Spring Training

I’d have thought that the whole concept of summer reading lists for high schoolers would have fallen by the wayside, as it would seem to lack usefulness in our testing- and extracurriculars-obsessed education system, but a CS Monitor article shows that it’s alive and well (and just in time for that last-two-weeks-of-summer cram).The article includes some interesting insights on the makeup of such lists and how they’ve changed over the years.For the most part, reading lists are still heavy on classics. But consider the differences between reading lists from the 1960s and those in the 1980s. Of the nine most commonly taught books in public high schools in 1963, only one (the 1938 play Our Town) was written in the 20th century. By 1988, the 10 most commonly taught novels in public schools included four books from the 20th century: The Great Gatsby (1925), Of Mice and Men (1937), Lord of the Flies (1954), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).But not all novels take a generation to catapult to required summer reading lists. Some new staples in summer reading lists: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, Monster by Walter Dean Myers, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.Ten years ago, these reading lists didn’t have new books like that,” says Alleen Nilsen, Arizona State University English professor and co-author of the textbook Literature for Today’s Young Adult. “These are really popular new books.”So what catapults Life of Pi and The Lovely Bones to the elusive reading list club? Both are bildungsromans, or stories of young people coming of age. Ms. Nilsen says this theme is crucial for reading list inclusion, as youth need to feel a connection to the literature.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Ismail Kadare. Honestly. The Albanian author is frequently named as a potential Nobel laureate, and his novel The Accident just appeared in English, earning him additional press and reviews. But this recent press for Kadare is only part of why I’ve been pondering his work.

Kadare represents a bit of a fantasy for me, as a reader and as a writer. When I was a child traveling to my family’s ancestral home in Northern Greece, we would always come to a point in the road where the left went north to Albania and the right went northeast into the Pindus mountains. We went right, but to the left were soldiers manning a checkpoint with military trucks and tanks. Beyond that, a few more miles of disintegrating asphalt, and then the Albania of Enver Hoxha, where few went in and no one went out.

Sometimes we’d stop at the checkpoint and just look for a minute or two. My great-uncle might talk how he helped push Mussolini’s army back into Albania, or he might point out that Hoxha’s communism was proof that the nationalists he’d fought for had been on the right side in Greece’s civil war. Then we’d get back in the car and head up the switchbacks to our house.

Because we couldn’t get in, because there was a fence, I wanted desperately to go to Albania. Years later, reading Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, I was perhaps most struck by his chapter on Albania. I remember few specifics now, though it remains one of my most admired books, but I remember quite clearly Kaplan’s description of the crowds outside a soccer match in Tirana. Men with identical flimsy plastic sandals on their feet, restive and straining against the dissatisfactions of the match and of their lives.

When I came across Kadare, I was excited to be reading prose that had come from within that world, even if Kadare had left Albania for France in 1990. (Kadare originates from a town not far at all from that checkpoint: Gyrokaster in Albanian; Argyrokastro in Greek.) I appreciated The Concert, but The Three-Arched Bridge unsettled and chilled me. The novel addresses the intersection of West and East during the final years of the Byzantine Empire as a local ruler organizes the building of a stone bridge. The bridge will open up a trade route for merchants on horseback, opening up as well the village to the oncoming Ottoman forces. Once outside influences are allowed in, it’s the beginning of the end for the crumbling Byzantine rule in the novel’s world.

The chilling part of Kadare’s book, however, has to do with the actual building of the bridge. The master builder gets a certain amount of work done each day, but overnight, the foundations of the bridge are swept away. Every day, the masons rebuild the bridge, and every night, the river destroys it. The solution is clear. The master builder must immure a volunteer in the foundation of the bridge, or else the building will never succeed. Immure: as in build into the wall.

The story of the immured volunteer (it is usually a woman) is not Kadare’s invention. Nor was it even the first time I’d encountered it. Those childhood treks to our family home began with an eight-hour drive from Athens to Ioannina, a city in Epirus which like Kadare’s fictional village was a crossroads between Islamic and Western cultures during the Ottoman Empire. Minarets still rise above the glassy lake at the city’s edge, by the castle of Ali Pasha, the 19th-century ruler. To get there (which was most of the way to our home in the mountains), we had to cross the Arachthos River at Arta. The road ran beside the medieval bridge—where legend has it that the master builder immured his young daughter into the foundations in order to defeat the water’s destructive force.

Hearing this legend when I was young, I was struck by the story’s cruelty, and by the inevitability of that cruelty. No one ever dwelled, in their retelling, on how tortured the masterbuilder must have been, how aghast at his own eventual acceptance of the will of society. To me, the gruesomeness lay in what seemed the ease of the master builder’s choice. And there was the bridge, intact still, a monument to cruelty and, at the same time, to the social good of selflessness.

When I came across the same story in Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge, the experience oddly proved the truth of the legend I’d grown up with. It cemented the story as part of a wider Balkan reality. Which in fact it is. The story is known, in folklore studies, as “The Bridge of Arta”—the name for a grouping of tales that originate in Central-Eastern Europe involving the immuration of a virtuous person in order for a society to achieve a common good. There is a Bulgarian version, a Romanian version, and a few modern interpretations besides that of Kadare, including Nikos Kazantzakis’ libretto for an opera called Protomastoras (master builder).

The Three-Arched Bridge isn’t considered one of Kadare’s major works. The folkloric dimension of the narrative nudges it away from standard literary fiction. But for me, it’s a powerful text. Not only because it reworks the traditional tale in a contemporary political and cultural context, but also because it’s a fiction that creates a kind of truth.

“Calvin and Hobbes” has begun reappearing – in reruns – in newspaper funny pages around the country as a way to promote what will surely be among the big-ticket book gifts during the upcoming holiday season, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. The 1440 page, 22 and a half pound, three volume, slipcased behemoth is an attempt by the publisher Andrews McNeel to recreate the success of its similarly mammoth offering from two years ago, The Complete Far Side. Judging from the current Amazon ranking of the Calvin and Hobbes book (81), it looks like another high-priced winner for the publisher. Meanwhile, Bill Watterson, the famously reclusive artist behind the strip, is still not speaking publicly, and newspapers around the country are notifying their readers of the beloved strip’s brief return with a palpable sense of disappointment. For example in the St. Petersburg Times:We announce their return with, shall we say, bridled joy. For starters, this is not permanent; Universal Press Syndicate is offering the feature only through Dec. 31. And the strips have been published before.Will Watterson ever make a comeback, as, I suspect, so many newspaper comics fans hope, or should we just shell out the dough for this voluminous shrine to the best strip to grace the funny pages, well, in my lifetime, anyway. (With apologies to “Bloom County.”)

It’s the stuff of fiction. Ian McEwan’s mother had an affair with an army officer and became pregnant while her husband was away fighting in World War II. She ended up giving away the baby via a newspaper ad saying “Wanted, home for baby boy aged one month: complete surrender.” After her husband was killed in the war, however, she married the baby’s father and went on to have Ian, who didn’t know about his long lost brother until recently. According to an article in The Independent, McEwan’s brother David Sharp is turning the story into a book.