Summer Reading: Back to the hills with Ernest Hemingway, to London with Samuel Pepys, the Sudan with John McPhee, and much more.
Meyers, Jeffrey
Summer Reading Jeffrey Heyers Jeffrey Meyers, distinguished biographer of Ernest Hemingway and many others, has written about the authors of the other works discussed here in his latest book,...
...Martin's, $22.95, 275 pp...
...Bayley, a noted critic and professor, met Iris Murdoch at Oxford in 1954 and was happily married to her (they were called "the most intelligent couple in England") for more than forty years...
...T his year is Ernest Heming way's centenary, and his Complete Short Stories (Scrib- ners, $29.95, 650 pp...
...contains some of his best work...
...He forces her to consent in order to keep his love, but the very fact of his asking her means she can never love him again...
...Everything he says is false...
...Paul Theroux's greatly underrated Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 358 pp...
...Summer Reading Jeffrey Heyers Jeffrey Meyers, distinguished biographer of Ernest Hemingway and many others, has written about the authors of the other works discussed here in his latest book, Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers...
...But the woman is frightened...
...Their love story has tragic overtones...
...Commonweal 2 2 June 18,1999...
...Her peaceful contemplation recalls Psalm 121 as she lifts up her eyes to the hills for help...
...He writes with considerable style and wit and provides the best description of the atmosphere as well as the landscape of India since his friend E.M...
...He describes their acute sensitivity to criticism, their financial struggles, illnesses, and mental problems, their difficult marriages and tormented love affairs...
...King tells an intriguing story, based on an actual unsolved crime—the murder of a child— and offers his own fictional solution...
...Theroux's book explains how Naipaul constructed a harsh and apparently invulnerable persona to counter his own sense of inferiority and, by running down all his competitors, to stake his claim to literary greatness...
...Though he criticizes V.S...
...Theroux has written a riveting story of two writers' lives: how they wrote books and won prizes, advanced their careers and achieved fame...
...The imaginative woman in the story is moved by the landscape while the literal-minded man refuses to sympathize with her point of view...
...Naipaul and reveals the dark side of his character at the end of the book, Theroux is, in fact, sympathetic, generous, and full of admiration for his old mentor...
...She walks away from him and finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river, and the hills beyond...
...Bayley appeals to readers by suggesting that Alzheimer's can be jolly good fun, and he manages to make senescent love both pleasing and poignant...
...His labors are rewarded as he finally, totally, captures as his sole possession the always elusive and sometimes promiscuous Iris...
...As they wait in a train station between Barcelona and Madrid, the egoistic man, unaware of her feelings, tries to bully her into having an abortion (which is never actually mentioned...
...is a murder novel with philosophical ideas and moral implications...
...He looks back on their life together through the prism of her Alzheimer's disease, diagnosed in 1994...
...After all the darkness and shadows, John Bayley's tender Elegy for Iris (St...
...Forster wrote of the subcontinent seventy-five years ago...
...But he vividly describes their intensified intimacy during her final years (she died, just after the book appeared, in February), when he single-handedly cared for her as she lapsed into a sad but still charming second childhood...
...is about a thirty-year friendship that finally, for complex reasons, went wrong...
...But her mood is shattered by his persistent argument, which drives her to the edge of a breakdown, and she frantically begs: "Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking...
...His masterpiece, Act of Darkness (Little, Brown, 332 pp...
...Francis King, who has a major reputation in England, deserves to be better known in America...
...A disturbing undercurrent swirls through the book and sucks most of the characters into an almost self-willed destruction...
...Most important, King has sharp insight into the moods and motivations of a wide range of disparate and desperate people...
...everything she says is ironic...
...This novel concerns the connection between murderer and victim, the obsession with death and concealment, the nature of evil...
...Those who think Hemingway doesn't understand women ought to read "Hills like White Elephants...
...Their anguished encounter signifies the end of something...
...Despite all his achievements, Naipaul, as an Indian from Trinidad, has never ceased to feel defensive, insecure, under siege...
...illuminates some obscure aspects of love, fate, and illness...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
