return to this world again. Much of Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth’s ballads, appeal to me the way old pop music does (the rhythms, the sentiments), but Wordsworth’s breakthrough longer autobiographical poetry has beauty and satisfaction akin to Schubert’s great song cycles (a composer born just before the time frame of this book, in January 1797). During this nail biting week of US electoral hell, it has been a relief to spend time with Nicolson as he journeys through the Quantocks, and to pick up my old college Riverside editions and rediscover why my very young self so loved Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.

2. On election day itself I went back to Robert Penn Warren and read his 1961 The Legacy of the Civil War, which was a kind of response to The Briar Patch the essay his younger self contributed to I’ll Take My Stand thirty years before. The War, he writes, “gave the South the Great Alibi and gave the North the Treasury of Virtues.” And, “sometimes it is difficult to distinguish love of liberty from lust for blood.” It’s an intelligent, sad little book, half a century old, examining dark political battles and yearnings that remain as immediate now as they have been for more than a century. 

*Götterdämmerungs of Sleaze 

Journalist Anne Applebaum and I have not shared a what I’d call a common political view. At the beginning of Twilight of Democracy she writes about her relationship to the centre right, and has not unkind things to say about Thatcher, John Major, and John McCain (in his pre Palin days). She begins her book with a 1999 New Years party at her home in Poland (an American, she’s married to Polish journalist and politician Radek Sikorski) and it’s a terrific set piece: many of the friends who were together celebrating the new century, friends who, for the most part, did share fairly common political views, would soon be at each other’s political throats. Her book’s subtitle is The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism and she makes her case with chapters on Polish politics (the rise of the Law and Justice party), Spain (the return of Fascist nationalism), and two lying disasters of Brexit and Trump. Running through all of these accounts are the roles played by clercs; the term comes from Julien Benda’s 1927 La trahison des clercs—(translated as either The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Great Betrayal) and refers to, in Applebaum’s words, “thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers, writers and artists” who aid and abet authoritarian sensibilities for their own political gain. (Clerc is a useful description in the same manner as Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.) Many of the people she’s writing about are the less than the best who, through family connections, cunning, lying and corruption, are able to achieve a kind of status and power previously unavailable to them.

Applebaum is extremely smart and she’s long been an observer near the centre of things. There’s her political husband, of course (and Sikorski was pals with Boris Johnson when they were at Oxford), she worked at the Spectator when it was owned by Conrad Black, and she’s an authority on Russia. This is a brief but significant book and she has lots to offer in her analysis of how the world has shifted/continues to shift into a madness that seemed impossible a mere decade ago. Twilight of Democracy is really to be recommended for its analysis and understanding our current hell. And yet her thoughts on previous conservative figures—Reagan, say—do muddy the waters for me, and not just because she speaks from a position of considerable privilege. After all, how many of us have the kind of parties where our friends jet in from across the Atlantic? In some ways she shares a similar turf with her pal David Frum who has gone from supporting the Iraq invasion (as in working in the White House and helping come up with that Marvel comix sounding moniker, “the axis of evil”) to being a massive anti-Trumper. But who clears the way for a nightmare like Trump? Three years ago, Applebaum tweeted, “After this is all over, I never, ever want to hear again about how businessmen would run the government better than politicians.” But American politics have been in the hands of capital (hello Dick Cheney, how fares Halliburton?) for quite some time, and Ronald Reagan’s City of a Hill was always, for many of us, a gated community.

*Poets, Mentors, Aging and Youth 

When Louise Glück got the Nobel Prize (hurrah), I checked to see what books of hers I hadn’t read and promptly ordered The Seven Ages. Published twenty years ago and written in her late fifties, it’s very much about aging, about death on the horizon, and (as is inevitable) about looking back, most movingly to summers in childhood, sunny afternoons with her sister. Glück seems a special case, a writer who is at once cool, almost detached, and yet obsessed with the passionate core of things. Both Romantic and Classicist, her poetry is elegant and intelligent, wise even, maybe, at times, a bit austere, and never showoffy, never annoyingly dense. She’s always on a quest that, by being personal, becomes profoundly universal. Every book of hers has made me feel a deep gratitude, and this one was no exception.

While looking her up online I found a book by one of her students, Four Reincarnations. Max Ritvo was an incredibly talented poet who died at 26 after a decade’s battle with cancer. Of course the poems are obsessed with his disease and death, and they’re also, like Glück’s, analytical in the best sense, that is, wise and probing, with marvellous language. His poems, much more overtly than his teacher’s, have a sense of playfulness and fun. That said, in this clip of his wedding vows, just a year before his death in 2016, Glück officiates, and she is very, very funny. They clearly not only respected but also adored each other.

* Kay Ryan

I’ve been spending time with the work of Kay Ryan, new and selected poems in The Best of It, and Synthesizing Gravity, a collection of her prose edited by Christian Wiman. Her orneriness attracted me, that and her brevity:  short poems (twenty-five lines would be a long one), and short lines (just a couple of beats per) that ripple forwards with internal rhymes. Her debts to Dickinson are clear, as well as to Stevie Smith. (She’s also fond of Philip Larkin and Marianne Moore.) Her verse can delight (“Flamingo Watching”) but it can sometimes move into the direction of “A wonderful bird is the pelican…” Her prose can be fun as well (she’s a bright and likeable curmudgeon); there’s a very funny piece about being very out of synch at a writer’s conference, and she uses wit to make her points in close readings of poems by Hopkins, Frost, Dickinson and Larkin.

I’m attracted to her suspiciousness of forms (“Just to say ‘the contemporary sestina’ sounds as lovely and hopeless as saying ‘the contemporary minuet.’”), and her plainspoken lack of preciousness. Sometimes there were stretches of poems that are amusing or ok, and I’d be thinking “more of same,” but then, suddenly a pay off such as one near the end of a selection from her 1996 Elephant Rocks when two poems (“Poetry in Translation” and “If She Only Had One Minute”) arrive and knock my socks off.

More than anything, I loved this paragraph from an essay called “Specks”, which is online, here, in the September 2013 issue of Poetry:

"It’s not so much what poems are, in themselves, but the infinitely larger optimism they offer by their intermittent twinkles: that beneath the little lights on their tiny masts, so far from one another, so lost to each other, there must be a single black sea. We could have no sense of the continuousness of the unknowable without these buoyant specks.”

October 2020

*Insectopedia

At the Banff Centre art gallery quite a number of years ago, there was an exhibit of entomological drawings by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger that affected me very deeply. Exquisitely detailed and painted, with labels like 

Soft Bug from Pripjat, Ukraine/ Right side middle leg is short with no foot but two claws

they were detailed portraits of mutations from insect populations that had been affected by nuclear fallout. It was extraordinary combination of environmental warning and great beauty, and it made me look at bugs in a new way.

Hugh Raffles has arranged his Insectopedia alphabetically, twenty-six entries of which Hesse-Honegger and her work are the third, under C for Chernobyl. His book is not so much about insects as about our relationships to them. There are essays on the tradition of cricket fights in China, on the dancing language of bees, on the role that anti-semites have given to cockroaches; it’s like reading one terrific New Yorker article after another. Raffles is smart and funny with a warm inquisitive take on the world; his fascinations are contagious. And I’m thankful for being reintroduced to Hesse-Honeggar, whose insects you can see here. 

*Ernesto

Although I didn’t see it, I was aware of Ernesto, the 1979 Michele Placido/Virna Lisi movie—who could forget that poster of Placido with eyes downcast, face worshipful, cheek pressed against the hip of a boy his pants pulled down below his bare ass? But I didn’t know of the Umberto Saba novel on which it was based until a friend sent me a copy. It’s an interesting little book, written late in Saba’s life, and not published until after his death, about the sexual awakening of a teenager in Trieste at the end of the 19th century. Ernesto is willingly seduced by a labourer at the warehouse where he works; when he tires of the affair after a few weeks, it seems to have as much to do with class as it does with being the young bottom. He proceeds to have sex with a prostitute, then—in an unfinished last section—is infatuated with a young boy he spies in a concert hall. But the most remarkable sequence in the book isn’t in the sexual stuff, it’s in a scene between Ernesto and his mother. When he tells her about the affair with man at the warehouse, it’s surprising  because his behaviour is as callow and self serving as it is honest. Set during Saba’s youth (he was born in 1883) and written in the early 1950s, it’s a slight thing, albeit groundbreaking and deft.

*Distant Next of Kin

In her first book, Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, Rebecca Wragg Sykes provides an up to the minute compilation of what is known about the subject, effectively conveying both her passion for it as well as a magnificent sense of time. Neanderthals are often thought of as a crude flash in the evolutionary pan as opposed to what they truly were, namely, beings who existed on this earth for more than three hundred thousand years. (To put that in perspective, that’s 298,000 years before Jesus died for your sins.) A great deal of her prose is clear and smart. “Neanderthals, over considerable periods of time, were interested in applying colour to unusual things,” she writes. “That, fundamentally, is a definition of art.” I liked the book a lot—there’s a fair amount of material here that was new to me—and I liked especially her chapters on art and on death. But I do have a couple of beefs. At the start of each chapter there’s a line drawing illustration accompanying a paragraph or half page of overwritten narrative text (e.g.“Breathing woodsmoke-spiced air, tiny fists uncurl as golden milk flows.”); the drawings are pretty uninformative and fairly crude and some of those paragraphs—unlike the bulk of the text—verge on the sentimental. This wouldn’t trouble me so much if there weren’t such a dearth of useful illustrations throughout. This is a book that could really use more maps, more charts, more pictures of stone and bone tools. It’s easy to get lost in the various digs or in their time frames. But still, for someone like me who maintains an obsession with prehistory and time, it’s a treasure trove. An extensive bibliography is online here.

*What We See When We Read

When I was eight or nine years old, a small public library opened in an upstairs room at our town hall and I became a true reader—going weekly to check out the shelves for new arrivals, and asking the librarian, Mrs. Leger (we called her Titsy because of the ample bosom on when she would rest the book she was reading), to order books for me. I was thrilled when she allowed me to start taking books from the adult shelves. She happily fed my reading habit.

At some point fairly early on, I realized that no matter where the books were set, when I read I would picture them in places I knew. Quite often characters lived in a version of my friend Richard’s house. I understood how not unusual this was when my mother told me that even though she had been to Cavendish and walked through “the real Green Gables”, when she read the book she pictured a house in our town, a house she had been inside only one or two times when she was a girl.

In What We See When We Read, his graphic essay of a book, Peter Mendelsund writes of similar connections and it’s fun to breeze through the text and pictures going, Yes, Okay, Aha. I, too, have only a vague sense of a book’s characters’ features, or have imagined scenes in Anna Karenina occurring in places that I know. Mendelsund is a very savvy book cover designer—he’s associate art director at Knopf—and a fair amount in here is fairly pithy. Some things are very pleasurable—the way he puts down a particularly terrible bit by Updike, say—but if you were to take all of his observations and put them in a list, it would run to, what, a handful of pages? Five? Ten? Yet his book is 400 pages plus (although, because the bulk of it is illustration, you can whip through it in an afternoon). Would it have seen the light of day if he were not who is is at Knopf?

I’ve sent it off to a friend with aphantasia to see what he makes of it.

* Eugene Onegin

My clearest memory from the first production I ever saw of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is that, unknown to the audience, the soprano singing Tatiana had inhaled a whiff of smoke from a candle during the Letter Scene in Act 1.  At intermission we were told that she was indisposed, and unable to sing the rest of the performance; instead, she marked her place on stage, moving her lips while her understudy sang out from the wings. This was quite a few decades ago at the cavernous and musically unfriendly O’Keefe Centre, and the whole lip synching experience was not one that drew me close to either characters or story. The next time I saw the opera was more than a decade later with Brett Polegato bravely giving his all in a production with a fairly stunned directorial concept, namely, that the entire story was some sort of fever dream of Onegin’s. This meant that Polegato could never once leave the stage and was always lurking about spying on the scenes (like the Letter, which takes place while Tatiana is alone in her room at night) where Onegin was not present. Despite the singing and the gorgeous, and gorgeously sad music, what one was aware of was a baritone trying not to pull focus.

So when I saw the Met’s Robert Carson production of Eugene Onegin a few years ago, with Michael Levine’s huge white walled set, and two great principals—Dimitri Hvorostovsky and Rene Fleming—I was shocked by how deeply it affected me. I’d admired Fleming before without ever really caring for her, but her Tatiana simply knocked my socks off. She pulls off the guileless romanticism of the Letter Scene, and she’s youthful heartbreak itself when Onegin condescends to her after she’s confessed her all to him. Then, in the final act, when, years later, and married, she rejects Onegin after his letter, Tchaikovsky’s opera seemed one of the greatest of all works of romanticism. It was beautifully staged and vividly alive. Since then I’ve tried to see it whenever I get the chance. The latest was another version from the Met, this one with Anna Netrebko and Peter Mattei. The Deborah Warner production didn’t thrill as much as Carson’s had, but the first couple of acts looked great and the leads inhabited the material completely: great singing and great acting. The libretto is so beautifully constructed; each act has a scene of remarkable emotional power—the letter and its aftermath, the name day party that ends with Onegin being challenged to a duel, the duel itself where he kills his friend and, in the final act, Onegin’s letter and Tatiana’s response. It’s so emotionally satisfying.

After this last go through, I thought it high time I finally read the Pushkin novel, which every Russian singer interviewed talks of as being a part of the Russian soul. (What literary equivalent could we possibly have in this country?) Luckily there was a copy in the house, a Book of the Month edition from 2000 of the Vladimir Nabokov translation that I’d picked up last year in a second hand bin. I sent off for a couple of verse translations, by Stanley Mitchell and James Falen, then settled in with the trio.

The Nabokov seems pretty indispensable for accuracy and for his introduction and commentary. What it does not attempt (because he believed it was folly to try) is the verse, eight chapters with forty to fifty some stanzas in each: a narrative of sonnets. The Eugene Onegin stanza is very specific, fourteen lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ababeecciddiff. Of the two verse translations, I favoured the Falen, for reasons that have nothing to do with anything besides the pleasure it gave me; it seemed the least forced and sounded best (to my ears) when read aloud.

Pushkin’s is a pretty wonderful thing, both playful and moving, with such compelling characters. Tchaikovsky wrote most of the libretto himself and wisely used whole chunks of the poem. What he left out is interesting—mostly the years between the duel and Onegin and Tatiana meeting again in Moscow—but his opera is very faithful. It seems the perfect subject for opera because the characters’ emotions are so big and clear. Because Pushkin is so present as narrator in the poem, their emotions are filtered through him and, to this non-Russian reading him a couple of hundred years later, they feel distant. What’s interesting to me is that this highly romantic story existing in two very stylized formats, both of which were dearer to the 19th century than to our own, still affects me; but from my vantage point, I admire the original as a historical relic but the opera, well, depending upon the singers and the production, that can tear me apart. If I were Russian and reading Pushkin in the original, would it move me as deeply as Tchaikovsky? Would the opera seem like a pale imitation? 

Here’s the final scene from the Met’s Carson production: link

*Jenny Erpenbeck

Because I think so highly of her last three novels, I grabbed Not a Novel, A Memoir in Pieces when it came out in a translation by Kurt Beals. It’s not quite a memoir either, rather a series of essays, lectures and thank-you speeches and always interesting without really being more than a collection. What is constant throughout is her intelligence, her (to me) exemplary politics and concerns for the disenfranchised. The pieces having to do with growing up in East Germany and with the fall of the Berlin wall are compelling for what they reveal about her perceptive from the East, and for the wider perspective in which she views the collapse: “we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall, but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean” Politics, social inequality—these are among the things that drive her writing. 

All these are evident, too, in a pair of Erpenbeck’s very slim early books, The Old Child & Other Stories and The Book of Words (both translated by Susan Bernofsky). The first is a novella about a young woman pretending to be a child in order to escape a world she cannot bear, and the second, set in a South American dictatorship, about a young girl who is being raised by parents not her own, in fact, by a man connected to her birth parents’ disappearance. Both are related to fables, but without the preciousness that often entails. She’s hard-nosed as well as compassionate, poetic as well as pragmatic. 

*My Friends

Victor Baton, the narrator of My Friends, the 1924 Emmanuel Bove novel, is a poor man with no friends, and as you read his brief saga, in which he walks about his Paris neighbourhood, stumbling into attempts to make some, you’ll know why he’s alone. Desperate for companionship, he’s ungrateful even in distress, and picky, latching onto everyone’ physical flaws; he’s a comic riff on John Cheever’s “Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand…” He resembles nothing so much as Chaplin’s dirty little tramp scrounging about in Samuel Beckett’s universe. The translation is by Janet Louth.

September 2020

* Damien Wilkins, Max Gate

Max Gate is the name that Thomas Hardy gave to the house he designed and built in Dorset in 1885, and where he lived for forty or so years, fairly unhappily with his wives Emma (she was, it’s safe to say, miserable) and Florence (his former secretary, nearly forty years his junior, she would have to come to terms with the fact that the great man would write reams of love poetry to her dead predecessor, revering, in death, poor Emma who he had not treated all that well in life). Damien Wilkins sets his novel during the very last days of Hardy’s life, and the politics, both domestic and national, are observed by his housemaid Nellie. To a certain extent it’s an upstairs/downstairs story, and a critique of Hardy, the man that all revere but, at this point, no one seems to like all that much. There’s the famous story of tug of war to determine who gets his body: the nation (that is burial in Westminster), or the local church in Stinsford (where Hardy wanted to end up). And so we have the tale of the local doctor cutting out the heart to leave in Dorset, while the heartless remains are sent off to glory in London. We also have the story of the cat who sank her teeth into that heart before it was interred. Wilkins is a lovely writer; the prose is very fine, and there’s such a strong sense of what it was to be stuck in that crazy, airless house. Nellie Titterington, looking back on the events of that 1928 January, is a wise and witty narrator.

*Here We Are In Deep Time

David Farrier is a professor of English literature with an interest in how poetry responds to the current geological moment. (His first book was Anthropocene Poetics.) In Footprints, In Search of Future Fossils, he’s looking at what will happen to our major constructions (buildings, roadways, bridges) over the centuries, at how we’re planning to deal with nuclear waste, at the effect of plastic on the oceans—in short, at what eternal markings we’re leaving on the planet (and beyond—we’re responsible for thousands of tonnes of space junk, hundreds of objects on the moon’s surface, and pollution in Jupiter’s atmosphere from the Galileo probe.) He’s situating our world and how we inhabit it into Deep Time. What are the origins of the plastic in a disposable water bottle and how will its future spin out in the eons to come?  In addition to science and his own first hand observations (at the Great Barrier Reef, at an open pit mine), Farrier filters information through writers he cares about—Borges, Woolf, Le Guinn; it’s a smart, erudite, compelling read.

August 2020

* Ninth Street Women, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art 

Mary Gabriel has written books about the Cone sisters, Karl and Jenny Marx, and Victoria Woodhull; her latest (2018), a big, fat, juicy history of the abstract expressionists, centres on two generations of women painters and spans the decades from the Depression (and FDR’s New Deal art projects) to the end of the Fifties and the arrival of art as an investment for the rich. It’s great to see this very exciting—and what’s often thought of as a very male—period through their perspective. Gabriel is very good at showing what women were up against both socially (living in sin, having abortions, etc.) as well as artistically. Critics and galleries actually changed their opinions of the work when they realized the painters weren’t men; women, it was believed, could not make serious, important art. What I’d forgotten was how vilified they all (men and women) were: Life magazine, the Hearst press, and the critics were all gunning for them. And, too, because they eventually were the beginnings of the insane American art market, it’s easy to forget that for decades most of them were poor as rats, living in New York studios that were alternatively freezing or sweltering with the season. (The exceptions were Mitchell and Frankenthaler who came from money.) The book is a history of the AbEx movement, but it’s also a feminist social history of America, and it’s written by someone who understand painting and writes well about it. All that being said, it’s interesting the degree to which Jackson Pollack dominates the book; he was the movement’s primary mover and shaker, after all, and, no doubt, when sober, was maybe a decent, shy, guy troubled by feeling of inadequacy, but, oh, god, he becomes such a colossal, needy, violent, pain in the ass drunk, and Lee Krasner becomes such an enabler because she is so wedded to the belief that he’s going to be not just their meal ticket but an immortal genius to boot. (Gabriel is heavy into the genius mythology as well—that noun, as well as “masterpiece” are more than sprinkled throughout.) I loved reading Ninth Street Women but have to admit that around page 500 I was getting weary of stories involving drunken Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf openings and dinner parties, as well as the who-was-sleeping-with-who tally sheets. A lot of the crowd were still living like untrustworthy twenty-somethings when they were twice that age. This is somehow exacerbated by the fact that Gabriel uses first names throughout. To a certain extent, I get it; one wants to be able to, say, keep the de Koonings apart. But the effect of all the Elaines, Bills, Lees, Graces, Joan, Franks, Jacksons, etc. is, after a while, a bit too gossipy chatty. But the book is filled with marvellous stuff: Lee Krasner dancing with Mondrian, Joan Mitchell playing pool with Samuel Becket and, on the one night they decided to check into a hotel and have sex, he loses his teeth in the room. This was not a crowd that could be accused of being dull. (It’s a tremendous relief when Helen Frankenthaler finds a bit of happiness with Robert Motherwell; you breathe a sigh of relief.) And then there’s the death of Pollack, which is like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the end, it’s a fantastic documentation (700 pages plus 200 more of notes) of the treatment of women artists in the 20th century by critics, the press, galleries and museums.

* Cranky Old Men

What attracted me to this book was old age: Michelangelo, God’s Architect deals with the last two decades in the artist’s very long life (he died at 89 in 1564 when the average life expectancy was less than half that). William E. Wallace has already written a good half dozen books about the man, and we get to understand a lot about Renaissance art and architecture, papal intrigue, Roman life in all levels of society, as well as Michelangelo’s day to day routines as he laboured on his last commission, St. Peter’s Basilica (Wallace considers it his “greatest masterpiece”). We come to see how Michelangelo reconfigured an inherited deeply flawed design, making the dome structurally sound, how he dealt with not only workmen and materials, but also a few popes (he outlived all but the last of five who kept recommissioning him to finish the thing). He kvetches in letters to his nephew back in his hometown of Florence (who supplies him with wine), he writes poetry to Vittoria Colonna, with whom he is smitten and with whom he shares a a deeply felt devotion to God. Wallace knows the material so well that he indulges in a bit of the I-know-what-he-must-have-been-thinking kind of historical writing, which is less a sin than the fair number of repetitions that have slipped past the editor. It is useful to look at the end of a life so filled with magnificence—buildings, paintings, sculptures—but I think that, in many ways, what I’m after has to do with what Wallace can’t give us. Michelangelo was a company man—the company being the Church of Rome—and I’m longing for insights into things he could speak only to himself when he was pushing ninety and had seen it all before. What did his think of Pope Julius III and his “nephew”? Would a pope’s carnal nature shake his own profound faith? But then, he was a Renaissance man, not a Modern one, and what I’m after probably doesn’t exist. His main goal probably was to make sure that the St. Peter’s he designed would be finished without him around to mortar the last brick. That was no small feat, and he did it. It’s a rich, compelling book, with nearly sixty glossy pages of very good illustrations.

*”It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.”

The Friend is the eighth book Sigrid Nunez has written, and it’s the one that’s really taken off: rave reviews, best book lists, the National Book Award, etc. This is almost surprising because it’s a very low key work, almost plotless, as much meditation as novel. The unnamed narrator, a writer and writing professor, and her former teacher and mentor, also a writer, have been old friends since they slept together once, years before, when she was his student; after his death, she ends up inheriting his dog, a Great Dane that she does not want. That’s pretty much all there is to the story. She’s a gleaner, a collector of facts, news items and anecdotes, and the narrative, which is addressed to her dead friend, consists of lists, quotes, scraps from other books, complaints about her students, as well as daily routines with his dog, Apollo (a rare character actually named), and the hassles of living in a small apartment where dogs are forbidden. It’s a sly work—the stakes never seem as high as you imagine they could be, and yet the accumulation of small events, literary artifacts, and simple story is very moving. It’s smart, and thoughtful, a generous book about grief and about why we write. When I was done, I read the last section again, and then over again; it was too spare and too lovely to be done with so soon.

* Where Power Stops, The Making and Unmaking of Presidents and Prime Ministers

The title implies that this is more than the sum of its parts, its parts being a collection of book reviews from the LRB, the books in question being about leaders (LJB, Thatcher, Clinton, Trump, etc.) and would be leaders (Edwards, McCain). But David Runciman is a very smart guy (his Talking Politics podcast is terrific) and the reviews are insightful and fairly snappy. Running through these pieces is the idea that once someone gets to the top, the president or the PM then comes to understand the limits of his or her power, Trump being the stunned exception that proves the rule.

* Flannery O’Connor

According to William Cowper’s old hymn, “God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform”; rarely was that wonder more mysterious than in the writings of the devoutly Catholic Flannery O’Connor. She’s been dead more than fifty years now—her time on earth ended just as she was about to enter middle age—and her stories can still shock you into laughter and make you squirm. Few writers aim to make us as uncomfortable, and fewer of them do it because they need to make us understand the grace and mystery of God. My relationship with O’Connor’s writing has been long and mixed. At the heart of what makes me squirm is her Catholicism which, for an old atheist like me, seems relentlessly bleak and cruel. I just can’t shake a story like A Good Man Is Hard To Find; her version of grace, that is, God’s favour and salvation, is about as grim as it gets (namely, three bullets in the chest of a gabby old woman from a killer on the lam). Yet her prose is wild and thrilling, cackling with brilliance. Because Paul Elie, himself a Catholic writer, wrote a piece in the New Yorker’s George Floyd issue this past June making the case that she was a racist, I thought it was high time to take her down from the shelf after quite a few years and give her another read. I dipped into The Complete Stories, then read the book that had always been my favourite—it was her last—Everything That Rises Must Converge.

O’Connor lived most of her life with her widowed mother on a farm in Georgia, a situation necessitated by the crippling lupus that eventually took her life. It’s tempting to see their relationship mirrored in her work: the stories are filled with self righteous single parents and ungrateful children fractiously living at each other’s throats in, for the most part, the rural South. If she was drawing from her own experience, she was looking into her family’s darkest, most unvarnished corners, fearless and relentlessly. She suffered constant physical pain, religiously went to mass, and when, at a literary soiree, she was told that the Eucharist was a pretty good symbol, replied, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” The one thing she did not share with her characters was their faith, and by that I mean that she pretty much wrote about Protestants. She also wrote about race. While she easily and keenly entered the minds of the most downtrodden, the most misguided, trashy, foolish, bigoted and self righteous whites, male and female, young and old, she always wrote about blacks from the exterior. Her narrative voice respectfully calls them “Negroes” (the accepted word at that time, one now needs to add), but to her characters they are always, always “niggers.” In the context of her stories, blacks folks are no better or worse than her white ones, but they are most certainly other, and you get the sense that she will not (or cannot) inhabit their world and their lives; she writes exclusively about the way her white characters relate to them. The last thing you could ever accuse her of is cultural appropriation.

Her dialogue, rich and hilarious, packed with sarcasm and sanctimony, reveals character and is pretty relentlessly punctuated with N-words. O’Connor’s people are always measuring themselves against the others in their limited worlds (families, friends and strangers alike), and in these assessments of caste, they inevitably see blacks as occupying the lesser position. In the title story Everything That Rises Must Converge, a college educated son who believes himself superior to his racist mother, and wants to display this by being friendly to black people, is exposed as a racist, a phony and a snob. His mother comes across as the less hypocritical of the two, which in no way leaves her off the hook; both of them suffer a grim comeuppance. (Not quite three bullets in the chest, but grim nonetheless.) In the story Revelation, a Mrs. Turpin (who hails from a farm not unlike O’Connor’s own) is constantly imagining conversations with a Jesus who forces her to make impossible choices about her future life like,“You can either be a nigger or white trash”; Mrs. Turpin ultimately proves to Jesus that she’s a superior person by choosing the former, “but that don’t mean a trashy one” and imagines herself “a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.” It’s simply a given that each and every person in all these stories lives in a world that is segregated, and deeply, profoundly racist. But race is not the subject of these stories because race was not O’Connor’s prime concern—that would be grace.

Was she a racist? No doubt she was raised to think and act like one, and she certainly didn’t see herself as a writer whose goal was to change the social order. The writer in her knew what a racist was, that’s for sure, and there’s no way that she writes approvingly of their actions. Her work is grounded in the lives of people who struggle, who cheat and lie, and who, if they love, do so fairly selfishly. Nearly everyone in these stories is filled with relentless anger, rage, and a sense of entitlement. Does she set herself apart from them? I don’t think so. You don’t understand that rage so completely if you’ve never been part of it. When she writes, she’s pretty much looking into a mirror (something that a lot of her imitators do not do.) The writing seems a constant struggle to overcome a personal darkness, to try for grace again and again (cackling all the while).

Reading her now, in this intense moment of Black Lives Matter (which is where Paul Ekie has firmly placed his New Yorker article), she certainly does not offer us an ounce of balm or hope in that direction. If her characters talk about integration, it is with anger. Ekie puts himself on the side of the angels of today and ends up somewhat akin to that collage educated son. What O’Connor does give the current moment is an eagle eyed look at what fuels the people who see their current president as a saviour. Everything That Rises Must Converge has been, to say the least, an interesting book to be reading during the 2020 Republican convention. It doesn’t seem to have dated one whit; and if you had to give a man from Mars one book that could help explain the bullheaded ridiculousness of Trump’s congregants, this wouldn’t be a bad choice. Ultimately for me it’s her faith, which was in many ways her all as a writer, that holds me back. (Those goddam bullets in the old lady’s chest.) Writers from the American South were among the first who spoke to the deepest parts of me; their world was, in so many ways, one that helped me make sense of the one I grew up with in New Brunswick. I can’t not care about Flannery O’Connor, and it’s no good wishing she were more like, say, Eudora Welty, who wrote in A Worn Path about of an old black woman walking to get her grandson some medicine as if that woman were a Biblical character in a profound fable. More to the point, when confronted with the horror of a political moment like the murder of Medgar Evers, Welty was capable of diving into the dark heart of a racist killer and writing Where Is The Voice Coming From? O’Connor was not so capacious a writer; she was too single minded of purpose. She also died young, so god only knows where her work might have gone in ten, twenty years.

Studs Terkel once asked his friend Mahalia Jackson when was she going to ease off the gospel music and start singing the blues. Her answer went something like, “When you start believing in God and going to church.”

* Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night:

Robert Penn Warren & James Kerry Marshall

[1] The links and associations one makes can be thrilling and revealing. Four years ago I went to a Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer, the old Whitney, on Madison Ave. Apart from reproductions, it was the first time I’d seen his work. Marshall is an extraordinarily productive and compelling painter; one of the things that made the show so exciting was simply the scope of it. The Garden Project (here), a series of huge unstretched canvases, ten and eleven feet long and almost as high, of housing projects in LA and Chicago, mixes images of childhood and pride of home with urban decay and municipal neglect. The paintings had the excitement and zing of old circus sideshow banners. There were also formal paintings of iconic historical figures, Harriet Tubman and the like; and there were big bright vibrant scenes of contemporary life in barbershops and hair salons, packed with figures alive with stories of their lives. In all of these, a remarkable array of shades of blackness—jet blacks, blue blacks, grey blacks—revealed his determination to paint blackness into the history of Western Art, magnificently showing that it is not one colour but an infinite variety of colour. Black Painting was all black; well nigh impossible to reproduce, you need to be standing in front of it to see it in all its heartbreaking glory. A bedroom in the dark with countless varieties of black pigments showing pictures in the walls, shoes on the floor, dresser, end table, lamps, bed, and a couple asleep—it’s December 4, 1969, just before 5 AM: Fred Hampton and his pregnant wife are in their final moment together before the FBI will bust in and shoot him in the head. Also in the show was Heirlooms and Accessories, a triptych of prints sourced from a famous (it was a popular postcard) 1930 photo of a double lynching in Indiana. The gruesome photo of the celebratory crowd of whites milling about beneath the huge tree, two bodies dangling above them, is ghosted out, barely visible; what Marshall has done is isolate the faces of three women in the crowd who are all looking at the camera; he has put each of them in a locket on a chain. (video) These last two works are remarkable in their politics, their clarity and their anger. Throughout the show, the “craft” of his work was everywhere apparent, but so was his intelligence and his heart; he’s a generous artist.

A little over a month ago, there was an email notice from the David Zwirner Gallery (here) and an article in the NY Times (here) about an online show of Marshall’s latest paintings, the beginning of a new series inspired by Jean Jacques Audubon, and the (disputed) idea that, being born illegitimately in what is now Haiti, the son of French sea captain and a chambermaid, he can be considered a black artist. The paintings are of birds, both black (crows) and “part black”, that is, one’s with black markings which, when you think about it, includes a fairly infinite number (finches, chickadees, bluejays, cardinals…). He’s very smartly riffing on both Audubon’s parentage and on the racist “one drop” of black blood rule that many American states used at one time to fortify white supremacy. Through Audubon and Audubon’s Birds of America, he looks at the idea of what is blackness, of what does it mean to be black, in new ways.

[2] In addition to Audubon’s potential racial lineage, I remembered the story of him being the lost son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; I knew that I knew this because of the first lines of Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon, A Vision:

Was not the lost dauphin, though handsome was only

Base-born and not even able

To make a decent living, was only

Himself, Jean Jacques, and his passion—what

Is man but his passion?

This last week it has been great to follow Audubon from painter to poet, to take the Selected Poems, 1923-1975 down from the shelf and look at Penn Warren’s 1969 poem again. I read it first in grad school, in a course that I loved more than any other I’ve ever taken, “Literature of the American South”, taught by the very aptly named Virginia Rock. She’d written her thesis on Penn Warren and the other Southern Agrarians who published I’ll Take My Stand in 1930. His contribution to that collection had been The Briar Patch, an essay in support of segregation. Born in Kentucky in 1905, he adored his grandfather, who, despite the fact that, as Penn Warren claimed, he’d supported preserving the union above states rights, had fought in the Civil War. In his youth, Penn Warren could not imagine an alternative to segregation in the South. What’s instructive about him as a man and a writer is that he didn’t simply outgrow this, he worked like a bugger to understand both the world of his grandfather and the civil rights movement as it was evolving. He travelled across the country interviewing a remarkable series of black men and women, including Dr. King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, and published Who Speaks for the Negro? He was nearly fifty when he became a father and the experience of it opened him up, he became warmer, more expansive, and began to find his truest voice as a poet. (There’s a lovely PBS documentary (here) about his life with contributions from his kids.)  Audubon, published when he was in his mid sixties, was practically a new beginning. What he found and loved in his grandfather’s stories and what subsequently became a part of his writing was a rich, and evocative sense of time and place. Audubon is set in America as Eden after the fall; the beauty and depth of it can take your breath away. There’s a long section, The Dream He Never Knew The End Of, with the painter spending the night with a family of villains, mother and sons, in their slovenly hut in a clearing that’s like “a wound rubbed raw in the vast pelt of the forest”; the episode, and its violent conclusion, bodies dangling in frontier justice, has the timelessness of a passage in the Brothers Grimm. The poem is about violence and wonder and ends with Penn Warren as boy in the dark on a dirt road listening the geese flying above him. “Tell me a story,” he writes, and a line or two later

The name of the story will by Time

But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

Beside his Selected on my shelf was an old copy of his Being Here, Poetry 1977-1980; at the heart of so many of the poems from this book written late in life are questions about time and place, questions asked by both the poet and by nature itself. It’s dedicated to the grandfather who had died sixty years before, and has this epigraph:

OLD MAN: You get old and you can’t do anybody any good any more

BOY: You so me some good, Grandpa. You tell me things.

July 2020

*Dames At Sea

In many ways The Far Traveller, Voyages of a Viking Woman is a record of Nancy Marie Brown’s obsession with a time and a people, 1000 AD and the decades before and after the official adoption of Christianity by Vikings. Her sources are the Icelandic Sagas (her book is a wonderful introduction), historical texts, and archeological digs, in some of which she participates. In addition to getting down on her hands and knees to sift through peat and dirt, she takes up traditional weaving, interviews a slew of experts in various literary and scientific disciplines, and visits the same places as her subjects on their various journeys and settlements, travelling from Norway to Iceland, then Greenland, and on to various sites in what would come to be the Atlantic provinces—L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the St Lawrence River in Quebec, and the salmon rich Miramichi River in New Brunswick. She’s very interested in the often surprisingly strong roles women played in this rough world, and structures her narrative around Gudrid the Far Traveller, who not only journeyed west to the New World but also, before she died, made a pilgrimage across Europe to Rome. It’s a rich, big story and a fascinating piece of feminist history.

* The Way We Were

Every sentence in Joe Brainard’s I Remember begins with its two title words (“I remember red rubber coin purses that opened like a pair of lips, with a squeeze”); his very personal collection of memories is so evocative it draws us in and becomes a kind of collective memoir. Although it’s a very kind of different kind of memoir, I thought of it a lot while I was reading Annie Ernaux’s The Years. Her book is written in the third person plural as a collective memoir, (“On learning of the death of General de Gaulle one morning in November, at first we could not believe it—we had really believed he was immortal!—and then we realized how little we’d thought about him over the past hear and a half”). The two books can occupy similar places in the reader’s mind—both writers were born in the early 1940s (Brainard died of AIDS in 1994), and their books speak to why the memoir can be so compelling as a form. Ernaux moves chronologically from her earliest memories until around 2006, and The Years is a combination of the very personal (school, family, love affairs, children, etc.) with the historical (the post war years, the Algerian war, sixties rebellions). In addition to her use of “we” there are also descriptions of photographs from childhood in which she regards herself in the third person, “She’d like to be allowed to wear lipstick, stockings and high heels. Ankle socks are a disgrace and she takes them off as soon as she leaves the house…” The book may hold some of us at a bit of a distance (although if the reader were French and of a certain age, I imagine that distance would be well nigh invisible), but when there is a confluence, it’s quite moving. Her objective approach to the personal and intimate blended with the politics and trappings of society is very compelling. The translation is by Alison L. Strayer.

* Love and Loss

At the start of Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère and his partner Hélène are spending the Christmas of 20044 in Sri Lanka with their respective sons; they have agreed that the relationship is not working and will separate when the vacation ends. Then the tsunami hits. Although the four of them are spared, they are intimate witness to unbearable suffering—a family loses a little girl; a newlywed, her husband. In part because they survive, in part because of the way they have dealt with the tragedy, they decide to remain together, and that enormous event becomes a strange and violent introduction to a much more intimate grief: on their return to France, Hélène’s sister suffers and dies from cancer. The book is portrait of her death and its affects on family, friends and co-workers. Juliette, the sister, was a judge, and a lot of the writing has to do with her and a colleague working to reign in credit companies who prey on the unfortunate; as material, that’s not nearly so dramatic as a tidal wave, but it’s both compelling and fascinating because of Carrère dogged curiosity, and the fact that he possesses not a lick of sentimentality, and a very hardboiled kind generosity. This is the extreme opposite of a sloppy book about the triumph of the human spirit. Carrère manages to write about adversity, bravery and love with remarkable clarity and dignity.

June 2020

* What Is the Grass, Walt Whitman in My Life

Poet Mark Doty’s new book combines close readings of Whitman’s major poems with gay memoir, and the result is both moving and insightful. The textural analyses are often extremely personal, which befits the subject, and are always compelling even when he gets a little woo-woo (as when a sex partner’s face morphs into Walt’s…). What we get is Whitman in both his own historical time as well as a Whitman for the present moment, a poet of gay liberation. There’s insights here for old fans of the poet, and Doty provides a wonderful introduction for readers just discovering him. Well written, honest, intelligent and, when the orgies arrive, a tad squirmy making. 

* Giller Prize

“It’s hard to get past the begats,” Army (short for Armistice) says late in Reproduction. He’s talking to his father about the Bible, but his words also lay out the intentions of poet Ian Williams in this, his impressive first novel. When two very different mothers are dying in a shared hospital room, the daughter of one meets the son of the other and a comic dynasty of frustrations and failures is set in motion. The book spans three (well, four, really, if you include the unconscious, bedridden mutters at the top of the book) generations of a mixed race family not always connected by blood or by legal institutions, and is set mostly in a fairly bleak Brampton suburb. Every one of William’s characters come into this world damaged, and they muddle through life being dishonest with both themselves each other. Dishonesty, in fact, seems to fuel them. What fuels Williams is an affection for them all (it’s contagious), as well as a profound let’s-try-this-on-for-size love of form. The style and structure of the book is as playful as the characters’ futures are grim, and it’s a pretty splendid, unputdownable mix.

* High Class Toiletries 

Michael Glover’s Great Works, Encounters with Art is half a hundred very short pieces (originally published in The Independent), each one accompanying the fairly decent reproduction of the artwork (mostly paintings) that is its subject. Glover breezes through nearly all periods in western art (with a few additions), and his observations are astute without being earth shattering. The book is an ideal addition to a washroom shelf or table.

May 2020

* How to Pronounce Knife and Light

The Laotian family I was involved with back in the late 70s and 80s had arrived in Toronto after an epic saga I barely understood involving war, dangerous nighttime river crossings, refugee camps and god knows what else. They were living in a fairly grim section of Regent Park, their sponsors, the Knights of Columbus. I was never sure what the parents had done in their former lives but here in their new home it was manual labour. They had four children, the two oldest being from a previous relationship of the mother’s. I came to know them as well as I did because I was working with kids in Regent Park then, and I became very attached to the oldest boy, who was in kindergarten when we first met. When the K of C got wind of the fact that the mom had gone to a clinic and was taking birth control pills, a couple of those Catholic fraternal sponsors paid her a visit, told her that the pill was illegal in Canada, and had her flush the lot down the toilet of the overpriced slum they had found for the family. I knew this because she turned up at the daycare where I worked, confused, in tears, her oldest daughter, who would have been seven, translating for her. The boy and I became close partly because his best friend, another six year old, was killed, shockingly and tragically; without quite realizing it at the time, we were comfort for each other. When I left that job, we stayed in touch, we’d go to Saturday matinees, he hung out with me at the theatre where I had a residency, and, after his family moved to another city, he’d come on the bus every couple of months to spend the weekend at the house I lived in. He got in trouble with the law when he was a teenager and called me from jail; I talked to his probation officer. He cleaned up his act, got an excellent job, made good money, fathered children. We drifted apart while he was in his twenties, but he tracked me down when he was in his thirties. The last time I saw him, he was older than I had been when we first met. It was wonderful to hang out with him, two adults, and I’m thrilled he ended up ok; yet I’ll always miss the little boy he was. We had so much fun and that friendship was good for us both. We helped each other through significant periods in our lives.

During those days when he was still a kid, when we would go out for hamburgers and a movie, I would think that when his generation came of age there would be writers among them who would write about their lives and I would read their stories and have a deeper understanding of what families like his had gone through.

And now here is one, Souvankham Thammavongsa, with a first collection of short stories and four books of poetry. The stories are pretty much all about that Lao immigrant experience, many them from a kid’s point of view, involving unhappy families with marriages in trouble, parents stuck in lousy manual labour jobs, and westernized kids dismissing their parents. The territory is familiar, in many ways like the family I knew, and one story, Edge of the World, is very satisfying in the ways that it opens up and reveals what life is like for these transplanted people struggling to cope with new worlds they’d never imagined or lives they’d never dreamed of living. But mostly this is storytelling with few surprises; the uncluttered prose has few as well, which is surprising from a poet. It feels, at times, as if the stories exist to tell us about something rather than illuminate that thing; we aren’t taken inside them. (And one of them owes a little too much to Joe Brainard’s I Remember.)  The situations are unhappy, distressing, yet so much here feels thin to me, like early drafts. And the poetry in her collection Light feels thin as well, like student work. Obviously I’m wrong, The work is wildly praised, and award winning. Perhaps my expectations were too high? Or, perhaps, simply misplaced.

* Will and Testament

“Suffering doesn’t make you a nice person,” writes Vigdis Hjorth about two thirds of the way into her roman à clef; we probably didn’t need to be told. Will and Testament, the first person narrative of Bergljot, incest survivor, focuses on the months before and after her father’s death, and her anger at her family usurps all else, causing her rant, drink too much, and generally misbehave in various self destructive directions. Apart from her brother, who is also estranged from their sisters and parents, she has no use for the rest—especially Astrid, a human rights lawyer—and can forgive none of them. The book (the English translation is by Charlotte Barslund) was was a scandal and a bestseller in Norway, and Hjorth’s sister Helga, a human rights lawyer, subsequently wrote a novel of her own, Free Will, about the nightmare of having a sister who makes false accusations of incest. Bergljot is driven crazy by the fact that her family refuses to believe her, which is understandable, but, because the accusations stem from a recovered memory occurring in adulthood, they have what they consider legitimate reasons to be skeptical. After having nothing to do with the family for years, Bergljot and her brother are insisting on equal treatment in their father’s will—there are summer properties that the two sisters alone will inherit. Brother and sister keep saying that they are entitled to an equal share. But it’s a little like having Ronan Farrow and his sister Dylan be furious with Woody Allen for not leaving equal amounts to them as to Soon-Yi. What’s ultimately frustrating about the book is that, because everything is seen through the eyes of Vigdis/Bergljot, we don’t really get to know anyone else very deeply. The suffering suicidal mother, Bergljot’s children, her siblings, none of them exist except on her terms; they exist to either oppose her or be on her side. What we don’t understand is the extent to which her suffering and self absorption have always been a part of her life, or have they arrived later, directly resulting from her recovered memory of abuse? The novel is a one woman show.

*An Escape to the Past

There’s a very satisfying nostalgia in Writers and Lovers; Lily King wonderfully evokes the period in a writer’s young life when university is done, bills are accumulating, jobs are shit, and there is a serious concern that a career might not be possible. The book is set in 1997 Cambridge, Mass., but it took me back a decade before that to Toronto and the writer friends I was hanging out with there and then. It’s a quick, fun read and the first half is very enjoyable. Later on, it becomes more than a bit of a romcom centring on questions like, “which nearly perfect man should I choose?” and “how will the bidding war for my first novel turn out?” Still, in the midst of a pandemic, while the world tears itself apart, it was a pretty enjoyable way to while away a day and a half.

April 2020

* Rebecca Brown

Not Heaven, Somewhere Else is aptly called “a cycle of stories”—these seventeen very brief pieces have a stronger resemblance to something like Schubert’s Winterreise than to a conventional short story collection. While many of the pieces have their roots in familiar fairy tales and nursery rhymes, all are concerned with someone finding themselves at odds with the world, and, more often than not, violently. With very few exceptions (Hansel and Gretel, or Gepetto, say) the characters are nameless; as she does so often in her work, Rebecca Brown works with pronouns: a series of characters referred to as she, he, I and you face a vicious world where each is very much alone. (Over the span of her dozen simply extraordinary books, Brown has investigated the pronoun with phenomenal rigour.) Her prose, as always, is stark and immaculate, as if her objective were to painstakingly and as simply as possible set down the details of trauma, loneliness, unfairness and despair—in other words, to clarify what’s often referred to as the human condition. Our time on earth, in the journey of this book, might be summed up is in the last sentence of Hansel and Gretel: “Surviving is just the start, the easy part.” And yet so often in each of these there is a flicker of grace, a glimpse of something involving forgiveness and hope. Two of the stories end with a similar belief in something better, something beyond. “I believe that I will rise, yes, I believe that I will see,” says I at the end of What Keeps Me Here; and “..remember only what is good and rise, yes, we will rise,” are the final lines of the final story. Rise. The verb is ambiguous. Rise as in rise above this? Rise as in rise against it? Without invoking God but once (and fairly offhandedly and ambiguously as well, “This is why God invented forgetting. Praise God.”) these lives variously designated as he, she, I and you yearn for something beyond the physical world itself. And not heaven, but somewhere else.

* Built by Animals

Mike Hansell teaches animal architecture at the University of Glasgow, and his dense little book is a wide ranging natural history covering everything from beaver lodges to birds nests and termite towers. If you’re curious about why man is the only vertebrate that builds traps (while lots of invertebrates do), or whether or not bower birds appreciate art, or how a tiny planktonic creature creates a house for itself out of the mucus it secretes from it’s head, this is a pretty good place to start. Why do different kinds of swallows build different kinds of nests? Is there a history that links hummingbird nests to those of ground nesting dinosaurs? Hansell’s interest is not just in animals and architectures and how they evolved over the millennia, but also in how our increasing understanding of the subject leads to a deeper appreciation of our own evolution and how as a species we inhabit the world.

*Two from the Badger State

-The Politics of Resentment, Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

Katherine J. Cramer, who comes from small town Wisconsin and teaches political science there, in Madison, tends to use words like gosh and gee, has a big toothy Carol Burnett smile and is, in short, extremely personable. (A good introduction to her and to this book can be found here.) She’s perfectly suited for the research for this study, which involved five years of travelling throughout rural communities, dropping in on informal local gatherings—coffee klatches, dice games, the town garage—and asking the regulars hanging out there about the things that were on their minds. What did they think of government, of urban Wisconsinites, of the University in Madison? What she couldn’t know when starting her research in 2007 was that Scott Walker would become governor or, after this book was published, that Trump would become president. What she does come to understand is what’s at the heart of the anger and resentment that people are feeling, why they feel ignored and patronized, and why they loath government agencies and public employees. For the most part she’s listening to people who work hard (often at physical labour) for very limited incomes and who, consequently, resent people who not only make more than they do but who seem ungrateful for what they are making. She’s motivated by a love of her home state, by a deep desire to have it work, to have it not be a place where citizens are at each other’s throats. It’s an extraordinary book about listening to people you may not agree with in an attempt to understand what’s making them tick. Wisconsin is an interesting case because so much of its politics were progressive but then took an abrupt, and often nasty turn to the right. How is it possible that someone who voted for Obama could turn around and vote for Trump? How is it possible that a state could endanger its citizens by insisting they vote in the midst of a pandemic? Cramer’s desire to understand, to listen, to know, is, in this very grim dark time, something hopeful to be applauded.

-The Fall of Wisconsin, The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics

There are a lot decent people in in Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin, but there are a lot of fairly unscrupulous (what I can only call) pricks as well, many of whom are funded by big corporate money people like the Kochs. The book is a wonderful history of the ways that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Wisconsin became a progressive state, and it’s a clear examination of how that legacy has been attacked and in many ways lost. On the plus side we encounter decent politicians like Bob La Follette, conservationists like The Sand County Almanac’s Aldo Leopold, native Americans, iron workers, and scholars like Katherine Cramer. On the minus side there’s Governor Scott Walker, the folks from ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), big oil people (including the Canadians from Enbridge), and a whole raft of vindictive, gerrymandering politicians kowtowing to corporations. Some of them define punitive. And there’s surprises, many of them not pleasant; George Wallace turns up in Milwaukee, for instance, and then there’s the legacy of the John Birch Society. Considering that it not a big book (just shy of 300 pages plus notes) it’s jam packed with history and knowledge about Kaufman’s home state. Like so much else these days, what happened to Wisconsin makes me think that this is where a belief in a concept as narrow minded and bullying as American Exceptionalism will get you: perched on the edge of the abyss into which you’ve already pushed the less deserving.

*Men Explain Things To Me

Although she takes no credit for the word itself, Rebecca Solnit’s title essay led directly to the creation of mansplaining. The jumping off point for the piece was a dinner party where the host, after hearing that Solnit had written a book about Eadweard Muybridge, could not stop telling her that she should read another “very important book” about Muybridge that had recently been published. “That’s her book,” Solnit’s friend kept saying to him, but it took awhile for that fact to sink in. The story is well known by now, but bears repeating. Most of the ten essays here started off online on TomDispatch, and all cover a variety of feminist related subjects, from the head of the IMF’s sexual assault on a maid in a luxury hotel, to marriage equality, to Virginia Woolf’s essays, why Rush Limbaugh should be classified as hysterical, and Slutwalks. 

* A Great Book

It’s not everyday that a contemporary novel comes along and makes me think of greatness, but All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski is that kind of book. Kempowski died of cancer in 2007, the year after it was was first published in German, and the English translation, by the late Anthea Bell came out five years ago. It’s set in East Prussia in 1945 as the Russians are approaching and all are forced to become refuges. This story of one family—entitled, set apart from their neighbours by money, connections and snobbery—builds slowly. Father is in Italy, a Nazi with a desk job, mother is distant and reclusive, in part because her young daughter has died of scarlet fever, in part because she’s in a fairly loveless marriage, but mostly because she’s spoiled and fairly self centred. Peter, their twelve year old son, plays with his microscope and electric train; a tutor shows up regularly. An unhappy old maid named Auntie runs the household; there’s a manservant and two maids—because these three are not German, they’re second class citizens on more than one level. The chapters are composed of brief episodes, the narration is clear eyed, compassionate, and at a slight distance. Days pass, people on the move stop, stay with them and continue on; the mother, for reasons that are neither political or compassionate, shelters a Jew. and then, suddenly, everything becomes more urgent. There are more people on the road; everything becomes desperate. The shape of the narrative starts to resemble Bosch’s The Hay Wain: a crowded, lively scene giving way to the the monstrous. In addition to his novels, Kempowski published a massive ten volume collective diary documenting life during WW II; All for Nothing is so rich and so profound that it feels like the distillation of all that research. 

March 2020

*Frank Stanford’s Crazy Epic

When Frank Stanford was growing up in the South, his family spent a sizeable chunk of his boyhood summers living in a tent city with the black men who worked for his father building and repairing levees. When he was twenty, he was told that his late father and his mother were his adoptive parents; he would never know who his birth parents were. These two facts along with his love of epic story and verse are driving forces at the heart of the dream filled, semi-autobiographical The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. The nearly four hundred paged unpunctuated poem is often a struggle—while parts of it just sing, there are pages and pages of slogging through images and lists that can make the reader despair. But the sections of the narrative that grab you have real thrill and zing. Francis Gildart (his name for himself as narrator) is a kid often hanging out or driving around with the black men who are closer to him than kin; he looks up to and adores them with eyes and ears wide open. When Stanford was asked what he learned from black people his response was simply, “How shitty white people were to them.” 

There’s the story of an Easter weekend trip to a drive in movie to see King Vidor’s all black cast Hallelujah because it was shot in Tennessee and Arkansas and featured old girlfriends and wives of the men he’s with; when the white owners turn them away at the box office, they commandeer a bulldozer to tear the place apart. There’s the story of a bunch of racist crackers succumbing to a poisoned barbecue of their own dogs. Filled with tall tales and tricksters out on a tear, the whole thing is fuelled by racial anger and Stanford’s sense of both loss and belonging. Francis wants to revenge the lynching of his friend Sylvester, he rides on a Freedom Bus to the all black community of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, he wants to be a part of that black world at the same time as he understands the facts of his own white privilege. In one remarkable scene he’s a smart assed kid using the N word, pushing to see how far he can go with these guys, testing the limits of his acceptance. The whole thing a fusion of memoir, poem and novel, with direct links to both Huckleberry Finn and Beowulf, and keeps circling back to the moon, to episodes in his dreams, and to death. Stanford’s suicide at twenty-nine—the death of a charmer with good looks, brains and talent to burn—was a loss that was not bewildering; he was courting it from the start. His Battlefield is a hugely ambitious young white man’s attempt to write about race in America, a really significant, crazy, frustrating and neglected piece of work.

* Misfits and Dreamers

I came to Jocelyne Saucier’s And The Birds Rained Down via Louise Archambault’s movie, which I pretty much loved throughout even if I didn’t believe half of it. The  performances are very compelling—especially that of Andrée Lachapelle as Marie-Desneige, an old woman on the lam from the mental health system where she has been incarcerated since she was a teenager. Saucier’s book deals with a small clutch of people—a photographer, a couple of pot growers, a trio of old folks living off the grid on a lake in Northern Ontario; it’s charming and relies, in part, on a very romantic idea of human resilience (something we’d all like to believe), that it’s possible for someone to make a new life for themselves against all odds. 

The book has it’s strengths—the descriptions of the forest fires that wiped out communities have the power of visceral myths—and it certainly has heart, yet a great deal of disbelief needs to be suspended. It’s greatest gift is the vehicle it provides for Lachapelle, as well as for Gilbert Sicotte and Rémy Girard who play Charlie and Tom, the hermits she joins in the woods. But Lachapelle, fearless and unsentimental, informs Marie-Desneige with the kind of acting that is referred to as luminous. It was, I believe, her final performance.

*Helen Weinzweig

My encounters with Helen Weinzweig were cordial and brief; we were both writers in residence at Tarragon Theatre in the 1980s and she’d occasionally drop in on the weekly Playwrights Unit sessions. What I most remember is her smile, and a combination of warmth and detachment—I was a bit older than a lot of the playwrights, but she was my mother’s age. She went to 21 McGill (that short lived and long gone women’s club), and seemed very much the sort who would wear pearls. In her second novel, Shirley (who calls herself Lola Montez) is always wearing them as she awaits and searches for her lover Coenraad, a mystery man we soon realize is as fictitious as their affair. She walks about a Toronto that no longer exists but is so familiar to me from my first decade living there, the Toronto where both Shirley and I used to go to The New Yorker on Yonge Street and watch Children of Paradise. The NYRB reissue of Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black With Pearls brings me back a time and place now gone. That time was one where married women like Shirley were reading feminists like Betty Friedan and realizing a longing for something other than a marriage in which their own lives were subservient to those of their husbands and kids. In one remarkable sequence, Shirley goes to the AGO, falls into a Pierre Bonnard painting, and has a long encounter with the girl trapped in it, “I am a prisoner of my mad father,” the girl tells her, a story from Weinzweig’s own life (as we discover in Sarah Weinman’s afterward). Weinzweig was just a couple of years older than Friedan, and she was half a generation or more older than the three of her most prominent contemporaries who were exploring that same territory—the Margarets Atwood and Lawrence, and Marian Engle. This is very much a Toronto book, but it’s nothing like anything else that was being written in this country, its novelistic roots are more European than Canadian; Shirley roams from the King Eddie Hotel to Spadina and Bloor Street, and over to Cabbagetown, but her literary predecessors are from the world of the nouveau roman. It’s wonderful writing, stylish, with a very dark wit; reading it now (when I’m the age that Weinzweig was then) adds such a level of poignancy. 

*Moving Underground

Not a bad way to spend a snowy day during the COVID-19 pandemic was to sit down with two books, Sean Borodale’s 2018 Asylym, a series of poems written in situ and pertaining to what exists beneath the surface of our world—caves, caverns, quarries, ancient churchyards, and Frederick Malleson’s translation of Jules Verne’s 1864 adventure Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Although he doesn’t give me the same thrills he did when I was a kid, Verne remains a compelling storyteller, and you really can’t underestimate his influence on pop culture. (Would FX exist for the reasons it does without him?) Journey is still great fun despite the fact that the characters are complete duds and there’s an appalling class element at play. There are, really, only three people to be seen, a brilliant, eccentric German professor, his scaredy-cat nephew (the narrator), and their faithful, brave, resourceful Icelandic guide, a cliché conceived by a writer with no interest in him whatsoever but as a device. The little engine that keeps it all chugging along is Verne’s love of science and fantastical speculation: giant mushroom forests, a lost world of dinosaurs, underground oceans. The whiney narrator does become a bit of a pain, ditto his smarty pants uncle, so whenever my interest lagged, I lay down one book and picked up the other, reengaging with Borodale’s language and voice. His poems are actively present, often they were improvised and recorded while caving or crawling about in a swallet, and so his approach is the opposite of contemplative. Which is not to say that they exist on the surface—while the poet is exploring and writing, he’s constantly accessing the poetic legacies of the underground—Dante, Euripides and, in particular, Oedipus. Reading the books in tandem, each became a kind of gloss of the other.

February 2020

* That Old Existential Dread

You Should Have Left is a slight thing; seven days of brief journal entries by a writer recently arrived (with wife and child) at an isolated rental in the mountains. As his writer’s block grows so does the building’s malignant power over him—is the place possessed or is he losing his mind? Is someone/something else writing in the journal? And what of the “get out!” warnings from the nearby villagers? His wife makes the obvious reference to it all being like “that good movie based on the not-so-good book…The one with all the Steadicam shots.” Which, I suppose, is when I knew for sure that Daniel Kehlmann’s novella was not for me. The Shining is one of those movies (like Vertigo) with a reputation that mystifies me; I remember it as the not-so-good movie based on the pretty good pulpy bestseller. There’s a chilling moment here when the writer realizes that the creepy figure on the baby monitor in his daughter’s room is his own self, but it feels more like a teaser for a thriller than something with any real weight of its own. This is the sort of thing that gets referred to as existential dread, but the whole exercise feels fairly derivative and as insubstantial as it is slim (just over 100 very small pages). A minimalist arty take on an austere arty take on a fun trashy read. Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.

* More Deplorables Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Behold, America is the history and evolution over time of two phrases, “America First” and “the American Dream”, and it’s an extension of the research that Sarah Churchwell has done on F. Scott Fitzgerald and America’s Gilded Age. Trump’s election—and all of the “how could this possibly have happened?” follow up—was what prompted her to show how he didn’t come out of nowhere. She accomplishes this by giving us, among other things, reports of American home grown fascism in newspapers and pamphlets from the first half of the twentieth century, plot lines from popular novels, the political aspirations of Charles Lindbergh. There’s more than a basket full of deplorables, and they’ve been around for a long, long time. Behold (she says) the Ku Klux Klan, behold, Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden, behold, corrupt right wing newspaper publishers like Randolph Hearst, behold, politicians running for president who would not take a stand against lynchings because it would cost them votes. It’s a very good piece of popular history, entertainingly written, well researched, and chilling. Fred C. Trump makes an appearance, and gets arrested, at a Klan rally. (I did not know that the C was for Christ.) Behold nepotism. You can catch Churchwell speaking on the subject as part of the The University of Birmingham’s Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture Series here.

*Hilton Als/ Alice Neel

Alice Neel, Uptown is the catalogue for an exhibition of Neel’s portraits curated by Hilton Als, who has written the highly personal text. (Both the 2017 show and the book are from David Zwirner Gallery.) It’s a beautiful book; the reproductions are vibrant and sharp, and the portraits reveal much about both the artist and her sitters. The subjects, with a few exceptions, are from the neighbourhoods where she lived, Spanish Harlem and the the Upper West Side, and there’s a strong element of social realism with none of its didacticism . This is a remarkable collection of faces—black kids and businessmen, Puerto Rican boys, Spanish and South Asian women, Arabs. (Because he did not include her portraits of white subjects, Als originally wanted to call the exhibition Colored People but, one assumes, politics intervened.) There’s a heartbreaking series painted throughout the fifties of a neighbourhood boy, Georgie Arce, who would grow into a con man and convicted murderer; she shows him as both street punk and reflective kid—as fully human. What’s stunning about her work is her generous insight into her subjects—these are, for the most part, poor people with rich lives and stories, compellingly rendered with matter of factness and no sentimentality. But her work is also about painting, about colour, about composition, about the manipulation of paint. Nothing is laboured; the brushstrokes are fresh and masterful, the black or blue outlines she often uses look quick and assured. And Als gives us enough biography to make us go searching for more. A lovely piece of work.

*Conversations with Pauline Kael, edited by Will Brantley

This is a series of interviews with and profiles about Pauline Kael from between 1966 and 1994, so starting just before she began at The New Yorker until her retirement. Although there’s a fair amount of repetition, and there are few surprises here for people who know her work, it’s great to have her voice in your head again. There’s a debate with Godard from 1982 that’s interesting and frustrating because he’s playing the bad boy, and there’s time after time when she plugs the movies and actors she loves. One of Kael’s great gifts was an all encompassing perspective; she loved movies because they drew upon the other arts and she knew those art forms in ways that so many other movie critics just do not. I doubt that there’s a movie critic alive who knew or cared about Henry James as much as she did; in addition to literature and pop bestsellers, she knew a ton about music (classical, jazz, rock and rap) and dance and opera. She was the definition of a voracious reader and just so goddam smart. In 1994, when she was seventy five and dealing with Parkinsons and a bad heart, Hal Espen asked her, “Do you feel like you’re in a painful predicament now?” “Getting old isn’t fun,” she answered, “despite Betty Friedan’s thesis. She must have a fantastic constitution.”

“To assert that it’s a wonderful new stage of life?”

“Balls.”

I miss her, and miss the anticipation of reading her.

*And the moon was a dead man, floating down the river…

Frank Stanford was unknown to me until I found a concise anthology, The Light the Dead See, in a book bin at a second hand store. He was incredibly prolific—seven books published before he died in his late twenties, including his 15,000 line epic, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You—and was very much a good old bad boy of poetry: handsome, romantic, promiscuous, unfaithful, and remarkably gifted. The poems are, for the most part, narratives with a recurring set of characters, both black and white, with names like Baby Gauge and Born In The Camp With Six Toes, who move through a landscape of back roads, levees and myth. Sometimes he writes with a crazy logic that makes you think of old Dylan lyrics in songs like Desolation Row; sometimes he conjures up a world of barnyard Southern gothic and old blues songs. He’s alive to the thrill of writing at the same time that he’s obsessively preoccupied with death, and he’s a real storyteller. While he was married to artist Ginny Crouch (who would much later paint the official portrait of Senator H. Clinton), he was having an affair with poet C. D. Wright; when the two women got together and confronted him with the lies he’d been spinning them both, he left the room and put a bullet in his heart. They were, the three of them, brilliants kids in their twenties. At the same time, he’d been sleeping with, among others, Lucinda Williams, who would eventually come to write the lyric, “See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world…” He was and is a heartbreaker.

Click here to see his 1974 16mm short It Wasn’t A Dream: It Was A Flood

* Yesterday The Children Were Dancing by Gratien Gélinas, translated by Mavor Moore

It’s both fascinating and sobering to go back to this play which premiered in English in Charlottetown at the Confederation Centre nearly sixty years ago in the summer of 1967. Yesterday The Children Were Dancing is a drawing room drama, taking place in real time, and, as such, a fairly accomplished piece of dramaturgy even though the comings and goings are a bit clunky, the characters tend to be fleshed out stock figures, and the speeches and monologues arrive on cue with few surprises. On the night that a Montreal lawyer, a Liberal, is being offered the position of Minister of Justice in Pearson’s cabinet, he discovers that his sons are connected to the Separatists who have been blowing up statues of Wolfe. We’re watching an extremely well heeled, warm and supportive family—a Quebecois Father Knows Best—in crisis. One of the most significant moments is lost in translation: when Pearson phones, the politician switches to English. The significance of the venue for the English premiere is perhaps lost now, too. There it was, in Centennial year, on a huge new stage in an arts complex that had been opened by the Queen just a couple of years before, a theatre that would go on to rarely house plays, serious or otherwise, but would become a permanent home for, initially, Canadian musicals. Anne of Green Gables has been there since the beginning, but the others on the bill have, over time, gone from being new Canadian works to jukebox imports like Mamma Mia. It’s impossible now to conceive of a time where that theatre would produce something political, but there it was, three years before the October Crisis, an honest attempt to put the pros and cons of Quebecois grievance on the national stage.

* Daniel Mendelssohn’s Ecstasy and Terror

A substantial portion of this collection of essays and reviews (mostly from the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books) have links to Mendelssohn the classics scholar (e.g. pieces on Sappho, Euripides), and he brings his classical chops with him when he’s talking about contemporary work, be it Game of Thrones (both books and TV series) or Karl Ove Knausgaard. He’s a smart academic who isn’t snobbish about pop culture and who isn’t gaga about it either. Something in his writing often seems to be guarded or held in reserve, even when he writes about being a fifteen year old fanboy writing letters to Mary Renault, or when he’s consumed with rage and grief in Stopping By Vilna, a piece about the destruction wrought on his family during the Holocaust. It’s not coldness or formality exactly, it relates to his precision and his fairness. He’s liveliest when he goes against the flow, as when he takes on Hanya Yanagihara’s Big Book of Victimology; he tears it apart without rolling up his sleeves and getting getting too down and dirty. He’s a charming, entertaining guy to spend time with.

January 2020

* The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s first novel is a remarkable thing; she reveals a major chunk of plot in a few lines on page three almost as if it were an aside, and then digs into the characters’ lives, returning to examine past events from one perspective then another, until the degree of understanding and compassion that she accords the participants in an unspeakable act—the rape of a child—is heartbreaking. The situation of Pecola Breedlove, impregnated by her father, is at the heart of The Bluest Eye, but the book is about the generational history that leads to it. The book is rich with characters—the girls Pecola knows, her parents and their parents, the white family where her mother works, the town’s whores, the chorus of the town itself—and there are few false steps. (The Dick and Jane opening hasn’t aged well, and, although his sexual nature is brilliantly conceived, the character of Soaphead Church feels like someone from the weird world of James Purdy. Quibbles.) The Bluest Eye is an indictment of racist America, but its strength is in pulling no punches at the effects of racism on its victims; Morrison really understands how victims are driven to victimize. The prose is poetic without being poetical—it has real zing.

* The Confessions of Nat Turner

William Styron’s 1966 book was important and seminal to me when I was a teenager. I’d read a rave review in, if I remember correctly, Time, and when it first came out in mass market paperback, I bought it at the drugstore. Up until that point—I would have been sixteen or so—my knowledge of slavery came from old Hollywood, from characters like Mammie and Big Sam in Gone With The Wind; so the sense of what it was to be owned by another human being was unknown to me. I lived in a small Maritime town, all white, English and Acadian, and would see black people maybe once a year when we went to the city of Saint John, where there was a substantial population whose ancestors had arrived with the Loyalists. I cannot recall a single instance of a black person being referenced in any way at any point in my twelve years in public school. Slavery had auras of both benevolence and loyalty. And so the violence of the whites to their property in Nat Turner was more than just an eye opener—it was an awakening and it changed me. I’ve been thinking about Styron’s book a lot lately, and thought it was a time to revisit it a half century later. The surprise to me (how could I have forgotten!) was the queer stuff: Nate’s childhood sexual moment with another boy (which is lovely), and a couple of malignant white sodomites (who are, as intended, creepy creepy creepy). As for the history, it’s pretty clear that he did his research and that he wants to give Turner his due as a tragic and heroic figure. It’s also clear how things that are very much a part of their zeitgeist can date quickly and that, in so many ways, Styron couldn’t get past his own whiteness. Turner’s narrative voice is quite grand—like a 19th century novelist’s—but doesn’t feel grounded in the character’s blackness, doesn’t have even a strong enough sense of the King James Bible that would have influenced it. The black dialogue is often minstrel show, all I gon gwine be goins and sho nuffs. The religious signs and visions that drive Turner feel bogus, standard stuff dreamed up by someone writing about religion from the outside. But Turner’s obsession with the young white women, Margaret Whitehead, the only person he actually killed himself, is where the writer really reveals the colour of his own skin. Not so much because he’s continuing the old racist tropes about black men’s obsession with white women, but because he can’t come up with a black symbol of innocence. His afterward, written for the 25th anniversary edition is unfortunate and comes across as whiny (although I can’t think of a single writer I know—most certainly myself included—who has not thought similarly about his or her critics). In the end, it’s a book about a black man that really can’t conceive of a reader who isn’t a white one. 

* Humanist

Ted Chiang wrote The Story of Your Life, which became Arrival, a brainy movie about aliens and space ships that compellingly dealt with language and grief. Like the very best of sci fi, the film used speculation and aliens not for Star Wars thrills but as a way to examine both human nature and the present moment. The stories in his second collection, Exhalation, work in similar ways. What if Creationism were an exact science? What if we could communicate with alternate versions of our own selves? The devices and software of his brave new worlds are meticulously rendered and they do fascinate, but it’s the way that his characters resonate within his speculative worlds that’s most gripping. His prose is unadorned and lean—its style is not in its beauty but in its intelligence. There were times when the worlds he invents made me think of George Saunders, but Chiang is not so cynical, his characters aren’t the writer’s pawns, as Saunders’ can sometimes be; he’s in the humanist tradition of Le Guin.

December 2019

* How to Live or A Life of Montaigne

A really smart, well researched and surprisingly breezy biography of the man who pretty well invented the personal essay. As one might expect, Sarah Bakewell looks at Montaigne in a historical perspective—his relationships to Catherine d’Medici, say, or Henri of Navarre, and his reaction to major events like the St Bartholomew Day Massacre—and she provides details about his family life and sexual being, his politics and his travels. She also examines his influence during the centuries since his death in 1592: how was he seen by Descartes and Pascal in their times, and how he has influenced our own era through the likes of Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, and Virginia Woolf. An excellent introduction and study.

* Two Prizewinners

Quarrels by Eve Joseph (Griffin)

The prose poems in the first two sections are gorgeous, quirky things—the ones in the second section, riffs on Diane Arbus photos. But it’s the third section that speaks to my heart, dedicated to her father, and very matter of factly about his death, it begins “I’m trying to summon my father as a whale.”

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (T. S. Eliot)

A first collection by a very bright British academic, a trio of long poems: the first, You, Very Young In New York, is about exactly that, bad stupid sex and all; the second, Repeat Until Time, about repetition, is more philosophical (and trickier to navigate). Both are smart, wonderfully constructed, and contain some of the most satisfying rhymes I’ve encountered in some time. The third, The Sandpit After Rain, is about the birth of her son and the death of her father. Of the first she writes, “Well, of course: who wants to be born?”

To be born purple, your hair scrambled like eggs?

I have never heard a person so incredulous with rage.

* The Hidden Life of Trees

Just about the most fascinating book one could imagine; forester Peter Wohlleben writes about trees as social beings, examining the varieties of ways they communicate and support each. They live for so many years—centuries in some cases—and the book has the effect of not just making you appreciate that, but making you wish that humans could have a sense of time that extended beyond (if we’re lucky and patient) a mere decade or two. Trees are clocks, they have eyes, they need each other. After reading, it’s impossible to look at a lone tree in a city under a streetlight in the same way again.

* A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Peter Handke’s nearly fifty year old tough little book opens with his mother’s suicide and describes an ordinary life in tough times: she survives the Nazi era, survives an unhappy marriage, self inflicted abortions, poverty, and has moments of happiness. But mental illness ultimately takes its toll. It’s a book that measures what can and can’t be known about another human being. The plainspoken, lyrical translation is by Ralph Manheim.

* Ferry, Ferryman, Charon

I’ve known poet David Ferry primarily as a translator (Gilgamesh, Virgil’s Eclogues), and his last collection, published when he was eighty-eight, does contain translations (of Cavafy, Rilke, Horace, and from The Aeneid) as well as his own poetry. Bewilderment was written after the death of his wife Anne, and some of the poems, most notably the extraordinary Soul and Lake Water, reflect this directly, but the translations do as well, albeit more obliquely; they are all of a piece, as if the two disciplines of poetry and translation were inseparable in Ferry’s life and work. The book is a meditation on death from the perspective of old age; calm and reflective, it’s filled with sadness and decency, and has touched me in ways that no other book has for some time. It’s a slim collection, eight sections varying in length from three poems to a dozen, containing little that’s narrative, yet it reveals an entire life—an autobiography, marital love as well as a love of the classics, and a sense of what those classics tell us about the human and universal. Ferry’s own love and loss, like our own, are small things in a huge world, but, for each of us, as significant and timeless as those of Orpheus and Euridice, or Aeneas and Creusa. 

The sixth section contains a set of poetic glosses on poems by Arthur Gold, a colleague of Ferry’s from Wellesley College, who died, aged 53, from lung cancer on the last day on 1988 (Bewilderment was published twenty four years later, in 2012). Gold’s five poems (reprinted here before each of Ferry’s poems about them) are from a 1989 chapbook, Poems Written During A Period of Sickness, that is virtually unavailable now, and the sequence gives them a new life, as if the poet had delivered them to us from the land of the dead. The entire book is a remarkable fusion of personal grief and generosity. 

November 2019

* Eddy and Eddy’s Father

Édouard Louis, originally named Eddy Bellegueule, comes from a factory town with a closed down factory, an economically depressed village in northern France where he spent his young life attempting in vain to live up to his name—Eddy, being his father’s idea of a tough guy, and Bellegueule (beautiful face), a tough guy’s expression. Young Eddy betrayed his name, his family, and, he believed, the village itself because he was effeminate, queer, and easily picked upon. From the book’s very first sentence (translated by Michael Lucey as “From my childhood I have no happy memories”), he writes of a life where the despair of poverty leads to drunkenness which leads to violence, to racism, to homophobia and on to an even deeper despair. It’s a life that can lead directly to support for the likes of Marine Le Pen, who speaks for the people who believe that no one else speaks for them. If Louis had pleasant memories (the smell of the fields, fresh warm milk), they were pushed aside by darker ones (the smell of manure, hunger). A short book about growing up with a destiny of grinding poverty, The End of Eddy has none of the sentiment usually attached to this genre (it ain’t The Corn is Green); Edouard Louis manages to look at his family and his tormentors clearly and fairly. The writing has a very particular tone because, at times, it’s as if he were an anthropologist from another world. (His descriptions of such things as his father’s physical pain, the filth in his grandmother’s house, the plight of girls and women, break your heart at the same time they make your flesh crawl.) While reading it, his boyhood self is so desperate, so immediate, and so doomed that you wonder how he could possibly ever have come to a point where he could write about it. 

Less than five years after the publication of The End of Eddy, Louis—now a celebrity and, to a certain extent, literary darling—writes Who Killed My Father, a tiny book (80 some brief pages) which feels like a postscript to his first. It is, primarily, a love letter to his father, who appears to have been the one person from his family now proud of his accomplishments (Louis’ mother decried him on French television, and a brother, furious that Louis had called him violent, pursued him with a baseball bat), and it details the ever increasing indignities of the man’s life. Initially doomed to a factory job that ruined his health, then debased and reviled by the political elites who legislated away his disability pension and prescription drug funding, the man ended up a street sweeper. He worked like a dog all his life and was rewarded with chronic pain and poverty. Louis ends with a list of the elite—Macron, Chirac, Sarkozy et al—attached to this sentence, “I want these names to become as indelible as those of Adolphe Thiers, of Shakespeare’s Richard III, of Jack the Ripper.” It’s an angry little book (translated by Lorin Stein) that speaks for the people who are fed up with the politicians who ignore and revile the poor and, here at home, by those of us who wanted to throw things when Trudeau unveiled the Ministry of Middle Class Prosperity. It’s no wonder that people say of Le Pen, or the Fords, or Trump, “finally a politician who speaks to me.”

What is one to think of the fact that New Directions have produced Who Killed My Father as an elegant art object of a book, with discreet lettering (no caps) on the jacket, and a cover photo by Arne Svenson? (It’s the same size as a DVD case and, at first glance, could be from the Criterion Collection.) In his acknowledgments, Louis credits, among others, the arty Terence Malick and his dedication is to Xavier Dolan, another talented celebrity darling (and writer/director of I Killed My Mother). Despite its politics, the book itself resembles nothing so much as the sort of item that a member of the elite might place on a coffee table.

*The Lathe of Heaven

Because her Earthsea fantasy novels remain so prominent, it’s possible to lose sight of the fact that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote on such things as contemporary politics, science and race with extraordinary intelligence. The Lathe of Heaven originally appeared in Amazing Stories nearly fifty years ago, and, although the future time of the novel (1998) is past and gone, she was so intuitive and smart that this short novel’s ideas haven’t dated, and her concerns feel immediate. 

George Orr is a young man whose dreams begin to affect reality, and the book’s driving conflict is with the utilitarian psychiatrist who manipulates his sleep in attempts to better the world. Dr. Haber may accomplish his goals (ending overpopulation and racial strife) but at great—and sometimes strange—costs. (Millions die, grey becomes the universal skin tone, and benign aliens come to earth and up thrift shops.) The book has the drive and energy of a pulp entertainment, but Le Guin’s intelligence and marvellous writing make it literature. It has the grace of a classic fable—Orr and Haber become a patient-doctor version of the couple in the Brothers Grimm’s The Fisherman and His Wife.



October 2019

Edna O’Brien’s Girl

Is there another writer more fearless than Edna O’Brien? In her eighties, she hies herself off to Nigeria to research first hand this story of a schoolgirl abducted by Boko Haram; then—even more fearlessly in this day and age—she writes Girl in the first person. As in Red Chairs, O’Brien takes contemporary political horror into the world of myth. Girl has the quality of a folk tale; she combines a world of cell phones and this weeks headlines with the timelessness of saga. Harrowing and violent, yet with moments of extraordinary tenderness and not a whiff of the sentimental, we are with Maryam on her terrible journey through abduction, rape, escape and return to a world that cries crocodile tears and wants little or nothing to do with her. 

There will be, undoubtedly, people who say that an old white Irish woman has no right to the voice of a young black African girl, but O’Brien shows us what fine writers can do, what profound empathy can accomplish. She knows her sexual politics, knows what it is to be female in a world where both religion and state devalue and abuse women. Maryam is an extraordinary character and the book does what strong, honest art can do—take us inside a world not our own and gives us with a personal connection to it. These terrible things happen everywhere, the book tells us, and unless we pay attention and give stories a voice, there’s little hope for stopping them.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

Can the reading public appreciate Ben Lerner as much as his peers? His new book has blurbs from five of the contemporary literary zeitgeist’s hottest writers—including Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, and Maggie Nelson—quite the bunch. This is, in some ways, the book I was waiting to read when 10:04 was done (see below, June 2015). We’re still in the land of metafiction, but The Topeka School, with the structure and feel of a novel, feels less self conscious (and less indulgent to boot). Adam Gordon, the central character (again), is clearly closely based on Lerner (again); Jane and Jonathan, Adam’s parents, are Steve and Harriet (Dance of Anger, Women in Therapy) Lerner. The Gordon parents narrate sections, and Lerner moves effortlessly into their voices, creating fully realized characters. He plays with time in interesting ways, and, even though you know where the book is it’s headed emotionally, the narrative has surprises. His main thrust here is male privilege and anger, white male division, and, while it tell us little that’s new, it’s fairly honest (Lerner is culpable) and up to the minute (encompassing Trump, the bullies from ICE bullies, and Topeka’s own Westboro Baptist Church). Despite a terrific opening chapter (which ran as a short story in the New Yorker), it feels like a book yearning to be diagrammed in term papers, something essential within it held too tightly in literary nerdyness to be fully alive.

September 2019

* The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

The Dozier School for Boys in Florida was a hellhole where teenage offenders were subject to more than cruelty; an archeological dig has revealed a cemetery where murdered boys were secretly buried. Colson Whitehead calls his version of this horror the Nickel Academy, and, although he doesn’t exactly soft peddle his story of an unjustly incarcerated black kid, he makes it bearable by concentrating upon a friendship between two boys, by moving about in time (giving us a sense of the survivors in adulthood), and by cheating a bit with a who’s-who reveal (it’s similar to a trick of identity that Spielberg used at the end of Saving Private Ryan). The Nickel Boys doesn’t have the inventiveness of his Underground Railroad, but Whitehead makes a harrowing story about race and class an unputdownable read. His Elwood Curtis is a believable nerdy guy during the days of Martin Luther King, and the terrifying results of his getting caught in a stolen car while hitchhiking to school are emblematic of the pure evils inherent in Jim Crow. A book about a nightmare, it has real sweetness in it—no mean feat.

August 2019

*Lolita

It’s been half a century since I first encountered Vladimir Naobkov by way of Maurice Girodias’ essay, “The Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita”, in his The Olympia Reader (that dogeared anthology of my adolescence that also introduced me to those two Jeans, Cocteau and Genet, the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, and a host of others). I read Lolita not all that long afterwards, and what floors me going back to it—and what meant so little to me as a teenager—is that it’s the work of a Russian émigré not writing in his first language. It’s a biting commentary on both America and on Humbert Humbert, the European narrator, who belittles it. The most unreliable of narrators, Humbert is snobbish, madcap, a depraved Romantic, a pedophile undone by the object of his own undoing, the now legendary twelve year old nymphet he abducts, as they travel back and forth across America. It’s funny and smart (and smart-alecky—reading, at times, like an academic’s idea of a caper with its endless puns and references to the likes of Poe and Maeterlinck), but as it propels itself forward, getting darker and darker, we have an increasingly powerful sense of Lolita’s despair. Nabokov creates a narrative in which we glimpse her through the cracks in Humbert’s version of their journey as he molests her and she cheats on him with his doppelgänger and nemesis, playwright Clare Quilty. There she is, stuck between two creepy old men, ruined. “We had been everywhere,” says Humbert. “We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.” It’s a crazy, uncomfortable puzzle of a book.

*Clyde Fans in Pictures

Twenty-some years ago, illustrator/writer Seth discovered a storefront on Queen Street in Toronto, looked through the window into the no longer in business Clyde Fans Limited, saw the pictures of two men on the wall, and the seed for this nearly 500 page picture novel was planted. The two photos evolved into the stories of brothers—one introverted, the other extroverted—who inherited a fan business from their father and ruined it. Some sections of the story (those involving the younger brother’s relationship to his demented mother and his obsession with postcards) have a poignancy, but the overall effect, for this reader at least, is of page after page registering the same series of emotional notes. The drawing is extremely good illustration, and all the thousands of images are in grey blue, grey, black and white—the total effect  is of a kind of grim sameness (as befits the sad story of the sad duo). It’s clearly a labour of love and an admirable piece of workmanship—like constructing a town of stores and houses built to scale for a model train set up—but I miss what isn’t there. The cartoon brothers don’t have the depth of characters in a novel, and the monotone images don’t have the vividness of an old comic book (those primary colours!). Clyde Fans is a triumph of design, and a sad and lonely thing.

*The Earth Dies Streaming

If A. S. Hamrah stuck to being smart (which he is, very) as opposed to smart ass (ditto), I would probably have finished his collection of film writings from 2002-2018 not long after it arrived in the mail last fall. I read it with pleasure for awhile, then started dragging my feet, then let it sit beside the bed for a few months. I’ve made a few stabs at it since but keep losing interest. Am I just too old for this style of stuff? He’s not a crazy making critic, and by that I mean that he’s not a silly fan guy like, say, Leonard Maltin, or a self important idiot like, well, Richard Brody, but like too many others—Anthony Lane, say—he seems to feel that he’s more important than the movies. It’s pretty de rigueur to trash Pauline Kael these days, but no one who really reads her could ever say that she thought she was better than the movies. But then most of the people who trash her don’t seem to read her. Hamrah does a modest bit of Kael bashing here—banging that old she-was-mean-to-Orson drum. I wish that the Welles defenders who attack her would actually read what she write about the man, specifically her piece on his Falstaff.

July 2019

*Deep Journeying 

There’s little doubt that Robert Macfarlane is one wonderfully erudite adventurer; his new book Underland is filled with amazement and wonders, and is also a clear eyed look into the darkness. He travels into caves, the worlds beneath forest floors, mines under the sea, underground rivers, tombs, the ancient lands below glaciers, the catacombs beneath Paris, and, most profoundly, through time, writing about our need for what is dark, buried, and mythic: Charon, Hades, minotaurs, mummies. His book has the excitement of an exploration narrative and the beauty of poetry—verse by Jules Verne might read something like this—and what drives it is a combination of Macfarlane’s clear headed derring-do—his need to see and to know—and the climate crisis that puts everything in jeopardy. There’s an element of elegy in the adventure; he explores a facility that will, hopefully, bury nuclear waste and keep it safely locked away for centuries. His various guides along the way—poets, fishermen, scientists, et al—are smart, compelling and as driven in their own ways as he is. This is just one fabulous piece of work and joins a handful of books—Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead, Steven Mithen’s After the Ice, David Christian’s Maps of Time, Thomas Laquer’s The Work of the Dead, to name four I cherish —that by looking at the past can tell us a great deal about the present.

*Meanwhile, back in the 19th century…

In an interview publicizing The Impeachers (see last month, below), Brenda Wineapple said that “dealing with the nineteenth century and disappearing into it in so far as I can is very consoling to me….to me the nineteenth century is a place to go for solace and to learn things.” I find myself very much agreeing with her—it’s exhausting to live in the present where every moment gives us a world worse than yesterday’s, and we careen from one lethal folly to the next. Therefore, more Brenda Wineapple for me, this time White Heat, her 2008 book about Emily Dickinson’s friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I knew very little about Higginson, apart from the fact that Dickinson sent him her poetry and that, after her death, he co-edited her first collection—which slapped on titles where there were none, altered texts, and played fast and loose with her punctuation. Wineapple works from the assumption that Dickinson picked him for her own very good reasons and that he wasn’t the editorial villain we might think. (She’s not so generous to Mabel Loomis Todd, who, in addition to being his co-editor was sneaking around Amherst having an all too public affair with Dickinson’s brother, Austin.) Cutting back and forth between their biographies, she tells us a great deal about Higginson as feminist and abolitionist—he believed in suffrage for both women and blacks, and led an all black regiment during the Civil War. Wineapple makes a very good case for his writings on such subjects as Nat Turner, and she’s an excellent stylist (of his relationship to the Dickinson/Loomis debacle during the editorial process, she says, “The families warred on and he wore out”); she’s also a perceptive reader, giving very fine close readings on a few key poems. 

Which prompted me to take Helen Vendler’s Dickinson, Selected Poem and Commentaries back down from the shelf. It’s just a superb book to pick up at any time and read one or two or ten of the 150 poems Vendler explores.

June 2019

* Dashing the Hopes of a Just Nation

Brenda Wineapple’s first books were American literary biographies (Janet Flanner, the Steins, Dickinson, Hawthorne); her last two have focused on the Civil War and its aftermath. The Impeachers deals with the malignant presidency of Andrew Johnson, and it’s an indispensable portrait of the political swamp of Washington after the Civil War, an analysis of the perils of impeachment, and a clear-eyed look at the depths of racism in America and the origins of Jim Crow. Johnson, a Democrat, was Republican Lincoln’s vice-president; he became president by assassination, and fairly soon began to pardon treasonous members the Confederacy (giving out a hundred pardons a day), and allowing former slave states back into the Union with few repercussions. He also permitted murdering racists (e.g. the perpetrators of New Orleans massacre of 1866) to go scott free, and vetoed legislation that would assist the four million former slaves themselves. Wineapple gives us terrifically in depth portraits of dozens of people on both sides, from the often maligned Thaddeus Stevens (fairly heroic here), and orator Wendell Phillips (who claimed that Johnson had made “the South victorious”), to Edmund G. Ross who changed his mind and cast the deciding acquittal vote, and Vinnie Ream (Johnson’s fan and Lincoln’s sculptor) who may have convinced him to turn. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman turn up as witnesses throughout, as do Frederick Douglass and Georges Clemenceau. And then there’s Andrew Johnson himself—incompetent leader, white supremacist, a liar, a bully, and a thin skinned bore. His brief presidency was a major blow to an exciting, visionary desire for a new and just nation. Wineapple is an exemplary writer of history and an ideal companion (you can hear her here, starting at the 22 minute mark, talking to Pamela Paul); it’s a wonderful book. She began work on it during Obama’s presidency, and the current president is never mentioned; but The Impeachers puts the current swamp king in a necessary historical perspective.

Metaphyctional Poet

Ocean Vuong was born in Viet Nam and grew up in America with his mother and grandmother; his volatile mom worked in a nail salon, his grandmother, who had been a prostitute during the war, struggled with both mental illness and cancer. Vuong escaped being ground down of poverty through language. (He started teaching poetry at U Mass when he was thirty.) On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his autobiographical first novel is in the form of a letter to his mother that she will never be able to read; this gives the whole enterprise a peculiar kind of tension and adds a level of voyeurism. He will tell her that he’s gay, but he gives us sexual details she may never know. The immigrant experience sections are vivid and revealing—how many of us have actually thought about the lives of the women in nail salons (apart from something along these lines)? Much of the writing about his grandmother is tender, as are the sections where he visits the American serviceman who was once her lover. Most moving is the tragic story of his friendship with Trevor, the redneck kid who becomes his sexual comrade. Those sections of the book are like an opiate fuelled version of Jim Grimsby’s Dream Boy; Trevor is the poor, white, trailer version of a Byronic lover, and dangerously, vividly alive on the page. These stories of depression and doom in America can be as poignant as they are wrenching; Vuong has been able to study and write his way out of poverty and despair, but Trevor is not so lucky. Ocean Vuong is an astute observer with a poet’s eye, yet, in the end, we know his family and his boyhood love in a way that we don’t quite know him; the reader may feel detached from the writer. Despite all the book’s strengths, the conceit of the letter to an illiterate mother can feel like too much of a device. There isn’t a strong suggestion that he’s writing something he actually wants or needs her to read; he’s writing his metafiction for us. 

Although the novel’s language can be poetic, it’s less highfalutin’ly so than the giddy title might lead one to expect. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also the name of the poem in Vuong’s collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds that now reads like a spare outline for this book. And those titles themselves! Filled with lyrical swagger, they give a similar kind of over the top pleasure as the plays of Tennessee Williams—how he would have loved them. 

May 2019

*Grief x 2

1. Kate, the young woman at the heart of The Heavens shuttles back and forth, via her dreams, between early 21st century New York, where she is falling in love with Ben, and Elizabethan England where she is Emelia, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. At the beginning of Sandra Newman’s book, the American president is not only a woman, she’s Asian and a Green; but as Kate keeps waking and returning from her Tudor dreams, her present becomes darker and more violent and her presidents degenerate as well, from Chen to Gore and then to Bush, and the world becomes darker, more violent and dangerous. Kate comes to realize that her actions in the past are influencing events in the future and determines to do things that will save the world. (A plot device that had me thinking of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, but without the pretentiousness and faith.) The grief that infuses this novel comes from a very personal place (author Sandra Newman lost her ex husband and best friend while she was writing), and there is something grandly romantic in the idea that one’s own loss is so great that it can have a butterfly effect on civilization. When she’s in the past, she discovers that Shakespeare dream travelled as well, and raising his stature in the 21st century is one of the effects of her journeying. (He’s relatively unknown in the world of President Chen at the book’s start.) Would the world be a better place if Shakespeare had been a near forgotten minor poet? Is Kate a time traveller or is she crazy? 

The dystopian present is the strongest part of The Heavens; it’s not that the Elizabethan sections are bad, but there’s a plethora of “thines” and “thous” and people riding “ahorse”—every time a floor is mentioned, so are the rushes covering it—it feels so self consciously, well, Elizabethan. But the despair that Kate feels when she awakens to the fresh horrible details of America in Hell feels as familiar as our daily miseries looking at the news and seeing the latest nightmares from Trump, Putin, Brexit, big Oil, and on and on into the night. Most days, when we look at the news, it’s easy to feel like we’re losing our minds.

2. The characters in Nell Freudenberger’s Lost and Wanted live in a very brainy, racially diverse, high end America, a world where people are Rhodes Scholars, MacArthur fellows or on their way to a Nobel; they fly about the world giving lectures, they have Tara Walkers hanging in their houses. Helen, the narrator, teaches at MIT, and is a single mom and brilliant quantum physicist who also writes best selling popular science books. (She’s lightly modelled on Lisa Randall who Freudenberger profiled in the New Yorker a couple of years ago.) Helen has lost her old friend Charlotte (Charlie), a brilliant black screenwriter, and comes to know the widower, a surfer who is the closest thing in this book to someone from the working class. (He and his brother own a successful business, so he isn’t exactly struggling.) Money is not an issue for anyone in this book; they live in a rarified world where the rich are intelligent and successful in their chosen fields. The current political scene is mentioned exactly once, in a paragraph, and not all that specifically, considering that the current federal administration is not exactly friendly to scientists and a fair amount of scientific research is being threatened with cuts. Not to mention the effects of the rise of racism on their colour blind world. Or that, in a bit of plotting that changes the direction of her life, Charlie was hit upon by an older professor who was a much tonier creep than is President Grab’m by the Pussy. Helen’s world is well-heeled and well mannered. What interests Nell Freudenberger is having a logically driven woman of science come up against death and the idea that something exists beyond it. She’s done her research and there’s lots in here about lasers, black holes and LIOD (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory); she’s also done tons of work on Helen and Charlie’s backstory and student days. It’s all very well plotted and worked out, with a mild frisson of the supernatural, yet genuine grief feels as absent from Lost and Wanted as do the poor. It all goes down so easily: a nice book, well brought up.

At this point in my life, I’m dragging along my own griefs while I read, so maybe I expected and wanted too much from both novels? This month I gave a eulogy for one of my oldest and dearest friends. Do I find both The Heavens and Lost and Wanted unsatisfactory and thin because they can’t hold a candle to my own loss?

*Psalms and Tyrants

Lux by Elizabeth Cook is an admirable book, beautifully written, and comprised of three sections; the first two (Ark and Prophet) telling the story of King David, chiefly the events centring on his passion for Bathsheba and its fallout, and the third, (Poet). of Thomas Wyatt’s travails in the court of Henry VIII before and after the king’s passion for Ann Boleyn. David’s guilt for his selfish passion (he had Bathsheba’s husband killed) led to penitence and the writing of Psalms; immoral Henry suffers no such pangs (he’s very Trumpian). The first and last sections are the strongest; the second, with David holed up in a cave following the birth of Bathsheba’s son, treads water a bit. You can see what Cook’s getting at, but it feels padded. She’s looking at the misuse of power, at selfishness and lust, and then at the redemptive possibilities in poetry. She really knows how to write a beautiful sentence and she has a finely tuned poet’s ear; she’s also clearly obsessed with the characters of both David and Wyatt. Some of her choices are odd to me; for example, she includes all of the pre-David Ark of the Covenant business involving the Philistines and their haemorrhoids (one of the Old Testaments great, crazy passages), but does not deal at all with the Absalom story. It’s a curious book that doesn’t quite come together but is extraordinary when it does. The balance feels wonky—in terms of what she’s going for, one part David and two parts Wyatt might seem a more logical structure. But perhaps that seems so to me simply because I’m more familiar with the David story and, even though she does very fine work enlarging parts of it, I wanted more of the Tudors. The Prologue, in which a young Bathsheba witnesses a woman stoned to death for adultery, is powerful and grim, the crowd as familiar as the mob in Shirley Jackson’s Lottery.

Cook did send me back to The David Story, Robert Alter’s translation of the two Books of Samuel, and it was wonderful to read it again. I can’t praise Alter enough, his prose is clear, his notes are thorough, and it’s so apparent when reading him that the story of the first Hebrew kings is, along with Gilgamesh and Homer, one of our great primal texts. What isn’t in this story? There’s young David the fairy tale giant slayer, the madness of King Saul, David’s love of Jonathan, incest, rape, revenge and David’s great lament at the death of the son who betrayed him. Alter’s translation work is a glorious thing and has given me great joy.

Elizabeth Cook also had me dipping back into The Poets’ Book of Psalms, edited by Laurance Wilder, with translations by Wyatt, along with Milton, Herbert, Sidney and a raft of others. More joy.

April 2019

*Melville, His World and Work

Andrew Delbanco is equal parts historian and critic, so his biography of Herman Melville gives you a pretty extensive sense of both the man’s life and his writing in the context of 19th century America. His career began at a time when Americans would rather read British writers than their own, and U.S. publishers preferred non-Americans because they didn’t have to pay them royalties. (Apart from copyright laws, it was much the situation that Canadian writers were in a century later.) One of the things that makes Melville so compelling a subject is his inability to fit in; his early South Sea adventure novels were successful, but then, starting with his great crazy whale of a book, he was the odd man out for the rest of his career, from the financially disastrous Pierre (Delbanco draws a convincing line from it to Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge), and Clarel, his epic 150 canto poem on faith and doubt in the Holy Land (reviled in it’s day, and now compared to Eliot’s Wasteland), to the final handful of brilliant stories, Bartleby, Benito Cereno and Billy Budd. What sustains a writer when the work is ridiculed, domestic life is less than ideal, and there’s constant financial stress? Add to that the suicide of one son and the death of another. Delbanco answers the question with a great deal of knowledge and compassion. I came to this book after hearing him interviewed about his latest, The War Before the War, about fugitive slaves; he talked of Melville as being the one great writer of his generation who understood race in America. The sequence near the beginning of Moby Dick, with Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed (“You had almost thought I had been his wife”) is an extraordinary moment in American letters; it was the first reason I fell for his work when I was an undergrad. Melville, in passages like this, had the ability to write about race and sexuality as if from another century.

March 2019

*T. J. Clark

Just over a dozen years ago, I spotted The Sight of Death on the new acquisitions section at a university library. I didn’t know T. J. Clark—being a sucker for death, it was the title I went for—and, because it was an analysis of two landscapes by Poussin (never a painter I’d been drawn to in any particular way) I almost left it on the shelf. Thank god I didn’t; it’s one of the best pieces of art writing I know. The two Poussins were hanging in the same gallery for a limited amount of time, and Clark’s book was about his daily encounters with them, and how his experience evolved over time. He wrote a lot about the shifting qualities of light and what that revealed. Clark not only changed my take on Poussin, I discovered  one of the few writers who really gets at what it is to spend time with a work of art. The combination of his intellectual rigour and his very savvy analytical eye makes him the ideal viewer. Because his new book is constructed from previously published essays, it isn’t the same kind of sustained thrill, but it’s really insightful, smart writing and I couldn’t put it down. Despite the presence of a Giotto angel on the cover, Heaven on Earth, Painting and the Life to Come, isn’t a book about Christian art; it’s Clark’s Marxist take on a series of painters he loves: Giotto, Breugel, Poussin (of course), Veronese, and Picasso. He not only makes you appreciate certain works for the first time, he also makes the familiar vivid in new ways. Reading him changes the way I look, and that’s an extraordinary thing.

*Time Song, Searching for Doggerland 

Tens of thousands of years ago, what is now the bottom of the North Sea was a countryside that stretched from the current British coast to the Netherlands; recently named Doggerland, after Dogger Bank (which, in turn, was named after the Dutch vessels that fished there for cod), it exists as a kind of prehistoric Atlantis. Julia Blackburn’s obsession with it comes from proximity (she lives on its edge), and loss—her late husband was Dutch, and she sees the the space between their shores as a place of longing and yearning. She’s a rummager, a beachcomber, and as a part of her research she hooks up with others who walk the coasts and fens or drag the sea looking for artifacts of a lost land—mammoth bones, human remains. Her curiosity is what drives the book, and it’s never not interesting as she talks to experts and amateurs, attempting to map out a vanished world and the people who lived on it. The Time Songs of the title are a series of numbered poems (there are eighteen), each accompanied by an elegant, vaguely calligraphic drawing by Enrique Brinkmann. These are the least satisfactory aspects of the book: the poems are perfunctory, more like lists and summaries of her research than true poetry, and the scale of the image reproductions robs the drawings of much of their beauty. Still, they give the book a shape, and the material in the bulk of the text—that combination of science and memoir—is pretty irresistible. There’s also a series of chronological maps, starting c. 18,000 BP, that work beautifully at conveying the geographical evolution of Doggerland. Blackburn is capable of wonder—in many ways, it’s really what she’s after, but she’s also a cranky old woman who misses people and longs for what can be no more; I liked spending time with both aspects of her. She has that marvellous desire for information about time that comes with age, that comes when one’s own time is clearly finite.

*William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow

This is a lovely thing, an old man’s version of the coming of age novel; it’s as if, at the age of 65 or so, a character like Carson McCuller’s Frankie were to look back at the end of her adolescence with the perspective of time. The story is a simple tragedy: a man falls in love with his friends wife and this leads to a killing. When he was a boy, the narrator was friendly with the son of the murderer; his book is an elegy and an apology to that boy from decades later. It’s an achingly fine little book.

February 2019