The BookReport

Jeremy is Reading: The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

The stream of posthumously published (or at least posthumously translated) works by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003, shows no sign of abating, as evidenced by the recent publication of The Third Reich (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Although the book itself contains no information on the background I did a bit of research and learned that it was apparently written in or around 1989. It was left in a longhand manuscript in the author's papers, along with about sixty pages which had been typed, indicating at least some intention that the book be published, though I found no explanation of why it remained in the desk drawer for the remainder of Bolaño's life. Be that as it may, it is now being taken by many critics as a real masterpiece, to stand behind The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Jeremy is Reading: The Newton Letter

Without having done very careful research, I was pretty sure that I had read everything written by John Banville, as he is one of my very favorite writers (whom we were thrilled to welcome to BookHampton last summer). I was therefore quite surprised to learn from a member of my extended California family — also a good friend and a great reader — of an early novel entitled The Newton Letter, first published in 1982, which I confess was totally unknown to me. It has many of the hallmarks of Banville's later work: a first-person narrator speaking in what I believe is known as a confessional mode; a keen interest in science; and a wonderful appreciation of the earthy side of life, in juxtaposition to the narrator's intellectualism (this is not intended as an exhaustive list!).

The narrator has been at work for seven years on a biography of Isaac Newton and lacks only one section to complete it: the story of a strange letter that Newton sent to John Locke in 1693, perhaps as a manifestation of a mental breakdown, in which he accused Locke of, among other things, trying to embroil him with women (in Banville's story there is actually a second letter to be considered as well).

He rents a cottage in a rundown area of the countryside in order to finish his book, but instead becomes deeply involved with the family which owns the property (including a very intense affair with one sister and an infatuation with the other). The interaction with this family provides most of the action of the book, as well as a number of surprises which I will not reveal here. At the end the narrator asks the person to whom the book has been addressed — clearly a teacher or mentor of his — "where is the connection between all that, and the abandoning of a book? I don't know, or at least I can't say, in so many words. I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find the way back to his bolt-hole. I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost."

This is pure Banville, and I encourage anyone unfamiliar with this short novel to add it to their collection of his works or to adopt it as a wonderful introduction to that collection.

— Jeremy Nussbaum

BookHampton's Rowdy Readers BookGroup will be discussing The Newton Letter on Thursday, January 26th. Please join us!

Jeremy is Reading: Catherine the Great

I'm going to come right to the point: I loved Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House). I can't imagine any literate person today having any idea of the history of Russia without having experienced Massie's sure hand in telling the story of some of its most notable figures, including of course Peter the Great and Nicholas and Alexandra. Of course these are larger-than-life figures with stories to match, but assimilating the material, making those stories comprehensible and human, is no small art.

In many ways, Catherine was the most remarkable of all: a German princess from a fairly obscure family, she was wrested from her homeland (and her not-so-happy childhood) by Empress Elizabeth of Russia with the single-minded intent of marrying Elizabeth's nephew Peter, actually also a German but nonetheless a bona-fide grandson of Peter the Great, in order to engender an heir who would continue the dynasty. Unlike her fiancé, Catherine took very seriously the notion of becoming Russian. She learned the language--although of course most court life and correspondence was carried on in French, in which she was also fluent--and converted to the Orthodox faith. And she waited: waited for Peter to enter puberty so they could get married, waited for years to have sexual relations with him after they were married.

Jeremy is Reading: The Orphan Master's Son

Yesterday, the day I finished Adam Johnson's amazing new novel The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House), the website of The Washington Post ran an item stating that North Koreans "who did not seem genuine or profuse enough in their crying" over the death of "their 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong-Il" were to be punished, including "six months in a labor training or reeducation camp". The North Korean government press agency called this a "smear," pointing out "that even bears and magpies mourned the death of their Dear Leader."

I mention this because it so perfectly typifies the world described in the book, a world filled with punishments and tortures for any number of real or imagined offenses but also one dominated by a kind of government-imposed fiction, drummed into the population through loudspeakers found everywhere, and inevitably made true. But this book is not written by a North Korean (the author is American, a professor at Stanford) and at the beginning one is naturally suspicious — how does he know what he is talking about, what qualifies him to be saying the things he does?

Jeremy is Reading: The Nature of Things

By way of a footnote to my write-up of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve I want to report that I did indeed read The Nature of Things by Lucretius, specifically a verse translation by A.E. Stallings (Penguin Classics). The original book is itself written in poetic form, so the effort to render it as poetry to English-speaking readers is extremely praiseworthy, and so far as I can tell (having no knowledge of Latin) is brilliantly executed.

Lucretius makes clear that he is using poetry to lure the reader in to his revolutionary theories, just as he makes frequent references to the gods and their stories as helpful metaphors and nothing more. For it is his belief that if the gods exist at all they have no interest in what humanity is doing and no capacity to influence human behavior. In the book Lucretius presents a theory borrowed from the Greek philosopher Epicurus: that all life is made up of atoms in ceaseless motion, combining and recombining, and, yes, with progress and change coming from the "swerve" of Greenblatt's title.

This is by no means a dry or academic work of philosophy: Lucretius set out to persuade the reader of his theories by all available means, sometimes comic, sometimes strident, sometimes purely poetic. One is quite frankly awed to find such a vivid reading experience in a book that is more than two thousand years old.

— Jeremy Nussbaum