Books Read in 2023
Douglas Olds
FICTION:
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
Don Quixote, Cervantes
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy.
I love McCarthy (The Road; Border Trilogy; Suttree), but these new releases are not my favorite McCarthy. The latter novel accompanies the more narratively compelling former title (although The Passenger seemed to me leave its ostensible title character a loose end). The protagonist of the latter novel was portrayed so grandiosely narcisstic and deluded that I learned nothing from either her (McCarthy's?) pseudo-intellectualism or the effete and incomprehending psychiatrist with whom she dialogues.
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
What happens when Buddha's apprentice finds the aging Leporello? Set as a farce, protagonist ("Boss") and title figure explore the inner and outer mishmashes of metaphysics. Easter is the day that "Jesus is born again," his mother is the "virgin of vengeance." The purely spiritual "last man" in his stupa by necessity turns out the lights and by the fate of the schtup-spark fails.
Mature women are "well-caulked ships" set sail toward havens of matrimony. Vivid imagery situates the character development of Zorba in his wavering allowance that women are human afterall. Thus Zorba dances ever alone between his bed adventures, while at capitalism's candlelit cafe the Boss entertains his shadow better half which Zorba ever tries to penetrate and crash. Will they ever embrace? And if so, to what end?
Our Missing Hearts: A Novel by Celeste Ng
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
Hugely entertaining: LOL funny, deep and nuanced portrayal of a White Russian count hanging on to his identity-sustaining epicureanism after being assigned to living erasure of identity: an endless "house arrest" and soviet reduction of circumstances in fin-de-siecle hotel as a "non-person" by the humanity-redefining Bolsheviks. A comedy of manners realized in suspense and irony, with disquistions and vignettes revealing philosophical aesthetics adapted and maintained during hegemonic change from the Czar to proletarian bureaucracy in the nuclear age.The once resident doyen is after the Revolution displaced from his leisured parasitism, removed from his hotel suite into the smallest staff apartment. To occupy his time and maintain his access to the restaurant, he becomes.a waiter and later a "Triumvir," a central planner of the classic repast, preserving and partaking of its gastronomic traditions ever threatened by food shortages and petty audits by the emerging apparatchik bourgeiosie.
Symbolizing the protagonist's adaptative aesthetics holding fast to an accustomed style, the hotel's imperial era wine cellar and chromatic caches of top shelf liqueurs become the sources of a river ever running through, transporting residents, police, rustics, and celebrity guests from meeting halls to bedrooms to grandly set tables and back again. Aesthetic (pre)tensions of historical experimentation exist inside the Bolshevizing state taking control of the old hotel: where the glamourous and international elites still climb the threatrical staircase of the Czars and the valorized workers are assigned, out of sight, to that of long-dead servants to the genteel.As intriguing petty hoteliers mixed with soviet apparatchiks like mongrel aperitifs into a household giddy made, its plots and aspirations reveal the bedsheeted character of suspense and the aesthetics of irony: to set sail and land upon an island Eden amidst a swell of storm outside, to build on it a primitive cabana of graces. But a final moral choice intervenes.
Highly recommended. Bravo!
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway.
[I've banged out, after some painful dialogue, a review that I recognize is controversial about an admired novel:]
Protagonist Robert Jordan's attentiveness to devices, detonation, and destruction planning is a far greater devotion than to his love interest whom he annoyingly and patronizingly calls "Rabbit" in his internal monologizing. Though Hemingway's technical mastery of prose is undoubted, might his existential focus have a baleful—or at least question-able--pedagogical application? Is going out in a death-dealing seeking of existential service of the rabbit—the summation Todestrieb--germane to an evaluation of the novelist as well as the novel?
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry
NON-FICTION:
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War By: Louis Menand
Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir by Charles Marsh
Christianity as a Way of Life By: Kevin W. Hector
my review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2REKHPT9QKXEY/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0CCX7YQ69
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
Timely exploration of the American tendency to vigilanteeism organized in the swell of wartime paranoia. Continues the historical reckoning of Woodrow Wilson's racism and vainglory and of J. Edgar Hoover's expedience in demonizing communists as the enemy within in lieu of his lifelong failures to take on the real elements of terrorism in society (esp. the Mafia).
Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner, trans. by Shaun Whiteside. Vintage, 2022. Originally published in Germany as Wolfszeit by Rowohlt, Berlin, 2019.
Remarkable portrayal of the cultural psychology of historical shame in a defeated and complicit nation, pointing toward the liberal democratic foundations of national renewal.
An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story by Jeremy L. Sabella.
Portrays Niebuhr's theological accommodation with Hobbesian secular reason which assumes the priority of violence so to tell of an ethics of how the world is best managed and confined by counter-forces of self-interest. A Christian academic who chose to become a "public ethicist" seated at the councils of power by relativizing Jesus' revelation of and call to the metaphysics of grace alone. Niebuhr instead promotes the syncretist consequentialism that "pragmatically" and politically accommondates the worldly shrewd and adopts their strategems of self-interested power-seeking for the service and legitimacy of the state. Not my kind of Christian conscience. Tellingly, Niebuhr equates "violence" and "non-violence" as simple programatic alternatives of moral compulsion. Sabella locates Niebuhr solidly inside the kind of Americanism that presumes to speak for Christ as it seeks assurance in earthly borders and territories. Realpolitik theology, of which Niebuhr's is a type (he supported every American war after WWI), all too tragically is applied domestically in categories of human pigmentation, migration, and social class. Thus, while Niebuhr had for his times an enlightened view of "race" tolerance, he needs to be contrasted with and subordinated to MLK as THE towering 20th C Christian and ethical conscience of this country.
Wagnerism by Alex Ross.
Prodigiously expansive research into the operas, polemical writings, and artistic influence of the composer Richard Wagner. While I've always been moved by his orchestral and vocal music, I've found his mythic stories and settings ridiculous. Their visual aesthetics of occult symbolism and thanatopsic psychosexuality, intended to build civilization on foundations of mystique, instead proliferated and fed neurosis and decadence. As Ross documents, Wagner's operas had close to a century of culture-bending influence in most Europeanizing nations, shaping the genealogy of nationalism and the emergence of modernism in a variety of artistic and historiographical media. At times the detail Ross presents ranges far into artistic mediocrities of ephemeral interest. But most (symbolists, impressionistes, pre-Raphaelians, occultists, Transcendentalists, pan-Germanists, [anti-]Capitalists et al.) sustained their influence far into the 20th C even up to our own times. Ross shows how and what. No matter your artistic sensibilities and schools, there is something Ross presents that might surprise you about Wagner's grand project to develop a "total art of the future," a cause taken up by acolytes and hacks across time and place.
Highly recommended intellectual history of the arts.
The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War by Sharlet, Jeff
Herder: His Life and Thought by Robert T. Clark (1955).
Intellectual biography of the most productive and interesting philosopher since Aquinas. Outshines and outpaces his teacher and later rival Kant. Initiated the frameworks for Anthropology, Linguistics, Comparative Literature and Psychology. Developed (teleological) foundations for historicism and the science of history surpassing all others before or after. For this far-ranging genius, he has been calumnized by lesser intellects (e.g. Gadamer) for supposedly laying the intellectual groundwork for romanticism and various distorted nationalisms that followed his death by half a century or more.
After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann by John R. Betz
Another teacher and rival of Herder, 18th C theological thinker Hamann is lumped into the founding philosophers of the Enlightenment as a dissenter, but is put forward by Betz as a "retrieval" figure for springboarding into post-modernism. Unlike Herder, Hamann conceives of language as a transcendental endowment from the divine to the human creature. Therefore, unlike Herder, Hamann might supply the anti-Enlightenment, post-rationalist foundations for a more mystical--non-empirical-- subjectivity--one of the projects claimed for post-modernism. Betz details some of the preposterous narcissism of Hamann's discourse. He self-styles himself the "Socrates" of Kant. He accepts the moniker "the magus of the North," bespeaking his quasi-methodological fideism. Hamann is worth knowing and studying as his transcendentalism offers a contemporary German companion to Rousseau's primordialism, reworked and transformed by Herder in immanentism and telelogical idealism, and recast in the followers of Goethe toward Romanticism's solipsistic and decadent seeking immersion in the Absolute. As sentimentalists, Hamann, Rousseau, and Goethe stand on the periphery of the Enlightenment defined by Kant's rational method of deduction, ever receeding from view as that ship sailed into the 19th C. Herder offers a third strand of the Enlightenment: comparative methods of analysis grounding reflective induction. He is the true thinker worthy of retrieval--one who can raise the sinking ships of modernism before science founders on the shoals of post-modernism's new kind of fideism and solipsism.
Well-written description of the various domestic and foreign parties that came together to combat fascism during the Spanish Civil War. While Orwell gives himself a lot of credit for his physical bravery and willingness to kill, his accounts lay the groundwork for his later works on the totalitarian mind that sets up dystopias of propaganda and endless warfare.
This book gives a necessary context to the distinctions of worker parties and anarchists fighting Franco, and the distinctions of communists and Trotskyists (the latter wanted a world wide revolution led from the working class, while the former were statists of Russian top-down dominionism threated by Trotskyists' bottom-up political idealism. All four of these parties were willing to kill to keep the far worse fascists out of government, becoming in the end some flavor of the same.
UNFINISHED:
Memoire of a Mormon family's social dysfunction and religious paranoia is realistically detailed but lacked, at least to the point when I abandoned it, insight into deeper structures of culture and history.
Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders
Meh. Not a fan of Sci-Fi and its accelerating turn to portraying sentient AI avatars.
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2004)
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