A Review of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

Reviews
May 14, 2006 | 6 books mentioned 14 3 min read

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coverThe more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child’s school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan’s rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.

Wanting to get an overview, I opted for John Keegan’s The Second World War, which turned out to be an ideal choice in that it was the broad, readable overview of the war that I had been looking for. (I would later read Keegan’s history of the First World War and review it.) But after Keegan, I wanted to delve into the war more, to take a narrower view and learn about some of the hundreds of smaller conflicts that, taken together, comprised the war. I turned to Rick Atkinson, not least because I had the chance to meet him twice and because I read and enjoyed his book, In the Company of Soldiers, about being embedded in Iraq.

An Army at Dawn is the first book in Atkinson’s trilogy about the liberation of Europe during WWII. This book covered North Africa, while the forthcoming books will cover Italy and France. An Army at Dawn won the Pulitzer in 2003 and deservedly so. I don’t think I’ve ever read a history book that flowed so well. The book is an incredible marriage of storytelling and historical fact, so that the reader feels both entertained and very well informed. Atkinson relied on battle memoirs and letters from soldiers to augment traditional, official sources and it shows. The war’s narrative is textured at every turn with the words of the men who were there, providing an insight I’ve not gotten from other history books. Along with using the men’s words directly, Atkinson also combines these collective observations in his own way to paint a vivid picture of the goings on. An example:

The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped for the first time in two days. A monstrous, blood-orange moon drifted behind the breaking clouds. Backlit by desultory shell fire, British victualers darted up with tins of cold plum pudding for men who spooned it down behind their pathetic fieldstone parapets. Flares rose to define the dead.

That scene occurred near Longstop Hill as the conflict raged back and forth in Tunisia. We all know about World War II, but beyond the most familiar aspects of the War – the invasion of Poland, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust – how much do we really know? For me, it didn’t go much deeper than that, but as Atkinson makes so vividly clear, the world once watched North Africa, and battles like Kesserine Pass, Mareth, and El Guettar made headlines. To me, though, the book is powerful in that it goes beyond just knowing when and where and how these battles happened, it gives us a glimpse into the lives and deaths of the men who were there. In that sense I found this book both incredibly informative while also conveying the unfathomable (to me in this day and age) emotions of war.

An Army at Dawn was one of the best books I’ve read in a while. I’ll certainly read Atkinson’s next two books when they come out, but in the meantime, as I look at my queue of books to read, I see that only Robert Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus is about WWII. I need to read more books about World War II. Any suggestions?

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

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Reviews

Baby and the Book: On Rivka Galchen’s ‘Little Labors’

Reviews
June 22, 2016 | 6 books mentioned 1 6 min read

“Literature has more dogs than babies,” Rivka Galchen writes in Little Labors, “and also more abortions.”

Put like that, the observation is startling. And though the babies are definitely out there — Galchen finds them in Beloved, The Millstone, A Personal Matter, The Fifth Child, and Dept. of Speculation for starters — the search seems to leave her (playfully) grasping at straws. Perhaps Frankenstein’s monster is her favorite fictional baby, Galchen cheekily suggests. Perhaps Rumpelstiltskin is the metaphoric firstborn of the fairy tale, and his hijinks are merely sad attempts to gain his surrogate mother’s attention.

From my own bookshelf I’ll add to the list Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a vicious and spry chronicle of her daughter’s first year. Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” features a baby of sorts. (Though one centimeter over is “Hills like White Elephants,” in which there will soon be an abortion.) Trials of parenting, once a child has achieved a certain age, give us highs of tenderness and brushstrokes of true cruelty. See Mrs. Ramsey winding her shawl around a fright-giving pig skull in To the Lighthouse; or Jason’s attempts to corral his mutinous niece in The Sound and the Fury.

And yet between courtship and marriage, or between the searchings of early adulthood and the intrigues of family life, literature seems to draw a two-year blank. A survey of 1,000 novels might produce nuanced portraits of extramarital affairs, or descriptions of all-night benders, but scant answer to the questions: Where do people come from? Under what circumstances are we born?

Why the omission?

Galchen isn’t sure. Thankfully not. Her investigations shoot off from her subject like finely-pointed spokes from a hub. The book’s split-up structure fits her purpose well. On the one hand you can occasionally imagine these short chapters as the immediate and authentic jotting-downs of a new mother reporting from the front. (For instance, Galchen on iPhone videos of her daughter, a.k.a. the puma: “footage of the puma has the unfortunate quality of making it seem as if the puma has passed away and the watcher, me, is condemned to replaying the same scene again and again and again.”) On the other hand, the book’s loose form also gives room to Galchen’s commendable analytical mind. Here, as in her novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, she is the type of writer who can show you in an outstretched arm one view of a sphere, then spin her subject in hand, and show you something quite different.

Unifying these chapters is a low-wattage but steadily glowing anxiety: that babies are not a subject of literature because babies are not interesting. To their parents and families in real life, yes, but not in general, not as a surface that will for the writer yield fruitful depths. Before she was a mother herself, Galchen confesses a nose-in-the-air dismissiveness toward a subject so patently and traditionally female. And her aloofness, she admits, didn’t stop at just babies: the authors she liked were all men (including Denis Johnson, whom she mistook for a French woman during an attempt to diversify her reading.) Two people with otherwise equal qualities would differentiate by gender: the man inevitably more magnetic in the pair. As for babies? The way Galchen tells it, you’d think it a prerequisite of youthful intellectualism to fall asleep at the mere mention of the word: God help you if you cared to go into particulars. Or put those particulars into writing.

But Galchen knows that’s not the whole story. Only recently have women begun writing with equal output of men, and with equal education to back them up. Only very recently have writers who are also women and also mothers had any significant spousal or institutional support to continue their work with children at home. Karl Ove Knausgård, for instance, whose influence is apparent in passages, manages to write about children’s birthday parties, his wife’s labor, a child’s real-time soiling of a diaper, in a way that makes those moments tremble with cosmic meaning. (Of course in Knausgård everything trembles with cosmic meaning.) Perhaps, though, the subject matter isn’t really the problem. Perhaps the problem is that while you are taking care of a baby you often don’t have time to write about taking care of a baby. Or as Galchen describes life with a newborn:

The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.

And it isn’t just time that’s the problem. Despite the fertile ground that Galchen describes — and which other new parents must certainly feel — it seems remarkably difficult to see past the “dull” label that has been affixed to infant heads. And no wonder, given a literary tradition in which an erection can boast an established history of metaphoric usage, while a menstrual cycle, for instance — with exceptions such as in Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love — is a detail that writers habitually leave out with trips to the bathroom and the buzzing of morning alarms.

Galchen, though, breathes decided life into her topic. And her writing is so good that her observations double as arguments for her choice of subject. Take, for example, this passage on a baby’s seemingly metaphysical essence:

We know babies are the only ones among us in alliance with time. They are the only incontestable assessors to power, or, at least, they are immeasurably more well-placed than their elder co-unequals. The way a baby, in a stroller, briefly resembles a fat potentate, for a moment unlovable, has something in it of the premonition. Even as to see a baby raise its chubby hand — to bow down before that random emperor can feel very right.

Or consider this, a comment on a baby’s loss of intrigue with the acquisition of language:

It’s as if babies don’t grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception. It’s striking that in the canonical Gospels, we meet Jesus as a baby and as an adult, but as a child and teenager, he is unserviceable.

There are a few places in this book where the writing does make a dangerous shift from brightly analytical to willfully cryptic (e.g., an unnecessarily complex description of a movie poster and its surrounding geography.) But that is rare. In Little Labors Galchen is recognizably the writer of the masterful short story, “The Lost Order.” Language like “random emperor” and “unserviceable” are the brilliant norm.

In interviews, Galchen has cited Sei Shōnagon’s 11th-century The Pillow Book as an influence for her work’s fragmented and miscellanea-driven structure. Shōnagon’s text gets room here, in summary form, if not thanks to what it offers on motherhood than as good evidence for the artistic worth of daily domestic life. (If an empresses’s court indeed counts as daily domestic life.) But Little Labors might be too tightly wrought, too self-conscious to really call back the flowing, pure diary feel of that book. Observations here more frequently have the ring of Susan Sontag or William Vollmann than dashed-off notes-to-self. And even the vivid glimpses of quotidian life with a child — the comments provoked by a trendy orange snowsuit, the comical tribulations involved in obtaining a passport photo for an infant, a child’s eerily suspicious fall among playmates — give the cumulative effect of toes cautiously dipped into water. Does this count as literature? the book seems to be asking itself. And this?

The result is that this quietly revolutionary little book is extremely difficult to qualify. I found myself thinking of it as a metanarrative on the genre of parenting novels: a genre, in other words, that does not yet fully exist. That is not Galchen’s fault; nor does it detract from the book. The way she writes, you feel she is onto something, as if she were peering down a long pathway of New Yorker issues to a literature ahead.

Little Labors ends as inconspicuously as it began. The child’s grandmother totes her to a senior dinner at their synagogue, where the child charms the crowd, “carrying her winter pants here and there, offering them to diners, rescinding the offer.” Couldn’t you charge $1,000 a day to bring a baby to a nursing home? the grandmother jokes afterwards. Couldn’t a family charge 20 bucks an hour to babysitters, adds the father, for the privilege of being with the baby? “Everything they said was true,” Galchen concludes, “and yet also, we know, not the case.”

Given what’s come before, it’s nearly impossible not to read this final note as a mordant analogy to the ambivalent place that the baby occupies in literature at large. After all, if novels are investigations into the workings of human existence — shouldn’t a baby, and a baby’s arrival, provide a useful key? Isn’t a baby a good place to start? In life, in literature, to borrow Galchen’s phrase, a baby should be a goldmine. And yet we know it is not the case.

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| 6 books mentioned 1 6 min read
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Reviews

Dancing with Memory: On Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

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February 17, 2012 | 6 books mentioned 4 4 min read

Memory has always been tricky; now that machines remember for us, it’s only gotten trickier. Google has already become Borges’ Fuñes, condemned to remember everything and, hence, unable to determine what’s actually worth saving. Kafka: “I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.” This is the situation we find ourselves in; when memory has been reduced to a science, the only appropriate response is to reclaim it by art. Increasingly, the novels I cherish most are those that offer tools for navigating the changing landscape of memory — thus my good fortune to have stumbled upon the Australian novelist Brian Castro.

I first heard of Castro’s Shanghai Dancing while at a conference in Sydney in 2003, where a panelist mentioned in the same breath as the German novelist W. G. Sebald. Intrigued, I bought a copy for the plane ride home, and Castro’s book took me immediately, gathered me up like few others. “Winter had descended on Shanghai,” it began. “There was no real hope of finding tomatoes. You went looking anyway. It was a cure of sorts. No, not the tomatoes, but the search.” I read nearly the entire 400-page book on that flight, enthralled and entranced, my concentration broken only by the flight attendant who kept hitting on the two girls next to me (which wasn’t all bad; he snuck them the first-class dessert, which they in turn gave to me). When I got home, I went straight to the only publisher I knew, and pressed the book into her hands and told her she needed to buy the American rights. Luckily, she did.

Castro’s obscurity in the States is a little hard to fathom. Like David Mitchell, Castro plumbs the histories of decaying empires, trawling the Eastern coasts of the Pacific Ocean, and intertwines them with vertiginous family dramas with the sensitivity and eloquence of Marilynne Robinson. Like Ondaatje, he approaches the ruin and calamities of the past without hand-wringing moralizing, instead tracing the echoes of these disasters on marginal figures otherwise forgotten. He’s won almost every literary prize Australia has to offer (short of the Booker), and at one point during the summer of 2011 the bookmaker Victor Chandler had 33:1 odds that he’d win the Nobel Prize (a long shot, to be sure, but better than the odds for A. S. Byatt or Ian McEwan).

Put simply, Shanghai Dancing is the best contemporary book in English that most Americans have never heard of. Castro’s “fictional autobiography” follows Antonio Castro (whose biography shares much with Castro the author) –forced to leave Shanghai as a child, he returns 40 years later seeking an inheritance consisting both of money and stories. Gradually, the latter will become more important, as Antonio’s investigation unearths stories of failed business enterprises and embezzlements, the atrocities of Japan’s occupation of Shanghai during the 1930’s, affairs and mistresses and illegitimate children, and even the Spanish Inquisition:

Sometimes you suffocate when you think of the past; of a life that never was, flashing up in sepia. Memory which is creamy-yellow, cracked; composed of protogallic acid, protosulphate of iron, potassium cyanide. Let’s not get too technical. Not right now. It makes for too much exposure. Still, in the dark, you remember that in Shanghai they used to wrap tomatoes in tissue paper. Like this story. Like the way everything in history is wrapped in a tissue; of words, of memories, of lies.

Castro’s solution to a surfeit of lies and contradictions, of “official histories” and other modes of obliteration is a mélange of voices, of tones that range from the literary to the technical to the groan-inducing pun — a light touch amidst what might otherwise bear down its reader. Fragmentary and sprawling, Shanghai Dancing never loses its focus — or rather, it encourages the reader to see its focus in terms of the fragmentary and the incomplete. The “Shanghai Dancing” of the title is given a dozen different slang definitions, from “a rite of passage” to syphilis, but ultimately it becomes the mode by which Castro’s novel engages with history and family memories — a narration that never settles into one voice, and which never settles for the accepted answers.

And then there are the photographs. In the wake of Sebald’s death, there have been dozens of novels that have attempted his approach of incorporating photography alongside prose, and less successful imitators have shown that one can’t simply slather photographs onto the page and expect profundity. Castro’s use of photography, like Sebald’s, plays on the inherently unstable relationship between text and image, and forces open the gaps between them to add more layers onto the novel. At one point, Castro gives us a straightforward group portrait of Antonio’s father’s jazz band from 1926: six men in tuxedos, their instruments neatly arranged in front of them. The image is staged in such a way as to lack any ambiguity; the caption that accompanies it, however, undercuts this entirely:

The Venus Café, New Year’s Eye, 1926. My father the band leader is seated. His best friend Lobo Ling stands beside him. Later they are going to kiss the girls in turn and watch the future unfurl with fireworks and bullets and take their trousers to the laundry in the morning past a line of bodies in the gutters, each shot in the back through their sleeveless pullovers.

Even with an evocation of such violence, Castro’s project is not to castigate or instruct us in politically correct history, so much as to complicate the relationship between family history and national history, the two infecting one another.

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| 6 books mentioned 4 4 min read

14 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I have three recommendations. They cover different sides of the war and require no special knowledge of the military in order to enjoy them. They are wonderfully written.

    The first is a novel, the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's about a crew of an anti-submarine corvette in the North Atlantic. I like it because you see how wearing it was. The crew gets on board in 1939 and those that live get off in 1945. The drudgery and terror are nicely described.

    Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire is great. It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read.

    Antony Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror.

    Tripp

  2. Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning above. I highly recommend it.

  3. I second anonymous' recommendation of Corelli. Just a great book.

    A few nonfiction choices. In my opinion, Beevor's "Stalingrad" is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out. Richard Overy wrote a very good overview of the Russian Front as well, in "Russia's War". William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating. John Lukacs wrote a great book about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone ("Five Days in May").

    Oddly, or perhaps not, there is a lot of good detective fiction set in Europe immediately prior to and during the war. Robert Janes and Alan Furst are both good, as is Eric Ambler (the latter two are probably better described as spy novelists). If you get nothing else from this long entry (apologies), put this one in the queue: Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title "Berlin Noir". They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular – Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good.

  5. I second the Beevor recommendations. Both are excellent.

    For a more personal look at the war, I recommend Studs Terkel's oral history of the war: The Good War. I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works.

  6. Great post. A guy like me doesn't find many readers interested in the warrior condition much these days. I recomend Flag of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Clint Eastwood is working on making it into a movie. I could make recommendations all day long, but I think you have a good start with the books already suggested.

  8. The war produced a lot of good fiction. I’d say all the famous books are still worth reading: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even A Bell for Adano and Tales of the South Pacific. A couple others I remember liking are Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. For contemporary non-fiction you won’t do much better than Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles.

  9. I'm just a few chapters into Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. His The Great War and Modern Memory is one of the best WWI books I've ever read, and so far in Wartime he is proving just as insightful on WWII. He served in WWII himself as an infantry officer and that firsthand experience adds another layer to the analysis.

  10. "Articles of War" by Nick Arvin–this new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage. There was lobbying here to have it as the "one book" selection for in our city–it may be set in WWll but it's certainly timely today.

    See you at the party! Wendi

  11. The Beevor book on the Battle of Stalingrad is indeed good, but here's a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict.

  12. I keep coming back to this thread to note down the various recommendations that are being posted. Chatten's recommendation re: German perspectives and the Eastern front reminded me of a couple more books that I wanted to mention. One of the best books that I read last year was Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS. It's an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself. I posted a mini-review of it on my blog in connection with my top ten reads from last year here. Another excellent book which covers similar territory in fiction is Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. It's been a while since I read that one but I remember finding it deeply disturbing and very thought provoking.

  13. "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer (Engrossing memoirs written by a German soldier); Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent — though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely; "A World at Arms" by Weinberg (massive and slow-going, but comprehensive); "Ordinary Men" by Browning (the banality of evil — a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting); I agree with previous posters that Beevor's books are worth your time, and also that "Fall of Berlin" is incredibly bleak; don't waste your time with "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer — it was poor history by the time it was published; also suggest you steer clear of Ambrose. One final suggestion: "The Book Thief" by Zusak (marketed as teen-lit, but a well-written).

  14. I don't know if you're still checking this, it's been a while since anyone posted but the book that got me started reading WWII stuff, that also does a great job of conveying the emotion tied to the war is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. It focuses on one event in the war, in the Pacific, but is a great read, also very well researched. I'll also differ from the previous poster and suggest reading at least the first third of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was very helpful in understanding how it all came about, although it is very dry and you have to be really interested to get through it.

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The James Joyce Book Club: Julian Rios’s The House of Ulysses

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April 19, 2011 | 6 books mentioned 1 4 min read

Ulysses is the literary equivalent of Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu or any of the world’s other great, beautiful, challenging locations.  Just as there are guides, travelogues and travel television shows designed to communicate a flavor of those locations while providing the traveler with the tools needed to actually visit them, there are guides and books hoping to create readers of Ulysses while providing those readers with the tools needed to actually read and appreciate it.  There are Gifford’s Annotated Ulysses, Blamire’s New Bloomsday Book, Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us, and many more guides, skeleton keys, and potential philosophical structures.

The House of Ulysses by Julian Rios isn’t exactly a guide or skeleton key to Ulysses, though it does offer short summaries of the episodes.  Nor is does it provide a direct intellectual structure for understanding Ulysses, though it certainly intellectually investigates Ulysses. Rather, House is a critical novel, or novelistic criticism, or some other mixture of the actions of creation and interpretation.  The House of Ulysses is essentially a book club novel with six speakers; “the Circeone” who leads the group, the silent “Macintosh,” a man whose Mac laptop displays information about the episode in question and who is a reference to one of the mysteries of Ulysses, “Professor Jones,” and “The mature reader (did she call him Ananias?), the young female reader (Babel or Belle?), and the old critic.  Let’s call them A, B, and C, for short.”

The House moves episode by episode through Ulysses with “the Cicerone” presenting the plot, historical context, and some of the many subtle threads of details that weave through the work, with “Passageways” sections in which the speakers discuss the episodes.  Though “discuss” might not be the right term as the speakers rarely directly respond to each other.  Instead, they  pile observations, critical insights, questions, philosophical flights of fancy, non-sequitorial conclusions, and bombast into a babbling tower of interpretation.  At times the “discussion”  is almost a vaudeville act; one could imagine the speakers participating in the intellectual equivalent of the exchanging of hats from Waiting for Godot.

Though the discussions never lead to anything on the same continent as a conclusion, they contain some of the best criticism about Ulysses I’ve ever read.  Whatever else can be said about House, Rios gets Ulysses at a level that allows him to encapsulate its spirit and core in single statements.  “…and it was also a way of referring to the secret unity of literature through ages and culture.”  “The revelations and knowledge emerge gradually, said A, as is so often the case in cities.”   “Ambiguity through contiguity.”  “Imitates and dynamites such enormities, so many delusions of past grandeur.”  “Words are the real hallucinogens here.”

One way to describe Ulysses is as a novel of mundane details, like the feeding of a cat, a forgotten tuning fork, and bad advertising copy.  Rios uses the “discussion” to elucidate many of the subtle details and connections in Ulysses.  “[Stephen] could have used those two pennies to settle the debt with the poor dairymaid.”  “We could also imagine as crossed the two keys Stephen and Bloom have left behind; the one for the Martello Tower, the other for 7 Eccles Street.”  “Another throwaway—Jacob for Elijah escaping in his chariot.”

The obvious question raised by a book like this is: “What if you haven’t read Ulysses?”  What if you don’t know about the dairymaid, the ad for the House of Keyes, or Throwaway the winner of the Gold Cup horse race? Unfortunately, House does not have enough content independent of Ulysses to be read and enjoyed by someone who hasn’t read Ulysses.  It has speakers, but no characters, and statements, but no plot.  Its jokes are all inside jokes.  For his part, Rios seems perfectly comfortable with writing to this particular audience, focusing his prose more on the critical than on the narrative components of his novel.

Ultimately, this means that House of Ulysses should be approached as criticism even if it uses techniques of fiction to convey its ideas.  Ulysses is a dramatic expression of the relationship between life and literature through ambitious experiments in narrative style and method.  So it makes sense for criticism about Ulysses to experiment with styles of interpretation.  Doing so allows the critic to explore and celebrate multiple levels of Ulysses within the same act of interpretation; elucidating details, making connections, and describing themes, while experimenting with the nature of communicating interpretation and thus directly engaging Ulysses’ statements on the nature of style.

I was left with one dominant effect from reading The House of Ulysses; the desire to read Ulysses again.  There are readers who have decided they will simply not read Ulysses, and no one will convince them.  There are readers who haven’t ruled it out, but Rios won’t convince them.  There are those who have it on the list, and when they get to it, Rios and his House will be there to deepen their reading.  But the readers who will get the most out of the novel are those whose familiarity with Ulysses will allow them to appreciate Rios’s criticism.  Criticism has a number of different goals, and one of them is to motivate a reader to return to the source text with new eyes.  In terms of this goal alone, The House of Ulysses is a brilliant work of criticism, one that reveals without dictating, written in the spirit of the source work, with a sense of humor and a profound love of literature.

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| 6 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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Lethem the Lyrical: You Don’t Love Me Yet

Reviews
August 8, 2007 | 6 books mentioned 4 3 min read

The salient aspect of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, is that by the end each character has found his and her level. It’s quite something: of the seven or so characters there are no winners and no losers. The author’s conscientious diplomacy imbues a basically playful book with a certain airy dignity.Hard to deny that Lethem is a virtuoso prose writer. He is a prize fighter sparring with plot lines in a ring of words. Like the best boxers, Lethem masters the ring – makes it his home – and approaches his craft without fear of getting hurt. Language is for him a sweet science. But just as interesting as the stick and move of the words in You Don’t Love Me Yet is the nature of the story. I was impressed with the way in which Lethem approached the complexities and complications inherent to crafting a female lead character, one who comes across as rather emotionally ambiguous – as opposed to Good. Or maybe Lucinda, 29, is simply young.Lucinda is the bass player in the band, Monster Eyes, a position she relishes for good reason: she’s good at it, self-taught and attuned to the varied musical voices that comprise the group. But she is impulsive, indulgent, and easily taken in by The Complainer, a man she meets over what is meant to be an anonymous call-line for which she is an operator. The implication is that Lucinda is both the creative catalyst of the band and also its Yoko Ono. Although her bass playing is the glue that ties the band’s songs together, and The Complainer’s words the inspiration for the lyrics in the band’s most popular number, her lusty infatuation with the seductive older man corrupts the band’s artistic integrity. But along the way Monster Eyes does get a moment in the sun.I “read” this book by listening to it on 5 CDs, performed by the author, unabridged. I use the word performed for good reason. Lethem has innate ability in this area too. He is able to read his work without self-consciousness and with a satisfying definitiveness, a pitch-perfect and distinct voice for each character. Bedwin, the band’s guitar player and musical soul, phrases everything he says as a question. It’s funny, but it also adds depth to the character, who is shy and introverted. Meanwhile The Complainer speaks in lugubrious platitudes. Because we hear The Complainer’s words through Lucinda’s ear, one trained for catchiness and not so much profundity, they initially come across as penetrating. But as the book goes on, insights such as “You can’t be deep without a surface,” in some ways the tart and tangy center of the book’s social wisdom, seem trite and tedious. The act of listening to Lethem read his book seemed appropriate because the book is based around sound, the sound of people making music, both literally and, yes, figuratively. I highly recommend the audio version of You Don’t Love Me Yet, while wondering if I would have gotten as much out of it if I had merely read it off the page.The book contains one or two very fine descriptions of ensemble music-making (and a not-inconsiderable dose of sexual steaminess, mm). And yet, one provocative suggestion in Lethem’s construct is that rock and roll lyrics are often shallow, transparent. The implication is that the resonance of rock lyrics depends not so much on objective quality – complexity, poetic feeling – so much as indelibility, the rhythmic imprint of the words on the mind, a pattern, a universally recognizable hook. And indeed, Lethem isolates and describes exactly that quality of good rock and roll lyrics that appeals to individuals: a song you connect with is “about you.” The irony is that those lyrics actually capture a colloquial value that is meant to appeal to many. Rock lyrics are rarely lyrical, but when they’re good, you know it. Twist and Shout; Fake Plastic Trees – same principle.My resolution, the turnaround if you will, is that Jon Lethem has written another very readable (and perfectly listenable) book. I could expound on the L.A.-ness of it all, but will instead assume that this setting is an aberrant and tangential element of the story. It really could be New York. And I think no matter where your heart is, it is an appealing kind of tale, made for you, me, the cool kids in Silverlake who play in the band, and everybody else.

Reviews
| 6 books mentioned 4 3 min read
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Reviews

Made of Sterner Stuff: On Roald Dahl and ‘Love From Boy’

Reviews
September 8, 2016 | 6 books mentioned 5 min read

As a fellow English boarding school veteran, I have always felt a certain kinship with Roald Dahl. His famous autobiography of his childhood, Boy, memorably captures the hierarchical structure of boarding school life, and although Dahl’s experiences were somewhat more brutal than my own (I was never forced to thaw a frozen lavatory seat with my own posterior) there is a definite sense of recognition in reading about his childhood days.

However, upon reading Love from Boy, a newly published collection of Dahl’s letters to his mother, I feel as though I may have to discard any claim to familiarity. As it turns out, there are even more differences between the boarding schools of the 1930s and those of the 2000s than were previously evident to me, and, if I learned anything about myself reading Love From Boy, it is that, had I been unfortunate enough to live in Dahl’s day, I probably would have ended up like “poor little Ford,” a briefly-mentioned fatality of one of the school’s many measles epidemics.

If the measles did not claim me, there would have been no shortage of other possibilities for a premature snuffing-out. Dahl, made of far sterner stuff, and arguably the most effortlessly macho of all 20th-century writers (including the posturing Ernest Hemingway), survived them all: being forced to fight a fire in his boarding house and then spending the night in the “black and charcoaly” building on “brown and nasty” beds; coming under fire when a student accidentally used live ammunition instead of blanks in a field-day training exercise; and experimenting with eating boiled lichen on a school trip to Newfoundland due to a lack of sufficient food.

Dahl detailed all of these horrors in regular letters to his beloved mother, and continued to write to her faithfully up until her death. Donald Sturrock, author of the acclaimed Dahl biography, Storyteller, collects a selection of over 600 of these surviving letters, dating from 1925 to 1965, in this new volume, entitled Love From Boy, after the phrase Dahl affectionately used to sign off his letters from school.

After he left boarding school, Dahl’s adventures continued and became even more outrageous. He moved to Africa, working in Tanzania and Kenya for Shell, where he contracted malaria, fought off a black mamba snake, and invented the game of strip darts. When war broke out in 1939, Dahl trained to become a pilot in Egypt, Iraq, and Greece. He shot down at least five enemy planes during the war before crash landing in the Libyan desert and being sent home to England to convalesce.

Following a chance encounter in a private London club, he was given a curious job offer and moved to Washington D.C. to work for the RAF. His military assignments there, as well as his own blossoming success as a freelance writer, soon launched him to the peak of American high society: he played tennis with Vice President Henry A. Wallace (winning 6-0, 6-0, 6-0), joined President Roosevelt for Thanksgiving dinner, went on a date with Ginger Rogers, attended a party with Charlie Chaplin, and worked on a major motion picture with Walt Disney. What is most extraordinary about this is the fact that it all took place decades before he found his ultimate success as a children’s writer, which would not come until 1961 with the publication of James and the Giant Peach.

These remarkable events (which must surely constitute one of the most interesting biographies of any writer) are all detailed in Dahl’s letters. Although one might feel a sense of unease reading or critically analyzing personal letters that were never meant for publication, Dahl’s may prove an exception since, as Sturrock argues, they were always written “primarily to entertain.” Therefore, although there might be a few personal details, such as inquiries about relatives, all in all the letters are highly accessible for those otherwise unfamiliar with Dahl’s life, and primarily document his extraordinary anecdotes in the ever-humorous style of a born entertainer.

My personal favorite of his many comical descriptions concerns the two elderly patients he shares a hospital room with after recovering from surgery, who fart “quite openly and unashamedly just as though it was like saying good morning.” For those (like myself) who are fond of these kinds of immature observations and jokes, there is plenty more to be found in Love from Boy, including Dahl’s description of a statue of a bison whose penis is painted bright red by vandals — “a very fine sight;” a picture by Dahl of “Hitler fucking himself,” annotated with an instruction to “note the smile of ecstasy on his face;” and a warning against the painting of toilet seats, lest some unfortunate “adhere to it,” followed by a conclusion that this would be “an excellent cure for constipation.” (Another difference between Dahl and myself: I would never dare to record any of these things in a letter to my mother, for fear she would be scandalized to the point of fainting, or worse.)

Although the letters themselves are fascinating and consistently funny, if the book has one flaw it may be that Sturrock tries too hard to force his theme of motherhood. It is clear that Dahl and his mother had a devoted relationship, but none of her letters survive, making the conversation in this collection entirely one-sided. Sturrock’s conclusion that Dahl’s mother “was an essential and invaluable foil” for the development of his writing is something we just have to take his word for. As a noted biographer of Dahl’s, it is likely that Sturrock is privy to more insights into her character than we are, so his conclusions may be valid — they are just not made immediately evident from what we have collected in Love from Boy.

Nonetheless, the book does a valiant job of collecting these letters for the first time and providing sound biographical context for them. For fans of Dahl’s writing there is also an additional layer of enjoyment, as one can seek out potential origins for elements later found in his fictional works. One obvious example is the cat, Mrs. Taubsypuss, whom Dahl and his fellow Shell workers took care of in Dar es Salaam — she later gives her name to the U.S. President’s cat in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Other more subtle details, such as Dahl’s descriptions of flying, may be the catalyst for scenes from his final book, The Minpins, which features miniature people flying on the backs of birds. Likewise, his eventual disillusionment with high society excesses (“Dinner of course was eaten off gold plate, but it tasted just the same”) may contain the seeds for the spoiled and greedy consumer-obsessed characters that populate Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Reading Love from Boy, one gets the sense that it was inevitable that Dahl would become a great writer. Not only did he get plenty of practice, composing a huge number of letters, all in a style that served to sharpen his skill as a humorist; but he also lived more in the 10-year period from his leaving school to the end of the war than most of us do in a lifetime. He carried with him a rich memory of innumerable fascinating anecdotes and ideas — enough to fill countless books. Love from Boy provides a wonderful summary of this extraordinary life and an intimate insight into his development as a writer. It will prove a charming read for anyone who has ever enjoyed his work. Plus (did I mention?) it also has lots of rude bits, which is always a nice bonus.

Reviews
| 6 books mentioned 5 min read
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