Great Fiction:Contemporary and Classic, BookMarks Update, January, 2023

Read My Review

Friends: As I sit writing at my desk in Vermont, the falling snow obscures my view of Mt. Ascutney, covering everything in sight with a white blanket that is cold and beautiful---perfect weather for reading by the wood stove.

Here are the books I read in January:

Joseph Conrad, named as one of three 'modern' authors worth reading by Virginia Woolf in her essay on fiction in 'The Common Reader', wrote a number of novels about the tension between man's murderous and grasping instincts and the moderating influence of civilization. In 'The Heart of Darkness', Charles Marlowe recounts his 200 mile voyage up the Congo to search for Kurtz, the ivory hunter who had 'gone native'. He finds the dying Kurtz only to hear his final words: "The horror, the horror". Conrad is a powerful writer and worth reading more than 120 years after he wrote this novel.

Colm Toibin addresses a similar theme of culture vs. evil in his fictionalized biographical account of the life of Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winning author. Mann fled his native Germany and his life-long immersion in the culture of Wagner, Beethoven, Goethe, and Heine in 1933 to escape the Nazi criminals who had taken over Germany. 'The Magician' is a remarkable book, deeply researched, and far more interesting and informative than a standard biography. Having read 'Buddenbrooks', 'The Magic Mountain', and 'Death in Venice', I was fascinated to learn how two world wars, depression, political upheaval, and exile in California affected Mann's work and his family comprising his Jewish wife and six children. In fact, Mann's closeted homosexuality and the Mann family dynamics are the most interesting elements of the book.

Reading these two books raised the age old question of whether to read contemporary best sellers and award winning books or read the classics that have stood the test of time----Chabon or Chekhov, Tobias Wolff or Thomas Wolfe, Philip Roth or Henry Roth, Paul Auster or Jane Austen, and on and on?

So what to do, and while I'm at it, what's a classic? While there are many definitions of what makes a book a ‘classic’, most are a variation on this commentary by M.H. Abrams who was still writing superb criticism when he died at 102 in 2015. In his book 'The Fourth Dimension of a Poem', Abrams summarizes a classic as follows: “Agreement among diverse humanists as to the importance and value of a work at any one time, and still more, the survival value of a work—general agreement as to its importance and value over an extended period of time—serves as a sound way to distinguish the better from the worse and to identify which work is a classic. The consensus that emerges when an imaginative work is viewed from a diversity of critical perspective and through a diversity of sensibilities—and especially a consensus that emerges despite radical cultural changes over many centuries—is a reliable index to the fact that the work is central in its human concerns, broad in its imaginative appeal and rich in its inherent aesthetic and other values.”

The test of time and broad agreement on a work’s centrality, imaginative appeal, and aesthetic value seem to be the key to entry into this exalted realm. I also like Philip Larkin’s criteria that he used when we was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1977. ”Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? If I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring and would it last? “

We're still reading Conrad and Mann because they wrote beautiful and moving prose and because their work still speaks to us with wisdom and clarity. Can we say the same for today's best seller list from the New York Times? Who will be reading John Grisham, Danielle Steel or even Stephen King in 100 years, not to mention Bonnie Garmus, Gabrielle Zevin, and Grady Hendrix who all top the NYT list this week? Since there's no need to choose only one or the other, I will continue to read both the canon and the contemporary. That combination worked this month!

The rest of the month's books included a short story collection by Wells Tower that had one great story while the rest were too dystopian for me. Octavia Butler's 'Kindred' provided a sci-fi frame for a deep look at the brutality of slavery in the South. It was well conceived and powerfully written, and it has recently been adapted for television on Hulu. The mysteries of Parker and Crais, one old and one new, were welcome distractions while Sedaris's new book provided his trademark laugh-out-loud cynical humor along with more serious reflections on his family.

Two highlights of the month's reading were Peter Brooks' 'The Seduction of Story' and Jack Mayer's 'Entanglements'. In the former, Brooks an emeritus professor at both Yale and Princeton analyzes our need for narrative especially the creation of the narrative of our own life. The book was heavy lifting on occasion, but well worth the effort. Mayer hits all the right buttons---a septuagenarian, Jewish pediatrician living in Vermont who hikes the Long Trail and is fascinated by quantum mechanics and cosmology. This, his second book, is a wonderful poetic exploration of those interests.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features Charles Simic who recently died at 85. Simic was born in Belgrade at the onset of WWII and lived there until his family emigrated to Oak Park, Illinois when he was 16. He attended my high school alma mater. The winner of the Pulitzer, MacArthur, and Wallace Stevens Awards, he was the US Poet Laureate in 2007. His poems are often dark and surreal, reflecting his early life experiences, but they're beautifully constructed and worth the effort.

I finish these monthly updates with an epigram or two. While Warren Zevon and Somerset Maugham have probably never been included in the same sentence before, I found their wisdom pertained to my reading habits:

"We love to buy books because we think we are also buying the time to read them." Warren Zevon

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." Somerset Maugham

And here, once again, is this extraordinary quote from Lewis Thomas that has elicited a great number of comments.

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond....

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member or our own species unique. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."

Good reading and good dancing!