WRB—Dec. 17, 2025

“poured back and forth”

Between my finger and my thumb
The WRB rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Lou Selfridge on Christmas crime:

  When a police constable suggests that “Christmas time is an unlikely season for crime,” Poirot disagrees. “Families who have been separated throughout the year,” he observes in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), “assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain . . . There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honorable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!” The appeal for crime writers isn’t hard to see: Christmas is the perfect time to knock someone off. Moncrieff’s Murder Most Festive (2020) is set in 1938 at the country estate of the Westbury family. Tensions are, as is often the case during large family gatherings, high; the novel’s first line of dialogue is: “Must you be quite so incessantly unbearable?” Janice Hallett stages The Christmas Appeal (2023) amid an amateur-dramatic troupe’s annual pantomime; you get the feeling that everyone could have a motive for killing anyone. And in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, an aging patriarch invites his estranged children for Christmas, providing the perfect excuse for Christie to gather a group of characters who have a great deal of bad blood—and kill at least one of them.

  [In WRB—Dec. 10, 2025 we linked to and discussed BDM on the appeal of sad Christmas music; if you’re happy, it brings out the cheer by comparison, and if you’re sad, it lets you embrace it. There’s a similar dynamic to the Christmas crime novel. If you’re enjoying your family and friends, it reinforces that; if you’re not, it allows you to share in murderous rage.

  But the Christmas crime novel is also a manifestation of the link between Christmas and death. In one sense this connection goes all the way back to the massacre of the innocents and has been sustained in part by art centering it—the Coventry carol, for example. But some of the most beloved Christmas stories, like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, force characters to explicitly reckon with death and, once faced with it, decide what they will do with life. Christmas is a time of heightened—theatrical, even—emotion, and people will do all kinds of things in those situations, —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, R. K. Hegelman on César Vallejo:

  Like poetry, hiccups are an anomaly of breath. Just as poetry is an audit upon the nexus of spirit and matter, the hiccup is a brunt intrusion of the body upon language, a glitching register of alterity: the automatic belying intention, the spasmodic instant piercing the drawl of experience, the animal in the human. It embodies Bergson’s definition of comedy as the “mechanical encrusted upon the organic”: its abiding irony is that as a convulsion of the diaphragm, its cause is also prime mover of the speech it afflicts. Language tripping over its own shoelaces. It encapsulates the twining of paroxysm and bathos that is one of Vallejo’s signatures: “I want to write but only foam comes out, / I want to say so many things, but I get stuck [ . . . ] I want to be crowned with laurels, but I’m stewing in onions.”

Reviews:

• In The Lamp, Matthew Walther reviews a reissue of some early sketches by Virginia Woolf (The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, edited by Urmila Seshagiri, October):

  It is not difficult to see why Woolf failed to publish these pieces in her lifetime, and why Leonard kept them from posthumous collections, even as he made a point of bringing out her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. They are, for one thing, a series of in-jokes, scarcely legible to strangers, especially at the remove of several decades. They are also very slight (the actual text runs only thirty-six pages in the Princeton edition).

  Still, I cannot help but think that they deserve more readers. Apart from Woolf’s fans and historians of modernism, the stories here should hold a certain amount of interest for actual biographers. At a time when formal experiment is not only encouraged but increasingly demanded in life writing, Woolf’s unconventional narrative structure—a wayward and ultimately inconclusive account of youth and early adulthood punctuated by hallucinatory interludes of social history—offers an interesting model, especially in situations where similar decisions are already dictated by a chronologically uneven distribution of primary sources. Even the Japan section suggests the sometimes unguessed value of throwing a subject into a radically different cultural context; at a more fundamental level, it also shows up the unavoidable pretense inherent in all biography: the mythologization of subjects, however ordinary their beginnings. After all the careful show of objectivity and the avoidance of anachronisms, we end up inevitably telling what are ultimately ludicrous stories about taming beasts from the sea.

  [Most biographies are actually translations of works by the great Arab historian Cid Hamete Benengeli. Big Biography (Big Life?) doesn’t want you to know this.

  As for the practice of life writing, Holden Caulfield isn’t wrong, exactly:

  If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

  The more you think about the convention the less sense it makes. Who, after all, would respond to the questions “tell me about yourself” or “tell me about this person” with a description of a birth? Perhaps biographers could take a page from Tristram Shandy by opening with the moment of the subject’s conception and getting to a number of other items of interest in the intervening nine months. And if the point of opening biographies with childhoods is to find out how the subject’s origin shaped them into the biography-worthy person they became, surely it would make more sense to first describe the subject as an adult before digging around in childhood for the source of this or that. That way the reader knows what to look for.

  My invocations of novels here reveal the real problem biographers face, though; we already perfected the art of life-writing there. Madame Bovary is a better biography of Emma Bovary than any biography of any actual person has ever been. Flaubert just had the advantage of getting to make it all up—and if the biographers cannot follow the novelist there they can steal other techniques. Personally, I’d like to see a biography with the equivalent of the whale facts chapters in Moby-Dick. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Jane Austen’s 250th birthday

• Generational warfare

• K. T. on a Poem by Leila Chatti and similes involving the moon

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]