Summer Reading

Summer is over. Back in school, with that strange smell of library paste and musty plaster, we are required by our English teacher--Mrs. Deutsch, Miss Ganyo, Mr. Erdmann--to prepare a report on the books we read over the summer.

Looking back over the season it strikes me that I found time to absorb several interesting volumes, and I wasn't lying on a beach, either.

Travels with Herodotus - Rysard Kapuschinski

I was forced to read Herodotus in college, and it changed my life. The professor demanded that we take detailed notes to prove we'd actually read that long book, and he warned us sternly, "I can easily tell if you're copying from a study crib."

The book was full of detailed information about tribes from every part of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, much of it anecdotal and some of it wildly far-fetched. The central "event" around which Herodotus layers his weird mix of narrative and ethnography is the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BCE. Good stuff. My thought was, "This is way more interesting than mathematics." So I changed my major, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Polish journalist Rysard Kapuschinski tells us here that during his early years as a stranger with few language skills reporting from India, China, and various African nations on the verge of dying or being born, Herodotus's histories were his constant companion. Though he never comes out and says so, it's reasonable to assume Kapuschinski thinks of himself as a modern-day Herodotus, chronicling strange customs and violent events from every corner of the globe. His descriptions of his early years as a journalist writing for a country—Poland—that many of the people he met had never heard of, are interesting. His retelling of selected parts of Herodotus's account of the Persian war are less so. The parallels to modern events are too obvious to mention...but he mentions them. On the other hand, in the course of his narrative Kapuscinski raises some interesting historiographic questions.

At one point he visits the ruined city of Persepolis and ponders all the suffering required to construct the once-impressive buildings that now lie in ruins.

When we look at lifeless temples, palaces, and cities, we can't help but wonder about the fate of their builders. Their pain, their broken backs, their eyes gouged out by errant splinters of stone, their rheumatism. About their unfortunate lives, their suffering. But the very next question that invariably arises is: Could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? Without the overseer’s whip, the slave’s fear, the ruler’s vanity? In short, was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? And yet, does not that monumentality owe its existence to some conviction that what is negative and weak in man can be vanquished only by beauty, only through the effort and will of his creation? And that the only thing that never changes is beauty itself, and the need for it that dwells within us?

Maybe so. Maybe no. I don't think that beauty and monumentality are synonymous. We may get a tingling of sincere faith standing in the dark nave of Notre Dame de Paris, but the masons who crafted it might rather have been back home repairing their cottages and sheep pens.

I have been interested in Kapuscinski for decades by reputation, without ever having read him. Wandering the house I found that I'd picked up several of his other books over the years: Imperium, Another Day of Life, The Other, The Soccer Wars. He has a reputation as being the journalist's journalist, more daring in both his escapades and his prose than others. But reading half-way through The Soccer Wars, I didn't find that to be the case. The details were scanty, and the tribal soldiers at jungle check-points, all of whom held him at gunpoint, all started to sound like the same man—a journalistic cliché. And I began to wonder if Kapuschinski might simply be a thrill-seeker or a daredevil ham.

A controversy arose in 2010 as to whether Kapuschinski's books ought to be categorized as fiction rather than journalism or contemporary history. I don't know. But his Travels with Herodotus is an engaging read, and it made me pull my own copy of the West's first historian off the shelf again. Briefly.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon - José Saramago

Saramago is one of those wise fools who cultivates a very simple syntax and is very patient in developing a plot. This book revolves around a proof-reader names Raimondo Silva who, on a whim, arbitrarily changes a single word in the book he's proofing. The author had written that the Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land by ship in 1378, agreed to help the Portuguese expel the Muslims from Lisbon. The proofer inserts the word "not"—they chose not to help them—thus changing the thrust of the entire story.

Why did he do this? I don't know. Perhaps I wasn't reading carefully. Though at one point Saramago makes an interesting point about the power of words:

It is well known, for example, that Nietzsche's proofreader, although a fervent believer, resisted the temptation to insert the word Not on a certain page, thus amending the philosopher’s phrase, God is dead, God is not dead. If proof-readers were given their freedom and did not have their hands and feet tied by a mass of prohibitions more binding than the penal code, they would soon transform the face of the world, establish the kingdom of universal happiness, giving drink to the thirsty, food to the famished, peace to those who live in turmoil, joy to the sorrowful, companionship to the solitary, hope to those who have lost it, not to mention the rapid disappearance of poverty and crime, for they would be able to do all these things simply by changing the words, and should anyone doubt these new demiurges, they need only remember that this is precisely how the world and man came to be made, with words, some rather than others, so that things might turn out just so, and in no other fashion, Let it be done, said God, and it was done immediately.

In any case, from this point on, the novel moves back and forth between two narrative strands. The proofer's boss, newly hired to make sure such mistakes do not recur, suggests that he rewrite the entire book as if the Crusaders had moved on, forcing the Portuguese to bring their siege to a successful conclusion on their own. Meanwhile, the proofer finds that he's falling in love with his boss. Saramago shifts deftly back and forth between the alternative history being fashioned by the proofer and his very-slow-to-develop romance with his boss.

Along the way, Saramago, like Kapuchinski, explores the issue of what makes history "true."  

...any piece of writing, good or bad, always ends up appearing like a predetermined crys­tallisation, although no one can ever say how or when or why or by whom.

But he also succeeds in interjecting a few vaguely erotic impressions, in case we were worried that the fictional history of the siege would be the only draw. For example, here is the passage wherein his boss first suggests that he write that counter-history.

Then why this interest, this proposal, this conversation, Because it isn’t every day that you come across someone who has done what you did, I was in a state of agitation, Come on, Without wishing to be rude, I’m convinced your idea doesn’t make sense, Then forget I ever mentioned it, Raimundo Silva got to his feet, adjusted his coat which he had never removed, Unless there is something else you wish to discuss, I’ll be going, Take your book, it’s the only copy of its kind. Dr Maria Sara wears no ring to suggest that she is married. As for her blouse, chemise, or whatever it is called, it looks like being made of silk, in a pale shade difficult to describe, beige, old ivory, off-white, whether it is possible that fingertips tremble differently according to the colours they touch or caress, we cannot say.

This passage may give you an idea of Saramago's style. He doesn't work very hard to distinguish who is talking when, but the sense isn't difficult to grasp in most cases. At one point it occurred to me that his prose bears some resemblance to that of the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore. But no one reads George Moore these days, and we'll leave that discussion for another time.

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

Unfolding in the aftermath of the Twin Towers debacle, this beautifully crafted novel follows the semi-vacant days of a Wall Street analyst named Hans once his estranged wife is impelled to escape the lingering ashes and return with their son to England. We learn, early on, that much of the plot, such as it is, will involve a Jamaican cricket-player named Chuck. Hans is Dutch, and was once an avid cricketer himself.

Time shifts come often and O'Neill handles them deftly. We aren't far into the book before Hans has rejoined his wife in England. Many months have passed. One night he receives a phone call from authorities in New York to inform him that Chuck's body has been found at the bottom of a harbor in New Jersey, handcuffed to a post. Genuinely perplexed, he tells them, "I can't imagine why anyone would want to kill Chuck."

The rest of the book consists largely of the narrator's ruminations about that strange and lonely interlude in his life, when, reverting to teenage enthusiasms, he played cricket often with the Jamaicans, took driving lessons from Chuck, and in the process learned about many ethnic neighborhoods in the boroughs that he'd never seen before, including one established by his Dutch ancestors centuries ago.  

On the dust jacket Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times compares Netherland to The Great Gatsby, but this novel is far better than that bland and clumsy tale. It might better be compared to Max Frisch's Homo Faber or Javier Marias's A Heart So White, both of which are exquisitely written and centered on the foibles of keenly observant but emotionally distant men.

She looked stricken; and I suppose, since I am now fully aware ... that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication, that I should have explained to my wife that I came from Holland, where I rarely saw dancing, and indeed that I’d been a little amazed to see how young Englishmen threw themselves around to music, dancing even with other men, and that this abandon was alien to me and that, perhaps, she might for this reason wish to bear with me. But I said nothing, think­ing the matter inconsequential. It would certainly have astonished me to learn that years later I would look back on this episode and ask myself ... if it represented a so-called fork in the road—which in turn led me to drunkenly wonder if the course of a relationship of love was truly explicable in terms of right turns and wrong turns, and if so whether it was possible to backtrack to that split where it all went wrong, or if in fact it was the case that we are all doomed to walk in a forest in which all paths lead one equally astray, there being no end to the forest, an inquiry whose very uselessness led to another spasm of wayward contemplation that ended only when I noticed Chuck leading a hobbled Dr. Seem back into the chair next to mine.

My one complaint is a minor one. The narrator could have given us a little more information about his home life and a little less about cricket. But the novel is so rich as it stands that I am suddenly tempted to start reading it again.