#40: My Struggle, Book 2, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Book 1 of My Struggle gave us two extended episodes from relatively early in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life. Book 2 skips backward and forward in time and deals with the more recent past. Knausgaard is keeping us a bit off guard—we aren’t always quite sure where we are in the stack of nested memories. The fact that the chronological distance between the telling and the tale has decreased can also be a bit disorienting, because whatever distance there is is not enough to confer a proper sense of retrospective—this cannot be an older wiser man writing about his younger self. If the author is in fact any wiser it’s because he is writing and contemplating rather than acting. Who isn’t a bit wiser when they aren’t actually functioning in a social situation?

There’s a kind of convivial hum to Knausgaard’s writing that I enjoy very much. His books are good company, largely because he’s writing about everyday life. He’s talking about the kinds of thing we talk about with our friends. I wonder if the real Karl Ove Knausgaard is such good company? I would suspect not; I would also suspect that Karl Ove is of the same opinion.

Knausgaard is actually a seething, uncomfortable, impatient man (according to Knausgaard the author at any rate), and when he is in a social setting he is always wishing he could be home writing. He has a confidence and clarity as a writer that he lacks as a man. His bold experiment is to escape from his life only to return to it on the page. He goes out through the front door only to stand in the bushes and look in through the window. He escapes from his life in order to write about nothing else, with the paradoxical intention of making it as real and immediate as possible.

I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write. Especially now that after six years of failure I had finally got somewhere and I felt it wouldn’t stop here, there was more. That was what I longed for, this filled my thoughts, not Linda and Vanja and the christening in Jølster, which I took as it came. If it was good, fine, then it was good. If it wasn’t good, well, then it wasn’t good. The difference did not matter much to me. I should have been able to categorize the argument in this way, but I couldn’t, my feelings were too strong, they had me under their control.

What must Knausgaard’s wife (Linda, herself a writer) think of all this? I believe they are still married and recently had a fourth child. He as much as tells us he finds his family a chore. But as soon as he gets behind that closed door, where is his mind? With his family, recounting everything he has seen, thought, and felt. And it isn’t pure narcissism because he doesn’t write only about himself—other people, friends and family, have substance on the page. Perhaps not as they would wish to be seen, but with weight, depth, and nuance nonetheless.

Here he is on choosing a DVD at the video store:

I ran my eye along the row. When I bought films it was always with the idea that they should broaden my horizons. They should have their own special imagery I could assimilate, or forge a relationship with places whose potential I hadn’t considered or be set in an unfamiliar time or culture. In short, I chose films for all the wrong reasons, because when evening came and we wanted to see one of them we could never be bothered to watch two hours of some Japanese event from the 1960s in black and white, or the great, open expanses of Rome’s suburbs where the only thing that happened was that some stunningly beautiful people met who were fundamentally alienated from the world, as tended to be the case with films of that era. No, when evening came and we sat down to watch a film we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes. Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye. If the eye saw the water that was everywhere in Tarkovsky’s films—for example, which changed the world into a kind of terrarium, where everything trickled and ran, floated and drifted, where all the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table were left, filling slowly with the falling rain, against a background of intense, almost menacing green vegetation, yes—then the eye would also be able to see the same wild, existential depths unfold in everyday life. For we were flesh and blood, sinew and bone, around us plants and trees grew, insects buzzed, birds flew, clouds drifted, rain fell. The eye that gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it, at least it was like that in our lives.

"Are we up for Stalker?” I asked, turning to her.

In a book of essays this would be thought provoking; in a novel about everyday life, juxtaposed to day care and cigarette breaks, it is a revelation. It’s conversational in a way that is always just a little beyond our ability to articulate in real time, and probably also just a little beyond any real acquaintence's willingness to stand there and listen.

Well, there are still four volumes to go. Most are in the 300-600 page range; volume six, though, is 1300 pages. If I live long enough, I’ll get there.

Meanwhile, here is one last long quote from volume two, which gives us Knausgaard’s explanation of his objective in My Struggle:

Over recent years, I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis. I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it was the same. The sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different drove you to a despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up.

I actually don’t believe any of this for a second. “Actually happened” is meaningless, because “reality” only matters insofar as it makes a difference in our lives. It matters to me whether the people I know are still here when I wake up tomorrow, and it matters to me whether the plane I get on next month has been correctly inspected and maintained, but as to whether some chain-smoking Norwegian is making up stories or telling me exactly what he thinks happened in his life, I really don’t care. But he cares, and it seems to have driven him to write some very interesting books, so I say “Rage on, Karl Ove.”

#39: From the Mouth of the Whale, The Blue Fox, and The Whispering Muse, by Sjón.

These are three separate books, but they are short books, with quite a bit in common, and it feels more natural to discuss them collectively. That’s how I first read about them, in a wonderful review entitled A Magus of the North, written by novelist A.S. Byatt for The New York Review of Books. It was one of those “you must read this” reviews, and it would probably be a better use of your time to read Byatt’s review than to read whatever follows here. The review begins: “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head.”

I’ve been reading a few Scandinavian authors in recent years: Sjón, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Isak Dinesen, Halldór Laxness. I’ve noticed two dominant trends—there are the intensely realistic family dramas, novels, plays, and films that put people and relationships under a microscope. This theme runs from Ibsen, through Ingmar Bergman films like Scenes from a Marriage, to Knausgaard. But then there is the fantastic element: Dinesen’s gothic tales, Knut Hamsen. Some writers can do both: Dinesen and Bergman alternated realistic works with more mythopoetic ones. Maybe these two modes aren't quite as distinct as I'm assuming, or maybe opposites can meet at either extreme. Laxness’s Independent People presents a vivid picture of sustenance farming at the edge of the Arctic while also making room for a few ghosts and spirits.

I’m generalizing a bit, and your blogger is presuming on what is in fact a pretty marginal acquaintance with Scandinavian literature—I’ve never actually read any Ibsen. I do have one real credential, however—one week in 2009 I fought my way, sentence by sentence, through Hans Christian Andersen’s Grantræet (in English, The Fir Tree) in the original Danish. Grantræeet is the 48-hour autobiography of a Christmas tree, from envious and expectant outsider, to centerpiece of the celebration, to trash. Unlike the lesson texts and simple newspaper articles I was mostly tackling at the time, Andersen’s writing was full of strange and exotic words, and the weirdness of the tale combined with my very unsure renderings of the sentences to create a kind of child’s consciousness. What could be alive? What could a tree think? What does this word mean? Is this a metaphor? I felt as though I were looking up at this very brief fairy tale; it loomed. (Another story I enjoyed in Danish featured Scrooge McDuck. You can read about it here.)

Andersen would obviously belong in the fantastic camp of Scandinavian writers. And so quite clearly would Sjón. Sjón is a modern-day disciple of Ovid—he deals in transformations. In the short novel The Blue Fox, a man shoots a fox and then stuffs it in his jacket. Later, when the hunter is trapped in a cage after barely surviving an avalanche, the fox revives and begins a conversation with him. In The Whispering Muse, a sailor on a modern trawler speaks in the voice of one of Odysseus’s sailors at night. He reveals that he has spent the majority of the preceding 20 centuries in the form of a bird.

Sjón writes in the third person, but always in the voice of his characters. The narrator of From the Mouth of the Whale, for example, is a 17th century man, and he speaks to us with what strikes me as a very convincing recreation of a 17th century mind, where shrewd and rational observations mingle with bits of myth and superstition:

Last winter I was as solitary as Adam in his first year in paradise, though the island in winter is nothing like that delightful place. It is cold and bleak and one does not venture out of doors except to empty one's chamber pot, and not properly even then; one merely opens the door a crack, just wide enough for the pot. I was more like a wretched mouse in its hole than a man created in God's image. As little and hunched as the rat's cousin, not ramrod straight, proudly surveying my domain like Adam. Ah, yes, Adam was tall and held his head high. That way he could see over the whole world, for he was bigger and heavier than his living descendants, just under thirty yards in height, and with such a head of hair that his locks cascaded like a waterfall over his loins. He was the largest living creature that God had created from earthly clay. And all through that year as he walked the Earth alone, his massive body was being fired and glazed by the sun like clay in an oven. All growth was new: the trees put down roots, sprouted, then dropped their leaves and stood naked for the first time. The swans rose honking from the moorland tarns and heard their own voices for the first time. The bee alighted on the dwarf fireweed and quenched her thirst with fresh honey before buzzing in flight to the next flower cup. It had never happened before. Everything was new to the eyes of the man and he was entirely new to himself. Molded by the Master from the four elements, as they combine in the Earth, he was closer to his origins now than he ever would be again. His blood was still diluted with seawater, there was gravel in his flesh, roots crept along his sinews and muscles, the seed that quickened to life in his testicles was thick as spider silk and foamy as sea spume. Thus he strode across the world and wherever he looked he saw to the ends of the Earth.

This is every bit as rich and weird as Grantræeet.

Sjón has collaborated with Björk, and is the lyricist on several of her compositions, including the ethereal Jóga. According the Byatt, Sjón has also written a trilogy set in the time of World War II, which hasn’t been translated into English yet. I’ll be looking for it.

#38: Dusk, by James Salter

Dusk a book of short stories. It seems to me there are two types of short stories—the kind that pack in so much information that they read like condensed novels, and the kind that achieve an effect, strike a balance, with the minimum of words and explicit exposition. Haiku stories. The author drops you into the action with no scene setting or preamble. You take in details, assemble a picture in your mind, understand as much of what’s going on as possible, and then it’s over. After reading a volume of such stories, it can be difficult even a day or two later to remember anything much. You work to fix each story in your mind as you’re reading, and just as you get it into focus, you are on to the next.

Dusk contains stories of the second, ephemeral type, and after the first reading I didn’t retain much. Were it not for the self-imposed obligation of writing this blog, it would have vanished from my consciousness like a dream. But now I am in the process of re-reading it, and I am seeing things I had not seen earlier. For example, there is one story named “American Express.” It’s about two New York lawyers who maintain a close friendship for 20-something years. They pull off a coup professionally when quite young and become rich. In the second half of the story they travel to Europe and stay on indefinitely. The time is mid-to-late 20th century—perhaps 1952 to 1972. Of the two, Frank is the clever and dynamic one, and Alan more the sidekick. Over the course of just 21 pages Salter does a number of deft things to make these two individuals real to us. He sketches details, but never fills them in. Information is provided in indirect, often surprising ways. Significant biographical facts are jumbled together with precise, seemingly random observations and details in a way that startles and stimulates the reader. Here is a very long excerpt that deals with one of Frank’s more significant romantic relationships:

As it happened, they never knew the girl at the reception desk with her nearsightedness and wild, full hair. They knew various others, they knew Julie, they knew Catherine, they knew Ames. The best, for nearly two years, was Brenda who had somehow managed to graduate from Marymount and had a walk-through apartment on West Fourth. In a smooth, thin, silver frame was the photograph of her father with his two daughters at the Plaza, Brenda, thirteen, with an odd little smile.

"I wish I'd known you then," Frank told her.

Brenda said, "I bet you do."

It was her voice he liked, the city voice, scornful and warm. They were two of a kind, she liked to say, and in a way it was true. They drank in her favorite places where the owner played the piano and everyone seemed to know her. Still, she counted on him. The city has its incomparable moments—rolling along the wall of the apartment, kissing, bumping like stones. Five in the afternoon, the vanishing light. "No," she was commanding. "No, no, no." He was kissing her throat. "What are you going to do with that beautiful struma of yours?"

"You won't take me to dinner," she said.

"Sure I will."

"Beautiful what?"

She was like a huge dog, leaping from his arms.

"Come here," he coaxed.

She went into the bathroom and began combing her hair. "Which restaurant are we going to?" she called. She would give herself but it was mostly unpredictable. She would do anything her mother hadn't done and would live as her mother lived, in the same kind of apartment, in the same soft chairs. Christmas and the envelopes for the doormen, the snow sweeping past the awning, her children coming home from school. She adored her father. She went on a trip to Hawaii with him and sent back postcards, two or three scorching lines in a large, scrawled hand.

It was summer.

"Anybody here?" Frank called.

He rapped on the door which was ajar. He was carrying his jacket, it was hot.

"All right," he said in a loud voice, "come out with your hands over your head. Alan, cover the back." The party, it seemed, was over. He pushed the door open. There was one lamp on, the room was dark.

"Hey, Bren, are we too late?" he called. She appeared mysteriously in the doorway, bare legged but in heels. "We'd have come earlier but we were working. We couldn't get out of the office. Where is everybody? Where's all the food? Hey, Alan, we're late. There's no food, nothing."

She was leaning against the doorway.

"We tried to get down here," Alan said. "We couldn't get a cab."

Frank had fallen onto the couch. "Bren, don't be mad," he said. "We were working, that's the truth. I should have called. Can you put some music on or something? Is there anything to drink?"

"There's about that much vodka," she finally said.

"Any ice?"

"About two cubes." She pushed off the wall without much enthusiasm. He watched her walk into the kitchen and heard the refrigerator door open.

The sentences give us information but they also imply a thousand different things. When Salter writes “It was summer,” we feel the scene shifting, we know time as passed. After this transition the relationship of Frank and Brenda (all of a half page old) takes on a new tone, a hint of cynicism and evasion.

And then there is the sentence “She would do anything her mother hadn't done and would live as her mother lived, in the same kind of apartment, in the same soft chairs.” What kinds of things would Brenda do that her mother hadn’t?—its an absurd statement that tells us more about Brenda’s determination and nerve than it does about what either woman might or might not do. But then there are those soft chairs, attaching themselves to the tail of that otherwise dramatic sentence. To me they suggest the inertia of living and money and becoming our parents despite ourselves. We try to define ourselves by opposition to our initial circumstances, but eventually we avail ourselves of whatever makes life comfortable—like a soft chair.

But this isn’t even Brenda’s story—she is present here for two or three pages, and then later on for two more.

Elsewhere we meet another of Frank’s lovers, a Mrs. Christie, who is also his client. Mrs. Christie is recently divorced and would like to find somebody new. Here is an episode that Mrs. Christie relates to Frank:

He didn't know what it was like, she told him. Not long ago she'd been introduced to someone by a couple she knew very well. "We'll go to dinner," they said, "you'll love him, you're perfect for him, he likes to talk about books."

They arrived at the apartment and the two women immediately went into the kitchen and began cooking. What did she think of him? She'd only had a glimpse, she said, but she liked him very much, his beautiful bald head, his dressing gown. She had begun to plan what she would do with the apartment which had too much blue in it. The man—Warren was his name—was silent all evening. He'd lost his job, her friend explained in the kitchen. Money was no problem, but he was depressed. "He's had a shock," she said. "He likes you." And in fact he'd asked if he could see her again.

"Why don't you come for tea, tomorrow?" he said.

"I could do that," she said. "Of course. I'll be in the neighborhood," she added.

The next day she arrived at four with a bag filled with books, at least a hundred dollars worth which she'd bought as a present. He was in pajamas. There was no tea. He hardly seemed to know who she was or why she was there. She said she remembered she had to meet someone and left the books. Going down in the elevator she felt suddenly sick to her stomach.

Salter is like Miles Davis, there are sweet lyrical bits that come out of nowhere, transition that are graceful and odd at the same time, melodies that seems to start in the middle, provocative silences. Frank and Alan are improvisers too. Like the story in which they exist, they never seem to look forward. They are without obligations, responsibility or meaningful connections. (It’s hard to say whether they are connected to each other, or just juxtaposed.) Their existences, over the course of 20 pages, seem to dwindle and attenuate. They go to Italy and Frank sees a schoolgirl in her uniform across a town square. He talks her into going for a ride with him and then they are lovers and she is traveling with the two of them in Italy. How old is she? we wonder. Alan says he is going home and Frank, to prevent this, agrees to share the girl with him.

The other Salter book that I wrote about in this blog, Light Years, also ends with an older American man taking up with a much younger Italian woman. Both stories take on a rather sad bitter quality, a sense of life’s vitality at an end. Somehow I imagine Frank commiting suicide eventually. There is no tangible suggestion of this in the story, but that’s the thing about Salter—you’re his collaborator as much as you are his audience. Sometimes he tells you how to fill in the gaps, and sometimes he doesn’t.

#37: My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle is a six-volume autobiographical novel by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. It was written between 2008 and 2011 and is being translated into English at the rate of about one volume a year.

To read My Struggle is to share the author’s life as it unspools across the page. You are in his head as he remembers events from his life. The various episodes sprawl across 50, 100, or 200 pages. There is nothing extraordinary about these narrative segments, except that they are never marshaled toward a tidy conclusion. They are a kind of texture or fabric, a state of mind.

Since reading the first volume I have been thinking a bit about the experience of sharing an author’s life in this way. And it made me think of…dogs.

Some people are dog people. Two of my three siblings have hardly ever been without a dog throughout their adult lives. My third sibling and I, on the other hand, are not dog people. I like dogs, but then I imagine standing in a cold rain with a bag on my hand.

I imagine that a large part of the attraction, for many dog people, is to have a certain kind of sympathetic companion consciousness—specifically a silent one. You can talk to a dog, you can adjust your mood to match your dog’s, or even change your dog’s mood to match yours. You can be kind or cruel, or both by turns. You are not alone when you are with a dog, but you will never be contradicted or criticized. Your consciousness stands unchallenged.

Reading biographies is a bit like owning a dog. Or rather, it’s a bit like being a dog. Especially with autobiographies. In this case you, as the reader, are on the silent, receiving end in the relationship. You attach yourself to the master personality, you share its emotions, experience what feels to you like a kind of companionship—but the dialog is strictly one-way. You can’t participate in the action the way a dog can, but you can understand more. You know you don’t have to love the subject/author, but most of the time, you sort of do, because you’re traveling along with him or her, silent and constant.

If you’re the kind of person who mostly reads to gain information or to learn as much about the world as possible, My Struggle might not be the right book for you, because Knausgaard has not had an especially eventful life. He’s in his mid 40s, and I don’t think he’s ever lived outside of Scandinavia—I can’t be entirely sure, because I’ve only read volume one so far. He’s been married twice, has three kids, and hasn’t done anything else worthy of note other than to write books.

So why am I so completely hooked? I think it’s because Knausgaard’s life harmonizes with mine—his circumstances, his attitudes, his fears, his talents, and his faults—all are comparable to mine. Comparable in the literal sense of “capable of being compared.” (“His talents?” you say? “What have you written, sir, other than this blog? “Nothing much. But a failed talent is a talent nonetheless. A little more intelligence, a little more dedication, a little more spiritual depth, and who knows?—you could be reading my autobiographical saga.)

Volume Two will be out in paperback in a few weeks, and I’ll be reporting back after I read it.

#36: The Human Comedy (selected stories), by Honoré de Balzac

Balzac was a maximalist. He is supposed to have written 90 novels before expiring at the age of 51. (One wonders how rigorously the term “novel” is defined for purposes of this census—for example, would the longish short stories in this volume be counted as novels?) Most of his work dealt with an interrelated constellation of characters and situations, and is known collectively as The Human Comedy. To write at such a pace is like keeping a huge fire going. You can’t be terribly choosy about fuel and you can’t really think twice about throwing whatever is at hand right onto the pyre. If Balzac were alive today he might be the “show runner” for some hour-long cable series, like Mad Men or Breaking Bad—that’s the person who runs the whole affair, writes and directs some of the scripts and keeps all the balls in the air. Except Balzac would probably try to write and direct the majority of the scripts himself. It would be a great show because the man had a kind of a crazy talent—he could play the different levels of society like a keyboard, from derelicts and pimps on up to princes and generals. He could do intimacy, and he could do sweeping panoramas—one of the stories in this volume, titled Adieu, depicts a scene from Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, in all of its magnificent horror. Never mind le mot juste, Balzac was about les mots, touts.

He was not squeamish about reaching for the lurid and the spectacular, either. One story, Sarrasine, deals with a man who falls in love with a singer who is revealed to be a castrato. (I first encountered Sarrasine long ago in Roland Barthes’ brilliant critical exercise, S/Z. ) Another, the aforementioned Adieu, depicts a woman who loses her mind after enduring great hardship. She regains it on the story’s final page under extraordinary circumstances—and then expires on the spot. In another, a woman enters a convent after her lover rejects her. The convent is on a stony island in the Mediterranean, and in the final scene the lover mounts an assault up the cliffs to the convent to claim her. Alas, she too has just expired from the intensity of it all, but he takes her away anyway, presumably leaving the other nuns to assume that she has been miraculously called up into heaven.

It isn’t all quite so over the top, but it is unfailingly extravagant and entertaining. I have read a couple of Balzac’s novels, and they were not nearly as lurid—perhaps the public expected short stories to be fantastic in those days—Balzac was a contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps as well the people selecting tales for this volume went for more sensational tales.

Since beginning this blog I have had some less than satisfactory encounters with 19th century works—I’ve been kind of underwhelmed by George Eliot, Dickens, and George Meredith. Balzac—no problem.

#35: The First World War, by John Keegan

History fans love the Civil War. Publishers feed the demand with an endless stream of volumes that minutely examine the careers of individual generals, or individual battles, or sometimes even individual generals at individual battles. Grown men devote their spare time to reliving it, right down to the itchy uniforms and the vile food.

Hardly anybody today can name the heroes or villains of the First World War. Its major battles have an almost convulsive quality, its soldiers could almost be white blood cells or army ants flying into battle and dying by the millions for no apparent reason. The essential realities that everyone knows are few: trenches, barbed wire, death.

The war was a global affliction, and after it ended, the world was a gloomier, more dangerous place. Resentments lingered. The fond notion nourished throughout the 19th century, that mankind was becoming more civilized, less warlike, less irrational, never quite recovered. The war left the world damaged, broken, an open wound that bred infections like Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

There were massive, monstrous battles in the First World War—the Somme, Verdun, Ypres. They all followed the same script:

1. Attacking army bombards enemy position.
2. Attacking army follows up bombardment with infantry attack, swarming out of its trenches and overrunning enemy trenches.
3. Infantry attack gains ground, makes a breakthrough—sometimes a few hundred yards, sometimes a few dozen miles.
4. Defending army rallies reinforcements, converges on the breakthrough.
5. Defending army repulses attacking army, lines reform, new trenches are dug.

In the interim, a couple of hundred thousand soldiers died. This scenario played itself out over and over again. After a few years of this, the soldiers stopped cooperating. The entire French army pretty much took 1917 off, though they rallied in 1918 to repulse the final, desperate German assault. The Russian empire collapsed entirely, giving us the world’s first communist state. The Austrians, well, they had the best uniforms, one for each of the ten nationalities that made up Franz Josef’s conglomerate empire. Not much of a resumé in battle, however.

The most interesting events were at the fringes—after 1917, Russian and Central Asia were wide open, with Bolsheviks, anti-Bolsheviks, allied forces, and captured Austro-Hungarian forces all in play. The Austro-Hungarian forces, once the central leadership collapsed, quickly transformed themselves into nationalist forces and generally switched sides and threw in their lot with England and France. An army of 40000 Czech soldiers declared their alliance with the western forces, but declined to engage with German armies in the east. Instead, finding themselves now behind enemy lines, they decided to get on the Trans Siberian Railroad, travel five thousand miles to the Pacific Coast, take ship there, and come around the globe to fight on the western front. For a time they controlled the entire Trans Siberian Railroad, making it difficult for actual Russian armies to get at each other. They didn’t reach the Pacific until September 1920, almost two years after the war ended. Their plan seems very wise in retrospect.

John Keegan’s The First World War is a serviceable volume. He does what he can with the material. In the aggregate, this was an unmemorable war, proof that mankind needs little incentive to manufacture its own misery on a colossal scale. For individual soldiers going into battle on an individual day, it was the same as any other war. Some died, others were maimed, physically or mentally. Did it matter much to them whether or not this was a “good war”? Happy 100th birthday, World War I.

#35: Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford

Voltaire falls within the “three fact” range of my knowledge—that is, I knew roughly three things about him before I read this book. Lived near Geneva, wrote Candide, a satire of naïve optimism, and was a defender of human rights. Much of my store of knowledge is in the three-fact category: Alexander the Great: conquered the world from Greece to India in the 3rd century B.C., died young, was gay. Or How about … The Dreyfus Affair: French military officer, anti-semitism, Zola involved (“J’accuse”). I could go on.

I guess I can also admit to also knowing that Voltaire was the personifying genius of the French Enlightenment, much as Samuel Johnson was the personifying genius of the English Enlightenment. But 300 years and a language puts Voltaire at a significant remove, and though I wish I could have learned enough French to explore a bit of 18th century French literature on my own, I’m pretty sure at this point that that’s never going to happen. So, when all else fails: popular history.

Nancy Mitford is a fascinating character in her own right, one of a trio of aristocratic British sisters who all made some sort of mark on the world in the mid 20th century. (Unity Mitford was a devoted Nazi who moved to Germany and had intimate suppers with the Fuhrer.) Nancy was a novelist turned biographer who, while living in France in the 1950s, managed to make a living writing biographies of such luminaries of the Ancien Régime as Louis XIV and Madame Pompadour. The image I had of Voltaire is of a dandy in a shiny powder blue coat with a white periwig and rouged cheeks. Probably I am conflating Voltaire with Candide in this image, but I was surprised to find that Mitford’s Voltaire was a pretty close match with my notions of an 18th century French intellectual: vain, supercilious, given to feuds and disputes, and promiscuous. These people went at it like cats! Voltaire had an assortment of enemies. Who has enemies anymore? Such an extravagance! Voltaire was all about extravagance.

I like biographies, but conventional biographies can be a bit oppressive due to the inevitable arc of an eminent life: obscurity, followed by fame and accomplishment, followed by decline and extinction. I must admit to sometimes flipping to the final pages of biographies when I’m browsing in bookstores to take in the deathbed scene. It’s typically about 10-15 pages from the end. (Has anyone ever anthologized deathbed scenes? Maybe it would be considered bad taste?) So yeah, biographies are like suitcases—you can pack different things into them, but they always have the same shape.

Which is why I like one-off biographies. Partial biographies, group biographies, whatever gets you away from the bell curve. Voltaire in Love is both a partial biography, covering primarily a 15-year swath of Voltaire’s life, and a joint biography, covering as well his sometime lover and close associate, Émilie, the marquise du Châtelet.

They were both geniuses, though not of the exact same type. He was a playwright, poet, and satirist. A very public intellectual. He could not live anyplace for very long without improvising some sort of a theater and producing amateur productions of his own works. This may sound insufferable, but they were usually good plays and it was the 18th century—the alternatives were embroidery and card games.

Émilie had a more mathematical mind. She translated the works of Isaac Newton and championed his theories in France, where they had to compete with an earlier cosmology, formulated by Descartes and based on “vortices.” If you suppose this to have been a slam dunk for Émilie, you would be wrong, especially in light of the fact that the leading minds of the time were skeptical that a woman could teach them anything about such weighty topics.

Which one would you imagine would have a way with money? Turns out it was Voltaire:

Voltaire was now very rich. His fortune came neither from his books, which were too often pirated, nor from his plays, whose royalties he always gave to the actors, but from astute business dealings. He would exert himself to any extent, he would rise from a sick bed and travel across France, if he saw a good profit to be made. He had no wish for money troubles in addition to all his others and used to say that a man should live to work but not work to live. On one occasion, by a simple calculation which others had overlooked, he discovered that whoever bought up a certain percentage of a public lottery would win, in prizes, much more than the money laid out. He raised enough cash to do this. The minister of finance was furious when he realized what had happened, and tried to bring a lawsuit, but he had no case against Voltaire who was perfectly in order. On another occasion he went the whole way to Lorraine from Paris to subscribe to a State loan which seemed very advantageous. When he arrived in Nancy, ill and shaken by the journey, he discovered that only native Lorrainers were eligible. He made such a song and dance that the authorities allowed his subscription on the tenuous grounds that his name, Arouet, was the same as that of the Prince de Beauvau’s castle near Nancy, Haroué. This investment trebled in a few months.

He could have been on CNBC! Émilie by contrast was a gambler who could lose money as fast as Voltaire could make it.

Reading of their 15 years together induces a kind of exhaustion. So many quarrels, affairs, letters, recriminations, reconciliations, and alliances. People come and go, suppers are consumed at all hours, carriages break down, tears are shed, it never stops.