Summer Reading
McCloskey, Elizabeth
Elizabeth McCIoskey Elizabeth McCloskey lives in Falls Church, Virginia. ~ hat gallant attempts people will make to brighten and beautify, to take a messy tangle of weeds and dirt and shape...
...Invited to afternoon tea with the most powerful man in town, Green notices that "there was only one knife on the table and the forks had been forgotten...
...I still lack a basic tune...
...takes those same simple things and uses them to make concrete theological terms such as Incarnation, eschatology, revelation, and evangelism...
...Liberated in these cut-rate fantasies, our desires and fears achieve unearthly clarity and intensity, but not fulfillment...
...An easy sort of joke would link Kafka to the supermarket tabloids and produce headlines like "Bureaucrat Wakes up as Roach...
...Prayer is "ordinary experience lived with gratitude and wonder, a wonder that makes us know the smallness of oneself in an enormous and various universe," Norris writes...
...Norris's newest book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, $24.95,384 pp...
...In the process they use women badly, thoughtlessly, with dreadful consequences...
...The Irrational Season, my favorite, gave me the feeling that I was sitting at the kitchen table with this talented woman, sipping tea and having a latenight chat about her writing, her friendships, her memories, her views on history, art, theater, prayer, and whatever else popped into her head...
...offers a glimpse of a young woman contending with much more sinister forces...
...In the first and last of the stories, American men, facing the onset of middle age and a gathering conviction of their own mediocrity, seek in Paris some effortless translation into something, distinguished and new...
...The middle story, "Jealousy," is the most mysterious and is still unfolding in my mind...
...This is clearest in two stories (the first and last) about ghosts from the Titanic and one about JFK secretly visiting the auction of Jackie O's property at Sotheby's...
...and The Irrational Season ($11, 215 pp...
...In a book of related short stories, Tabloid Dreams (Holt, $12, 288 pp...
...She was killed in Auschwitz in November 1943...
...At first, the war is barely mentioned...
...As they are joined by reinforcements, as they share out their weight of meaning, their semantic range narrows to the denotations that we carry beyond the family, the playground, and the neighborhood...
...In this delightfully wry little book, Florence Green is recently widowed...
...My current favorite (which I quote from my New Revised Standard Version) is Psalm 131: "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,/my eyes are not raised too high;/I do not occupy myself with things/too great and too marvelous for me./But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother...
...Estrangements define all these characters...
...Kathleen Norris's account of monastic life, do so...
...She decides to open the only bookstore in the small town where she has been living for some years, only to be met with both subtle and direct opposition...
...In the midst of days when I occupy myself with things that can seem quite mundane, I gain perspective and calm when I read this psalm...
...They embrace, press faces together, only to sense the boundary of skin that separates them...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh Daniel M. Murtaugh is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Florida Atlantic University...
...If at the end of a long life I am able to give some form to the chaos inside me, I may well have fulfilled my own small purpose...
...This small domestic detail causes her to "wonder whether, as a general rule, he had any regular meals at all...
...If you haven't yet had a chance to read The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, $12.50,385 pp...
...The determination to create something worthwhile drives the rather ordinary protagonist of English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (Houghton Mifflin, $10,123 pp...
...Her early entries reveal a young woman immersed in complicated and intimate relationships with men, engaged in intellectual and political discussions with a wide circle of friends...
...HiUesum's journal is anything but abstract and vague...
...In so doing, we can begin to recognize "the transformative power hiding in the simplest _9 Theological and biblical studies in context _9 Located in Jerusalem _9 Excellent facilities in scenic location _9 Inlernational, ecumenical, inlerreiigious studies _9 Courses and field trips _9 Worship and daily cominon prayer Dates for Programs of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal: Fell 1998: September 8 through December 4 _9 Spring 1999: January 12 through April 8 _9 Summer 1999: May 26 through July 28 and June 29 through July 28 Foil 1999: September 7 through December 2 Spring 2000: to be announced _9 Summer 2000: to be announced For information and an application: Rector Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies P.O...
...Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25, 364 pp...
...At close quarters, in a metaphor that works its way through all three stories, something is lost in translation...
...Fitzgerald has an amazing capacity to convey the simplest human interactions with accuracy and wit, and she hits the mark squarely when describing the halfthoughts that materialize in polite conversation...
...Yet when, like any other decent citizen, I get up on time, I feel proudly that I have achieved something marvelous...
...Each of the books I am recommending takes the raw materials of life and turns them into something delightful and distinctive...
...my soul is like the weaned child that is with me./O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore...
...Diamond argues instead that the civilizations that originated in the "fertile crescent" of Southwest Asia, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join, were simply dealt Commonweal 2 8 June 19,1998...
...life is beautiful and meaningful...
...a steady undercurrent...
...addresses the riddle of European world conquest, particularly since 1492...
...ca ~ recommend two books of short fiction, a memoir, and a study of the biological determinants of history...
...In a chapter on prayer as mystery, she describes how Psalm 122 came into her mind as she wearily trudged from one terminal to another at O'Hare Airport...
...for which she writes an introductory "commentary...
...Hitlesum's journals were written when she was twentyseven-years old...
...Her chapter on revelation is less than a page, and mostly describes a conversation with a little boy who lives on a ranch about a dream he had after his dog died...
...Their relative scarcity makes each carry more meaning, like a musical theme...
...Though the title seems to promise otherwise, these three stories are told from the viewpoint of men, and they share with Independence Day a concern with the responsibilities entailed by close relationships...
...Norris does not provide brilliant new insights about the psalms, but the handsome layout of the book makes it easy to imagine reading them all, perhaps one each day...
...Box 19556 Jerusalem 91194 ISRAEL TDlephnne: (972) 2-679Q-911 Fax: (972) 2-6760-914 E-mail: tantur@netvision.net.il Commonweal 2 7 June 19,1998 things...
...Racist colonialism credited this to inherent ethnic and cultural superiority...
...McCourt recaptures the lost, musical density of childhood language, and it redeems the sadness of his story...
...Flowers and fruit grow wherever they are planted," she tells us...
...published for the first time in the Ulxited States last year...
...They are, to speak plainly, firstclass jerks, and yet Ford steadily avoids irony in his treatment of them and makes us take them seriously...
...The voices that first spoke them, the places where we first heard them, even the smells that attended them all stick to their semantic core...
...Not exactly light reading, but perhaps something to settle down with after returning from the shore...
...The liturgical seasons provide the backdrop of her reflections, transforming this rambling conversation into a sort of testimony to faith and life's abiding goodness...
...Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, $27.50, 480 pp...
...She becomes more and more sure of herself and her faith in God even as her fate as a Jew A TANTUR ECUMENICAL INSTITUTE FORTHEOLOGICAL STUDIES Founded by the University of Notre Dame at the request of Pope Paul VI Ecumenical Program of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal for Clergy, Lay Ministers and Teachers under the Nazis becomes more uncertain...
...Besides the appalling misery of his childhood in Limerick and the terrible luck that gave him a drunken wastrel for a father, the book's most striking quality is the sharpness with which it recaptures the language of childhood...
...Green simply plugs along, fumbling and hesitant at times, resolved to keep the bookstore alive despite the efforts of certain prominent people...
...Sometimes it takes so much effort to get through the daily round--getting up, washing, exercises, putting on stockings without holes, laying the table, in short getting through the basics--that little is left over for other things...
...Green endears herself to the reader with her unassuming manner and reluctance to abandon the belief that she has something to offer her town...
...Small, wispy, and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back," Green is not the type of person to make waves, or even to be noticed at all...
...Here, the character who makes bad use of another person is a woman, and we see her through the eyes of the book's only firstperson narrator, her seventeen-year-old nephew...
...The Crosswicks Journal consists of A Circle of Quiet (HarperSan Francisco, $13,246 pp...
...Words first come to us wrapped in a penumbra of unshared connotation...
...The Summer of the Great-Grandmother ($12, 245 pp...
...Richard Ford's collection of three novellas, Women with Men (Knopf, $23, 272 pp...
...Norris has also published an edition of The Psalms (Riverhead Books, $12.95, 400 pp...
...Famed A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L'Engle's memoirs, The Crosswicks Journal, have their own charm...
...has been widely praised, and I need not add much to what has been said already...
...confirmed for me the impression made by his wonderful 1995 novel Independence Day...
...The expected hilarity gives way to surprising dimensions of longing, a funhousemirror elucidation of the urge that draws us to the tabloids in the first place...
...the inner source that feeds me keeps drying up and, worse still, I think too much," she writes...
...The King James translation, used here, renders the psalms in their most poetic English form...
...An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum (1941-1943) (Washington Square Press, $5.99, 281 pp...
...Robert Olen Butler plays this joke backward, starting with (probably) invented screamers as titles--for example, "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," and "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis'--and then burrowing into the first-person sensibilities that inhabit these fantasies...
...Norris helps us to see the value of structuring our days, relentless and demanding and amorphous though they may seem, around the liturgical rituals of prayer and reflection...
...But you certainly do not need to buy Norris's book to read the psalms this summer...
...They make their most daring affirmations over long-distance telephone...
...Each of these books reminds us that people are "guardians of a precious slice of life" (Etty Hillesum), capable of finding or creating meaning in the most commonplace of circumstances or even in the face of uncommon evil...
...hat gallant attempts people will make to brighten and beautify, to take a messy tangle of weeds and dirt and shape all that unruly life into something lovely...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 12
