Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Mason, Alane Salierno
Alane Salierno Mason Alane Salierno Mason is an editor at W. W. Norton. Her last article for Commonweal was "Respect: An Italian-American Story" (October 10). She lives in Brooklyn. On the age of...
...One such recent discovery for me was Art Spiegelman's Maus (Vols...
...I'd certainly had occasion to discover his work sooner, having heard him read...
...an ordinary town with its Muslims, its Christians, and its Jews, but also its distinctive, majestic bridge between East and West...
...Another discovery of the already-known: the pleasure and challenge of reading poetry, something I had neglected to venture since literature classes in school...
...which won Bosnian Serb author Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize in 1961 (he died in 1975...
...It's better to wait...
...his poems are moody, too: funny, depressing, erotic, wistful, worried, grateful, and inspiring of gratitude...
...In a time of the empty uses of the rhetoric of family values, Orsi's book investigates the roles of the values of a particular time and place in the lives of an actual group of people, how those values uplifted or constrained them, and how they were expressed in particular ritual devotions...
...It is not a story of the so-called ancient hatreds of the Balkans, but of provincial experiences of world events with their origins on a large, indifferent canvas...
...Through the stone's-eye lens of a monumental bridge built over the River Drina by a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century, Andric retells five centuries of Balkan history, from the ferocity and eventual fading of the Ottoman Empire, to the arrogance and stratagems of the Austro-Hungarian, to the coming of World War I. All are seen through the ebb and flow of the daily life of a town on the empire's fringe...
...The son's duti-fulness and fury, the father's self-absorption and maniacal stinginess, are the foreground...
...and found his work bursting open in my hands, his language alive, tactile, and transcendent at once, sensually and intellectually exciting...
...of history's ebb and flow between normalcy and tragedy...
...the Holocaust story is background, the books' reason to be, but also a way for the son to grapple with who his father is...
...I should make it a policy to give old books this Christmas...
...What I had never understood, and what bowled me over when I finally picked them up (and could hardly put them down), is that they are a father-son story, and a riveting, hilarious portrait of an extremely difficult man, the artist's father...
...His language was both familiar and shocking to me, visceral and meditative...
...It is vivid, accessible cultural history, exploring how immigrants from various parts of Southern Italy became Italian-Americans, and made a place for their homes and streets in their religious beliefs and practices...
...I had an image of them as cartoon books about the Holocaust, risky, ambitious, sophisticated, high art, depressing...
...Its evocation of ideas about family and home, the codes of rispetto, ring so startlingly true that I made another discovery...
...I was given Maus as a gift a couple of years ago, but hadn't gotten to reading either volume until recently...
...Then I discovered Ranier Maria Rilke on my shelves Sonnets to Orpheus (Norton, $9.95,160 pp...
...a book that has gained ever more of a following in the ten years since it was published...
...Even during the Bosnian war, I never heard anyone mention The Bridge on the Drina (University of Chicago Press, $11.95,314 pp...
...Either you feel rebellious, and don't want to like it...
...Reading Rilke on a breezy summer day in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, between naps that, for me, was to feel I'd accomplished something worthwhile, had really discovered poetry...
...Another find in plain view for me was Robert Orsi's The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian East Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale University Press, $16, 366 pp...
...On the age of hype, one gets used to being disappointed...
...and his prose Letters to a Young Poet (Norton, $6.95,126 pp...
...They are a magnificent, fascinating work...
...Cavafy, and got me to bring to the kitchen table Edmund Keeley's selection and translation of The Essential Cavafy (Ecco, $10...
...At first, the utterly unfashionable narrative approach not merely omniscient, but pan-historical is uncomfortably cold, but its cumulative effect is magnificent...
...It doesn't magically turn reading into homework, as I'd feared...
...That is, it's much better to be the first to discover a great new book or movie than it is to follow the crowd, because once you've heard everyone say how wonderful something is, you are no longer in a private relation to the thing, but participating in a social phenomenon...
...It was a pleasure appropriately followed and sustained by Ed Hirsch's Wild Gratitude (Knopf, $16,96 pp...
...To do so is also to become part of the process of moving something from short-term to long-term cultural memory...
...A friend quoted turn-of-the century Alexandrian poet C.P...
...or you do want to like it, and feel let down...
...keeping a pen in hand to underline, and using it, can intensify one's engagement with and pleasure in a book...
...1&2, Pantheon, boxed hardcover set $40,280 pp...
...There are plenty of Nobel Prize winners in literature available for rediscovery, as so many of them seem vulnerable to being brought out of obscurity for the prize but slipping back into it afterwards...
...I began reading him at night, and though his classical allusions made me feel uneducated, still I was shocked to find him speaking so intimately to a contemporary sense of being in the world...
...You never know when other people might decide to discover what's been in front of their noses while their attention was distracted by keeping up with the new...
...but it was not a disappointment to discover the words on the page now, in this book full of rediscoveries of the taken-for-granted and of the just-remembered past...
...which won the National Book Award for poetry in 1981...
...one of vivid physical presences amidst a more general uprootedness, fluid identities, memories of past attachments, constant transition...
...There's a particular, pungent pleasure in discovering for oneself books that have dropped from media-view and recommending them to others who might also have missed them in the equivalent of the first-run theaters...
...the book itself remains as a permanent edifice in one's mind...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
