#15: see under: love, David Grossman

Such an unassuming title—see under: love. Makes me think of something intimate and tender for the Hallmark Channel—you know, poignant. I’d seen it in bookstores for years and had never been the least bit tempted. Then I read about its author, David Grossman, in an excellent New Yorker profile by George Packer—Grossman is Israeli, and plays a somewhat prominent part in leftist politics. According to Packer, see under: love had something to do with the holocaust and was the book that had made Grossman’s reputation in the late 1980s. So I decided to read it.

It was not poignant. It was a tornado—a little bit Kafka, a little bit Ulysses (Nighttown), a little bit … I don’t know what. I saw the word phantasmagoric used somewhere to describe it, and that hits the mark. I had about as much chance to comprehend the finer points of this book as George Bush had of comprehending the effects of Katrina as he flew over in his helicopter. I didn’t so much read see under: love as perform a reconnaisance. It’s a beast.

The book is divided into four sections, each so different that it could almost be its own book. The first part concerns Momek, a young boy growing up in Israel in 1959. He lives among a cast of older relatives who have barely managed to survive the holocaust. Most of them are damaged, some have lost their minds completely, like his great uncle Anshel Wasserman, who arrives in an ambulance one day. We see the world through Momek’s eyes as he tries to make sense of the human wreckage around him. He hears something about a “Nazi beast,” but, without having any hard information to go on, tries to figure out what this beast is and how to make it show itself. He goes so far as to imprison cats, birds, and mice in his basement with the notion that he can make the mysterious beast manifest itself from one of these animals.

In the later sections Momek has grown up to be Schlomo and is the author or at least the consciousness through whom the story passes. The second section is the phantasmagoric one. It has to do with Bruno Schultz, who was an interesting real-life writer and artist who had the misfortune to be Jewish in Poland in the early 1940s. He dies in a rather unusual way—here is how the event was described in the Grossman New Yorker profile:

…After a Jewish dentist in town was murdered by a German officer who had acted as Schulz’s protector, a German who had been the dentist’s protector shot Schulz, saying, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”

But in section 2 of see under: love, Shultz experiences an alternate reality—he escapes to Danzig, jumps into the Baltic and becomes a salmon. But that description is like the description of a dream—it grabs the most coherent detail but loses about 99.9% of the essence of the writing.

Most of the writers who incorporate fantastic or hallucinogenic elements into their work keep one foot in reality—Kafka, for example, is compelling in part because his characters are very orderly and earthbound, anxious to remain on the straight and narrow paths of their quotidian lives, even though they contend with dreamlike circumstances. In see under: love there is no such anchor in reality. You put the tab under your tongue and settle in:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, next to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, happier events were in progress: Edzio, the young cripple, swinging his muscular torso on crutches, finally met Adela face to face. Stout Edzio, whose cruel parents took his crutches away at night, and who dragged himself like a dog every night to Adela’s window, to press his deformed face against the pane, and watch the lovely servant girl in deep slumber, sprawling naked and moist for columns of bedbugs, wandering through the wilderness of sleep… He saw her, and she, without opening her eyes, saw him. And a small spark passed between them, with a trembling that shook the people all around. And they stood and stared at each other, and for a moment Adela’s eyes were opened: a thin white film—like the film over a parrot’s eye—was lifted, and light flashed, like a magnesium bulb. She saw his soul, understood the full force of his tragedy. She read the story of his nightly vigil over her dreams and felt the column of bedbugs turn to fingers of desire between her thighs. She contracted with pain and pleasure, and let him kiss her, in his thoughts, for the first time.

Those bedbugs—it’s like something out of Buñuel, or Dali. Edzio and Adela are in the book for about three pages and never appear again.

The third section describes the relationship between a Jewish children’s book author and a Nazi death camp commandant in 1943. (No turning back now…) The children’s book author is none other than Momek’s gibbering great uncle from the first section—Anshel Wasserman. We are given to understand that Momek—Schlomo—is inventing this history for his great uncle, and so we can tolerate a certain amount of … implausibility in the story. The commandant, Neigel, grew up reading Wasserman’s celebrated tales for children, known as The Children of the Heart.

Although there is still much to marvel at in the third section, my enthusiasm did begin to flag. The story is relentlessly extravagant and inventive, but is becoming a bit overwrought. It is not dramatically feasible to maintain such a high emotional pitch. Invention becomes tiresome when new characters and scenes keep emerging—really there are entire new books and universes erupting into the storyline.

Section four is in the form of an encyclopedia; it deals primarily with characters and events imagined by Neigel and Wasserman. The Children of the Heart live in a zoo in Warsaw. They have various mystical and magical talents. There are dozens of them. Every few minutes, I count how many pages I have left to read. I long to be done with see under: love.

#14: Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier

I first knew of Ian Frazier as the author of some very funny short magazine pieces such as Lamentations of the Father, in which a harried father hands down rules for his children in the diction of Jehovah (“Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room”) and Coyote vs. Acme, which takes the form of a legal brief prepared by a lawyer on behalf of Wile E. Coyote detailing in precise, dry legal language his client’s very specific complaints with the various products (such as rocket-powered roller skates) purchased from the Acme Corporation. There is a touch of genius in these pieces, in the way they work a simple conceit so flawlessly and so well. They’re like great jazz solos—they sustain an astonishing level of creativity for longer than you would think possible. If you haven’t read them, go find them.

Then one day about 10 years ago I picked up and started reading a book by Frazier entitled Family. I was surprised to discover that it was very earnest and serious. I would not go so far as to say it contained no wit or humor, but there wasn’t a single sentence in the book that was there just to be funny.

Family is a kind of extended personal history. Frazier’s parents both died relatively young, in their 60s, and within a short time of each other. It fell to Frazier to go through their apartment and sort through their effects. He dilated over this responsibility until it into a kind of hobby, and his sorting and organizing evolved into actual research, wherein he traced his origins back in various directions and in various ways. He wrote about his aunts and uncles and his childhood, but he also wrote about the regiment his hometown raised during the Civil War, and what became of various members of that regiment. I loved Family. I loved it for the way it turned a gentle current of curiosity into a substantial, interesting, and even profound book. I loved it for the way Frazier incorporated himself into the book as a kind of humble, rather hapless presence. The book isn’t a memoir, it isn’t about him—and yet it is about him. It’s about any- and everything that led to his existence.

I think Family was a kind of memorial to Frazier’s parents, an act of reverence and devotion. But in a very indirect and understated way.

Frazier has written several more nonfiction books since Family; his latest is entitled Travels in Siberia, and I just read it. Frazier has no organic reason to write about Siberia—it’s not his heritage or his destiny. It’s just a whim disguised as a career move—or vice versa. When Frazier wrote Family, I don’t think he knew that he would be making a career of book-length travel fiction. Now, after several books, I guess he felt it would be prudent, from a professional perspective, to break some new ground.

Which is not to make Frazier sound cynical. I can well understand getting bit by the Russia bug—it’s happened to me. I took three years of Russian language in college after discovering Tolstoyevsky in my teens. It’s hard for Americans to imagine Russia and the Russians, even though they were our rivals and presumptive enemies for five decades. Russia isn’t a developed first-world middle-class nation, any more than it’s a successful former colony like Brazil, or a poorer third-world country. It’s a primary, powerful place, an unconquerable empire, but it’s also shabby and ill-run. Whatever else it is, it demands to be taken on its own terms.

In Travels in Siberia, Frazier has retained much of the deliberate amateurism of Family. He is still very organic—that is, spontaneous and rather arbitrary in the way he goes about things. Much of the book is taken up with an account of his 5000-mile expedition across the breadth of Russia, from St. Petersburg on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific, in the company of two rather unobliging, not terribly professional guides, in a rent-a-wreck van. This lends a rather slapdash “road trip” quality to the story. Frazier is forever being abandoned at mosquito-ridden campsites while his guides rendezvous with ladies. Or kicking around in the weeds by the side of the road as they try to improvise a repair on their vehicle. He lets Russia happen to him, and he takes Russia at face value—one person at a time.

After his cross-country trip, Frazier returns a year or so later to experience Siberia in winter. He re-hires his guide Sergei, and once again their relations fluctuate between amicability and hostility. Sergei resents Frazier’s interest in Siberian labor camps—much as an American guide might resent a Russian author’s interest in the camps where Americans interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Of course, the latter was a brief episode involving several thousand people., whereas the Russians exiled many millions to Siberia over the course of a century and a half. Most died. Some settled and became Siberians. A few returned to European Russia in their old age. Frazier tells us of the mining camps of the Russian far east, where convicts labored in the most horrendous conditions and were housed and fed like animals. Very few survived.

Frazier and Sergei silently suspend their feud one evening as they explore an abandoned convict camp deep in the forest on a snowy -40˚ night. The camp has changed little in the decades since it was abandoned, and the contrast between the still beauty of the night and the wretched bare dormitories where the convicts lived is eerie. Frazier and Sergei are no longer American and Russian, they are just two people who have found a haunted place.

#13: Just Kids, by Patti Smith

There are two ways to be an artist. The first way is to be born with a fabulous talent, like a Mozart or a Picasso, and then to nurture and develop that talent. The second way is to know that you are an artist, and then to find some way to express that identity. Patti Smith is the second kind of artist. She achieved fame as a rock musician in the mid 1970s, yet for most of the years covered by this memoir (1967 to 1972) she never aspired to be a musician, and didn’t own or play an instrument. But she certainly knew that she was an artist.

The memoir deals with the years when Smith was living with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. They were lovers and soul mates. Mapplethorpe ultimately found fame—and notoriety—as a photographer, but when he lived with Smith he had not yet found his art form either. They met in 1967, both poor and newly arrived in New York City. They spent their La Boheme years sketching and drawing; she wrote poetry, he crafted jewelry, collages, and tableaus a la Joseph Cornell. Their lives were precarious and difficult and Smith’s humble and plainspoken account is often very moving:

For the following weeks we relied on the generosity of Robert’s friends for shelter… Ours was an attic room with a mattress, Robert’s drawings tacked on the wall and his paintings rolled in a corner and I with only my plaid suitcase. I’m certain it was no small burden for this couple to harbor us, for we had meager resources and I was socially awkward.

Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDs in 1989, is known today for his brilliant and often shocking photography; he photographed flowers and friends, but also explicit sadomasochistic scenes. He was the occasion for a skirmish in the cultural wars back in the late 1980s, when Republican politicians objected to public arts funding for exhibits of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. (I remember my mother being incensed at the idea.)

Knowing of his future, we read Smith’s account of their time together as we might read of someone’s bringing home a lion cub for a pet—we know that their domesticity will not endure. Smith recognizes that Mapplethorpe is going through a metamorphosis:

He was searching, consciously or unconsciously, for himself. He was in a fresh state of transformation. He had shed the skin of his ROTC uniform, and in its wake his scholarship, his commercial path, and his father’s expectations of him.

Smith refuses to separate Mapplethorpe’s development as an artist from his progress toward recognizing and acknowledging his sexual identity. She will not acknowledge the tabloid mentality, will not present a standard “coming out” story, or retroactively pretend to understand what she did not fully understand at the time.

Smith and Mapplethorpe moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, years before either achieved fame, where they were able to establish themselves in New York art and music worlds. While she resided at the Chelsea, Smith met everyone from Salvador Dali to Allen Ginsberg to Janis Joplin. She visited William Burroughs in his apartment on the Bowery. Harry Smith, known as the man who put together the landmark Anthology of American Folk Music, which single-handedly kick started the folk revivial of the 1960s, became a friend. She had an affair with Sam Shepard and wrote a play with him—Cowboy Mouth, which I recently discovered takes its title from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Smith (Patti, not Harry) and Mapplethorpe start hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, where they were eventually given places at the celebrated round table, where they could rub elbows with Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and other Warhol "stars."

And then, they each find their niche. Smith begins giving poetry recitals with guitar backing. Over time, this evolves into a band. Mapplethorpe begins using a Polaroid to collect images for his collages; eventually the collages fall by the wayside. There is no single eureka moment, but there is a distinct sense of destiny arriving:

The Polaroid camera in Robert’s hands. The physical act, a jerk of the wrist. The snapping sound when pulling the shot and the anticipation, sixty seconds to see what he got. The immediacy of the process suited his temperament.

At first he toyed with the camera. He wasn’t totally convinced that it was for him. And film was expensive, ten pictures for about three dollars, a substantial amount in 1971. But it was some steps up from the photo booth, and the pictures developed unsealed.

And there we are. Mapplethorpe takes the iconic photo for the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses in 1974. After that, they more or less go their separate ways.

My friend Melanie once made me a Patti Smith tape and scribbled a quote from Lester Bangs on the cover: “What’s a Patti Smith album without some bullshit?” Smith can be naïve, cerebral, or fierce by turns. She speaks with a lower-middle-class South Jersey accent, yet she is a disciple of Verlaine and Rimbaud. I wonder what it would be like to have gambled everything on becoming who you are meant to be. Most of us just sort of happen—we have certain skills or talents and we use them to find a job that makes us enough money to pay the rent. We marry, have kids, buy a house. Patti Smith actually did go on to marry and have kids, which is a bit surprising in a way. She retired after just a few years in the spotlight. Now as she looks back, does she wonder who that person was who burned with such passion and ambition? Or has she always remained that person?

#12: Silence in October, by Jens Christian Grøndahl

Jens Christian Grøndahl has written almost 20 books in Danish; Silence in October is the first to be translated into English.

As Silence in October begins, a man has just been left by his wife. She has departed with little notice and no explanation. She doesn’t say where she is going, why, or for how long.

As the author mediates on his newfound solitude, his life slowly moves forward—he travels to New York for a few days, sees his daughter in a café, etc. But his thoughts dwell mostly in the past—he recalls how he met his wife, then an earlier love affair, then episodes from his childhood. He frames, separates, objectifies his experiences as he relives them. His memories are cinematic, visual, with no assumptions about what others were thinking or feeling—or even what he himself was thinking or feeling.

The narrator makes his living as an art critic, and reading Silence in October is a bit like looking at a cubist painting. The narrator is not just remembering his past, he is creating a kind of memory collage. Past events are introduced one by one, though not in strict chronological order, and then put into rotation with other memories, as though they were I-Pod songs playing in shuffle mode. There is an obsessive, repetitious quality to this:

wife has left – how they first met –wife has left – earlier affair – how they first met –wife has left –earlier affair – parents and childhood – wife has left – how they first met – earlier affair…

It’s like watching a juggler starting with three balls and then adding a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. But if the narrator is the juggler, he is not the one who decides which ball to introduce and when. That is Grøndahl’s doing.

This is a risky way to write--Grøndahl is daring the reader to be bored as his narrator circles relentlessly around his own life and realizes how little he understands anyone or anything. Sometimes the writing tries the reader’s patience:

Perhaps she also thought of the whirling fortuitousness of it all, and perhaps with the years she thought that it is not the paths and the faces that make a difference, the paths that open out all the time in all directions, the faces that approach you all the time and pass by.

More often, though, the author’s words hold us and remind us of the ephemeral nature of our own identities and relationships. We realize that the path we walk through life is along a cliff of oblivion, and that if we don’t feel vertigo every minute it is only because we refuse to look:

It is only our own helpless lack of synchronicity, the inertia of our senses, the illusory power of memory and habit, that shields us from facing the unknown when we open our eyes in the morning, washed up on the shore of yet another alien day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ending of Silence in October is unresolved. We have started with a woman standing over a bed, suitcase at her side, ready to leave. Two hundred and eighty pages later, we know only what her credit card statements tell us—that she has traveled from Denmark through France down to Portugal, staying in hotels.

Instead of moving forward, the story has spiralled out from a starting point in time and space, bringing in ever more information about the narrator’s experiences. We have been taking steps backward from the painting, until we can see the entire canvas.

Silence in October is kind of like chamber music, a melancholy book for a dark fall evening. Serious existential art, like Camus. Very European—it’s hard to imagine an American writing such a book today—or maybe ever

#11: Parrot and Olivier, by Peter Carey

Europeans in the 1820s and 1830s saw America as the hope of the future. The great democratic experiment had managed to survive early scuffles with the great powers and looked to be gaining momentum. We had entered our adolescence as a nation, and so reading about that earlier America is like looking at the teenage image of someone you only got to know in middle age. At first you see no resemblance—the youthful face is blade-thin, the hair thick and shiny. But then you notice the angle of the nose, the distance between the eyes, and the identity begins to emerge.

In the Age of Jackson, American democracy was fluid and effortless. There were no entrenched aristocracies or theocracies. If you needed land, you could move west a few hundred miles and find some for the taking. As long as your ancestors came from a select short list of approved countries, you bowed to no-one, and no-one bowed to you.

America in 2012 still sees itself as a classless society. We believe that anyone can become rich if they’ve got the brains and the determination. This is why millions of people working 50-hour weeks for $10 an hour rally around a political party that refuses to tax the rich—couldn’t that be them with just a little luck and effort? And it’s why teachers are held in such low esteem—if kids don’t learn it isn’t because of where they live or who their parents are. Because this is America and everybody starts even. So it must be the system—those teachers.

Parrot and Olivier is the story of two Europeans—an Englishman and a Frenchman—who come to American in 1830. Parrot, the Englishman, has to his credit no family and no money, and just a modest amount of talent. Fate has carried him from England to Australia and then to France. His real name is John Larrit, but he is called Parrot in recognition of his mimetic abilities—he can draw pretty well and can reproduce the vocal mannerisms of others. He is a copier rather than a true artist. Shrewd, ironic, elliptical and precocious, Parrot is an elusive figure who tends to blend into situations. When others look at Parrot, they don’t really see him—they see his status (or lack thereof) or they see an instrument to do their bidding, because Parrot lives by making himself useful.

Olivier is Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, the only child of two French nobles who have managed—just barely—to survive the French Revolution. We first see Olivier as a high-strung sickly 10-year-old trying to make sense of the mayhem around him. He is a weak, rather pathetic creature given to puking and nosebleeds. But there is determination and imperiousness in him, as well. Olivier adapts the high drama and self-importance of his parents’ circumstances to his own cosseted little world:

Then Odile arrived carrying a large rose-tinted Ch’ien-lung goldfish bowl. This contained my leeches. She set it on an English giltwood stand and removed the muslin cloth from around its neck. These vieilles amies had always been in her charge and she was constantly ready, at whatever hour her bell rang, to scoop out the starving parasites…

Olivier, the book’s jacket copy tells us, is “an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Not being well acquainted with that figure, I perused his wikipedia entry and decided that the similarities were relatively superficial. Their circumstances are obviously very similar, but I would be rather surprised to discover that de Tocqueville was nearly so pompous and fantastical as Olivier.

The book consists of alternating first-person chapters from Parrot and Olivier. We wonder, at first, how they will find each other. It happens after they have both grown up. Olivier’s mother, worried that her son might be becoming a conspicuous target for political intrigue, arranges to get him out of harm’s way by having him shanghaied to America. The pretext for this removal is that he is to compile a report on prison conditions in America (as per de Tocqueville). Parrot is sent along as servant and spy—to protect the incautious nobleman but also to report back on on his doings.


Once his characters reach America, Carey keeps several balls in the air. One is the evolving relationship between Parrot and Olivier. After some early spats, they come to appreciate and assist each other. Each has a view of the other that adds perspective and depth to our understanding. Each see the other’s flaws, vanities, etc., but sometimes the observer underestimates the observed, as when Parrot thinks Olivier is failing to woo a certain American heiress when in fact Olivier (who is after all a Frenchman) has matters well in hand.

A second ball is the appraisal of America performed by Olivier. This is where a better appreciation of de Tocqueville would probably have served me well. Olivier admires America and recognizes that its experiment in democracy will eventually spread back across the ocean.

A third ball would be Parrot’s American transformation. Parrot becomes an entrepreneur, helping to publish a book of lavish illustrations of American birds. The reference, of course, is to John James Audubon—another Frenchman who made a name for himself in early nineteenth century America. Except that here the artist is not French and in fact bears no resemblance to Audubon.

Parrot’s talents are a better fit for America than they were for Europe—he’s a swan in New York when he was just an ugly duckling in Paris. He does have a talent after all—for business. All his pecularities and shortcomings have become assets.

I had read two previous Peter Carey novels—Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector. I think of him as a highly entertaining and very original writer. Parrot and Olivier is all that and much more—a book full of riddles, crosscurrents and obscure parallels. That’s what two Man Booker prizes will do for an author—up the ante. It is a book that should probably be read twice. It might not be unfair to say that it is a rather strenuous book that is perhaps a bit overwritten.

Parrot and Olivier is also a very late flower of what Henry James called the “international novel”: the collision of old world sophistication and corruption with new world energy and artlessness. Except that in the 21st century it is no longer possible to present this theme without considerable irony, where innocence corrupts and sophistication is naïveté. In this respect, Parrot and Olivier reminds me in places of another unlikely late specimen of the international novel: Lolita. Humbert Humbert and Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont are alike in being simultaneously enchanted and appalled by American vitality and vulgarity. Both contemplate marriage. Both are humorously high handed. But Humbert has a kind of moral disease in him. He and his teenage nymphet are infecting each other even as they seduce each other. There is tragedy and monstrousness amid the sparkle of Lolita. That’s what makes it a great book. Parrot and Olivier is a fine book as well, but it’s no Lolita.

#10, A Time of Gifts, and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I found about about these books by reading the author’s obituary in the New York Times on June 11, 2011. He had died at the age of 96. The two books are parts one and two of the author’s account of his journey, mostly on foot, southeastward across the continent of Europe, from Holland to Istanbul, in 1934. He was 19 at the time. The books were published in 1977 and 1986, respectively, so a lot of time elapsed between the walking and the writing. In fact, the two books only cover the first two thirds of the author’s journey, getting him as far as the border between Romania and Bulgaria. (He’s only averaging about two miles a page!) According to the Times, “his biographer Artemis Cooper told the British newspaper The Guardian that Mr. Leigh Fermor had completed a draft [of the third and concluding volume], and that it would be published.”

If I had the opportunity to change lives with another person (or at least to take part in a parlor game with that premise) I would have to give serious consideration to choosing Patrick Leigh Fermor. Besides exploring and getting to know many remote corners in the world, Fermor was also a war hero, who kidnapped a Nazi general on Crete in 1942. This exploit was made into a film, “Ill Met by Moonlight,” directed by Michael Powell and starring Dirk Bogarde. Of course, it is always possible that someone having an interesting and full life is for one reason or another not able to fully enjoy that life, but having read these books, I don’t sense that this was the case with Patrick Leigh Fermor.

When I was 19 and under the spell of Jack Kerouac I found myself with no job and nothing to do during the summer. So I decided to go hitchhiking. Here are two key differences between my excursion and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s: One, walking is a lot more open-ended than hitchhiking. I may have been looking for experience, but most people in cars, as it turns out, are looking to get somewhere, so hitchhiking turns out to be about transportational assist more than adventure. People take you into their cars to keep them awake, to complain, or just to fend off boredom. I covered 33 states and several thousand miles in a little over three weeks before finding myself back in New York City again. It was a bold and probably dangerous journey in its way, but nobody would ever suggest that there was a book to be written about it.

The other key difference is that I lacked Fermor’s gregariousness and his ability to enter into the fabric of peoples’ lives. I met some nice people and had some minor adventures, but it would have been better had I been able to “stick” in a few more places for a few more days. Fermor not only makes friends, he gets invited to stay in a series of sumptuous ancestral manses across Middeleuropa. To quote Jan Morris in the preface to Between the Woods and the Water, “[F]riends had passed him on to friends, a count here had recommended him to a baron there, and by the time we join him he is almost as often being picked up in a limousine, or riding a borrowed thoroughbred, as he is plodding along a highway.”

These differences are closely related—to travel on foot is to be a kind of pilgrim, to qualify for a traditional form of charity. For centuries religious pilgrims had crisscrossed Europe depending on just this kind of charity. It is odd, though, that after hundreds of kilometers—and pages—Fermor has not one rude or hostile encounter to report. My luck as a hitchhiker was not nearly as good.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s memoirs, as in Karen Blixen’s, the authors present accounts of their lives that are essentially free of elements like self-doubt, envy, fear, and resentment. Is this because these elements were lacking from their lives? I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s that these authors are writing about the times and places in which they lived, as much as they are writing about their own lives. In writing of this type, it is appropriate to filter out certain psychological frequencies that would otherwise obscure the view of the world outside. As an example of an entirely different kind of autobiographical writing, consider Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which dwells on the author’s suffering and personal development more than on its author’s times and places. Do memoirs and autobiographies generally fall into one of the other category, or is there more of an even distribution across the spectrum? Are more personal accounts becoming more common? These are matters to consider.

On the foundation of his personal experiences, Fermor has built an impressive edifice of erudition. After taking his walk, he spent a half century studying, revisiting, and considering the significance of those times and places. His art is in making the personal experience and the added learning blend so well. We are not often reminded that he is commenting on and looking back at a former self. Somehow, he has invested that former self with the knowledge and perspective of the older man. The books do not feel particularly elegiac or nostalgic.

Fermor’s command of information is evident from the precise and extensive vocabulary he uses to describe his experiences. There is hardly a paragraph in these books that does not contain a word that I did not know. Once in a while I would look one up—for example, incunabula, a word that describes a category of early printed books, or aurochs, a type of wild Eurasian cattle that became extinct in the 17th century. Occasionally, Fermor’s precision goes a bit too far, as when he spends 10 pages describing the architecture of a single building in Prague—lintels, ashlars, cusps, ogees; even if I was familiar with these architectural terms, there is no way I could reassemble the images that Fermor is trying to capture in words. I would gladly visit such structures with such a knowing and enthusiastic guide, but the words alone will not suffice.

I am glad to finally know something about the geography and the history of places like Hungary and Transylvania and Romania: of the procession of peoples over the plains and mountains of southeastern Europe over the past 20 centuries. Of the Dacians who made war against Rome and were ultimately subdued by Trajan’s legions. Of the Turks who pushed up the Danube as far as Vienna before slowly being pushed back to Asia Minor. And of the Tatars of central Asia who were still raiding Hungary as late as the 1780s. Few places on Earth have been as fought over as southeastern Europe.

But Fermor’s books are more than a collection of wikipedia entries. There is warmth and charm in his accounts. I felt a bit sad when I finished the second book, because I liked hanging out with Paddy. I look forward to meeting up with him again.

#9 Middlemarch, George Eliot

Every former English major knows that Middlemarch is one of the great novels in the English language. It’s the Victorian novel to end all Victorian novels. I just searched online for “greatest novels of all time”; the first list I found has Middlemarch in eighth place, between Madame Bovary and The Magic Mountain. If Middlemarch were a baseball player, it would be Ted Williams.

I read Middlemarch in grad school, and I remember that I asked the professor, whose name was Felicia Bonaparte, if I could write my master’s thesis on it. She recommended that I take on Eliot’s next and final novel, Daniel Deronda, instead. I produced a 36-page paper, which seemed at the time almost as epic as the 900-page book it was about. I worked at it most of one summer—1982, perhaps—and I truly enjoyed it. Daniel Deronda spoke to me. I thought I’d produced a masterpiece, and I got an A. If I read it today I’d probably be appalled, but if nothing else I’m sure it was bursting with enthusiasm.

I wonder how clear an idea I had, back in 1982, about what I would have wanted to say about Middlemarch—what it said to me back then.

Middlemarch is about two marriages, both unhappy. All four principals marry an idea of the other person, and all four find afterward that the reality does not match the idea. The psychological insight is wonderful and it all seems very real and nuanced. What little I remembered from my first encounter with Middlemarch had to do with these two marriages.

Middlemarch is also the story of various citizens of a country town. They all struggle and scheme; some come out well and some do not. Invariably, though, everybody seems to get according to their desserts. George Eliot is a just god and moral law is strictly enforced in her universe. I’ve sort of lost my taste for this sort of moral exactitude—it doesn’t tally with the world I live in.

There’s really only one character in Middlemarch who has the ability to surprise us—or her author. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman who marries a dry and dreary scholar, imagining that she will help him illuminate the universe with his wisdom. In the Prelude to Middlemarch, Eliot invokes St. Teresa of Avila:

Teresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and fed, from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction…

Dorothea is a modern-day St. Teresa. You might imagine that such a character would be insufferable, but in fact the scenes with Dorothea are luminous—and sometimes even a bit funny. She’s exalted, but she’s not particularly shrewd. She provides an interesting mirror in which other characters can see themselves. Inherently good characters see their goodness in her and are sustained by that vision. Bad or tedious characters see their deficiences, or see nothing.

But I am just saying the obvious things about this book—these comments are like snapshots of the Eiffel Tower. Proof that I’ve been there—not much more. I don’t seem to have any way to “warm up” Middlemarch. I am not generally attracted to the idea of book clubs, because I’m pretty sure I would find my own opinions more interesting than everybody else’s, and therefore would find myself engaged in an exercise in patience (or, failing that, rudeness). But with Middlemarch, it might be interesting to hear how different people reacted to and assessed the different characters. Each so perfectly framed by circumstances and by other characters. Each facing a moral dilemma or difficult choice. Each bathed in the light irony of the author’s prose, with thoughts and feelings presented in a detached way that provides the necessary clues to each character’s flaws. To talk about Middlemarch is to consider how one might live better.