Summer reading
Deen, Rosemary
check out Wittgenstein's Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95, 256 pp.), David Markson's fascinating 1988 experimental novel. Markson's stream-of-consciousness narrative echoes James Joyce on...
...Whatever pain achieves," she says, "it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language"—in fact, to its active destruction of language...
...Summer offers us time to restore the soul, to build up the harried self buffeted by the raw chills of winter...
...Yet being unable to think is almost worse than being unable to act...
...This is not a polemic or even a cry of outrage...
...It is impossible to read this book without getting dragged deep into the wrenching pain that Roth unsparingly evokes...
...The book provides a gentle commentary on the ordinariness of life in a small Midwestern town...
...Homosexuality is part of a thoroughly live and large controversy...
...Michele Dillon An associate professor of sociology, Michele Dillon teaches at the University of New Hampshire...
...and the intergenerational conflict and political turmoil of the 1960s are all woven seamlessly into Roth's story...
...What follows is an uproarious string of lies and double-dealings...
...What Am I Doing Here...
...Penguin, $15, 384 pp...
...Beginning in this way with unmaking, Scarry goes on in the second half of the book to the nature of imagining and making: "making up and making real," that is, to the structure of belief and of the artifact...
...Sitting "by the lake," taking in the peaceful dignity of its changing views, and observing the seasonal routines of the inhabitants is gripping precisely because it is so richly descriptive of ordinary people in a very ordinary but alluring place...
...an absolutely hilarious look at the world of art critics and dealers...
...It's the "most vibrant example of what it is 'to have certainty.'" But for others this pain is "so elusive that 'hearing about pain' may exist as the primary model of what it is 'to have doubt...
...There is no big plot and no character development, and although some of its themes and personalities are what one would expect from a story set in a small rural community in the west of Ireland, this is primarily a Wordsworthian narrative...
...This is a searingly rich and compelling story of one New Jersey family's psychological odyssey through the years that transformed post-World War II American society...
...What are the differences between the way homosexuality was honored in Greece, in China, in Japan...
...Like the other two novels I have recommended, By the Lake envelops you and remains with you long after you have turned the last page...
...If you want total relaxation this summer and a beautiful read, then you probably cannot do much better than By the Lake, by Irish novelist John McGahern (Vintage, $14, 352 pp...
...Crompton's book is a part of social history and has all the interest of that wonderful genre...
...When almost every public voice is trying to badger, cajole, or persuade me, it is like paradise to hear a voice freely at work in thinking out a public good...
...The Body in Pain bestows the special freedom only philosophy gives, where no subject is unthinkable...
...Humor also runs throughout Michael Frayn's Headlong (Picador USA, $14, 352 pp...
...In our age the element of love and devotion is now, if not fully present, fully available for inspection and understanding...
...But did they form a community with a special identity...
...And it is easier to inspect when we know something of its thousands of years of history in civilizations other than ours...
...haw famously said that polite society does not allow the three most interesting topics of discussion: religion, politics, and sex...
...the suburban affluence of their children and grand-children...
...Not bad for a 350-page book that's hard to make last longer than a few days...
...How did the worst persecutions, in Spain, affect the New World...
...Debates about nanshoku [male love]," "l liraac lo ruin Ole u~liu...
...I could join human-rights groups, take some action against torture, but I did not know how to think about it...
...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...
...By the time you are finished, you will have a new appreciation for the tragic beauty of life and of relationships whose texture cannot be undone...
...You may want music too...
...It's when I most often feel like riding off into the sunset without any specific destination in mind...
...The narrative is typically attentive to the details of personal charcommonwealmagazine.org acter and the intricate beauty of the surroundings in which life plots unfold...
...Despite Clay's harebrained schemes and self-absorption, you find yourself rooting for him...
...The book also recounts the adventures of the professor's young student, Tom Outland...
...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...
...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...
...Starting from the simplest proposition, philosophy unfolds a whole world, which was all implicit in its beginning...
...What better way to lose one's self than to get immersed in Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winner, American Pastoral (Vintage, $14.95, 423 pp...
...The world Cather creates is ultimately a pleas-ant one to travel through, but readers cannot journey for long without at least rethinking the superficiality of some of their own ambitions and recommitting to the sacred ideals that animate life...
...Crompton sits down cool...
...Markson's stream-of-consciousness narrative echoes James Joyce on Molly Bloom, with a postmodern gloss...
...That's remarkable, amidst the welter of hideous punishments, avaricious laws, and general folly he has often to record...
...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...
...Whatever side you take, there's now no reason to wander in ignorance...
...When that's not feasible, due to mundane commitments of job and rent, I turn to Bruce Chatwin, the late, peerless travel writer...
...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...
...years after it was published...
...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...
...To read it is to return to what you knew of world history—and much you didn't know—and hear again those lively voices of the men and women who formed and expressed their eras...
...Torture is almost unimaginable and was, for me, outside of discourse...
...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...
...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...
...and the subtle and some-times glaring ways in which people try to inject meaning into their lives...
...This is indeed the same author but writing totally different prose...
...His most important point may be this: "Whatever the vocabulary, two elements are present—the sexual fact and the possibility of love and devotion...
...Pagels ofCommonweal 28 June 18, 2004...
...Deeply learned, it relies on abundant quotations (not paraphrases) from primary sources...
...the precipitous shift from a manufacturing to a corporate economy...
...The perfection of philosophy is its unity...
...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...
...For every situation when he has presented what we know, he gives not an answer but a question...
...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...
...Don't let its encyclopedic title scare you away...
...Finally, given the wide appeal of Gnosticism evidenced by the popularity of Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code, may I suggest that readers turn to Elaine Pagels's concise yet erudite The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, $12, 224 pp...
...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...
...the faults we wish we didn't find in ourselves and those close to us...
...which traces the emotional journey of a successful professor who is set adrift by the prospect of moving to a bigger house...
...And in the process, you even learn something about sixteenth-century painting and Dutch history...
...These are large subjects and this is a large book, but it is not larger than a mind...
...I discovered Elaine Scarry's great book The Body in Pain (Oxford University Press, $17.95, 385 pp...
...Subtitled The Making and Unmaking of the World (published in 1985, but easily available on line from Half.com or Abebooks.com), it is important be-cause of its great scope and the power of its philosophic reasoning...
...Less intense but equally gripping is Willa Cather's The Professor's House (Vintage Classics, $11.95, 258 pp...
...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...
...It begins with the structure of torture ("The Con-version of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power") and the structure of war ("The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues...
...So Scarry begins with the two most elemental Commonweal 2 7 June 18, 2004 VALERRY things about pain: first its "incontestable and unnegotiable" presence for the per-son in pain...
...By the Lake touches on nothing controversial or really tragic...
...Some Common-weal readers may well associate McGahem with The Dark and other controversial books he wrote years ago and the debates they ignited over sex, women, and the repressive power of Catholicism...
...I was going to write about Shirley Hazzard's wonderful new novel The Great Fire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24, 278 pp...
...I'll end by recommending two dazzling piano recordings (from Hyperion) by Angela Hewitt: Bach's magnificent English Suites and Couperin's lyrical, witty Keyboard Music...
...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...
...For many centuries in Europe, homosexuality was conceived principally as certain sexual acts...
...What accounts for the various ways homosexuality was persecuted in Europe...
...In the process, you get a glimpse of Chatwin the man and his self-described "anatomy of restlessness...
...N o matter how you spend your summers or what memories they evoke, the prospect of summer is full of the promise of endless freedom...
...The upward mobility of Jews and the Irish...
...These questions and their possibilities are the intellectual joy of the book...
...How many of us know when the story of Sodom began to be interpreted as concerning homosexuality...
...The gentleness and connectedness of life and the endless gifts of nature are what McGahern evocatively celebrates...
...Alone in a landscape devoid of life, the heroine ruminates on characters from Greek mythology, philosophy, and art...
...Reading about the protagonist, Seymour Levov, one writhes with torturous recognition...
...What distinguishes Crompton's treatment is his ruling genius, reason...
...Sometimes, especially perhaps in summer, that is precisely what we want a great book to do...
...The power of the book comes, though, from the poignant descriptions of the well-meaning but disconnected members and friends of the Levov family...
...l S WALLY LITTMAN Commonweal 26 June 18, 2004 he writes, "were popular and reveal the existence of men who identify them-selves as definitely homosexual and were ready to defend their preferences...
...but space does not permit and I'm sure someone else will praise it as it deserves...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
