Critics' choices for Christmas
Nussbaum, Mary Margaret C
Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum is an MFA student at the University of Iowa, where she teaches freshmen. The most celebrated first novel in recent memory correctly answers Elie...
...is a twenty-year-old American who travels to the Ukraine carrying a yellowed photograph of Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis...
...a man with a temper who ticks off Matthew 25 like a to-do list...
...The conditions that Farmer witnessed in Haiti transformed his subsequent medical studies at Harvard...
...Here is a MacArthur Genius who walks for hours through the hills of Haiti to treat patients...
...Gawain's is a bloodied and fantastic world, not unlike our own...
...Foer's story whisked me away from the unattended-bag announcements and the buzzing lights...
...Farmer is an infectious-disease specialist based in Boston who battles preventable illness in the developing world and works to expose the first world's blindness to that suffering...
...Read Merwin's translation and experience its charms and illusions, knights errant, and green...
...a Robin Hood who courts the World Bank while wearing a rumpled suit...
...During high school, with his father he briefly picked citrus in Florida with a crew of Haitians...
...Kidder first traveled to Haiti in 1994 to report on U.S...
...there he heard Creole, the language that he would adopt as his own when he moved to Haiti after college...
...Monomania abounds in W. S. Mer-win's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 208 pp...
...Still, the novel is unnecessarily scatological in its depiction of Grandfather Foer's trysts, and at the end the narrative comes unmoored...
...It is tempting to dismiss Farmer as a monomaniacal genius...
...Here is a "poor people's doctor" who enjoys a fine meal...
...A year later, on his way to the Green Castle to finish his duel, Gawain stops at a manor where, among other occurrences, the shapeshifting lady of the manor conspires to steal his chastity and so, as such stories go, his quest...
...Tracy Kidder's biography of Dr...
...I was delighted to stay up reading...
...To the revelers' surprise, the Knight picks up his severed head, mounts his green horse, and takes off for Green Chapel...
...I read Everything Is Illuminated while stuck overnight in New York's La-Guardia Airport...
...but his work is real...
...Paul Farmer, shines with the light of a well-lived life...
...Mountains beyond Mountains (Random House, $25.95,336 pp...
...During his stay, Kidder met Farmer and was struck by how happy Farmer was with his life, and later by how the memory of Farmer and his searing vision of justice disturbed him...
...Sir Gawain steps forward, promising to strike the Knight and to accept a counterblow in twelve months' time then decapitates the Knight...
...Yet, Everything Is Illuminated deserves the praise it has received, and more...
...Mountains beyond Mountains reminds us how gracious a single life can be...
...Three narratives meet in Everything Is Illuminated chapters from a novel that Alex writes about his travels with Jonathan, letters full of malapropisms from Alex to Jonathan, and the story of Safran Foer's ancestors in Trachimbrod, a shtetl that the Nazi Einsatzgruppe destroyed in 1942...
...An unknown poet wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War...
...The levity and magic of Foer's writing let us speak of the Holocaust in a new way...
...He wanted to create a translation that could hold the attention of a great hall...
...for five years he and his family lived in a school bus...
...The hero of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (HarperCollins, $13.95, 276 pp...
...Because God loves stories...
...The Green Knight, frightening, completely green, "taller than anyone in the world," appears in the hall, holding holly and an axe...
...Farmer grew up poor in Alabama and Florida...
...As a student, Farmer commuted between Port-au-Prince and Boston, where he organized Partners in Health (PIH), a public charity that provides hot meals, AIDS education, tuberculosis treatment, and training for Haitian medical students, among other services...
...He taunts Arthur and his court into a duel...
...The most celebrated first novel in recent memory correctly answers Elie Weisel's question, Why were human beings created...
...Kidder attends to Farmer's character as much as to his work...
...Foer's work is reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories and Marc Chagall's paintings, where hens, moons, meno-rahs, and lovers float above their shtetl and its mysteries...
...Mer-win's translation of the Middle English text recalls the accented, alliterative rhythms of the Welsh he heard as a boy...
...The hero is, as it were, named Jonathan Safran Foer...
...Now Farmer travels to PIH outposts in Russia, Mexico, the United States, and Peru, preaching the preferential option for the poor and decrying the "Great Epi Divide": the epidemiological bifurcation of the world into the contagious poor and the botoxed rich...
...He succeeded...
...Abroad, Jonathan meets Alex, a Ukrainian translator who, armed with a thesaurus, deems the Ukraine "totally awesome," claims to be "carnal" with his girlfriends, finds it "electrical" to meet Americans, is "spleened" often, "girdles" his letters in envelopes, and signs those letters "Guilelessly...
...troops stationed there after a military junta was deposed...
...The poem begins with Christmas dinner at King Arthur's Court...
...His descriptions are curious, funny, and exact, and his novel arcs through the great themes of literature and of life, illuminating them as it goes...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 21
