In being true to the name of this blog, here are a few notes about books I’ve finished this month. They are listed in order of completion, along with a few initial impressions of my own and a selection to whet your appetite. In the comments below, let me know what you read last month and what you’re looking forward to reading this month. Happy reading, all!
§ The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
As a fluent German speaker, I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read this gem of a novella before now. Kafka recounting how Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer or “monstrous pest” is one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature, and certainly in German literature. But I can’t say it ever struck me as a captivating or alluring line—who could be allured into a story where the protagonist becomes a pest, a vermin, an insect, a bug? In any case, Nabokov called this the second greatest novel of the 20th Century and that was enough to give me a nudge to see what the fuss was about. Upon closing the book, I couldn’t believe how much I sympathized with poor Gregor and—like a rescue dog bumper sticker—I feel like I was the one who was transformed in this book. Last week, I came across a desiccated beetle who had passed away on our kitchen floor. “Poor Gregor,” I said with a tear in my eye:
Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.
§ The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
Have you ever asked yourself: what would it be like if Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem The Windhover was 200 pages long? The Peregrine is the answer; Baker’s heart was certainly “stirred for a bird,” as his hawks hunt fowl among the sillion and the blood of their prey runs gold-vermilion. This book has become a cult classic for everyone from Werner Herzog to David Bentley Hart, who laud Baker’s polychromatic attention to the natural world, his lyrical recounting of the hawk’s graceful and violent movements, and his ability to become one with the bird he observes. The week after I finished this book, I found myself in the countryside of my hometown; a hawk hovered around a neighboring farm; gladly I borrowed Baker’s reverent eyes for that animal, but tried not to pick up as much of his occasional misanthropy. Given that it seems animals act on instinct rather than ethical deliberation, The Peregrine makes for a rather ambiguous work: if predatory animals killing their prey is neither good nor bad, then why not describe these kills in the most lavish lyricism? The amorality of animals makes this book the purest work of aestheticism I think I’ve ever read; it seems Baker tests the limits of Oscar Wilde’s maxim: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” And this one is very well-written:
Their rapid, shifting, dancing motion had been so deft and graceful that it was difficult to believe that hunger was the cause of it and death the end. The killing that follows the hunting flight of hawks comes with a shocking force, as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had killed the thing it loved. The striving of birds to kill, or to save themselves from death, is beautiful to see. The greater the beauty the more terrible the death.
§ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
If I could boil the Western (and especially Anglophone) culture down to three books, I’d chose: the Collected Works of Plato, the KJV Bible, and the Collected Works of Shakespeare—our classical heritage of philosophical inquiry; our religious sense for relating to God and the world he made, along with all the existentialism that comes from that; foreshadowings of the dramas and emotions every modern person will experience and live out. When it comes to the Sonnets, I find their structure to be a perfect plot: a introductory or scene setting quatrain, a development quatrain, a third-act reversal or climactic turn with the volta into the last quatrain, all tied up with a heroic couplet to cement the resolution. Robert McKee would be proud. Upon this reading, most of my favorite sonnets played about in the “Art saves Love from Time” theme. This creative drama is probably best seen in Sonnet 19:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do what e’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow,
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
§ Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
This small book tells the story of an ordinary man who needs to step up to do the right thing. I remember wondering: why does doing the right thing strike us as so transgressive? Keegan wrote a charming and encouraging story here, that makes me grateful for my mundane work and home life; it also made me see what a thin wall separates some people from that same, small warmth and all the other cold sufferings our world contains. Along with Dickens, this book makes for a great Christmas read:
Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
§ The Iliad by Homer, translation by E. V. Rieu
If the Odyssey is our template for individual hero stories, the Iliad is our template for collective war narratives: Band of Brothers, War & Peace, Black Hawk Down, Les Misérables, Thin Red Line, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings—they all owe something to Homer. Aside from dipping in a few times here and there over the years, I haven’t done a sustained reading of the Iliad since high school. During this reading I found myself asking: What does it mean that the founding epic of our culture is concerned with a brutal battle and people trying to rouse soldiers into it? (Meanwhile, their fate is really being manipulated by and determined by powerful, fallible rulers at a distance.) Cynical politics aside, I really did enjoy the Rieu prose translation this time around; in addition to his very fluid (and subtly poetic) prose, this Penguin edition includes brief but solid essays, just enough notes and headings, and a very comprehensive and very helpful index for revisiting sections later.
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
§ Not Far from the River: Poems from the Gatha-Saptasati, translation by David Ray
“Why do these prudes fear Prākit poetry, our music, and the blunt facts of love?” The opening line to this collection of pithy and evocative quatrains kinda says it all. This book definitely talks about the “blunt facts of love” from brothels, wives, mistresses, and how men & women come together or fall apart. Out of its hundreds of quatrains, here’s a sampling of some of my favorites (which are all fairly safe for work):
Love’s a medley of terrors,
jealousy, unrelieved passion,
terrible conduct, lies, hell of parting,
Worst of all, it’s not fatal.Lady, your great fading beauty
is like a country returned to—
impressive ruins,
your eyes two pools gone stagnant.
Good men can never be lovers,
for they must keep themselves constant,
tell the truth most of the time,
keep the tigers of passion in cagesEven an elephant feels it,
grief for the love who has gone.
He holds in his trunk the sweet lotus,
lets it wither, looks so sad.
Links
§ The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
§ The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
§ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
§ Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
§ The Iliad by Homer, translation by E. V. Rieu
§ Not Far from the River: Poems from the Gatha-Saptasati, translation by David Ray
Also mentioned in this post:
§ Collected Works of Shakespeare
§ Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee