In which we have a look at this week's
New York Times Book Review.
Excuse me? It's the week before Christmas. Is that an appropriate time for a
"Books on War" issue?
It would seem that the purpose of a "Books on War" issue would be to capture
the interest of readers who do not otherwise focus on military history. War is
as human an activity as there is, unfortunately, but military history (not that
I've read a great deal) seems either dishonest ("war is grand") or detached. We
may like detachment in a surgeon at the operating table, but writing about
"armies" is creepy: we are not ants. That's why writing about war has to be
special in order to hold the general reader's attention.
Fiction & Poetry
On the cover this week, we have Brad Leithauser's very good review of Robert
Fagles's new translation of Virgil's Aeneid. A fine poet himself, Mr
Leithauser notes that the translator's most fundamental choice is between iambic
pentameter, the standard English long line, or the Latin hexameter; he also
tells us that Mr Fagles's has opted for "free verse, with the ghost of hexameter
serving as loose armature. Having compared a few passages from the new book and
from the last important translation, by Robert Fitzgerald, in 1983, Mr
Leithauser concludes,
Yet if the blazing moments belong to Fitzgerald, there's a
capaciousness to Fagles's line well suited to this fast story's ebb and
flow. Aeneas is a storm-tossed man - the epic opens with shipwreck on the
coast of Africa - and Fagles renders the pilgrimage in cadences that are
encompassing without feeling cluttered.
(Mr Leithauser
neglects to advise readers to read the epic aloud, so I shall do so.)
This week's lone novel is Jane Kuntz's translation of Lydie Salvayre's
"deliciously dark little desk drama," Everyday Life. Julia Scheeres calls
it a "commentary on today's cubicle culture, where employees are warehoused in
such tight quarters that any hiring or firing throw the entire office ecosystem
out of whack." (So that's what they mean by "NSFW.")
Nonfiction
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein spends a good deal of her long review of Robert D
Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A
Biography on storytelling, but eventually she engages with the biography and
finds it wanting.
It is in using the life to grasp the philosophy that Richardson's
book disappoints. Too often the philosophical positions themselves come out
wrong, the emphasis cockeyed, the subtlety subtly missed.
Curiously, the reviewer's examples inclined me to side with Mr Richardson. There
is no getting round the fact that James was a profoundly complicated man whose
longing to be manly as well as lucid kept him from mastering the fashion of his
own thought as well as his brother Henry mastered his.
Tom Shone writes an unhelpful review of John Sutherland's
How to Read a
Novel: A User's Guide. He does not say so, but Mr Sutherland is a dean of
Trollope studies, and apparently a very gentlemanly gentleman. Perhaps it would
have been wiser to assign his book to someone who did not go by a nickname. In
any case, it is clear that Mr Shone is not temperamentally inclined to like, or
even to try to understand, How to Read a Novel. This becomes crystal
clear at the end, when he refers reader to the writings of Nick Hornby (another
nickname). Mr Sutherland's book may be as unprepossessing as Mr Shone claims it
is, but his claims don't sound very reliable.
Continue reading "In the Book Review" »
