Booked Up
SIMON, JOHN
Booked Up A critic’s anthology of literary bliss. BY JOHN SIMON Back in 1486, when books were scarce, 23-year-old Pico de la Mirandola could declare himself de omni re scibili...
...His four oldest subjects are Lao-tse, Heraclitus, Sappho, and Lucian...
...As you read these delightful mini-essays, two-to-fi ve pages long, most of them full of glancing references to other books besides their subjects, you may well conclude that Dirda has indeed read everything worth reading...
...BY JOHN SIMON Back in 1486, when books were scarce, 23-year-old Pico de la Mirandola could declare himself de omni re scibili magister, master of everything knowable...
...In those days, many scholars refused to confi ne their efforts to some narrow fi eld of specialization...
...if you do, you will be stimulated by Dirda’s fresh outlook into rereading them...
...Sappho’s heartache is that of anyone who has ever been hopelessly in love...
...As a result, they reveal our most primal fears and secret desires with heartless and dreadful clarity...
...The writing is always plain yet pungent, sometimes inspired, and wearing its erudition as lightly as a pair of livedin pajamas: Cavafy is primarily an elegist, capable of recalling with equal emotion the touch of a hand and the fall of an empire, of memorializing both the carnal favorites of ancient Antioch and John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News...
...if in other languages, how different translations compare...
...Reading him you feel as trusting as a backseat rider driven by a master chauffeur...
...And he explains why some favorites are not in Classics for Pleasure— Isaac Babel, Ford Madox Ford, and Colette—because they are in his previous collections...
...Among the latter he includes Spinoza, whom I fi nd unreadable...
...Or this tribute to Switzerland’s Jacob Burckhardt: Even though Burckhardt was to make his name as a historian of the Italian Renaissance, he was an equally notable authority on the culture of ancient Greece and the reign of Byzantium’s Constantine the Great...
...He explains his choices persuasively: his love of great stories, exciting poems, and humanist philosophies...
...Cavafy, and I want you to love them, too...
...Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel starkly reveals both the horror and exhilaration of war...
...Be warned however: His characters may be primitive or exotic people, but that only means that they are stripped of the meretricious veneer of so much polite society...
...There are 88 pieces in the book: Eighty-three about individual writers, one about a pair (E...
...Also: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...
...In those quattrocento days, if you were a prodigy like Pico, it was just barely possible...
...Also the poetry of George Meredith and Anna Akhmatova, the fantastic tales of E.T.A...
...To this Greek living in Egypt among Arabs and British colonials the world appears as a palimpsest: When Cavafy looks at Alexandria, he glimpses, beneath the blandness of a modern urban wasteland, the playground of youthful gods...
...Almost 400 years later, in 1865, Stephane Mallarme began his lovely poem Brise marine (“Sea Breeze”) with, “The fl esh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books,” but that surely was poetic hyperbole...
...Offhand, only one candidate leaps to mind, John Updike—not a bad fellow to share a bracket with...
...Extensive reading and lively writing about it are not usually Siamese twins...
...But I must stop now, and go off in search of Dirda’s no-doubt equally pleasurable earlier collections...
...To be sure, as a former editor for the Washington Post’s Book World, and its subsequent book columnist (excellent in both capacities), he had and has the advantage of making reading both his leisure pursuit and his work, his predilection and his livelihood...
...As pleasing as the works they promulgate, the essays, thematically grouped, are a true smorgasbord for the mind—or rather, hors d’oeuvres so tasty that you can’t wait for the oeuvres...
...the perfect limbs of the dirty young blacksmith down the street...
...his four most recent, Philip K. Dick, Eudora Welty, Italo Calvino, and Edward Gorey, which should clue you in that every genre, from philosophy to science fi ction, from belles letters to whimsy, is grist for this omnivorous mill...
...Now comes Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure, brief essays about books Dirda considers essential, or just a tiny bit less essential than those he wrote about in a couple of previous collections...
...Nesbit and John Masefi eld), four about groups of writings (Icelandic sagas, Arthurian romances, the English religious tradition, classic fairy tales...
...For such good offi ces I am almost willing to forgive Dirda’s little lapses: “Disinterest” (for uninterest), “a novel like this” (for this one), “the military tribunal Scipio Africanus” (for tribune), and Ovid’s famous “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor” transmogrifi ed into “Video melora proque deteriora sequor...
...If you don’t, they will easily entice you into reading the authors discussed...
...The Book of Common Prayer reliably comforts us in times of sorrow, uplifts us in times of celebration...
...I love the Icelandic sagas and Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘conversation’ novels and the poetry of C.P...
...Lovecraft, and the novels of Eca de Queiros, Jules Verne, and Ivy Compton-Burnett...
...Moreover, in these tightly-packed pieces, Dirda may tell you, if his authors wrote in English, which of various editions is the best...
...in Dirda, though, they are...
...With these unforgettable words the reader is launched into one of the most powerful visions of . . . what...
...Even so, how many people nowadays can lay claim to such productive ambidextrousness...
...And in the pieces about single authors, Dirda usually writes about several of their books, if not indeed their entire oeuvre...
...In his brief introduction, Dirda explains that classics are not boring pensums deemed good for you, but books that are a pleasure to read, and have, in many cases, been so for centuries...
...And further, he writes, “my approach is that of a passionate reader rather than a critic or scholar...
...Again: If reading the Victorians may be likened to devouring a rich Christmas feast, reading [Prosper] Merimee is like sipping a dry Martini—cold, bracing, and delicious...
...Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a far more complex work of art than commonly believed, being one of the half dozen greatest romance novels of the century and a subtle undercutting of the whole romance genre...
...Though writers in English preponderate, there are plenty from all ages and in all sorts of languages and genres...
...Be it said here that the little essays are equal fun whether you know their subjects or not...
...Hoffmann and H.P...
...Rather than reiterate the merits of a Shakespeare or Dickens, he takes you along less-traveled but equally scenic and adventurous routes: Rider Haggard’s She, Jean Toomer’s Cane, G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk...
...in fact, they ranged across subjects with the swagger of adventurers, soldiers of fortune, condottieri...
...It is simultaneously a devastating examination of the sexual politics of marriage, a haunting study of jealousy and psychological obsession, and a classic of suspense...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 12
