Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman is forthcoming from NYRB (in translation by Clara Winston and Richard Winston, and with an introduction by Barbara Hahn). NYRB’s blurb:
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though not published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, passionate woman, and an important figure in German romanticism. Rahel Varnhagen also bore the burdens of being an unusual woman in a man’s world and an assimilated Jew in Germany.
She was, Arendt writes, “neither beautiful nor attractive . . . and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality.” Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel’s life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which assimilation defined one person’s destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.” Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Arendt observes, “did she find a place in the history of European humanity.”
A conversation with a colleague this week led me on a not-entirely successful search for the “best” books of 1972.
The gist of the conversation is something like this: Asked about the “best” books that came out last year, I admitted I don’t read that much new fiction, so I had no idea.
I also said something cavalier along the lines of, It takes like half a century to know if a novel is important or not. (This is not a statement I entirely believe in.)
So what did folks in 1972 think the best books published that year were?
The first thing I did is check the bestsellers of fiction that year.
(I should be clear that I’m mostly interested in novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope, whatever that means–so I didn’t really pursue nonfiction stuff that much here.)
The New York Time’s fiction bestsellers for 1972 is dominated by two novels: Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (21 weeks) and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (26 weeks). Fiction bestsellers are often (but not always) entertainments that we don’t expect to last over time, and while Wouk and Bach’s titles still get reprints every decade or so, they aren’t exactly Ulysses (published fifty years earlier in 1922).
So I looked for what titles the NYT critics deemed the best books of 1972. The contemporary NYT comes up with a list of ten titles each year (five fiction, five non-), but things were a little looser fifty years ago. In December of that year, the NYT offered just “Five Significant Books of 1972.”
This list is entirely nonfiction:
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, edited by Robert Manson Myers (“…a loving work of scholarship. From 6,000 letters written among several branches of a Southern family between 1854 and 1865, Robert Manson Myers has woven 1,200 of them into a massive and touching portrait of a bygone society.”)
The Master by Leon Edel (“With…the fifth and final volume of his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel brings to a close a literary labor of 20 years.”)
Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald (“…the richest kind of contemporary history; it places political and military events in cultural perspective—something rarely done in the hundreds of books written about Vietnam during the last dozen years.”)
The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Patrick O’Brian (“…confronts a subject of universal private anguish and universal public silence…she has single‐handedly established a history of and a rhetoric for the process of aging.”)
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (“…a magisterial exercise in ‘moral geometry.'”)
Rawls’s book is the only one I’ve heard of and de Beauvoir is the only other author whose name I recognize on the list (I did know that there was a ridiculously long multi-volume biography of Henry James). Beyond the list’s being all nonfiction (if there was a fiction version somewhere, I could not find it), it’s also remarkable how long each of the books is: the shortest is 491 pages; the longest is 1,845 pages. Those are long books!
I tried searching for other newspaper and magazine lists of best books of 1972 but came up short. If anyone has anything else to offer for contemporary thoughts on the best of ’72 (by which I mean, folks in ’72 on the best of ’72), I’m all virtual ears.
I then looked into what Goodreads had to say.
I have no idea how their list works, but Richard Adams’s Watership Down tops it. That book completely fucked me up as a kid, which is maybe why I didn’t press too hard when both of my children were reluctant to read it when I pressed it on them. I think it’s a classic though (oh, and it made The New York Times year-end list in 1974–I guess it didn’t get an American publication until then?).
I don’t really think Watership Down is a children’s book, but rounding out the top three on the Goodreads list are two classics of the genre: Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Together and Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day. (Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing comes in way too low at #44.)
And now, because I’m lazy, I will use the rest of the list to offer an incomplete, inconclusive, and ultimately unnecessary list of the best books of 1972. There are many books on the list I’m pilfering from I have not read (including ones by authors whose books I esteem, like Nabokov, Welty, DeLillo, and Atwood), and these books may deserve a spot, as might the many many books that have failed through no fault of their own to wind up under the right eyes, ears, hands.
A list:
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. LeGuin
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
Roadside Picnic, Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky
Chimera, John Barth
Augustus, John Williams
Sadness, Donald Barthelme
“Fundamentals of Esperanto”
by
Srikanth Reddy
The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one
sitting.
Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj
(pronounced -oy) & the accusative, -on (plural 0ojn).
Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative
friend & friends.
Adjectives end in –a & take plural & accusative endings to
agree with things.
Ma amiko is my friend.
All verbs are regular & have only one form for each tense or
mood; they are not altered for person or number. Mi havas
bonajn amikojn is simply to say I have good friends.
Adverbs end in –e.
La bonaj amiko estas ie. The good friend is here.
–
A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in
Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in
Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the
International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with
its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth
branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA,
has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where
young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings
by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home
Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old
Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first
feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto.
Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space
on board the Voyager spacecraft.
–
Esperanto is an artificial language
constructed in 1887 by L.
L. Zamenhof, a polish
oculist. I first came
across Fundamento Esperanto, the text
which introduced this system
to the world, as I travelled abroad
following a somewhat difficult period
in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the
railway platform just outside
Warsaw where I had missed
my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit
& dark glasses pushed a cart
piled high with ripped & weathered volumes—
sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing
musical scores & outdated physics textbooks,
old copies of Life, new smut,
an atlas translated,
a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics,
a guide to the rivers &
mountains, thesauri, inscrutable
musical scores & mimeographed physics books,
defective stories, obsolete sex manuals—
one of which caught my notice
(Dr. Esperanto,
Zamenhof’s pen name, translates as He Who Hopes) &
since I had time, I traded
my used Leaves of Grass for a copy.
–
Mi amas vin, bela amiko.
I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough.
There’s a man from Quebec in my head,
a friend to the purple martins.
Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows.
All purple martins are dying or dead.
Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest
these creatures feel the same levels of doubt
& bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity.
While driving home from the brewery
one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program
about purple martins & the next day he set out
to build them a house
in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything,
let alone a house,
not to mention a home
for somebody else.
I’ve never unrolled a blueprint onto a workbench,
sunk a post,
or sent the neighbor’s kid pedalling off
to the store for a bag full of nails.
I’ve never waited ten years for a swallow.
Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting.
Never piped sugar water through colored tubes
to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded
with strong, tired hands.
Never dismantled the entire affair
& put it back together again.
Still no swallows.
I never installed the big light that stays on through the night
to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights,
never rested on Sunday
with a beer on the deck surveying
what I had done
& what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx
while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers.
I have never collapsed in abandon.
Never prayed.
But enough about purple martins.
–
As we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted
by upset languages such as Interlingua,
Klingon, Java & various cryptophasic tongues.
Our only hope of reversing this trend is to write
the Esperanto epic. Through its grandeur
& homegrown humility, it will spur men
to freeze the mutating patios so the children
of our children’s children may dwell in this song
& find comfort in its true texture & frame.
It’s worth a try. As I imagine it, it ends
in the middle of things. Every line of the work
is a first & a last line & this is the spring
of its action. Of course, there’s a journey
& inside that journey, an implicit voyage
through the underworld. There’s a bridge
made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers;
a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors;
a digression on shadows; men clapping
in fields to scare away crows; an unending list
of warships: The Unternehmen, The Impresa,
The Muyarchi, Viec Lam, The Przedsiebiorstwo,
The Indarka, The Enterprise, L’Entreprise,
Entrepeno… One could go on. But by now,
all the characters have turned into swallows
& bank as one flock in the sky—that is,
all except one. That’s how we finally learn
who the hero was all along. Weary & old,
he sits on a rock & watches his friends
fly by one by one out of the song,
then turns back to the journey they all began
long ago, keeping the river to his right.
The Acrobats, 2020 by Xiao Guo Hui (b. 1969)
Attributes of the Moon, 1947 by Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988)
“The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books”
by
Alice Notley
X-Men #141 & 142
Defenders #125
Phoenix: The Untold Story
What if. . .? #31
New Mutants #1
New Mutants #2
Micronauts #58
Marvel Universe #5
New Mutants #14
Secret Wars #1
The Old Man Stays Behind, 2021 by Eric Fischl (b. 1948)
This afternoon I finally jumped in to Esther Allen’s new translation of Antonio di Benedetto’s novel The Silentiary (the original title, El silenciero means something like “the silencer,” I think). We have an unnamed narrator living in an unnamed Latin America in a not-entirely unspecified time (“as of the late postwar era”). Our narrator is an office worker who lives with his mother. He dreams of being a writer and is in love with a neighbor. He despises noise, which is too bad because an autoshop has just opened up right next to his bedroom wall.
There’s a Kafkaesque vibe to The Silentiary—everything’s a bit uncanny, a wavelength off. The narrator is a wavelength off, I suppose. The prose is sometimes crisp and economic, and then zips out into wonderfully estranging images, like this odd sentence just a few pages in:
At dawn, the daylight a glaze of watery milk on the widowpanes, as my mind, jerked into a state of alertness, discerns a noise attached to the rear wall of my room, something like my heart grows agitated within me.
Or this little moment, longer than a haiku but still in the same spirit:
Last night the big gray cat of my childhood came to me.
I told him that noise stalks and harries me.
Slowly, intensely, he cast his animal, companionable gaze upon me.
It took me a few dozen pages to attune to the humor of The Silentiary. It’s just as odd and dry as the dark humor in Di Benedetto’s 1965 novel Zama, but again, a wavelength off, a different flavor from the same palate. An episode of drinking that ends with our narrator carried home by his fellows is particularly entertaining. When I type out the description the bit seems hardly subtle. But it is.
More thoughts to come, but for now here’s NYRB’s blurb:
The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.
The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation” in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”
Spinner, 1922 by Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929)
“The Preacher’s Daughter”
by
Victoria Kennefick
We drink too much pineapple rum, straight from the bottle,
bitch about the red-haired girl, the fetish model,
a preacher’s daughter with a thing for unreasonable shoes.
From her faded patchwork quilt, bleeding
hearts, we watched her mutate into a PVC Alice Liddell.
How did she manage in seven-inch patent heels?
She was tall as wheat — or the ceiling was low.
Cradling a mewing ginger-ball, she kissed the mirror
where their confederate-blue eyes
matched. Three scars began to scab on her arm,
deep big-cat scrawls she told us she cut herself
because it’s art and her clients like her
that way. We followed her clip-clop down
the rabbit hole; me, to hear tales of her running track
in those shoes; you, to see her white skin even paler
under lights. Back in your dorm room, I am static.
You pay to watch her pixelated Snow White online;
complain her constant chatter ruined it, or her, for you.
Ari Reading, 1973 by Dorothy Thornhill (1910–1987)
“Libraries Destroyed by Fire”
from
THERE are many of the forces of Nature which tend to injure Books; but among them all not one has been half so destructive as Fire. It would be tedious to write out a bare list only of the numerous libraries and bibliographical treasures which, in one way or another, have been seized by the Fire-king as his own. Chance conflagrations, fanatic incendiarism, judicial bonfires, and even household stoves have, time after time, thinned the treasures as well as the rubbish of past ages, until, probably, not one thousandth part of the books that have been are still extant. This destruction cannot, however, be reckoned as all loss; for had not the “cleansing fires” removed mountains of rubbish from our midst, strong destructive measures would have become a necessity from sheer want of space in which to store so many volumes.
Before the invention of Printing, books were comparatively scarce; and, knowing as we do, how very difficult it is, even after the steam-press has been working for half a century, to make a collection of half a million books, we are forced to receive with great incredulity the accounts in old writers of the wonderful extent of ancient libraries.
The historian Gibbon, very incredulous in many things, accepts without questioning the fables told upon this subject. No doubt the libraries of MSS. collected generation after generation by the Egyptian Ptolemies became, in the course of time, the most extensive ever then known; and were famous throughout the world for the costliness of their ornamentation, and importance of their untold contents. Two of these were at Alexandria, the larger of which was in the quarter called Bruchium. These volumes, like all manuscripts of those early ages, were written on sheets of parchment, having a wooden roller at each end so that the reader needed only to unroll a portion at a time. During Caesar’s Alexandrian War, B.C. 48, the larger collection was consumed by fire and again burnt by the Saracens in A.D. 640. An immense loss was inflicted upon mankind thereby; but when we are told of 700,000, or even 500,000 of such volumes being destroyed we instinctively feel that such numbers must be a great exaggeration. Equally incredulous must we be when we read of half a million volumes being burnt at Carthage some centuries later, and other similar accounts. Continue reading ““Libraries Destroyed by Fire” | From William Blades’ The Enemies of Books”
Secrets of the Constellation, 2021 by Anton Evgenievich Frolov (b. 1982)
It is not a bad problem to have to have a big ole stack of big boys stacked up, waiting to read, but I nevertheless continue to feel anxiety as the stack grows and I head into a new semester, knowing that my reading for work—student papers of course, but also all the other stuff, the rereads of ringers I can’t give up, the new reads I continue to dedicate myself to incorporating into a syllabus, cursing myself when I’m not sure how to do what I think I want to do with them, etc.—but yeah, it’s the knowing that work-based reading will dominate my eyes and brain, both of which have grown duller, slower, and more easily-wearied over the last two years (and I have, after forty-one years of perfect eyesight, taken up glasses to my face to read finer print), and that I will find myself without the reserves to jump into the big books like I used to (I fall asleep sooner too these days–but also wake up sooner too, and do dedicated some of those early morning minutes to reading).
Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps is (translation by Vincent Kling) is one of a few NYRB titles on my list. I’ve jumped into it a few times and I can tell it’s a big deal—maybe something revelatory to me, a big mash of consciousness like Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. But other books keep showing up.
Or, really, I keep picking up other books, like Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated, almost eight hundred pictures to go with Thomas Pynchon’s novel. I’ve paged through it, but the anxiety here is the realization that I want to read Gravity’s Rainbow again, which will make me go insane.
The two by Pessoa cause me anxiety for other reasons. I’m pretty sure I will never finish The Book of Disquiet (in translation by Margaret Jull Costa). It’s smart at times, but it’s not really a novel—the catch is the protagonist’s consciousness. And the protagonist often needs a big kick in the ass. Disquiet will riff out some lovely little missives, and then whine a bit. Not my favorite flavor. And yet I feel like I can’t tangle with Writings on Art and Poetical Theory without engaging Pessoa’s aesthetic firsthand (or, really, mediated through translators and editors).
Pessoa’s Writings is published by Contra Mundum, as is Pierre Senges’ Ahab (Sequels) (translation by Jacob Siefring and Tegan Raleigh). I made a bit of dent of the book, but then took a slimmer volume with me on a vacation to some Smoky Mountains. I read Alan Garner’s novel Red Shift there in two or three days and loved it and failed to write about it here. (I am sometimes astounded that for a few years in very early thirties I somehow wrote about every book I read on this blog.) Maybe spring for Ahab.
I’m really excited about Vladmir Sorokin’s postapocalyptic novel Telluria (translation by Max Lawton). I’m so excited that I’ve decided not to have anxiety and commit to a proper review by the time it comes out this summer.
Esther Allen’s translation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1965 novel Zama is one of the best books I’ve read in the past five years, so I was very happy to get Allen’s translation of El silenciero — The Silentiary–a week or two ago. I was so happy that I added the book to a stack of books I was intending to read, rubbed my eyes really hard, let anxiety pulse through me, and read a little more of the Pessoa (which added a different layer of anxiety).
Writing about these anxieties has not purged them, but maybe I have a plan, or an outline here, a promise to myself (but not you, if you’re reading this, I promise you nothing, to be clear). Maybe I’ll dig in, set an early AM alarm to read an extra hour or so. Maybe I’ll even quit acquiring new books for awhile.
(Or not, no, I’ll just lie to myself some more.)
The Cave of Sleep, 1941 by Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957)
Biblioklept 