Summer reading
Cipolla, Benedicta
facing male artists—whether they be priests or novelists—who portray naked women, and his commentary on the subject is droll.) The novel's distinctive, splashy prose and insistent rhythms—Mda rarely...
...Familiarity with Italian Renaissance and twentieth-century painting, Greek tragedy, and metaphysics is helpful, but even without it, the book makes for a rollicking ride into the mind of someone who may or may not be clinically insane...
...Along the journey to Italy, Aeneas must contend with Juno's long-held grudge against the Trojans, the menacing Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, and a trip through the underworld...
...Despite Clay's harebrained schemes and self-absorption, you find yourself rooting for him...
...With a review of who's who among gods and mortals fresh in your mind, CAMPUS MINISTER YALE's Catholic Chapel & Center seeks a Campus Minister to share leadership in the life of this vibrant and expanding Catholic community...
...Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale 268 Park Street, New Haven, CT 06511 email robert.beloin@yale.edu Program information available: www.yale.edu/stm Commonweal 25 June 18, 2004 check out Wittgenstein's Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95, 256 pp...
...her epigraph is from Blake: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make some-body Poor...
...ith a beefed-up Brad Pitt kicking off the summer movie season as Achilles in Troy, what better time to re-visit the ancient epics...
...The obvious choice is to turn to Homer, and perhaps, in response to Hollywood's continuing interest in sexing up Greco-Roman adventures, many will...
...I read most of the first six books in Latin back in high school, though I am ashamed to admit my dead-language skills are no longer up to snuff...
...The sheer breadth of his travels and experiences with foreign cultures may leave you wondering if you're really tied to those mundane commitments after all...
...What are the differences between the way homosexuality was honored in Greece, in China, in Japan...
...Robert Beloin St...
...Vibrant spirituality, competence in pastoral counseling and ability to work collaboratively are necessary qualifications...
...Most famous for In Patagonia, the book for which he abandoned a job at Lon-don's Sunday Times with a curt telegram "Have gone to Patagonia," Chatwin managed to capture not only place but personality in his writings...
...Markson injects humor into his character's meditative monologue on being, lending the book a light-heartedness without which it might have become just an arid exercise in pushing the boundaries of fiction...
...How many of us know when the story of Sodom began to be interpreted as concerning homosexuality...
...The story's limpid prose, which circles memory to replay events in greater and greater detail, reflects the charmed lives of the Catholic family whose story it tells: the academic branch of the family, in Italy, and the leisure-class branch, in Switzerland, register the fate of Europe's Jews but do not intervene until it is too late...
...Martin Clay, a philosopher who can't focus on his overdue book manuscript during a sabbatical at his country house, believes he has discovered a lost Old Master painting at the home of a once-wealthy neighbor...
...All three of these striking novels bring to life families peculiar to their own cultures, each capable of nourishing cowardice and selfishness, courage and sacrifice...
...Don't let its encyclopedic title scare you away...
...Debates about nanshoku [male love]," "l liraac lo ruin Ole u~liu...
...Her narrative shakes us to the core with its quiet insistence on the complicity of so many Catholics in the deaths of so many Jews...
...Homosexuality is part of a thoroughly live and large controversy...
...Like Odysseus, Aeneas faces a host of tasks following the Trojan War, but unlike the Greek hero, the Trojan Aeneas is destined to found a divinely ordained empire...
...Rosemary Deen Co-editor of Commonweal's poetry section, Rosemary Deen is the author of a book of es-says, Naming the Light (University of Illinois Press...
...Crompton sits down cool...
...Rosetta Loy's narrative of uncovered memory reminds us that we must be honest about the past before we can be, along with Monica Ali and Zakes Mda, hopeful about the future...
...What Am I Doing Here...
...Not bad for a 350-page book that's hard to make last longer than a few days...
...If these two third-world novels look with hope and good humor to the future of the formerly oppressed, Rosetta Loy's Hot Chocolate at Hanselmann's (published in Italy in 1995 and recently released here in an elegant translation by Gregory Conti, University of Nebraska Press, $16.95, 183 pp...
...Humor also runs throughout Michael Frayn's Headlong (Picador USA, $14, 352 pp...
...That's remarkable, amidst the welter of hideous punishments, avaricious laws, and general folly he has often to record...
...First he must escape the sacked city and deal with the guilt that his flight causes...
...What follows is an uproarious string of lies and double-dealings...
...I, however, think the better bet during languid summer days is to crack open that other, often-overlooked epic, Vergil's Aeneid (Vintage, $10, 464 pp...
...Whatever side you take, there's now no reason to wander in ignorance...
...Markson's stream-of-consciousness narrative echoes James Joyce on Molly Bloom, with a postmodern gloss...
...Benedicta Cipolla A former correspondent for Catholic News Service in Rome, Benedicta Cipolla is a freelance writer in New York...
...looks back at the Holocaust and the hounding of Europe's Jews with tightly contained fury...
...if you're ever in Rome, don't miss Bernini's moving statue of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of the burning Troy, at the Galleria Borghese...
...David Markson's fascinating 1988 experimental novel...
...Isabella's sister pities Arturo's plight and escapes with him—but she cannot forgive him, finally, for the act he commits to save himself...
...Book 4, the tale of Queen Dido's crazed passion for Aeneas during his extended layover in Carthage, is the one that really gets me, though I've always been a sucker for the dramatic rhetoric of tragic love...
...Leadership and participation in sacramental preparation, liturgy, and retreats is also required...
...This is a deeply disturbing book whose conventional domestic surface (Isabella, the wife of an Italian professor, has an affair with his Jewish col-league Arturo) is probed—gently at first, then insistently—by the family's elder daughter...
...Alone in a landscape devoid of life, the heroine ruminates on characters from Greek mythology, philosophy, and art...
...With its subtle commentary on academia, the art world, and English society, Headlong reminded me of The Information, Martin Amis's laugh-outloud take on the publishing industry...
...It's a perfect summer pick—literature in the guise of a page-turner—so you don't have to feel guilty devouring it on the beach...
...The position has a particular emphasis on working with undergraduates as well as social justice outreach and some ministry with graduate/professional students and faculty...
...The Campus Minister will join the pastoral staff in ministering with and to the Catholic undergraduate, graduate, and faculty/staff populations at Yale University, and continue the Center's mission of promoting Catholic intellectual and spiritual formation...
...The novel's distinctive, splashy prose and insistent rhythms—Mda rarely delivers a sentence whole when he can break it down into two or three emphatic fragments—make reading The Madonna of Excelsior a charged, often exhilarating experience...
...And in the process, you even learn something about sixteenth-century painting and Dutch history...
...an absolutely hilarious look at the world of art critics and dealers...
...Even today, though, I can remember the words that open this great tale of love, war,and the founding of Rome: Anna virumque cano in Robert Fitzgerald's classic translation, "I sing of warfare and a man at war...
...What distinguishes Crompton's treatment is his ruling genius, reason...
...In the process, you get a glimpse of Chatwin the man and his self-described "anatomy of restlessness...
...This is not a polemic or even a cry of outrage...
...When that's not feasible, due to mundane commitments of job and rent, I turn to Bruce Chatwin, the late, peerless travel writer...
...l S WALLY LITTMAN Commonweal 26 June 18, 2004...
...How did the worst persecutions, in Spain, affect the New World...
...Clay is a selfish boob who neglects his wife and baby in his quest for the painting he is sure will lead him to greatness and historical permanence, but Frayn is too skilled a writer to leave the character without any sympathetic qualities...
...Deeply learned, it relies on abundant quotations (not paraphrases) from primary sources...
...published in 1989, the year of his death, is a collection of brief sketches examining people and locales like Maria Reiche, a German who studies the Peruvian pampa, and a 1980 "Lament for Afghanistan," which should be of particular interest to the American reader of 2004...
...Salary and benefits commensurate with experience...
...haw famously said that polite society does not allow the three most interesting topics of discussion: religion, politics, and sex...
...For every situation when he has presented what we know, he gives not an answer but a question...
...Start date: August 1, 2004 Candidates are encouraged to apply with CV to: Rev...
...Loy has said that she is interested in contrasting the Jewish idea of justice and the Catholic notion of pity...
...Summer is the season when daydreams threaten to hijack my workdays and my imagination is spurred, perhaps by the temperature, to ponder far-flung alter-natives to humid cities such as New York...
...It's when I most often feel like riding off into the sunset without any specific destination in mind...
...Penguin, $15, 384 pp...
...For a thorough and thoroughly civil account of sex, we have now Louis Crompton's monumental but compendious study, Homosexuality and Civilization (Belknap Press, $35, 623 pp...
...His is the spirit of Bentham, who observed, "To other subjects it is expected that you sit down cool, but on this subject if you let it be seen that you have not sat down in a rage you have given judgment against yourself...
...What accounts for the various ways homosexuality was persecuted in Europe...
...It's handsomely illustrated with fine art (Belknap underwrote its publication for a low price) and writ-ten in the best English style: easy, colloquial, clear, understated...
...The qualified candidate must be experienced in pastoral ministry with a master's degree in theology, or appropriate field...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
