Challenge: 50 Books discussion

35 - On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain by Edward Said

Edward Said, perhaps best known for “Orientalism,” one of the most-recognized and important contributions to post-colonial studies, wrote the essays in “On Late Style” shortly before his death. The sense of “lateness” – of mortality, of obsolescence – permeates them, and they cover everything from the music of Strauss, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the political activism of Jean Genet, to “Il Gattopardo” (as envisioned by both Lampedusa and Visconti). In many ways, this is Said’s last conversation with Theodor Adorno, whose presence deeply informs his criticism in many of these essays.

The book begins by reading around lateness as an aspect of chronological development – as synonymous with maturity – and opens the concept up as something that can realize “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” instead of the facile harmony and resolution that seeks the end of all tension. Said claims that late style refuses to reconcile what is impossible to reconcile, and that this reconciliation is oftentimes just a refusal to accept difference. It “grasps the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then goes forth to try anyway.” Musicologist Rose Subotnik says of the late work of Beethoven, no doubt with his Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony in mind, “no synthesis is conceivable [but is in effect] the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of its wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” It is this idea of lateness – which is quite distinct from, but not completely unrelated to, mortality and death – which Said puts to critical use in these wonderful essays.

While I think that everything in the book is worth reading, a few essays especially jumped out as being worthy of attention. In “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” Said sets out to carve a middle path between two radically different opinions on the late operas of Richard Strauss. Adorno’s rejection and derision of them is total, saying that he “intended to master music without submitting to its discipline” and that “his ego ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure.” Compare this with Glenn Gould’s hagiographic characterization of Strauss as “more than the greatest man of music of our times.” In one of the most convincing arguments made in the book, Said argues against Adorno’s accusation of Strauss being a Beidermeier relic, and that he went a long way in countering Wagner’s theatrical idiom of “history as a grand system to which everyone and every small narrative is subject,” becoming the “keeper of the art of our fathers.”

The most compelling and readable essay in the collection is “On Jean Genet,” an autobiographical account of Said’s two encounters with Genet during the early 1970s. The second of these, which took place in Beirut, allowed Said to learn about Genet’s role in Palestinian activism, which was passionate and total. Through a reading of “Les Paravents,” Said argues that because of Genet’s lifelong marginality as a thief, prisoner, and homosexual, that he was able to sympathize with Palestinians without the Western rose-colored glasses of Orientalism.

I recommend this for anyone, especially those seriously interested in classical music. For Said admirers who have only known him as a literary critic, these essays open up whole new vistas by displaying the full panoply of his concerns and academic interests. While I have the suspicion that many musicologists would disagree with his characterizations of, for example, Mozart and late Beethoven and perhaps Strauss, these are nevertheless well-wrought essays constructed with lapidary reasoning. These essays are all the more poignant because Said knew that he was in the last stages of his fight with leukemia as they were being written. Readers who admire Said for his clear presentation of sometimes very opaque ideas will not be disappointed with this collection.

36 - Movements in Art Since 1945 by Edward Lucie-Smith

Many non-fiction genres sometimes find it difficult to navigate between two audiences: the rank neophytes who need a basic grounding in the topic at hand, and those who already have a thorough knowledge of those fundamentals. It is those of us who are in the middle who sometimes have difficulty finding the right book for them. Edward Lucie-Smith provides some of those big, overarching ideas that are essential for those building on the basics, but the sheer number of painters and sculptors that he throws at the reader is a little disorienting, especially when you’re still trying to discern what ties Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Helen Frankenthaler all under the category of “post-painterly abstraction.” Maybe it’s just my compulsion to over-categorize and draw connections between all the artists that detracted from the book.

The introduction to the book was really promising, and draws a lot of lines of continuity between the art of pre- and post-World War II. Lucie-Smith argues, for example, that whereas it is often thought that Modernism came to some sort of end not long after this time, the techniques, aesthetics, and materials used to make the art never changed, and therefore this art remained, in many ways, Modernist. The first few pages of each chapter also give some great intellectual background to each of the major movements, i.e., abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, p/op art, and photorealism. But after this, the reader is met with page after page of artists who appear quickly and just as quickly disappear never to be heard from or seen again, with usually just one painting or sculpture to represent an entire artist’s oeuvre. Well-known artists like Henry Moore and Frank Stella get two photographic plates, and no one gets more than that. Quickly afterward, I got lost in a welter of names with which I was barely familiar or not familiar at all. What I appreciated most about this book is that I was introduced to many new names that I didn’t know before, and now know to keep an eye out for them.

37 - The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson, perhaps best known for his “The Making of the English Working Class,” and his posthumous book-length treatment of the poetry of William Blake titled “Witness Against the Beast,” planned a comprehensive – and possibly multi-volume - treatment of English Romantic poetry. Unfortunately, he only got a chance to sketch the plan for the project before he passed away in 1993. This volume, “The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age,” then represents not Thompson’s complete vision, or even anything close to it, but is rather a compilation of some preliminary ideas collected by Thompson’s wife (a fine historian in her own right, but not of the English Romantics), which constitute about one-fourth of the material of the book. The rest consists of extended book reviews that, while integrating a lot of the relevant history that certainly would have been included in Thompson’s completed book, fail to contribute to the overarching thesis that Thompson seemed to set out in the first couple of essays.

The weakest parts of the book were the reviews, which were really tied together by nothing other than the fact that they concerned the figures involved in the lives of either Coleridge or Wordsworth, and influenced their ideas about and reactions to the French Revolution. William Godwin and John Thelwall are two of the most prominent of these figures, who are of no small amount of historical interest. However, I would imagine that the average reader of this book would not likely be interested in reading Mark Philp’s seven-volume edition of the “Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin,” and might feel genuinely miffed that reviews like these make up the majority of the book. To make matters worse, the words “book review” are mentioned nowhere on the inside flaps or back cover of the book.

But there are a couple of pieces that save this book from being completely uninteresting to the average reader. The first piece, “Education and Experience,” is a convincing if somewhat truncated argument asserting that Wordsworth’s poetry tried to bridge the gap between the educated gentry and the common man, elevating pure experience as the true metric of education. Thompson argues that education prior to the 1790s was practically synonymous with social control, and that a so-called classroom of experience could be liberating. Of course we recognize this viewpoint now as one of the cynosures of Romantic thought, but it was radically new in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

In the second piece, “Disenchantment or Default?,” Thompson discusses the role of what he calls disenchantment (being critical of former positions, politics, and opinions generally) versus apostasy (the total and utter disavowal of said positions). He says that disenchantment can enhance poetry, while the completeness of apostasy ruins it, often turning the poet into a cynic, which is what I take it to mean when he says, “There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason, egalite, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also.” Thompson insinuates that this might have happened to Wordsworth, and that it certainly happened to Coleridge. The title of the last piece, “Hunting the Jacobin Fox,” refers to the political radical John Thelwall and his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their subsequent repudiation of his political positions.

During the years leading up to his death, Thompson was passionately involved in worldwide nuclear disarmament. I suppose some of us think that the eradication of atomic weapons is more important than 1790s England. While I too share this sentiment, I secretly found myself wishing that he would have used the down time between delivering polemics against Reagan’s Star Wars program to sketch some crib notes on our beloved Lake Poets.

38 - A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe by Geoffrey Hartman

Oscar Wilde once declared that “literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apothegm to heart. Closely associated with Yale University for most of his professional life, Hartman is one of the most well-known literary critics in the United States, and often identified with the Yale school of deconstruction, even though no overarching methodology can be applied to the entire body of his work.

First, a word on the audience at which this book is aimed: it will be of little interest for most readers who are not at least moderately familiar with the last fifty years of literary criticism in Europe, and especially the American upending thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the book both is and is not a bit of self-conscious omphaloskepsis: while Hartman does a lot of name-dropping, he discusses many of those names in detail, or at least as much detail as a 180-page book could. Those particularly interested in Hartman’s contributions to Holocaust studies, memorial studies, and digitization will certainly find something interesting.

Born in 1929 in Germany, Hartman was taken via Kindertransport to England until the end of World War II, when he was able to move to the United States to pursue his education. While he was doing his graduate work at Yale, and later when he was a professor there, he met a number of important people in the field, including but not limited to Paul de Man, Hans Robert Jauss, Derrida, Harold Bloom, Rene Wellek, and Erich Auerbach. Instead of turning his formidable power as analyst and critic toward himself, he looks at their ideas and offers the occasional insight of them as people, including passionate defenses of both de Man and Jauss against accusations concerning their questionable pasts. The book ends with a beautiful tribute to the German critic Erich Auerbach, whose “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” is one of the most important contributions to the genre.

Beyond these occasional coruscations, we get precious few glimpses into his inner life, which is perhaps what many readers might want. But this wouldn’t be the first time in his life that he bucked a trend. The material in the book is wholly refracted through scholarly apparatus and his contribution to it, and therefore comes across as more aloof and impersonal. Hartman is a gentle, avuncular soul with a capacious intellect. His call for the continued close reading of literature is a vital one, as is his continuing suspicion of literary fads like postmodernism, in its all sundry incarnations. I recommend it for those interested in a meditative account of a life in reading and learning, both of which Hartman does with a considerable joie de vivre.

John wrote: "37 - The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson, perhaps best known for his “The Making of the English Working Class,” and his posthumous book-length treatmen..."
I always learn something when I read your reviews. I especially like this quote: “There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason, egalite, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also.” I suppose, then, without struggle there is no creation. Something to think about.
Sherry

39 - Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty by Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish-born sociologist in the Marxist tradition mostly known for his thoroughgoing critiques of consumerism, modernity, and cultural memory (especially the Holocaust). His “liquid” books, including “Liquid Modernity” (2000), “Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds” (2003), “Liquid Life” (2005), “Liquid Fear” (2006), and the book presently considered, “Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty” (2006), for the most part seem to be shorter books whose aim is to adumbrate the arguments Bauman has made over the course of his career.

The focus of “Liquid Times” is a meta-critique of globalization and all of the problems it presents, from rootlessness to the ubiquity of the security sate, with Bauman’s central thesis being that the consequences of globalization have seriously hindered attempts at international justice. The goal of globalization - to eradicate any trade barriers and therefore create “markets without frontiers” - results in the transition from a world where people are subject to the laws and protections of their home countries to one in which radical fear and lack of security are reified and the “fading of human bonds and the wilting of solidarity” reigns. This lack of security results in fear and a perceived lack of control, which in turn perpetuates and shores up the conspicuous shift toward national security that we have experienced in advanced liberal democracies. And so the pernicious cycle goes. In his comparison of cities, the globally located ones (that are able to participate in the fully integrated sphere of globalization) and locally located cities ones (those that aren’t), Bauman says that the job of the city has changed from protecting its inhabitants from outsiders to housing ghettoized populations of peripatetic transnationals and strangers, the “dumping ground for globally conceived and gestated problems.”

Our new liquid times have also brought about an unprecedented number of refugees, both political and economic. Wars, which Bauman thinks are essentially local attempts to solve global problems, become intractable. The result is an “excess of humanity” – humanity as waste product – completely and utterly divested of property, personal identity, or even a state that will recognize their existence.

Bauman suggests that democracy has ironically become an elitist affair, where the rich protect their interests and the poor continue to suffer from a lack of social safety nets and supportive governmental networks. He is also not terribly optimistic about the chances of gaining a pre-globalized utopia, a word which Thomas More first darkly noted could mean, homophonically, either “paradise” or “nowhere.” While it is still a paradise for some, our world has become too liquid to be anything but the latter for most of us. In the end, Bauman offers in every analysis of globalization the ultimate paradox of modernity: a permanent life shot through with impermanency.

As I pointed out before, at least according to the back of the book, Bauman has taken the time to further detail his analyses in other books. However, from what I read here, I am not sure how many of his arguments are original. Books on globalization with themes of alienation and disenfranchisement are not unpopular in the field of sociology. However, Bauman’s wry wit definitely has me interested in reading more of his work, which I plan on reviewing in the future.

40 - The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel is one of those writers you will eventually encounter if you like books about books, the history of libraries, and the sociology and culture of reading in general. Perhaps these subjects come naturally to someone with a 30,000 volume library, located at his home just south of the Loire and made of a reconstructed and expanded centuries-old presbytery and barn. It is with this physical location that Manguel begins his journey into the phenomenologies of reading and most everything else one can associate with collections of books.

Well-known characters in the history of literacy make repeated appearances between the pages: the Library at Alexandria, the Tower of Babel, and of course Manguel’s own impressive collection. With short, episodic chapters with titles like “Library as Myth,” “Library as Order,” and “Library as Mind,” he looks at many of the topics of perennial interest to book lovers: censorship, the numerous ways of organizing a library, books as spiritual nourishment, and even the library as a tool of power. Manguel also shares a habit of my own – creating connections between the ideas of different books simply because of their physical proximity with one another, though “Library as Stochastic Syncretism” didn’t make the editorial cut.

His admiration, however, can turn into an awkward kind of fetish, which can sometimes try one’s patience. The vast number of media available on the Internet also seems to turn him into a suspicious Luddite, but I suppose many of us have unfortunately come to expect that opinion from someone like Manguel; I personally much prefer “real” books, though I would be one of the first to admit the convenience and advantages of e-books.

Some of the readers that gave this book a lower rating seem to have been disappointed because this isn’t a systematic, linear history, but instead is rather topical and roaming in style. This is not the formal, academic account that some may have expected; they certainly exist, but the audience for Manguel is different. It’s much more of a meditative, contemplative sociology of libraries and the reading culture. However, for a relatively small book, Manguel manages to conjure all the avuncular charm he can. “Charm” really is the word that garners this book a fifth star. These are not ideas cynically passed on by someone only barely familiar with them; Manguel lives, loves, and breathes books. If you’re looking for a passionate advocate of reading, you can hardly go wrong with “The Library at Night.” Manguel is truly a faithful and knowledgeable cicerone.

41 - The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative by Frank Kermode

“The Genesis of Secrecy” is a set of the collected and expanded Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard during 1977-1978. In this book, Kermode announces his task to be one of a secular interpreter (or anti-interpreter, as it were), completely unencumbered, yet still highly knowledgeable, of older Biblical-critical traditions and their concomitant dogma.

Hermeneutics is the main concern here. The Gospel of Mark is the real center of gravity, but Kermode’s catholicity draws him also to James Joyce and Henry Green, with some non-canonical Gospels thrown in for good measure. In the first lecture, “Carnal and Spiritual Senses,” the act of interpretation is likened to an attempt to transition from being an “outsider” to an “insider,” that is, someone with special, institutionalized knowledge about the text at hand. Interpretation is necessarily an act that always frustrates itself if it aims to find a concrete, absolute nugget of meaning; instead, the multiplicity and indeterminacy of hermeneutic practice, and our proclivity for allegorical and elliptical readings, mean that any essentialism is textually impossible. In fact, Kermode all but says that what it means to be a narrative is to have “hermeneutic potential.” His carnal and spiritual are reconfigurations of Freud’s manifest and latent, but without all the Freudian baggage. With biblical texts, he sometimes opts for the similar “pleromatist” instead of latent.

In another lecture titled “What are the Facts?,” he discusses the role of textual facticity in historical writing. This is especially controversial, considering that Kermode has chosen the Gospels as a main focus – texts whose historical facts are hard to square, to say the least. To add to the complexity of looking at the Gospels as historical documents, one must consider that the Passion narrative was foretold in the Old Testament, and therefore its authenticity was a prerequisite to the supposed authority of the Gospels. In short, Kermode makes the dubious claim that, as a textual outsider, it is well nigh impossible to discern historical writing from any other type.

It is uncertain whether Kermode knew exactly how close he is to poststructuralism here. It is not the case that all narratives dissolve into an incoherent semiological play of signs and signifiers when under interpretive scrutiny. Kermode’s approach results in a kind of textual nihilism. Interpretation always involves the interplay of intentionality and historical perspective, but there is no reason why that interplay must necessarily annihilate our ability to discern between genres, or what those genres are trying to accomplish. Kermode also never discusses his controversial choice of texts he uses to reach his conclusions. What would have happened had he chosen Sallust or Polybius, whose accounts can be checked against other texts and archaeological evidence? The choice of the Gospel of Mark makes Kermode’s arguments no less fascinating or thought-provoking, but it does make arguing the point much easier.

This is one of the best-known books of Kermode’s latter theory, and is indicative of a marked turn away from some of his earlier work, especially 1957’s “The Romantic Image,” which was a more traditional piece of criticism. In the earlier book, he accuses historians of applying some “false categories of modern thought,” rendering their work little more than “myth” or “allegory.” Many of Kermode’s attacks in “The Romantic Image” were driven by a call for a correspondence theory of truth between all kinds of texts – critical, historical, and literary. Unfortunately, “The Genesis of Secrecy” took a turn away from his earlier attempts at genre criticism, and toward what Kermode has elsewhere called “French utopianism.”

This is a wonderful and interesting book, and one that everyone interested in modern criticism should be exposed to. I happen to disagree with its conclusions, but I found that it made me wrestle with some of the most fundamental assumptions I had about criticism as an act. Even considering the significant change in approach in the twenty years separating “The Romantic Image” and “Genesis of Secrecy,” Kermode never lost any of his scholarly cosmopolitanism and humane warmth, which is what draws me to read him again and again.

42 - Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity by Luke Timothy Johnson

Many religious people choose to focus on those things that make their religion unique, ahistorically separating it from the cultures and other religions in and around which it originally formed. It makes sense that several kinds of contemporary Christianity would do the same. For those looking for a scholarly, well-argued position against the singular historical uniqueness of Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson provides an excellent one in “Among the Gentiles.”

Johnson feels that illustrating lines of continuity between Greco-Roman paganism, Jewish traditions, and nascent Christianity opens up the possibility of dialogue, as well as providing a space where the comparative history of religions can take place stripped of the limiting, often judgmental assumptions of contemporary conservative Christian apologetics. Any project with this type of scope requires tools which allow for the analysis of those types of continuity at which Johnson is looking.

Methodologically, he proposes a fourfold religious typology which claims will be useful in looking at all of these traditions; even though Johnson teaches in a school of theology, he avoids any theological language in any of these. What he calls “Religiousness A” is the participation in divine benefits, including “revelation through prophecy, healing through revelation, providing security and status through Mysteries, enabling and providing for the daily successes of individuals, households, cities, and empires.” This type of religious practice is optimistic in believing that the world is a stage for divine activity, and pragmatic in that “salvation involves security and success in this mortal life.” Johnson says that Greek orator Aelius Aristides embodies this type. In several of Aristides’ orations, he singles out for praise Serapis (who protected him on his journey to Egypt) and Asclepius (who bestowed the gift of oratory upon him).

Religiousness B is moral transformation, which exemplifies the belief that “the divine [spirit] is immanent within human activity and expressed through moral transformation.” The pagan example here is the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, whose Enchiridion is quite literally a “handbook for the moral life,” detailing how to manage desires and emotions and learn one’s social duties.

Religiousness C attempts to transcend the world, since “the divine is not found in material processes of the world but only in the realm of immortal spirit and light. Salvation is rescuing the spark of light that has fallen into a bodily prison and returning it, through asceticism and death itself, to the realm from which it first came. It is triumph through escape.” Johnson selects as an example of Religiousness C the Poimandres, a selection from the Corpus Hermeticum (a complex set of texts of Egyptian origin associated with the revealer-god Hermes Trismegistus).

Religiousness D tries to stabilize the world, consisting largely of “all ministers and mystagogues of cults, all prophets who translated oracles and examined entrails and Sibylline utterances, all therapists who aided the god Asclepius in his healing work, all ‘liturgists’ who organized and facilitated the festivals, all priests who carried out sacrifices, all Vestal Virgins whose presence and dedication ensured the permanence of the city.” Johnson chooses Plutarch, the biographer, priest, and philosopher as the epitome of Religiousness D. Plutarch accepts the responsibility of exercising civic magistracies, shows a commitment to maintaining Apollo’s temple at Delphi (as well as serving as a priest there), and expends a lot of effort in returning the temple to its former grandeur. Plutarch is a student of the social dimension of religion, and obviously is most concerned with how religion affects the reigning social order.

Johnson says that types A and B were already at work in the Christian world in the first century; he looks at type A in the apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Montanism; type B is discussed in Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Polycarp. Religiousness C, “transcending the world,” Johnson argues, does not appear until the second century, where its predominant idiom is found in the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag-Hammadi, and especially Irenaeus’ refutation of Gnostic doctrine in “Adversus Haereses.” Religiousness D, stabilizing the world, first became recognizable after 313’s Edict of Milan, which marked the beginning of Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the official imperial religion, and grew even stronger after the appearance of political and communal power within the bishoprics around the Christian world.

If there was one criticism I have of the book, it would be that the fourfold typology is sometimes applied too strictly to situations where it doesn’t apply as well as others. It is clear from the way Johnson phrases the language of the four types that he anticipates the rise of Christianity, and therefore molds them to accommodate it. Also, Johnson represents the types as if they were compartmentalized and essential, when in fact they bleed together and inform each others’ practice. Surely transcendence was sometimes thought of as a gift bestowed by the gods, or that moral transformation can stabilize society, and so forth. Surely Johnson realizes this, but he has already performed quite the feat in establishing his thesis in a mere 280 pages.

Johnson is a Catholic, and his scholarship in this book truly is in the spirit of the “Nostra Aetate,” the Second Vatican Council’s rallying exhortation for a thoroughgoing ecumenism. The truth is that Johnson does have an agenda: one of inclusion, one whose goal is the “embrace of a catholicity of religious sensibility and expression.” At the heart of Johnson’s book is a call for Christians to embrace the fullness and complexity of their past, and to view this as a means of starting a conversation instead of stopping one.

I have simplified and adumbrated some of the arguments that Johnson makes in the book, because they really are too rich and fully textured to give them the treatment they deserve here. I recommend this highly for anyone with a catholic (lower-case c) attitude toward Christianity and Christian history, and anyone who wants to learn about the ways that Christianity borrowed from paganism during its first few centuries.

43 - The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller

Herta Muller was born in the German-speaking region of Banat in central Romania, and grew up under Ceausescu. It was only in 1987 at the age of 34 that she and her husband were able to settle in West Berlin. This novel is difficult to appreciate apart from Muller’s personal experience of living under an authoritarian dictatorship, and having German as a first language but being forced to learn Romanian in primary school.

Herta Muller’s third novel tells the story of a group of young university students living in Ceausescu’s Romania. One of the young women, Lola, has violent sexual encounters with men in semi-public places, and we are left to guess why. (To keep party officials satisfied? For food? Pure sublimation?) She ends up dead one day – found hanging in her closet – under circumstances every bit as mysterious. Everyone’s lives are full of paranoia, angst, and fear of being turned into the state officials, who filter into and out of the characters’ lives in both latent and manifest forms. Unlike her friend who committed suicide (or was she killed?), the narrator of the novel decides to emigrate to Germany to face an uncertain future.

I must admit that I had a very difficult time with this novel, but not in the normal ways: it wasn’t difficult to read, or difficult to understand in historical context. It simply offered nothing new for me. The story, the tale of the lives of a young woman and a few of her male friends seemed, with all of its verisimilitude, straight out of history. Anyone that has read about Romania under Ceausescu knows about his cult of personality, the utter deprivation that his people constantly lived under, and surviving only to think possibly of one day being “disappeared.” The lives of Lola, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt are not unfamiliar to history.

The lessons this book teaches are the lessons of history, not of literature. I have a small amount of familiarity, gained solely through reading, about that time and place. In those books, I read of people like the major characters presented in the book. But at least for me, Muller’s novel presents no added value to the history I already know. Great fiction has to be more than “litterature verite.” It needs to bring something to the table that history cannot, something that speaks to the human condition differently than a historian does. Muller’s writing lacked this, at least for me.

Michael Hofmann’s translation is poetic, meditative, disjointed, which I found appropriate for the tone and subject matter of Muller’s novel. I look forward to reading more of Muller’s work in the future, and hope to appreciate it more than I did “The Land of Green Plums.”

44 - The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations by Edward Hallett Carr

This book, perhaps the one for which Carr is best remembered, was written immediately before the start of World War II, and is considered one of the seminal texts of international relations. In fact, the preface to the first edition is dated September 30, 1939, a mere four weeks after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. This is by no means incidental to the content, either. “Twenty Years’ Crisis” is a thoroughgoing critique of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international politics and especially the assumptions on which they rest.

It can be broken up into roughly two sections; the first is more theoretical in approach, while the second part analyzes certain instances of political structures, treaties, and international relations that support his theoretical assertions. I’m much more interested in the theory, so my focus in this review will be the first half, where Carr explores utopianism, realism, and their intellectual genealogies.

After the end of the Great War, a popular idea in diplomatic circles was that only irrationality and aggression could possibly start another war, and only the construction of a set of international institutions, like the League of Nations, could prevent a similar breakout. That certainly is a pleasing thought, considering how much carnage and loss of life there was. This hope, which Carr identifies as a naïve and empty sentiment, is perhaps the most conspicuous symptom of what he calls “utopianism.” Utopians “pay little attention to existing ‘facts’ or to the analysis of cause and effect, but will devote themselves wholeheartedly to the elaboration of visionary projects for the attainment of the ends they have in view – projects whose simplicity and perfection gives them an easy and universal appeal” (5). Carr associates utopianism with the more intellectual strains in international relations, imputing the label to those with “the inclination to ignore what was and what is in contemplation of what should be.” Utopians put their moral ideals before political observation and empiricism. He traces utopianism to the willed, persistent belief in “the harmony of interests” – the common assumption that the pursuit of individual self-interest will necessarily dovetail with the interests of the nation as a whole. This idea is similar to the social Darwinism which also populated much nineteenth-century European social thought.

Realism can in many ways be thought of as the antithesis of utopianism. Realists let observation, national interests, and power inform their view of international policy. Realists have “the inclination to deduce what should be from what was and what is.” Whereas utopians let morality inform their politics, realists let their politics inform their morality. Because of the rationalist, Weberian strains Carr associates with realism, he associated realism with the bureaucrat instead of the intellectual.

While this book is often listed as the first defense of realism, Carr is extraordinarily fair-minded, and openly admits that there are problems with this approach, too. Importantly, realism fails to provide the idealism that any international policy must have. As Carr says, “Most of all, consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action. If the sequence of cause and effect is sufficiently rigid to permit of the ‘scientific prediction’ of events, if our thought is irrevocably conditioned by status and our interests, then both action and thought become devoid of purpose” (92).

Because of the respective strengths and weaknesses of utopianism and realism, Carr concludes the theoretical portion of the book by suggesting that any meaningful, pragmatic political approach must rest somewhere near the middle of the realist/utopian continuum. “We return therefore to the conclusion that any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality. Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham which serves merely as a disguise for the interests of the privileged, the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible” (93).

In the second part of the book, Carr asserts that utopians were so concerned with preventing another Great War, they began to completely ignore the element of power in international relations. For example, utopians assumed that all nations had the same interests in maintaining peace, and for the same reasons. A simple look at the actual milieu of European politics leading up to both World Wars I and II will suggest something different.

He also spends a good deal of time pointing out how the three kinds of power that operate in international politics – economic, military, and public opinion – can’t be analyzed separately and have to be considered interdependently. Also, because (at least at that time) the international community has not agreed upon a means of resolving international disputes, treaties are barely worth the paper they’re printed on since countries can opt out on trivial conditions. It would have been interesting to see how the formation of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice would have changed Carr’s option on this point, if at all.

For being over seventy years old, Carr’s analysis is still fresh, fascinating, and convincing. The only part that dates the book is the second half that looks at actual international events, since nothing after 1939 is covered. I did have to read up a little on the some of the treaties that are now lesser-known, like the Treaty of Locarno and the Franco-Soviet Treaty, but Carr very much rewards the reader’s effort in this respect. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in the history of international relations, or anyone who wants a full-throated defense of realism and its place in the field.

45 - Celestina by Fernando de Rojas

This review may contain spoilers.

“Celestina” is one of those literary peculiarities that you might not have had the pleasure to be introduced to if you had not taken a course in Spanish literature. I first ran across the title in the Dedalus European Classics series, which has a lot of similarly obscure and wonderful things, including Georges Rodenbach and Gustav Meyrink. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that a more mainstream publisher like Penguin had the same translation, by Peter Bush.

Celestina, the local procuress and alchemic mage, makes a living off of restoring the hymens of previously deflowered young girls so that they may be marriageable again. The rich noble Calisto has fallen in love with Melibea, yet it is wholly unrequited. He enlists Celestina to fix this, and through some crafty manipulation she eventually succeeds. Two of Calisto’s servants, Parmeno and Sempronio, promise to offer their own services to Celestina if she will split Calisto’s payment three ways. Parmeno starts out being honest, telling Calisto that Celestina is nothing but a money-hungry crook, but eventually gives up when he sees how hopelessly in love Calisto really is. Once Celestina refuses to pay them, everything starts to go horribly, horribly downhill. What read for the first two-thirds as a bawdy comedy turns into a bloodbath on par with “Hamlet.” The label tragicomedy seems especially appropriate here, having equal measures of both.

The plot is fast-paced and easy to follow. It is divided into twenty-one short, heavily dialogue-driven chapters that read very much like a play (even though it was apparently never mean to be staged). Throughout, the best advice is given through numbing, stultifying bromides, and this is especially true of Celestina. You can almost open the book randomly and find clichés, though the humor of the characters still manages to jump off the page.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote a beautiful description of Celestina in “The Coming of Age.” She wrote, “This was the first time that an old woman had appeared as the main heroine; in the traditional way she was of course a bawd, but a bawd of dimensions quite unlike those of any character who had yet been produced. She was a former whore who had stayed in the trade because she liked it, a self-seeking, lewd, and intriguing old woman, and something of a witch as well – the leading, most active character in the play [though play, as I noted above, is not the right word for this piece]. In her are summed up all the vices that had been attributed to the old women since classical times, and in spite of all her shrewdness she ends by being severely punished. The French theatre turned to this source of inspiration, but with less striking results: we find old bawds and prostitutes in Jodelle, Odet de Turnebe, and Larivey.”

The reader gets the feeling that, when it was first published at the very end of the fifteenth century, “Celestina” was meant first and foremost to be a savage critique of the reigning morality of the time. While it has lost its critical punch, it is still full of characters, ideas, and bawdy that make it enjoyable, humane, and lovable. Since it was written before most modern-day genres had the chance to fully gel, the style takes getting used to; it cannot be easily pegged down, like we do more easily with Cervantes and Shakespeare, who in theme and style and both heavily foreshadowed here (especially the former).

I can’t read Spanish, so I can’t comment on the original. However, I can recommend Peter Bush’s translation to anyone who is looking for a unique reading experience far off the beaten path.

46 - The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

This review contains spoilers.

This is a wonderful, evocative novel tracing the life of the Gault family beginning during The Troubles in the twenties. Fearing reprisals against Irish nationalists and a previous attempt to burn down their family estate, Lahardane, the Captain Everard Gault and his wife Helene consider fleeing for the Continent. Lucy, their daughter, overhears them talking about moving, but wants to do anything but move from her home on the Irish seaside, the only place she has ever known. In an act of lapsarian rebellion, Lucy runs off into the woods abutting Lahardane just as the Gaults are getting ready to leave, and they end up having to leave without her. Later, the servants (a husband and wife named Henry and Bridget) that are left behind to tend the house stumble on Lucy, and decide to stay behind and raise her there.

She leads a reclusive life, socialized by only an old local canon, a solicitor charged with looking after the house – a displaced child in a world of adults - and the library of books her parents left behind. She meets and is dutifully courted by a young, earnest boy named Ralph who has been invited to be the tutor of a couple of local boys, and while she very much returns his affection, her sense of abandonment lingers, and whenever Ralph shows his romantic interest, she coolly refuses him. He leaves at the end of the summer, and much later Lucy sees in the newspaper that he has married another woman.

Very occasionally, we get flits of the life that Everard and Helene are leading in Europe. Her heart is understandably broken, but she can’t stand of returning to Lahardane even though Lucy is still there. She dies of influenza before she can ever see her daughter again. However, as an old man Captain Gault eventually makes his way back to Lahardane to see Henry, Bridget, and Lucy. While the servants understandably expect Lucy to be thrilled with his return, her relationship with him seems just as inadequate as her relationship with Ralph. Long silences and short, terse replies from Lucy dominate their conversations, even as her father tries to engage her meaningfully, and we immediately know that this is not the silence of rejection, but rather one of a young girl who was forced into an exile all her own, though not a physical one. While he is at Lahardane, one of the boys, named Horahan, who tried to burn down the estate decades earlier shows up and tells of his part in the attempted arson, and he expressed his deep, heart-felt anguish and regret at what he has done. One night, Captain Gault quietly passes away in his sleep.

In her later years, she visits Horahan in an asylum where he has been driven to the verge of madness from his guilt, comforting and talking to him. It is finally in Horahan, who has riven the Gault family into pieces, whom Lucy finally finds her redemption. The end of the final sees Lucy passing the days as an elderly woman. On the radio, she hears “If you’re not on the Internet, you’re not at the races.” The sudden mention of the Internet in a story that started some seventy years before is a jarring reminder of the impersonality of history, and the relentlessness of its march.

Some reviews have found this book depressing, sad, or pessimistic. All is not sweetness and light in the lives of the Gaults, but Trevor injects the comforts of consolation and possible salvation through meaningful human relationships. Compared with the work of John McGahern whose work is downright bleak, Trevor doesn’t see the vagaries as time as wholly malevolent. As Lucy later realized, “What happens simply did.” This novel is superior in both the expansiveness of its themes – of love, sin, regret, meditation on history, and the possibilities of reconciliation – and the tight, sharp elegance of Trevor’s prose. Above all, as a first-time reader of his work, I was struck by the poignancy that never devolved into mawkish sentimentality, and the honesty that never lowered itself to bare confession.

By the time I was halfway done with “The Story of Lucy Gault,” I was already enjoying it so much I had already ordered another William Trevor novel. Trevor has also published about as many volumes of short stories as novels, which may very well tempt me out of my continued disinterest in the form. If they are anywhere near as beautifully done as “The Story of Lucy Gault,” they will be nothing short of endlessly rewarding.

47 - Love and Summer by William Trevor

This review contains spoilers.

I read this quickly after finishing my first book by Trevor, his previous novel "The Story of Lucy Gault" (2002). While I didn't find "Love and Summer" to be as spectacular, it was still wonderful, treating many of the themes - the irrevocably of decisions made and unmade, forced conformity to social standards, and institutional decline - with the same sensitivity and honesty.

While we usually associate funerals and death with separation, "Love and Summer," William Trevor's fourteenth novel, shows how it can just as easily lead to passionate connections. On the death of Mrs. Eileen Connulty, the young amateur artist Florian Kilderry intends to photograph the funeral procession through the town of Rathmoye. He stops to ask a young woman, Ellie Dillahan, for directions, and they are mutually taken with one another. Ellie, a foundling raised from childhood in a nearby convent, has been taken in as a housekeeper and was eventually married to Mr. Dillahan, a kindly, older, loving farmer with good intentions, but whose slow, regular life fails to satisfy the young Ellie. The death of his first wife and their child in a horrible farm accident also hunts him constantly. During their first encounter, Florian is taken with Ellie's innocence, and she is drawn to him because he stands for something - anything - outside of her small farm and her life of daily routine.

Florian idles for much of the book, occupying his parents' house while he waits for a buyer to appear, all the while thinking about his meetings with Ellie and his parents' artistic pasts. Over time, they meet more and begin an affair. He eventually tells her that, after selling the house, he plans to move to Scandinavia. Ms. Connulty, the daughter of the deceased woman whose funeral originally brought Florian and Ellie together, watches what she perceives to be Florian's encroachment on Ellie's life with suspicion. Ms. Connulty and a curious, verbose man by the name of Orpen Wren cast a shadow over the relationship of Ellie and Florian. In the middle of the night, Ellie slips out of the farmhouse to meet Florian on the road to give Florian one last embrace before assuming the only choice she ever really had - to live out the rest of her life with her harmless, unexciting, damaged husband.

It may just be the sentimentalist in me, but Trevor captures the poignancies and ambiguities in life with a wonderful tenderness. He can catch those feelings that pass between the quick silences in conversations that we so often look over, and a beautiful way of making even the pedestrian occurrence highly poetic. I already have "Fools of Fortune" and "Death in Summer," two of his other novels, and very much look forward to reading and reviewing them soon. For those new to Trevor, I recommend "The Story of Lucy Gault," his second-to-last novel, and probably the best work of fiction that I've read in the last year.

48 - The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Ranciere

This book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere's earlier work "The Ignorant Schoolmaster." All of these pieces are tied together by Ranciere's attempt to overcome the dyad so often associated with modernist aesthetics of passive spectator/active seer. The title essay extends the concept set forth in "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" by suggesting that the knowledge gap between the educated teacher and the student should be given up in place for an "equality of knowledge." The goal of this is not to turn everyone into a scholar, however. As Ranciere says, "It is not the transmission of the artist's knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third that is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect" (15). This is by far the most cogent and understandable of the essays in the collection, and it offers an interesting suggestion in rethinking the space between the actor and viewer, teacher and student, or any other relationship. However, it struck me as the kind of idea most at home in the world of theory, one that might not be well-translated into praxis.

The second essay, "The Misadventures of Critical Thought," Ranciere criticizes the traditional role of the spectator by claiming that it, even though a mode of criticism itself, it "reproduces its own logic." He looks at photos from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Vietnam, by Martha Rosler and Josephine Meckseper. Some people do not want to view these graphic photographs, however that very refusal perpetuates and continues the logic of the war in the first place. Therefore, a critical stance toward the image needs to shift away from this approach toward the uncoupling of two logics, "the emancipating logic of capacity and the critical logic of collective inveiglement" (48).

The last essay, "The Pensive Image," sustains a further opening up between the formalist opposition of the active and passive. Ranciere argues for a shift - again, what he argues to be an emancipating shift - away from the "unifying logic of action" toward "a new status of the figure" (121). The end of pensiveness (of being, literally, "full of thought") lies between narration and expression, one the mode of the active artist, the other of the passive spectator who fixes upon the artistic vision in order to impart to it a kind of reality.

Like a lot of (post)modern Continental writing, Ranciere's writing can be elliptical, and his arguments somewhat hard to follow, perhaps because they are difficult to sustain, however engaging. I chose this because it was short enough and seemed like a suitable introduction to his body of work. The essays were interesting and provocatively argued, but sometimes they seemed less than original: for example, the title essay really seems to add nothing to the old breaking apart of the bipolar opposition of active and passive in theatre, art, and political conscientiousness; it recapitulates it nicely, but imports nothing new to the conversation. Those looking for ways to re-imagine issues in contemporary aesthetics will find something new here (as well as penetrating discussions of the poetry of Mallarme and the films of Abbas Kiarostami), but it will unnecessarily frustrate the casual reader.

49 - Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

The premise is simple enough. A married couple, Wim and Marie, decide to take in a Jew named Nico during World War II. In hiding him, the comfortably middle-class Wim and Marie learn what it means to live the precarious life of a Jew in 1940s Holland, in what would have otherwise been a set of rather ordinary circumstances. Soon afterwards, Nico becomes ill and eventually dies in their house, leaving the couple in the unique position of needing to dispose of a body no one can know they had there in the first place. They eventually leave him wrapped in blankets in a nearby park, but soon discover that they might have left a clue to their identity behind. Therefore, in a wonderful turn of irony, Wim and Marie are themselves forced to instantly flee their house for fear of being discovered by the police.

The title is beautiful and wholly appropriate to the story. Juxtapositions are everywhere: there is the comic lightness of opera bouffe as Wim and Marie try to figure out how to get rid of Nico, but also the crushing dramatic realization of how this has all come about because of how some humans have chosen to treat others; the interplay of the quotidian as the couple go about their day-to-day existences in war-torn Holland with only the audience to find that this will one day be a place of grand historical importance.

Writer Francine Prose recently wrote in a piece in the New York Times that she has come to include Dutch writer Hans Keilson in her personal list of the world's "very greatest writers." On that alone, I took up Keilson's "Death of the Adversary," and was just as impressed. Despite Time magazine's listing it as one of the ten best magazines of the year, aside Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and Porter's "Ship of Fools," Keilson unfortunately fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world.

Translator Damion Searls' revivification of his work is admirable and deserved, even while I found this "Comedy in a Minor Key" to be much less rewarding than "Death of the Adversary." The former is a small, personal, intimate picture of human identity and frailty touchingly conceived, but it felt underdeveloped to me. Its size, at a mere 135 pages, gave me less time than I would have preferred to get to know Wim, Marie, and Nico. "Death of the Adversary," however, deals with looming, world-historical forces that are at work in our lives, with bigger, abstracter ideas, and was probably for that reason more compelling for me. My rating of three stars here might be a little low. I didn't know whether to go with three or four, but I can't see myself rereading it any time soon, so I chose three. I would recommend to anyone interested in Keilson that they read "Death of the Adversary," which I found to be truly spectacular.

50 - The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich

Just a dozen or so pages into this book, I knew that it was one I wish I would have had access to when I was first seriously exposed to art. While in many respects, it is a conservative textbook (being first published in 1950), it is fundamentally meant for someone who has little to no previous formal contact with art history. Of course, if you have some, this can make you seriously engage some of your previously held assumptions about what you like and why you like it, but I got the distinct impression while reading that it was meant to initiate a teenager – a teenager who very much reminded of me of myself – into a whole new world.

The inclusions and exclusions of certain artists are, of course, always arbitrary. However, Gombrich’s choices do not deviate too much from a standard art history text. What particularly drew me to the book was what I perceived to be its inordinate focus on medieval and especially Renaissance art. Of the twenty-eight chapters included in the book, about five mostly focus on Western medieval images (6 and 8-11). Another six chapters (13-18) focus on the art of the Western Renaissance. Most surveys of art history to which I had been previously exposed paid scant attention to medieval art and they sometimes did not give the Renaissance the space that I felt it deserved. There is no doubt the medieval and Renaissance art Gombrich’s pet periods here (and, admittedly, they’re mine, too.)

What makes it so special is that, instead of spending the first chapter in an abstract exercise of thinking about what “Art” is, he forces you over and over again to take the art on its own terms. While discussing the various visual perspectives painted by the artist of “The Garden of Nebamun,” he says: “To us reliefs and wall-paintings provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of life as it was lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. And yet, looking at them for the first time, one may find them rather bewildering. The reason is that the Egyptian painters had a very different way from ours of representing real life. Perhaps this is connected with the different purpose their paintings had to serve. What mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle” (p. 60). It is the occasional insight like this that makes the book most worthwhile for a neophyte. After all, how many of us have measured something we saw by the standards of our particular narrow time and place? He really drives home the point that thinking about art seriously means thinking about other perspectives (both literally and figuratively), other preoccupations, and other aesthetic modus operandi. This is a lesson that should be lost on none of us, about art, or about anything else.

51 - Culture: The Anthropologists' Account by Adam Kuper

As Kuper states, “The core of this book is … an evaluation of what has been the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology” (x). More explicitly, in the first part of the book, he details the French and German ideals of culture that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Part Two: Experiments” looks at how Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, and Marshall Sahlins respectively have constructed anthropologies of culture in response to various intellectual influences. As he explains in the moving introduction, he lived through South Africa during the Apartheid when the very concept of culture was used to legitimize the most inhumane kinds of violence and racism imaginable. Because of this, Kuper is very much a skeptic when it comes to any kind of belief that use of the word “culture” communicates any objective, essential quality about people or the way they live their lives.

As I hinted at above, the argument starts in Europe, and migrates across the Atlantic Ocean. Kuper suggests that German intellectuals (Mannheim, Jaspers, and Mann more recently, but the concept dates back to Herder) believed in Kultur or Bildung – a kind of “cultured state by way of a process of education and spiritual development” which is “bounded in time and space and is coterminous with a national identity” (30). The French version of culture, with its haughty, transnational cosmopolitanism and materialism was perceived to be a direct threat to local distinctive cultures.

Kuper then goes on to detail Talcott Parson’s conception of culture as a tripartite endeavor between the psychologist, anthropologist, and sociologist, each of whom would understand culture as a semiological system of how we use symbols. He calls Geertz a Parsonian, and takes him to task for analyzing signs and symbols outside of social structure. He gives a detailed account of Geertz’s hermeneutical account of the Balinese cockfight in his book “The Interpretation of Cultures,” suggesting that Geertz’s lack of sociological concern in his anthropology leaves only an idealist approach to interpretation which is radically separated from social conditions.

David Schneider, the second anthropologist Kuper takes up, is known for his study of kinship relations. However, he completely divorced this pursuit from anything like an idea of “relationship” or “blood lines.” It should be noted that this is a fairly extreme version of relativism that not even many anthropologists adopt, and Kuper goes to lengths to point this out. Schneider makes the somewhat peculiar statement that “since it is perfectly possible to formulate … the cultural construct of ghosts without actually visually inspecting even a single specimen, this should be true across the board and without reference to the observability or non-observability of objects that may be presumed to be the referents of the cultural referents” (133). For Schneider, culture is wholly symbolic and arbitrary.

The best part of the chapter on Marshall Sahlins is Kuper’s retelling of Sahlins’ debate with Gananath Obeyesekere, the Princeton professor of anthropology. At the heart of the debate was the nature of rationality of “native peoples” (the debate specifically focused around Captain Cook and the Hawaiian Islands). Obeyesekere maintained that anything short of admitting that native people and Westerners think similarly is another way of saying that they are hopefully different, irrational, and uncivilized. Sahlins, however, holds that the rationality of native peoples is wholly and completely unknowable to those in the Occident. The closing chapters of the book are scathing rebukes of postmodernism, and especially its influence on the American anthropological tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, claiming that it has “a paralyzing effect on the discipline [of anthropology]” (223).

The twentieth century has certainly given the reader plenty of reasons to look askance at the very notion of culture. However, I am not sure that I am ready to completely do away with it as a powerful explanatory tool, no matter how diaphanous it may occasionally seem. I would definitely recommend the book for anyone interested in trends in twentieth-century American anthropology, and especially their intellectual genealogies. Whatever conclusions you have drawn about culture and what it means, I can guarantee you that this book will challenge them, and will do so thoughtfully.

52 - The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art by Thomas Mathews

It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries) portrays the Roman Emperor as some sort of demigod and intercessor between our world and that of the divine, imbued with ultimate power. This is what the author called "Emperor Mystique." In fact, this idea might even shore up the even more commonly held belief that the Church and the state were united for much of the middle ages. In "The Clash of Gods," Mathews critically examines this assumption and comes to what I thought were some fascinating conclusions.

According to Mathews, it is largely the work of three scholars that is responsible for the rise of the Emperor Mystique: art historian Andre Grabar, medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, and archaeologist Andreas Alfoldi. Along with collectively contributing to the Emperor Mystique, they come from Czarist Russia, Wilhelmine Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire respectively, and all harbored a great love for imperial greatness and yearned, in some way, for its return. In order to do this, they all retroactively read signs of vanished empire into the early Christian art they were studying. As Mathews says, "The need to interpret Christ as an Emperor tells us more about the historians involve d than it does about Early Christian art" (16). The scholarly apparatus that Mathews brings to bear on his argument is impressive. The vast majority of the book looks at individual pieces of art, arguing for an interpretation against that of the Emperor Mystique, none of which I will recapitulate here. It could even be convincing, but I will confess to not knowing enough about the art of the period in question to say one way or another.

One thing that I can say is that Mathew's argument seems to exhort the reader into an either/or reaction toward the three aforementioned scholars. As Peter Brown, the Princeton professor of the post-Constantinian Christian world, said in a review of the same book, Mathews thinks that "either representations of Christ betray artistic conventions that must mirror faithfully the visual content of contemporary court ceremonials and imperial representations - and, further, must communicate the overbearing message associated with such ceremonials and representations - or they communicate, often, the exact opposite."

Another tacit assumption of the book that Mathews does nothing to repudiate is that the thesis would, in some ways, suggest that we dismiss not only the Emperor Mystique, but also the entire body of scholarship of Kantorowicz, Grabar, and Alfoldi. Grabar and Alfoldi might not be as read today, but Kantorowicz's "The King's Two Bodies" is still considered an indispensable text in historical medieval theology. I certainly do not want to suggest that the book is a hatchet job. It is not. I think Mathews achieves something lastingly important by giving us a book-length treatment that resists what is still, in some quarters, a widely held assumption. I would just regret to see this book read as something more than an unfortunate interpretive misreading that was made by a group of otherwise superb, astoundingly learned scholars.

John wrote: "52 - The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art by Thomas Mathews

It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from ..."

Again two very thorough and informative reviews. Thanks

53 - Leaving Home by Anita Brookner


After reading a couple of online interviews and other pieces about Anita Brookner, a distinctive personality profile starts to emerge. Professionally trained as an art historian, she taught at the Courtauld Institute and developed a reputation as a rather distinguished academic. She didn’t publish her first novel, “A Start in Life,” until she was in her fifties. She almost never gives interviews, is known among friends as being extraordinarily intelligent, and according to herself, wants nothing more than to be left alone. She has never married, stating “I chose the wrong people, and the wrong people chose me. So it never came about. At the time that was a cause of great sadness, certainly.”

Much like in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, we must only engage in a willful suspension of disbelief when we are asked to assume Brookner’s storyline is more novel than memoir. Emma, the novel’s protagonist, is strikingly like Brookner herself: cold, distant, aloof, and perhaps eager for excitement, but would think it gauche to ever outwardly show that eagerness. Feeling trapped by her suffocating relationship with her mother (who, by the way, also highly resembles Brookner), Emma moves to Paris to study the designs of French palatial gardens, unconsciously thinking this might bring some sort of linearity to her otherwise disordered personal life.

Once she arrives in Paris, she slowly befriends Francoise Desnoyers, who works in the library where Emma regularly studies. She quickly pegs Francoise as a sort of libertine, only to realize that she too has an awkward, cumbersome relationship with her mother. Instead of the rational progress she envisioned that could be easily transferred from her study of gardens to her personal life, she is stupefied by the similarity of her circumstances. Once Emma is introduced to Francoise’s mother, she is quickly drawn into her family’s circle, with their outré manners and bizarre rituals.

Brookner, much like she has teased herself with the idea of happiness and fulfillment in real life, has done the same thing with Emma here. She meets men, and while she may be open-minded regarding her possible success in a romantic relationship, the reader gets the distinct impression that her overbearing cynicism and willful jadedness will crush any living thing within a mile. The message of the novel, if there is one, may very well be “growing is impossible, and don’t be so naïve as to think there is anything called happiness.”

Brookner’s style, on the other hand, left a wholly different impression on me. She can certainly write. She does it beautifully. Many of the sentences reminded me of early Henry James, with the kind of formal premeditation for which I have always had a fondness. Other reviews have suggested that “Hotel Du Lac” is a better novel, and it might be. But “Leaving Home” left me tired with its message of intellectual and emotional stagnation and utter pessimism.

54 - Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

“Travels with Herodotus” gives a wonderful taste of Kapuscinski’s travel writing. Those familiar with some of his earlier books – “Another Day of Life,” “The Emperor,” and “The Shadow of the Sun” – will detect his distinctive voice here. He even recalls visiting some of the same places in this book, including India, China, and northern Africa.

As the title hints at, Herodotus is a kind of trope liberally interlarded throughout the book: he is source for meditations on the philosophy of history, the place of humans in relationship to the gods, and occasional thoughts on subjects as various and sundry as ethnography, the customs of local people, and the birth of the historian’s wanderlust.

The book opens with Kapuscinski’s recounting of his discovery of Herodotus, remembering that when he was in school there was regrettably no reliable translation in Polish (his native language); he only discovers him later when he is given the book as a gift early in his career before beginning his travels. On the first page of the book, he immediately finds a kindred spirit. He is in awe of Herodotus, a man we know little of, but whose inexhaustible curiosity about people, their mores, history, and ideas obviously inspired him – and reminds him much of himself.

The interplay of the Herodotus and Kapuscinski shed light on one another in unexpectedly beautiful ways. The stories of Solon, Croesus, Darius, and Xerxes, and many others, are retold and reexamined. Points of continuity start to appear between Kapuscinski’s travels and Herodotus’, each of which sing in tandem with one another.

There seems to be some fracas regarding the author’s conscious mixture of reportage and literary writing, but I never got the sense that he was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader or that he was “rewriting history.” I found his writing less fictive than imaginative. After all, what historian claims to write without the aid of imagination?

I thought this was a great place to start to get a taste of Kapuscinski’s unique literary voice. It will certainly plant a seed of interest in both writers, if it isn’t there already.

55 - Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons


This book is hilarious. More than once I made a fool of myself while reading it in front of other people, bursting out in spontaneous laughter when I got to a particular passage. It is pure parody. But of course, it helps to know what is being parodied: the object of derision here is the rustic, rural life portrayed in countless novels by D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Webb. But even if you’re not familiar with the dark, brooding nature of some of these characters, I think the book remains funny because it has aged very well.

The book begins with the death of the Flora Poste’s parents, and her relatively blasé reaction. Unaffected though she is, she finds that her parents have left no money to support her, and she simply cannot bring herself to work for a living. Instead, she decides to impose upon her cousins, the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm with only the aid of a favorite book, “The Higher Common Sense.” This is when the fun begins.

On arriving at Cold Comfort Farm, she finds a host of backward, absurd rubes with names like Urk, Elfine, and Amos. (On the farm, there are four cows named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless.) Presiding over the whole clan is the loony, elderly matriarch Aunt Adam Doom, who at one point repeatedly declares that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” But none of this manages to perturb Flora, whose Englishness seems to foreordain a neat, tidy plan for everyone involved. She rescues Elfine from a freewheeling “loam and lovechild” life of writing poetry, and marries her off to a local man by the name of Richard Hawk-Monitor. She sets up Mr. Mybug, an officious hack-scholar who is working on a book supposedly demonstrating that the works of the Bronte sisters are really the product of their brother Branwell, with a girl named Rennett. Perhaps her biggest accomplishment is convincing Aunt Adam Doom to leave Cold Comfort Farm to finally leave the room she has confined herself to for twenty years to spend some time in Paris.

This novel is wonderful lightness, but that should not be confused with being light: it is so wonderfully crafted, full of such deft sharpness and acerbic wit that it is difficult to write off as simply a parlor game satire. The narrative voice is memorably tart and sardonic, but not overweening. Whenever you think that Flora will trip up in one of her plans, you find that she is already three steps ahead of you: in fact, she already has you, the reader, figured out. The silly, unbelievable characters do prevent Flora from having a Big Problem to solve, but I always appreciated her ability to compartmentalize, rationalize, and order what she conceived to be a very disorderly universe. It struck me as a very English theme. And you’ll probably walk away from the novel smirking at yourself if you’ve ever admitted that you admired a novel by Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence.