I’d like to take you now on wings of the WRB, as it were, and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives.
Links:
Alan Jacobs on Thomas Flanagan’s novels about Ireland:
Often in Flanagan’s books an older person learns (sometimes from a younger person) something surprising about a dear friend or lover—something hidden and even unsuspected for decades. And if some people grow garrulous in old age, others become more secretive and never tell what could be told. No one knows—this is what Patrick Prentiss learns, this is what turns him from history to the law—no one knows the whole story of an event, or even of one ordinary person.
In 1934 the distinguished judge Patrick Prentiss is listening to an old friend talk about another old friend, one long dead, and as she mentions a dark moment in that man’s life she says, in passing, “You know all about it, Patrick.” But Patrick does not know about it, though, when he hears it, he thinks that he should have guessed. More than a decade after that friend’s death, Patrick’s mental portrait of him undergoes revision. And if he did not know that, what else does he not know? About that friend, about other friends, even about himself?
For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden—perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.
Reviews:
In the local Post,
reviews Sebastian Castillo’s second novel (Fresh, Green Life, July 24):Sebastián’s delusions are sustained within and obscured by his cosseting self-awareness; he sees so much of himself, and yet so little—and certainly much less than his creator. Yet as the novel went on, I found myself wanting more. Castillo is writing in the splenetic tradition of Thomas Bernhard, but we feel for Bernhard’s egomaniacal losers because their illusions have been so thoroughly disabused, often beyond the threshold of death. His narrators vent with the mechanical force of a drilling rig, unearthing uncomfortably human insights in the process.
Castillo clearly perceives Sebastián’s many self-pitying neuroses and myopic insecurities, and he is well-positioned to satirize this particular sort of puffed-up literary man. But all the talk and references, all of that hilarious and fluid prose, papers over the inability of a man to communicate anything deeper than his petty resentments, his silly fantasies.
[What about those of us who have nothing but petty resentments and silly fantasies? Are we to be excluded from being the solipsistic narrators of novels? —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Katherine Harvey reviews a book about solitary geniuses (The World Within: Why Artists, Writers and Thinkers Retreat, by Guy Stagg, July 3):
Though The World Within is framed as an exploration of a near-universal desire for retreat, it soon becomes clear that its subjects were driven by something more extreme than a need to take a break from the trials and tribulations of daily life. All three were prickly characters who struggled with personal relationships and repeatedly sought out solitude. Wittgenstein made multiple visits to the Norwegian village of Skjolden and worked for several years as a primary school teacher in remote mountain settlements—a career which ended when he beat a pupil around the head, leaving him unconscious. Jones, who once said that waking up with a woman beside him “would be revolting to me in some way,” spent his final years as a virtual recluse, filling his cell-like room with paintings—although he did agree to a meeting with Igor Stravinsky, who left feeling that “I have been in the presence of a holy man.”
[I am with Harvey that, if I were interested in generally applicable lessons, I would not take Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones, and Simone Weil as my starting points. I also wonder in what circumstance David Jones felt moved to say “I don’t want to wake up with a girl beside me. That would be revolting to me in some way.” (And why he felt the need to qualify it it with “in some way.”) Did someone try to set him up, or did he volunteer this information unprompted? —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:
R.I.P. Tom Lehrer, who changed my life
Renaissance Florence had the same population as Albany, New York. What should we conclude from this?
A Poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the history of poets pursuing women who are also deer
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. I appreciate it. 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 telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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