The most remarkable book I’ve read this year was recommended to me by Cees Nooteboom: a fifty-page-long essay by the Hungarian scholar László Földényi, Dosztojevszkij Szibérában Hegelt Olvassa, és sírva fakad (Dostoevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and weeps). I have no Hungarian, so I read it in a Spanish translation. Földényi suggests (quite plausibly) that Dostoevsky may have read Hegel’s Lessons in the Philosophy of World History in his Siberian prison, and that he deduced from Hegel’s philosophical methods the miseries of our present self-defeating society. I don’t think the essay has yet been translated into English and I urge any publisher not afraid of short books to consider it.
My vast ignorance of neuroscience did not prevent me from enjoying Eric R. Kandel’s In Search of Memory (Norton), partly a personal memoir (Kandel’s family fled from Austria in 1939 and settled in the United States) and partly an account of his scientific research (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000). Kandel is a considerate guide in what must be for most readers a mysteriously forbidding territory: the study of the biological nature of memory, emotion and thought. “I find myself filled with wonder to be doing what I am doing”, he confesses at the end of his book: the reader adds gratitude to this sense of wonder.
Finally, tired of agonized fiction that tells me more than I want to know about life in Brooklyn, Bombay and Birmingham, I was delighted to discover a new novel by the surviving half of the Fruttero & Lucentini duo who decades ago produced that masterly thriller, The Sunday Woman. After Lucentini’s death in 2002, it seemed as if Fruttero had chosen to remain silent. Not at all. Donne informate sui fatti (Women called to bear witness, Mondadori), an ironic chronicle, told in eight female voices, of bad behaviour among Turin’s upper crust, is as good as anything the pair ever published.
MARINA WARNER
War and the Iliad (New York Review Books) joins together for the first time in a single volume Simone Weil’s ferocious lament (“The Iliad or the Poem of Force”), with her less well known contemporary Rachel Bespaloff’s antiphonal meditation on conflict, pacifism and justice.
Mary MacCarthy was the original translator, and her luminous work is reprinted here. Samuel Beckett made terminal bleakness his business in a different way, and of the many tributes, I found Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: Uncollected interviews, edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson (Bloomsbury), full of perceptive and appealing revelations about the man and the writer. In The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British slave trade (Profile), William St Clair opens a rare archive in the Public Record Office to give an account of British slavers and their suppliers in Africa. It’s an admirable, succinct work of historical research, and tells its appalling story stoically to great effect. But after so much cause for despair, it has been a lift to read Lois Parkinson Zamora’s The Inordinate Eye: New World baroque and Latin American fiction, beautifully produced by the University of Chicago Press. She argues exhilaratingly that an aesthetic of fusion, adornment and exuberance rose phoenix-like in the aftermath of the conquest, shaping an influential mode of fantasy, as in the art and architecture of Mexico and the marvellous fictions of Borges.
PAUL MULDOON
Books by four of my colleagues at Princeton University made a big impact this year. A new translation by Robert Fagles of The Aeneid (Viking) shows Fagles equally at home in the wide shot of constant battle and the big close-up of Aeneas and his men munching on their flat-bread plates, so fulfilling the prophecy of Anchises that when “hunger drives you to eat your own platters, then’s the moment, exhausted as you are, to hope for home”. That Rome was founded on an item of food would hardly come as a surprise to Leonard Barkan, whose Satyr Square: A year, a life in Rome (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) finds Barkan flirting with a young man by the name of Gabriele: “Cooking, I said, was my second-favorite activity in the world. I gave him that opening, but in case he didn’t step into it, I added, ‘But I’m afraid of bending over the hot stove’”. This last image would have appealed to Philip Roth’s raunchy character, Nathan Zuckerman, as he appears in The Human Stain, musing on the idea that Monica Lewinsky “revealed more about America than anybody since Dos Passos. She stuck a thermometer up the country’s ass”. Ranging as he does from Lewinsky to David Lynch, Lou Reed back to Roth, the Pixies to Pere Ubu, the great cultural critic Greil Marcus suggests in The Shape of Things To Come (Faber) that in the USA, artists rather than politicians truly have the measure of the country. That is surely the case with C. K. Williams, whose Collected Poems (Bloodaxe) so often combine great toughness with tenderness, as in a pre-Lewinsky take on “The Dress”:
We knew so little in those days, as little asCRAIG RAINE
now, I suppose, about healing those hurts:
even the women, in their best dresses, with
beads and sequins sewn on the bodices,
even in lipstick and mascara, their hair aflow, could only stand wringing their hands,
begging for peace, while father and son, like
thugs, like thieves, like Romans,
simmered and hissed and hated, inflicting
sorrows that endured, the worst anyway,
through the kiss and embrace, bleeding from
brother to brother into the generations.
I lost my heart to Milan Kundera’s new work of criticism, Le Rideau (Gallimard), soon to be published (as The Curtain) in the US by HarperCollins and by Faber in March 2007. He is of course the greatest living novelist. But admirers have always known that he is also a great critic, a fabulous close reader – meticulous, intuitive, completely original, a gifted phrase-maker, profoundly persuasive, no, more, seductive. He makes love to his chosen texts – talking to them in tender undertones, getting them to talk back, to give up their secrets. Don’t have this book by your bedside. Go to bed with this book. You won’t regret it.
ELAINE SHOWALTER
In a great vintage year for books, two stood out for me. First, Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous novel about the Nazi occupation of France, Suite Française (Chatto), brilliantly conceived and artfully composed along the lines of War and Peace, fully deserves the Tolstoyan comparison. Shortly before her arrest and deportation to Birkenau, where she was gassed in August 1942, Némirovsky noted in her journal that she must try to write about the everyday details of life in Occupied France that would fascinate readers in ten, or 110, years. Tragically unfinished, Suite Française, with its dispassionate portraits of the psychology of collaboration and the persistence of hope, is a timeless masterpiece.
The American science fiction writer who is the subject of Julie Phillips’s biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The double life of Alice Sheldon (St Martin’s Press), was by no means a great artist, but this account of her life and especially the ten years or so she spent publishing under a male pseudonym that became a fully fledged male persona, is riveting in its illumination of the psychological conflicts and contradictions of modern female authorship. Phillips’s insightful treatment of a “writer who – like many women writers – concealed herself in order to tell the truth” makes this a thought-provoking and paradigmatic book.
A. N. WILSON
For Elias Canetti addicts, such as I have become, Briefe an Georges (Letters to George, Carl Hanser) is an unputdownable book. It is the letters between Veza Canetti and the great genius’s consumptive doctor-brother. It covers the period of the publication of Die Blendung (Auto da Fé), the outbreak of war, and the Canettis’ exile in England. Much of this stuff is known to us from Canetti’s memoirs; but what he has omitted is here plentifully supplied by his wife – the everlasting depressions, the repeated adulteries and (what I’d never picked up on) the drink. As melodramatic a text as – well, as an Iris Murdoch novel. (The book stops, alas, before she comes on the scene.)
Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale University Press) is magisterial and scholarly, and richly enjoyable. Whether describing the grotesque stage machinery which made the first Rhine Maidens throw up at Bayreuth, or exploring Wagner’s fortunes at the hands of East German directors in the 1960s he is equally illuminating. Hours of enjoyment and much to ponder.
The best biography of a poet that I ever read, I think, is Maggie Fergusson’s George Mackay Brown (John Murray), a book which gets inside a profoundly secret person and illuminates the way he works as a poet. He will outlast his contemporaries, surely, and Fergusson has written a work of literature.
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