Nuit - Edgar Hilsenrath

You try to stay human, but afterwards, what does it get you?*

I first heard about Edgar Hilsenrath after reading his obituary in the paper, so I guess you could say I was late to the party. Still, his work sounded interesting and I thought I’d check it out. Unfortunately, the only book of his available from the Ottawa library was a French translation of Nacht. I don’t typically read French books in translation, as it seems kind of pointless—if I’m not reading a novel in its original form anyway, I might as well read it in a language in which I’ve written multiple books, instead of one in which I still struggle to order things effectively in restaurants. But you take what you can get.

It’s interesting to compare this book to John Hersey’s The Wall, especially since I started and finished Hersey’s book during the period in which I read Hilsenrath’s (French books take me forever). Both stories are about Jews living in ghettos in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation: The Wall takes place in Warsaw, Nuit in a city in Romania. Both describe the harrowing circumstances in great detail. The chief difference is in their tone. While The Wall doesn’t shy away from the horror of the Warsaw ghetto, its nevertheless retains a level of hope cut with realism. Life is hard, and people do turn on each other, but their remains a certain camaraderie, and even heroism.

No such nobility is to be found in Nuit. Life is simply about survival, and brutality reigns. The book’s “hero,” Ranek, eagerly awaits his own brother’s death so that he can in good conscious snatch the gold teeth from his jaw and trade them for food. The caustic indifference of the characters to their own suffering and that of their neighbors and friends is cut with the darkest of dark humor. Put next to The Wall, Nuit paints a very bleak picture of ghetto life (and while The Wall is based on the true and profoundly heroic tale of the Warsaw uprising, it’s worth noting that Hilsenrath actually lived in a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation; Hersey didn’t.)

But that’s too simplistic a take. There is heroism of a sort in Nuit, and as shabby as it may seem, it’s nonetheless remarkable given the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. This heroism emerges in simple moments of humanity. Every choice a character makes in which self-interest is not the pervading driver is in itself heroic, because the substance of their lives has worn so thin that the slightest yielding could cause them to rip in two. To offer shelter to two orphans may seem like basic human decency; asking them to pay for the privilege in cigarettes sounds downright mercenary. But for Ranek, who does just that, taking them on costs him dearly in the goodwill of his neighbors, and such a currency is the only in which he remains even remotely solvent. When you look at it that way, trading a roof for a few cigarettes seems generous.

I can’t comment much on Hilsenrath’s prose, since I observed it through the double filter of translation and a foreign language, but on a purely practical level it appeared ornate enough to push my facility with French to the limit. I’m picking up Camus next, and just thinking of his prose in comparison feels like a relief. As for his story and characters, there is a richness here, one leavened with a bitter sort of humor without being cheapened by it. A powerful book.

*On essaie de rester humain… et après? Qu’est-ce qu’on y gagné?

Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy

Is there a more singular author than Cormac McCarthy? If so, I struggle to think who they might be.

Outer Dark is McCarthy’s second novel, but if you didn’t know that going in it wouldn’t be all that easy to place. His style seems to have emerged fully-formed and unmistakable, and has fluctuated little even as he drifts from dark parables to picaresque and Appalachia to Apocalypse (though apocalypse in one form or another is never that far away in a Cormac McCarthy novel). It was a style I tried to ape for awhile before setting it aside, chafing from its poor fit and embarrassed by my own lack of originality, but it tantalizes me still. A surreal brew of long commaless sentences, archaisms, inverted syntax, and quasi-biblical grandeur, and an almost complete lack of access to the character’s interior.

I can’t think of another author who tells you less about what his characters are thinking, or their motivations for their actions. For a medium so perfectly designed for psychological free-diving, McCarthy’s refusal to show any cards seems on paper like an insurmountable handicap, but it lends a rich other-worldliness to his prose that is hard to match.

But what about Outer Dark specifically? It might be the most quintessentially “McCarthyan” (McCarthyesque?) of his novels that I’ve read (there’s at least 2 I haven’t got to yet). More so even than his masterpiece Blood Meridian, since despite the popular assumption McCarthy isn’t really a Western writer (though he wears the genre well). The through-line to his work is hard-bitten outcast heroes and devilish, almost supernatural villains, and Outer Dark holds plenty of both.

For the heroes, you have Culla and Rinthy Holmes, a brother and sister who together have a child. Culla leaves it for dead in the woods, Rinthy finds out and goes hunting for it. The villains are a largely nameless trio of outlaws acting according to their own dark nature. They are less philosophically precise than Judge Holden or Anton Chirgurh, and indeed much of their activity occurs in dense asides between the main chapters. They reminded me, in their sudden and violent appearances, of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit.

I finished the book unsure of the finer points of some events, but with McCarthy you need to take that as a given. He makes me want to be braver in my own storytelling, less inclined to hold the reader’s hand through every plot point and character decision. Even if I can’t cop his style, I think that’s a lesson worth learning.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder

Max Boot’s book was fine, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a lovely palate cleanser after a dense tome on warfare—not simply for its slender page count, but for the spare, breathy urgency of its prose. Wilder wields a fleet style that I admire in no small part because I just can’t do it. His writing isn’t colloquial, but it gains its literary sheen without becoming comma-clotted and dense. It sits at the opposite end of a spectrum counterbalanced by Thomas Wolfe and WIlliam Faulkner, and while I can rival neither of those masters, I am much more an eager (if incompetent) disciple at their feet. With Wilder, I don’t even know where to start.

The book is interesting in structure as well as style, a quasi-religious meditation on causality and faith. The eponymous bridge lasts barely an instant, collapsing in the very first sentence only to be raised repeatedly through jaunts backwards in time. Five people fall to their death while attempting to cross it, and a devout friar named Brother Juniper seeks out every detail of their life in hopes of summising some grander purpose that will prove the existence of God.

Most of what follows is a biography of the five ill-fated individuals, with particular focus on three of them: the Marquesa de Montemayor, an epistolary savant pining after her indifferent daughter; Estaban, a man grieving his lost twin brother; and Uncle Pio, an avuncular figure managing a tempermental actress. Their stories intersect in different ways, some of which seem to defy their own causality (Im not sure if this is a deliberate effect, an error on Wilder’s part, or simply a result of my own misreading). Each chapter inevitably ends with the bridge’s collapse, lending a strange air of fatalism to the proceedings.

A great book. I’ll read more from him one day.

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present - Max Boot

I picked this book up unsure whether I was going to commit to it. I like Max Boot, as I’ve said before, but I’m not a huge fan of military history, which can be a little on the dry side. Luckily, Boot doesn’t bog down his prose with tactical descriptions of battles (I can never follow these anyway), but instead offers a higher level view of overall campaigns.

Invisible Armies is a book about guerrillas. The subtitle pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Though it follows a loose chronology, beginning with ancient Mesopotamia and Rome and ending with modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan, the book’s structure is primarily by theme, rather than time period. Boot covers liberal uprisings of the 18th century, anarchists of the late 19th, communists of the early 20th, through to the Islamic rebels of today. He makes a useful distinction between guerrillas and terrorists, with the former encompassing loose military units that fight largely military targets, while terrorists are smaller and primarily target civilians.

I was disappointed that he didn’t talk about Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was the man, but despite this omission he covers a lot of ground. There were several people who I’d heard of very vaguely and appreciated learning more about—T.E. Lawrence, Yasser Arafat— as well as I people I hadn’t heard of at all (Massoud). The spreadsheet at the end was a nice little bit of wonkiness. I wonder if he lets people download it as an excel file.

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is technically an epistolary novel, though it doesn’t feel like one in the traditional sense. The conceit is that John Ames, a 76 year old reverend in the town of Gilead, Iowa, is recounting his life in a long, fairly digressive letter to his seven year old son. He also recounts the story of his grandfather, a one-eyed firebrand preacher whose vision of Jesus in chains drove him to the abolition movement during the civil war. This figure and his legacy is the focus of much of the early novel, but Ames’ attention eventually drifts to another figure, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s prodigal son and his own namesake. The result is interesting, since Ames’ letter to his son become the means through which he examines and resolves his complicated feelings towards this divisive figure.

The prose is elegant and believably voiced, containing the frequent digressions into scripture and ruminations on life and faith you’d expect from a man who’d spent most of his life writing sermons. This is a nice effect, as it allows Robinson to draw on rich symbolism in a manner that never feels forced.

The book’s plot is slight, a meandering mix of past and present, which works for the overall subject matter. A larger denouement would likely have felt contrived.

In all, I enjoyed the book and will likely pick up her previous novel at some point in the future.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer

The title pretty much says it all. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is an exhaustive chronicle of Germany under Germany. It takes its time with background, reaching all the way to Martin Luther and giving a detailed biography of the Hitler clan as well as Hitler himself’s early years, but the bulk of it fixates on the period between 1933 and 1945 when the Reich held Germany by the throat. There is little postscript, apart from a couple pages about the trials at Nuremberg.

In addition to the copious research supporting it, the book also benefits from Shirer’s unique perspective. He was a news correspondent in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent rule, and consequently the narrative takes surprisingly intimate turns from time to time as he recounts his personal experience of absorbing and reporting on a particularly large bit of news.

Shirer makes no effort to hide his feelings about particular actors, and though such a lack of objectively might rankle in a different context, it works fine here, since Hitler and his ilk are well beyond defending. If anything, his invective provides a bit of a release valve for the reader, as we absorb accounts of atrocity after atrocity. The flip side of this candid approach is that some passages have not aged particularly well. There are several instances where Shirer references the homosexuality of some Nazi officials in a manner than does not distinguish between it and other traits that you’d actually call morally reprehensible: things like corruption and violence. His attitude was probably not out of step with the day, but it catches on a modern ear in a way the writer probably didn’t intend.

The prose is unadorned but eloquent, and the content surprisingly accessible given the book’s scope. There are some chapters that began to drag a bit, as Shirer provided voluminous accounts of various diplomatic exchanges, but as the book strove to be comprehensive I don’t feel justified in calling this a fault. Shirer’s objective was to tell the whole story, and that he did.

The Corrosion of Conservatism - Max Boot

I came across this book by happenstance. Chantal had put a hold on it at the library and I picked it up for her. I flipped through a few pages on the way home and ended up reading the whole thing over a couple of days.

I knew Max Boot only through his columns at the Washington Post, which I read regularly. Lately I’ve found my favorite columnists are actually those rare conservatives and former Republicans who have become vocal critics of their former party in the wake of Trump. Folks like Boot, Jennifer Rubin, and Rick Wilson. While I disagree with them on most nuts-and-bolts policy issues, I appreciate their common stance on politics as a means of good governance, rather than a vehicle for seizing power. It’s not easy to speak up to your own team when they’ve gone stray, and I respect Boot and others like him for doing so.

The Corrosion of Conservatism isn’t the sort of book I usually gravitate towards. It’s essentially a platform book, in which Boot lays out what drew him to conservatism and where he feels the movement went wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but such books usually come across as fairly shallow exercises, the sort of thing people buy for the name on the cover more than the actual content. Boot’s book rises above this level, largely thanks to his experience as a writer of modern history, which he uses to provide context and depth to his arguments.

In the closing section of the book, Boot offers a mea culpa of sorts, in which he highlights the darker side of conservatism that his party affiliation had blinded him to in the past. I’m aware there are hard-liners on the left who find his past stances unforgivable, but from where I stand Boot seems to have done some real soul-searching, and willingly embraced the aspects of progressivism that partisanship alone had previously repelled, without pinballing between extremes—an act that is surprisingly common in politics. There are many stances he holds with which I still disagree, but I think he’s got integrity, and these days you can’t ask for much more than that.

The Wall - John Hersey

The Wall tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto during the second world war, from the creation of the wall that formed its perimeter to the final savage thrust of noble—if ultimately hopeless—rebellion in which the Jews finally struck back at their oppressors.

The story itself is inherently dramatic, based as it is on a true and monstrous period of history, but the most defining feature of The Wall is not the plot or the characters, but the way it is told. The entire book, from its editorial introduction to its final pages, purports to be extracts from the copious notes of Noach Levinson, a citizen of the ghetto who becomes its de facto archivist.

The opening pages, written in the style of an introduction by an outside academic, describe how the archive was found, and give us a first glimpse of Levinson through outside eyes. The remainder is structured as an assembly of different notes, with each passage marked with the date of its occurrence, the date of its recording, and the source of the material, though every word with very few exceptions is supposed to be written by Levinson.

It’s an interesting structure, giving the impression of something between an oral history and a non-fiction account, and the frequent use of dates helps situate the reader in the broader story. Occasionally notes from other “entries” are inserted as asides to add context, thereby circumventing one of the challenges of the epistolary novel, with its rigid limitations of chronology and perspective.

There are times where the format can be a bit distracting, and while I admire Hersey’s commitment, I occasionally wanted him to just write the novel in a more traditional way, with multiple POV characters undergoing experiences in real time, rather than having everything filter through Levinson’s notes. However, it’s not fair to judge a book on something it’s not, and I have to say it held my interest, and the second half moved much quicker than the first. Hersey apparently wrote a non-fiction account of Hiroshima, and given the talent for historicity he demonstrated in The Wall, I intend to check it out.

Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe

“…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door…”

So begins the prologue of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, five free-flowing paragraphs of image-clotted prose, without a single plot point or character in sight, and instantly my mind turns to the Dark Tower. Readers of King’s epic will recognize the line—even with the original leaf in place of the rose—alongside the lamenting cry of “o lost” that sounds throughout the story.

At first I wondered why King chose this book to mirror in his series. On the face of it, it doesn’t have much in common with his macabre fusion of oat opera and high fantasy. Far from a genre piece, Look Homeward, Angel is unapologetically “literary” in style and content, a long-limbed Bildungsroman that shuffles sideways through its thin narrative, favoring florid digressions and subtle characters studies over anything as coarse and tangible as a plot.

And yet, as I read the book and sank deeper into its style, I started to see the peculiar ways in which it and the Dark Tower are alike. For Look Homeward, Angel is really a story about grief: grief for loved ones who die, in part, but mostly grief for the past, and for a childhood spent and squandered and inevitably lost. Likewise, the Dark Tower, underneath its industrious world-building and horror fantasy trappings, is a lament for a world that has moved on. And while Roland’s relentless quest for the Tower is driven by a need to restore order, there is a sense of futility that underpins the journey—a point driven home by its divisive ending.

It’s easy to accuse books like Look Homeward, Angel of being all style and no substance, exercises in pretension that wallow in their opacity, verbiage for verbiage’s sake. I’ve read books like that, and I’m not a fan. But there’s more here than simply stylish prose—though Wolfe is without peer at composing sentences of symphonic richness.

The characters are keenly felt, and their flaws and interactions are painted with a storyteller’s eye for detail. Though set over a century ago, much of it feels surprisingly contemporary, if not in its setting or technology, then at least in the problems that emerge in a single house shared by too many people, and the oscillating love and fury that families often excite in one another.

I read Look Homeward, Angel at a comparatively relaxed pace, putting it down partway through to read other books in the interim. I think this helped me more fully appreciate it, as it gave me time to approach it on its own terms. I enjoyed it more the more I read, and though it seemed daunting in its first hundred pages, by the end I found myself feeling sad that it was over—fitting, I suppose, for a book about grieving the past.

O discordia, o lost.

Claudius the God - Robert Graves

It’s been a couple of years since I read I, Claudius, but I remembered liking it enough to request Claudius the God from the library, and the first few pages wasted no time in reminding me why.

The story picks up where I, Claudius left off. While the first book detailed the lives and reigns of Rome’s early emperors through the eyes of the stammering, sly, perennially underestimated Claudius, the second chronicles the reign of Claudius himself. Written under the same conceit as a purported autobiography, it retains much of the flavor of its predecessor, reading more like a second volume of a single work than as a standalone sequel.

Graves writes with supreme confidence in his subject matter. He adopts the persona of Claudius with impressive commitment, the style and substance of his prose lending a great sense of authenticity to the story. He clearly knows the history of the Roman Empire inside and out, and this knowledge comes across in the tiny details, and in references to historical figures great and small.

While I, Claudius stayed largely in the confines of Western Europe, Claudius the God ventures farther east, spending many pages chronicling the machinations of Herod Agrippa in consolidating his grip on the Jewish throne. There’s also a recurring reference to Christianity, which in Claudius’ eyes is little more than a bothersome sect with bizarre practices. It’s interesting to consider how Claudius would view Jesus, and Graves paints his reaction in mingling tones of amusement and contempt for a figure he doubtless assumed would be a footnote in history whose presence he would easily dwarf.

Writers of historical fiction walk a fine line between drowning their reader in explanatory text and stranding them in a world they little understand. This is especially true for books like this one, which don’t merely adopt a historical setting, but set out to retell the stories of men and women who actually lived. Graves strikes the right balance here. While I occasionally got lost in the thicket of Roman names, particularly while Claudius described some finer points of palace intrigue, I generally had a good sense of what was happening politically and socially, and why people were acting the way they were. Descriptive passages felt authentic, less the shoehorning of key details than the lectures of a ruler with a solidly academic bent, which the real Claudius had.

The story itself isn’t quite as engaging as I, Claudius, but I wouldn’t fault Graves for that—when you’ve got a guy like Caligula running things in book one, a steady hand at the rudder doesn’t allow for quite as much intrigue. Still, I read it quickly and with pleasure, and even find myself considering a reread of I, Claudius at some point.

De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) - Jules Verne

This book is insane, even by Jules Verne standards.

The year is 1865. The civil war has been fought and won, and the Union’s crack team of artillery scientists is 1at a loose end. They’ve spent the last several years developing new and exciting ways to kill each other, and now they’ve got a miserable stretch of peace on their hands. Fortunately, their intrepid president, Impey Barbicane, has a solution: build a giant cannon and shoot a bullet at the moon.

Of course.

The United States jumps on Barbicane’s proposal with gusto, and soon the whole country has shoot-the-moon fever. Not to be outdone, a charismatic Parisian named Michel Ardan joins the venture by volunteering to ride inside the bullet. His thoughts on the whole thing are wonderfully cavalier—when asked how he’ll return to Earth once his bullet—a decidedly one-way mode of transport—collides with the moon, his response is simple: he won’t.

The story is punctuated by Vernian digressions explaining in copious (an uncharitable writer might say tortuous) detail: the origins of the solar system, the basic physics of firearms, the composition of explosive powder. These asides emerge sometimes through dialogue between the characters, sometimes form the narrator himself. While their insertion is somewhat artless, I have to say that I find these asides charming, in part because the intervening years have rendered some points startlingly inaccurate. At one point Ardan argues with a naysayer over whether or not there is any air on the moon. Ardan insists there is, and the flow of the narrative leaves little doubt that we are to assume he is correct. The following passage gives a good sense of the tone, which straddles a thin line between staying true to its premise and celebrating its absurdity:

The crowd returned its attention to their hero, whose adversary remained silent. Ardan continued his assertion, speaking without aggression or vanity. “You see, my good sir, one cannot deny with any real certainty the existence of an atmosphere on the moon. Such an atmosphere is likely somewhat thin, but the scientific consensus is that it exists.”

“Not on the mountains,” barked his opponent, not wanting to cede the point.

“No, but in the valleys, and there should be no problem for heights of a few hundred feet.”

“In that case, you’d better take care! The air’s going to be very thin!”

“Good sir, surely there’s enough for one man! What’s more, should I need to ascend, I’ll do my best to conserve it and only breathe on special occasions!”*

Mostly, though, the book’s charm shines through simply because Jules Verne loves science so. much. His outbursts feel like the literary equivalent of that dorky kid in math class with his hand thrust halfway to the ceiling, straining to be picked by the teacher to answer a question about quadratic functions. It’s that earnestness that carries the book.

The narrative itself is slight, with only the most rudimentary plot: some eccentrics decide to shoot a bullet at the moon, they build a cannon,they fire it, the end. Books from that era in general show less interest in “raising stakes” to hold the reader’s interest, allowing for digressions and a detached narrative tone that can often seem almost heartless, as if the plight of the characters was not a story to be viscerally felt, but an experiment to calmly observe and record. Verne, with his perennial interest in science, leans into this trait more than most.

The language itself I find hard to judge. As French isn’t my native tongue, I’m less attuned to changes in style and more or less accept the prose however it’s served to me. However, Verne’s earnest humor shines through even for a non-Francophone, and I found it genuinely fun to read. It may feel like a minor work compared to Voyage au Centre de la Terre, but it’s worth picking up.

*Passage translated from the French

Let the Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist

I’m hesitant about vampires.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m anti-vampire—an increasingly common stance in the post-Twilight world—but I do approach books about them with some degree of skepticism. They are, as a trope, a bit shopworn, and the sheer volume of stories about them have worn several crisscrossing ruts in the narrative earth. A careless write can all-too-easily slip into one, and find themselves unable to extract their story from its cliched depths.

As such, I read the first pages of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s book uncertain as to whether I’d bother finishing it. Part of this reluctance came from the fact that I couldn’t quite remember why it was I’d requested it in the first place—due to a processing error at my local library, I received my copy about 18 months after I’d put a hold on it. What passing whimsy first sparked my interest I’ve no idea.

In any case, I read the first chapter reluctantly, but after fifty pages or so my reluctance vanished. While it opens with a fairly common scene (shy protagonist, unpopular, beset by bullies), the story grows by maintaining the courage of its convictions. It treats vampirism not as an adolescent power fantasy, but as a terrible disease, which is how some of the earliest writers in the genre envisioned it.

Another strength is that it delves into the psychology of one of the more peculiar roles in the vampire mythos: the familiar. For those less familiar (no pun intended; seriously, I only noticed this while proofreading) with vampire fiction, a familiar is a vampire’s human servant and protector, performing the tasks that the vampire, exiled from daylight, cannot. Usually, the familiar serves the vampire with the hopes of one day joining his ranks. In Let the Right One In, his motives are different. The familiar, a middle-aged man named Håkan, has no interest in becoming a vampire himself. Instead, he goes about his grisly duties in order to feed his own particular hunger, one that is, in its way, just as sinister as the vampire’s.

I hesitate to comment on the prose, as the book is in translation from the Swedish, but he version I read was well-written, lyrical without being too flowery, though the occasional over-reliance on sentence fragments stuck out.

All in all, I’d recommend Let the Right One In for readers seeking a thoughtful, modern take on a classic trope, and those who can handle taboo subjects and a bit of gore.