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
Johns, Elizabeth
Elizabeth Johns Elizabeth Johns teaches art history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is American Genre Painting (Yale). The landscape exhibition that she has co-curated, "New...
...is based on another kind of journey, that of a real leader of a doomed expedition into the interior of Australia in the mid-nineteenth century...
...In such expeditions, they battled against dry-ness, Aborigines, the peculiarities of their fellow human beings on the trek, and, most of all, their own interior and mysterious darkness...
...He represents their terror of losing their whiteness in the hostile environment, of becoming savage like the Aborigines, and worst of all, of possibly already being brutal at their core, their real nature hidden by a mere veneer of En-glishness...
...In Voss, Nobel laureate White explores these matters in the character of a stubborn German who journeyed inland and never returned...
...Endo ponders some implications of the brutal persecution of the Christian community in Japan in the seventeenth century...
...Another profound reading experience is Endo's Deep River (New Directions, $10.95,216 pp...
...which probes whether Christ is truly "in" the world...
...The landscape exhibition that she has co-curated, "New Worlds from Old," opens in Canberra, Australia, in March 1998 and will be seen in Hartford, Connecticut, throughout the fall of 1998...
...the nature of guilt...
...Another Australian writer, David Malouf, grapples with related questions in Remembering Babylon (Random, $11, 200 pp...
...Several issues are at the heart of his meditation: the relationship between simple faith and educated faith...
...Altogether more radiant journeys, stopping points, and apparent outcomes are traced by the poetry in Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, edited by Jane Hirshfield (HarperCollins, $13,259 pp...
...Written from a variety of religious traditions, the poems celebrate the sensuous world, the mystery immanent in it, and the strangeness of suddenly being present to God...
...later they strove to assert their mastery of it by undertaking expensive and arduous (and in most cases doomed) treks into the interior...
...The theme has become a major motif for twentieth-century ruminations about what "being Australian" means...
...At first they took heroic measures to prove the land's malleability by imagining it as very much like England...
...Whether free or transported into the penal colonies, arriving Australians were baffled by the land's strangeness...
...Patrick White's Voss (Viking, $9.95, 448 pp...
...Through their correspondence (although they never actually received one another's letters), White explores the strangeness of "knowing" another person and the agony of understanding oneself...
...and, overwhelmingly, the mystery what seems to be the inscrutable silence of God...
...I read the novel in the investigative spirit of an exhibition and book that I was working on comparing nineteenth-century Australian and American landscape paintings...
...The metaphor of the journey inspired Australian writers and artists attempting to come to terms with their inhospitable environment, one quite distinctive from the fertility of much of the American continent...
...Gemmy, the "black white man," wrestles to recover what he has lost, can remember only snatches of it, and finally, unable to return to who he was, rejoins "his" people...
...To the terrified white settlers he is an insufferable presence...
...The novel is framed by the reactions of the children who first see Gemmy when he climbs up on the fence that separates their home from the outback and who, fifty years later, attempt to make sense of the experience...
...The editor provides biographies and historical context for each poei, placing the modern reader into a moving company of spiritual companions...
...In the 1850s, having forgotten virtually all he grew up with, he comes upon a straggling white settlement in Queensland and attempts to join the group...
...Using motifs from Isaiah's figure of the suffering servant, Endo makes the reader the companion of an uncomely and mocked hero who searches for the person who may be the reincarnation of his dead wife...
...the symbolic meanings of literal action and the literal meanings of symbolic action...
...White limns a sequence of stubbornness, madness, and, most startlingly, of obsessive (and not unrequited) love that Voss had for a young woman, also a loner, whom he met in Sydney during the fund-raising preliminaries of the trip...
...In gratitude for the life of Shusaku Endo, the Japanese writer who died in 1996,1 re-read his stunning early novel, Silence (Taplinger, $9.95,294 pp...
...His haunting story presents a white Englishman who as a young boy on a ship had been tossed overboard, found by Aborigines, and absorbed into their community...
...Rich with yearning and confidence, most of the poems are breathtakingly short...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
