Robert Weibezahl

NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Keats

Review by Robert Weibezahl

John Keats exists in many minds as an effete, epigraphic nature lover (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”) rather than the spirited, earthy man he was. The profile that historian and literary critic Lucasta Miller assembles in her engrossing Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph is a welcome corrective that seeks a truer understanding of the life and work of the iconic British poet.

Keats’ life was short (he died in 1821 at 25), and some of its details are scant (the exact day and place of his birth, for example, are sketchy), but as in her previous literary study The Brontë Myth, Miller doesn’t offer a full-fledged biography in Keats. Instead, as the subtitle plainly states, she looks closely at nine of his most representative works in chronological order, threading in literary analysis as she unspools the pertinent life events that may have inspired or unconsciously influenced each piece.

Those seeking a truer understanding of John Keats will welcome this invigorating reappraisal of his short life and enduring poetry.

Miller is an avowed Keatsian, but one of the strengths of this study is her refreshing willingness to call out the poet for some inferior writing just as often as she extols the brilliance of his more enduring masterworks. The Keats she presents here was a work in progress, cut off in his prime (or perhaps before), and Miller is quick to point out the peculiarities, and sometimes failures, of even his most revered poems. This candor adds to rather than detracts from the affectionate picture she paints of a young man who alternated between ambition and insecurity: a poet who routinely compared his own work to Shakespeare’s yet wrote his own self-effacing epitaph as, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Keats embraced the pleasures of life and art while wrestling with childhood demons. He was born in the waning years of the 18th century, into England’s newly formed middle class, and his father died under suspicious circumstances when the future poet was 8. He was fully orphaned by 14 but was effectively abandoned by his mother years earlier, when she ran off with a much younger man. Keats may have been somewhat emotionally crippled by parental longing, Miller suggests, but he was also a full participant in day-to-day life, devoted to his brothers and sister as well as to a passel of equally devoted friends.

The extraordinary language with which Keats fashioned his then-radical poetry percolates with striking neologisms and is laced with coded sexuality. Indeed, Keats himself could be profligate in matters of sex, drugs and money (he abandoned an apprenticeship to a doctor), and Miller sharply centers his life in the context of its time, detailing the moral ambiguities and excesses of the Regency period that would later be whitewashed by the Victorians.

While the U.S. publication of this superb volume misses the 200th anniversary of Keats’ death by a year, it is never a bad time to revisit a poetic genius. Miller has given us a thing of beauty, indeed.

Historian and critic Lucasta Miller assembles a candid yet affectionate portrait of poet John Keats in this creative blend of literary analysis and biography.
NonfictionLiteratureEssays

Burning Questions

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Women wearing red cloaks and face-concealing bonnets at political protests in recent years speak to the enduring popularity and relevance of Margaret Atwood’s most well-known book, The Handmaid’s Tale. In a 30th-anniversary essay about the novel, featured in her delectable new collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, Atwood lays no claim to prescience, but of course, she is just being humble. (She is, after all, Canadian.) With an inquiring mind and the razor-sharp intellect to fuel it, this cherished and award-winning writer, now 82, is never afraid to push boundaries or speak her mind about the things that matter to her and, collectively, to many of us. What may surprise casual readers of Atwood’s work is the way her mind is honed by a delicious wit that makes reading her thoughts on a wide array of subjects as entertaining as it is edifying.

There are more than 60 wide-ranging pieces gathered in this capacious collection: essays, speeches, reviews, introductions and appreciations. Somehow the book manages to be both an enchanting hodgepodge (in the best sense) and a cohesive amalgam of a writer’s vision. Many of the entries tap into one or both of Atwood’s primary concerns: literature and environmental science. The daughter of a scientist, Atwood has true bona fides in the latter category and has been sounding the call for climate change awareness for some time, such as with the MaddAddam trilogy.

In addition to providing invaluable insight into her own work, Atwood digs with enthusiasm into Shakespeare, Kafka, Dickens, Dinesen, Bradbury and the ancient Greeks. She writes with cleareyed affection about women slightly older than her who paved the way, such as Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rachel Carson, a clear favorite, makes numerous appearances, and the book ends with a brief reflection on the 2020 death of conservationist writer Barry Lopez.

This is the third collection of occasional nonfiction pieces Atwood has assembled over her 60-year career, and she divides it into five sections reflecting societal changes over the course of the last two post-9/11 decades. Some of the pieces are quite current—there is a piece on quarantine, for instance—but as one might expect, Atwood avoids a straightforward or navel-gazing approach even when contemplating our current state of affairs. Instead, the COVID-19 piece hearkens back to the everyday realities of quarantine (against diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough) when she was a child in the 1940s.

While no means an autobiography, Burning Questions scatters a generous enough smattering of personal recollections and details throughout to grant intriguing, often charming insight into Atwood’s singular life, from girlhood to her life partner’s death in 2019. Years ago, a lesser-known Toronto-based writer told me that “Peggy” Atwood was always a welcome—and hilarious—guest at dinner parties. That appraisal stayed with me, and upon reading Burning Questions, there can be little doubt it’s true.

Read our review of the audiobook, which boasts a huge cast of notable narrators.

A bracing, entertaining collection of nonfiction pieces further illuminates Margaret Atwood’s inimitable and indomitable mind.
NonfictionBiography

Lorraine Hansberry

Review by Robert Weibezahl

In many respects, Lorraine Hansberry could be called a one-hit wonder. But that hit, A Raisin in the Sun, is an iconic masterwork that continues to speak to audiences more than 60 years after its premiere. Hansberry was only 29 when she seemingly came out of nowhere to become the first Black female playwright produced on Broadway. Six years later, she died tragically young, precluding further literary greatness. Charles J. Shields, best known as a biographer of Harper Lee, delves into the short yet significant life of this great writer in Lorraine Hansberry, an evenhanded and informative study that reveals truths about a woman whose complexities were largely erased from the public portrait she and her heirs fashioned.

Shields has not written a glitzy showbiz biography that takes readers behind the scenes of the theater world. In fact, the triumph of A Raisin in the Sun only takes up a couple of chapters near the end of the book, and Hansberry and the team that mounted the show—including her cheerleader husband, Bob Nemiroff—were Broadway outsiders. Instead, the story Shields tells is of a smart, reserved and gifted young woman from the Black upper class who applied her intelligence, and sometimes anger, to a quest for her authentic personal identity in midcentury America.

Hers was a life of confounding contradictions. The Hansberry family wealth was amassed by Lorraine’s father, a Chicago real estate tycoon who fought racial covenants all the way up to the Supreme Court yet was himself a slumlord who preyed on Black tenants. His daughter’s rebellion manifested in part through her embrace of communist ideals (which triggered FBI surveillance), yet she did not refuse the monthly profit checks she received from the family business. Married to a Jewish man, Hansberry eventually came to terms with her lesbianism but stayed married. While she was at the center of the Black cultural dialogue in her time—counting Paul Robeson, James Baldwin and Alice Childress among her friends and influences—she maintained that her most famous play at its heart was about class rather than race.

To paint the full landscape of the time and place that Hansberry inhabited, Shields often detours from the writer’s immediate story to place the many supporting players in context. These side trips are generally informative, although some seem extraneous and interrupt the flow of the main narrative. Shields raises interesting questions about others’ contributions to Hansberry’s work—particularly those of original A Raisin in the Sun director Lloyd Richards, and of Hansberry’s husband, who worked doggedly to shape her posthumous image and keep her literary legacy alive—but the answers remain largely unexplored. Overall, this equitable portrait of Hansberry is thoughtful and deftly rendered, a welcome corrective for the carefully curated and sanitized version that has long constituted fans’ received wisdom.

An admiring portrait of the great American playwright Lorraine Hansberry lays bare both her greatness and her complications.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Dante

Review by Robert Weibezahl

“Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third,” T.S. Eliot said. James Joyce called Dante Alighieri “my spiritual food,” and Russian poet Anna Akhmatova learned Italian just to read him. The influence of Dante and his Divine Comedy permeates Western history and, clearly, the consciousness of even the most modern writers. And yet the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021 went largely unmarked, at least in the United States. Just a few months tardy, Alessandro Barbero’s Dante: A Life arrives on these shores, translated from the Italian by Allan Cameron. Surprisingly, this is the first book by Barbero, a highly regarded historian and novelist in his native country, to be published in America.

Seven hundred years after Dante Alighieri’s death, a new biography parses the elusive life of one of civilization’s greatest poets.

Many of the details of Dante’s life, even the date of his birth, are lost to time, but Barbero is an indefatigable detective when it comes to piecing together a narrative from the historical record. His mission is not merely to sketch the possibilities of Dante’s private life but, perhaps even more so, to place Dante within the context of his times. The turn of the 14th century was a turbulent age on the Italian peninsula, and Dante was a native son of Florence, that most powerful city-state. Though likely of humble origins, the Alighieri clan had high aspirations, and Dante ambitiously immersed himself in the politics of the day. He aligned himself with the Guelphs, who supported the Pope, against the emperor-supporting Ghibellines. This divisiveness further fractured as the Guelphs themselves split into warring factions, which eventually led to Dante being banished from his beloved city. He lost his land, social status and wife and spent the last 20 years of his life in exile.

Dante’s literary legend has long been tied to his muse, Beatrice—a young woman whom he only encountered on two occasions, nine years apart. Again, Barbero plumbs the historical record to flesh out Beatrice’s story and discern how her veritable non-relationship with Dante nonetheless inspired some of the world’s great love poetry. In what might be viewed as an early form of metafiction, Dante made himself a character in the Divine Comedy, and so Barbero seeks clues to his familial and political relationships from within the pages of the epic poem, as well.

Still, given the gaps in the record, Barbero’s Dante is less biography or literary study than medieval history as seen through the foggy lens of one seminal man’s life. It raises the inevitable question that always surrounds genius: From where did this ordinary man spring, only to go on to create one of humanity’s masterpieces? Despite his erudition, Barbero is no better equipped to answer that question than his predecessors, but his well-timed work reminds us of Dante’s greatness and, perhaps, will send us back to the original source material to puzzle out the answer for ourselves.

Seven hundred years after Dante Alighieri’s death, a new biography parses the elusive life of one of civilization’s greatest poets.
FictionShort Stories

The City of Mist

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose bestselling works were beloved by readers around the globe, died too young, at 55, in June 2020. Before his death, he collected a slim volume of stories as a parting gift for his fans. Varying from two to 40 pages in length, the tales in The City of Mist are filled with classic Ruiz Zafón elements: absorbing, old-fashioned storytelling, atmospheric settings and characters who exist in the margins between reality and imagination.

Ruiz Zafón’s fiction, exemplified by the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet that began with The Shadow of the Wind, draws freely on the conventions of many genres—gothic, fantasy, historical romance, noir. The 11 pieces in The City of Mist follow this pattern, tapping into a sense of ethereal mystery and otherworldliness. Some characters will be familiar to avid readers of Ruiz Zafón’s oeuvre, and most of the stories are set in the fictional version of Barcelona that has long been his literary terrain.

The final, posthumous work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón dwells in the familiar, fantastical literary terrain that he claimed as his own.

Because Ruiz Zafón was a writer known for burly, sprawling narratives in a style hearkening back a century or two, it is interesting to see him working in miniature. The shortest stories here are mere whimsical episodes, and one senses that The City of Mist, which has the feel of a writer’s sketchbook, comprises nuggets the author intended for future exploration in novels. This fragmentary quality, however, in no way diminishes Ruiz Zafón’s storytelling charms, which are on full display especially in a number of the longer pieces. “The Prince of Parnassus,” the longest story and the one placed dead center in the volume, is an apocryphal tale within a tale about Cervantes, a journey to Rome to save a young woman and a Faustian bargain with a shadowy, devilish figure. “Men in Grey” cleverly makes use of noir tropes while following the exploits of a political assassin during the Spanish Civil War. In another story, the eccentric Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí takes a voyage to Manhattan to meet with an elusive millionaire in hopes of securing financing to complete his legendary cathedral. One can only imagine, and lament, where Ruiz Zafón might have taken these conceits had he lived longer.

Ruiz Zafón luxuriated in an old-school narrative style and was an indisputable master of the form. If he had one blind spot as a writer, it may have been in his portrayal of female characters. The women in these stories, young or old, are likely to be either virginal or fallen (sometimes, oddly, both), serving as mysterious objects of veneration or temptation but rarely as multifaceted human beings. This omission or oversight often leaves the reader yearning for a little more depth. Nonetheless, for the legion of fans of this mesmerizing storyteller, The City of Mistt will not disappoint.

The final, posthumous work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón dwells in the familiar, fantastical literary terrain that he claimed as his own.
NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Everything and Less

Review by Robert Weibezahl

There is little question that Amazon has radically changed publishing—in both the way readers read and writers deliver their work. But has Amazon’s digital platform changed literature itself? Stanford professor Mark McGurl believes it has. His probing new book, Everything and Less, offers an intriguing examination of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) as a tentacle of the larger megabeast that is Amazon and how the digital platform has been shaped by the business ethos of the Everything Store.

An award-winning literary critic scrutinizes how the novel may be forever changed by the age of Amazon.

Amazon, of course, started as an online bookstore, and while it’s now responsible for more than half of all book sales, those sales are a shrinking piece of the company’s ever-expanding pie of profits. But with KDP, which McGurl is careful to label as a platform rather than a publisher, the company has “partnered” with hundreds of thousands of writers, further increasing its stranglehold on the reading public.

Unlike a traditionally published writer, those who self-publish on KDP need to be entrepreneurs as much as, or perhaps even more than, artists. Their work, at least as assessed by Amazon, is a product. Readers are customers. The same principles that make customers click on a suggested product have been transferred to the selling of digital books. The result is a proliferation of series and a tilt toward genre fiction, which best accommodates serial storytelling. Literary fiction, McGurl finds, is not the bailiwick of the successful KDP writer-entrepreneur. Indeed, nowadays, the saga-inspired territory once confined to the fantasy and science fiction genres has taken root in unlikely places, especially romance novels and their kinkier erotica siblings. (One of McGurl’s most engaging sections looks at Fifty Shades of Grey and its seemingly millions of KDP imitators as heirs to the marriage plot novels of Jane Austen and Henry James.)

McGurl delivers the occasional sharp quip, but overall he is evenhanded in his assessment of the unimaginable amount of self-published KDP “product” he presumably had to slog through to write this book. He equitably includes examples of the reverse flow of KDP’s influence, as well, as when “serious” writers such as Colson Whitehead and Viet Thanh Nguyen infuse their work with genre tropes.

But the book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It neither predicts nor condemns the future. The scholarly McGurl does not always wear his erudition lightly, and portions of the book require some heavy lifting on the part of the general reader. Still, Everything and Less will speak to those who submerge themselves—whether as writers or readers, entrepreneurs or customers—into the KDP landscape, while offering much to think about, a fair bit of it dire, for those who cherish traditional publishing and still place some value in the role that gatekeepers have long played in the book industry.

An award-winning literary critic scrutinizes how the novel may be forever changed by the age of Amazon.
NonfictionFictionLiteratureClassicsArt

Unique offerings for the devoted book lover

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary for the bibliophiles on your list, here’s a collection of notable new releases that includes books about books, artwork made from books, a richly illustrated classic and more. Because books really do make the best gifts!

The singular mind of Umberto Eco takes readers on a tour of fabled places in literature and folklore in The Book of Legendary Lands. In this lavishly illustrated book, Eco explores “lands and places that, now or in the past, have created chimeras, utopias, and illusions because a lot of people really thought they existed or had existed somewhere.” From Atlantis to Camelot, 21B Baker Street to Dracula’s castle, he contemplates why these places are invented and why our imaginations have embraced them. The more than 300 color illustrations range from the canvases of Bosch, Rossetti and Magritte, to illustrations by Arthur Rackham and N.C. Wyeth, to movie stills and book jackets. At once intellectually stimulating and visually stunning, The Book of Legendary Lands is a distinctive gift for the serious reader.

BOOKS INTO ART

Some book lovers may shudder at the prospect of their precious books being “altered, sculpted, carved, and transformed” into something other than, well, books, but there can be no denying that the creations made by artists and displayed in Laura Heyenga’s Art Made from Books are dazzling to behold. Twenty-seven artists who use books as their primary material have fashioned everything from jewelry to chess sets out of all different kinds of books. Some, like Cara Barer, transform the books themselves into sculptural objects, while others, such as Jennifer Collier, make mock household items like shoes and knives. Alex Queral carves celebrity faces into phone books. Better seen than described, Art Made from Books is whimsical and inspirational, and begs the question—could any of these gorgeous artworks be made with e-readers?

ILLUMINATING THE DARKNESS

From its very title, Joseph Conrad’s masterwork, Heart of Darkness, conjures the murky jungle of the Congo and Marlow’s dark passage deep into the human psyche. But, in the arresting artwork by Matt Kish in this new illustrated edition of the classic (a follow-up to his art-enhanced edition of Moby-Dick), there is as much light as darkness. When he was contemplating how to convey the story pictorially, Kish realized that “Conrad’s Africa, the scene of so much death, so much killing, so much horror, would not be a dark place in the literal sense.” The 100 drawings are awash with bright acid greens, diseased yellows and blood reds. The haunting images have a Day of the Dead quality, with skeletal figures and skull-like faces. The effect is at once unsettling and compelling, inviting readers to consider a fresh interpretation of this ageless, seminal work.

TALE OF A BELOVED GARDEN

Beatrix Potter’s first and most famous book originally bore the longer title of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor’s Garden, and as Marta McDowell makes abundantly clear in her lovely book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, the lure of the garden was an essential aspect of the writer’s life. Potter bought her beloved Hill Top Farm, in England’s Lake District, when she was nearly 40, and in time transformed it into her own version of paradise. This volume is a cornucopia of delights for anyone who shares Potter’s love of gardening, as well as those who simply love her enduring work. McDowell provides a congenial biography of Potter as observed through the prism of her gardens, and follows her through a year in the garden. There is valuable information for travelers planning to visit not only Hill Top, but also other English gardens that shaped Potter’s horticultural passions, and an appendix that details all of the plants Potter grew and those she featured in her books. Copiously illustrated with photographs and Potter’s own drawings, this charming work is a must for the book-loving gardener or garden-loving bibliophile.

COLLECTING THE COLLECTIVE

A Circus of Puffins? A Shiver of Sharks? What lover of words doesn’t relish the cleverness of collective nouns? A band of four friends who form Woop Studios (two of whom were graphic designers on the Harry Potter movies) offer the dazzling, richly colorful A Compendium of Collective Nouns. From an Armory of Aardvarks to a Zeal of Zebras—and everything in between—they have compiled some 2,000 examples. Full-page, full-color illustrations with a cheery retro feel are supplemented with dozens of smaller pictures scattered throughout the text. A Charm of Words to delight logophiles, for sure.

WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED

As a reader, you probably already know that books can be good for what ails you. Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin have taken this notion to the logical next step with The Novel Cure. Modeled on a home medical handbook, this witty compendium prescribes just the right book—751 different remedies in all—to combat both physical and psychological disorders. Lost your job? Read Bartleby, the Scrivener or Lucky Jim. Nauseated? Try Brideshead Revisited (if not for Sebastian’s nausea, the authors point out, Charles Ryder would never have gone to Brideshead). The Debt to Pleasure will help the gluttonous, and Crime and Punishment will help assuage guilt. For ailments without a simple cure—the common cold, fear of flying, snoring—the authors supply lists of the 10 best books to get you through.

If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary for the bibliophiles on your list, here’s a collection of notable new releases that includes books about books, artwork made from books, a richly illustrated classic and more. Because books really do make the best gifts!

The…

Fiction

A return to old-fashioned storytelling

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

The many collections of short stories that are arriving in time for summer reading are an indication that the genre is not just alive and well, it's thriving. And for readers who long ago tired of the kind of postmodern, ironic stories that usurped the pages of literary quarterlies in the 1980s and '90s, the good news is that the old-fashioned art of storytelling seems to be making a strong comeback. Some new collections by familiar writers and a couple of noteworthy debuts are among the best of a shelf full of possibilities.

Antonya Nelson was selected by The New Yorker as one of 20 best writers for the 21st century, which is a nearly impossible accolade for any writer to live up to. Hyperbole aside, though, Nelson is a masterful writer, and Female Trouble, her fourth collection of stories, is filled with compelling, sometimes funny tales of love and loss and, well, trouble. Nelson's characters are so well-defined and her plots so well-delineated that it often seems as if she manages to cram a whole novel's worth of treasures into the 20 pages of a story. That's the case here with stories like Incognito, in which a woman re-encounters a brash, outrageous and decidedly fictional alter ego she and her high school friends created when they wanted to do the things good girls didn't do, or "The Other Daughter," about the less-than-perfect sister of a beautiful, if tragic, prom queen type. In the aptly named title story, a befuddled man gets involved with three very different women, two of whom just happen to be patients at the local psychiatric hospital. But he is unable to commit, it seems, even to the committed. As a writer, Nelson makes no false moves. She understands and empathizes with all of her characters from the inside out and, thanks to her assured talents, so do we.

Anyone who enjoyed Mark Winegardner's sprawling urban novel Crooked River Burning might be surprised, and pleased, to discover that he can also write polished little gems in the short story form. As with the novel, many of the stories in That's True of Everybody are set in or around the author's native Cleveland. Others are set in unassuming Midwestern and Southern locations, where ordinary people go about the unadorned business of getting through life. Some, like the bowling alley owner who has lost the essential connection with his two grown daughters in "Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home," manage it with an iota of sangfroid. Others, like the teenage bride faced with an impotent groom in "Song for a Certain Girl," or the college dropout shacking up with a pool hall pick-up in Travelers Advisory, take their lumps and move on. After all, what else can they do? That is the underlying question in many of the stories by Winegardner an author who sympathizes with, but never patronizes, his characters. Less sympathetic, though, are three wickedly acerbic, nominally interconnected stories grouped as Tales of Academic Lunacy: 1991-2001, in which he skewers the insular groves of academia. There is The Visiting Poet and his serial conquests, The Untenured Lecturer whose sorry writing career leads him astray and Keegan's Load, in which an aging, ineffectual professor frustrates the rest of the faculty's aims and ambitions. Since Winegardner himself is a creative writing professor at Florida State, we need not doubt the accuracy of these unforgiving and entertaining tales.

Adam Haslett takes his characters from the fringes of society the repressed, the mentally ill, the orphaned, the grieving and the dying. But do not be deterred by this dark fact, for his You Are Not a Stranger Here is a very impressive debut. Haslett is an expert storyteller, who draws the reader in with his compassion, then methodically unravels unexpected truths. In his stories we meet a young man shutting out the world as he succumbs to AIDS, a boy so thrown by his mother's death that he can find solace only in brutally submissive sex with a hateful classmate, a callow doctor marooned in a rural practice whose own perceived suffering pales against the mental anguish of a depressed farm wife. In many of the stories, there is a connection made between two unlikely souls, a connection that, if it does not provide salvation, at least provides some measure of comfort. In "The Storyteller," a man adrift in Scotland meets an odd woman whose dying son supplies a purpose to go on. A high school boy forges an unusual relationship with an old woman battling the demons of memory in The Volunteer. Haslett's perceptive stories are far-flung in setting London, New England, Scotland, California but his themes are grounded in one place: the troubled human mind.

Madeline Thien is a talented young Canadian writer, whose first collection Simple Recipes arrives on this side of the border heralded by none other than that author of glorious short stories, Alice Munro. Though she is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants, Thien doesn't much use this uncommon cultural upbringing in her stories, which is bit disappointing. Only the title story and the lengthy "A Map of the City" contain direct references to her Asian-Canadian background. Instead, Thien's wistful stories are more universal explorations of family and yearning. A number of them feature an ailing, absent or emotionally unavailable mother and/or an outwardly gentle father with a malicious streak. Her writing is spare, her observations direct and perceptive. At times she experiments with form, as in Dispatch, which is told in the second person. The strength of Thien's stories lies in the way she captures the distorted perspective of childhood and the confusion that accompanies the coming of age. By broadening her concerns beyond small domestic tragedies, Madeline Thien should continue to be a writer who has something to say and her own way of saying it.

 

A frequent contributor to BookPage, Robert Weibezahl lives in Southern California.

The many collections of short stories that are arriving in time for summer reading are an indication that the genre is not just alive and well, it's thriving. And for readers who long ago tired of the kind of postmodern, ironic stories that usurped the pages of literary quarterlies in the 1980s and '90s, the good news is that the old-fashioned art of storytelling seems to be making a strong comeback. Some new collections by familiar writers and a couple of noteworthy debuts are among the best of a shelf full of possibilities.

NonfictionMemoir

Well Read: There and back again

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

The work of Greek-born Swedish writer Theodor Kallifatides is not widely known in the United States. But based on the merits of his charming, late-life memoir, Another Life, that shameful wrong needs to be righted. Slender in size, yet anything but slight in scope, this inviting meditation on age, writing and sense of place, beautifully translated into English by Marlaine Delargy, is witty, profound and thoroughly captivating.

When Kallifatides turned 77 a few years ago, totally spent after producing more than 40 books, he decided it was time to retire as a writer. That decision would prove troublesome for a man whose identity and purpose were inextricably tied to the act of writing. What transpired was a kind of spiritual journey that took Kallifatides both mentally into the past and physically to the central places of his life as he sought a new objective.

The first of these places is his longtime studio in the heart of Stockholm, where he continued to go each day even after making the decision not to write. When he ultimately gives up the office and stays home each day, it proves a jarring experience—not only because of the routines he must abandon, but also because he suddenly finds himself negotiating for space with his wife. Worst of all, he feels he is losing touch with the people and the rhythms of the city in which he was formerly and quite naturally immersed.

He and his wife then head to their summer cottage in a lovely coastal town that has lost population over the 40-some years they have stayed there. Despite the beauty and memories of the place—or perhaps because of them—Kallifatides feels the emptiness within himself growing.

Finally, he travels to Athens, Greece, and to the village where he grew up, where the local school is to be renamed in his honor. He encounters a country that has changed greatly since his departure 50 years before, not least of all because of Greece’s financial crisis and the widening gap between rich and poor.

This inviting meditation on age, writing and sense of place is thoroughly captivating.

Despite the aging writer’s ennui, Another Life is far from somber. Kallifatides is a companionable and funny guide (his 13-year-old grandson states that at Kallifatides’ funeral he will remember his grandfather not as a great writer but as the funniest person he knows—a declaration that brings tears to the old man’s eyes). So while Kallifatides ponders the dilemmas that plague Sweden and Greece and beyond—intolerance toward migrants, materialism, the growing propensity to offend others in the name of free speech—his manner is rueful, but not pessimistic. His friendly encounters with others—on the streets, in cafes—speak to our shared humanity and concurrent desires for a better life.

In the end, as he witnesses Greek high school students performing Aeschylus in his honor, his life as an expat comes full circle, and he reconnects with his native tongue after years of speaking and writing in Swedish. The floodgates open, and he begins to write again—for the first time in many years—in Greek. These writings eventually become Another Life. “You can say what is to be said in every language of the world,” Kallifatides writes in the final pages of this exquisite book, but some things are best expressed in your mother tongue.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The work of Greek-born Swedish writer Theodor Kallifatides is not widely known in the United States. But based on the merits of his charming, late-life memoir, Another Life, that shameful wrong needs to be righted. Slender in size, yet anything but slight in scope, this inviting meditation on age, writing and sense of place, beautifully translated into English by Marlaine Delargy, is witty, profound and thoroughly captivating.

NonfictionBiography

Well Read: Tell all the truth

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate, not only for her brilliant, sui generis poetry but also for the reclusive life she lived. Yet just beyond the door of her self-constructed hermitage, all manner of intrigue and scandal was afoot, as her married brother, Austin, carried on an affair with his also-married neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, for more than a decade. At the time, this not-very-well-hidden indiscretion rocked close-knit Amherst, Massachusetts, but the true historical and literary significance of the connection rests in the fact that Todd, along with her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, would become central forces in bringing Emily Dickinson’s work to the public posthumously and therefore shaping how we continue to understand the poet’s work. In After Emily, Julie Dobrow tells the full story of this remarkable mother and daughter for the first time.

Emily Dickinson is a shadow figure in the events of After Emily.

Todd pushed against the parameters erected for women of her time, applying her intelligence and talents to music, painting and travel writing. Her diaries indicate that she was comfortable with the sexual aspects of love, and her marriage to David Todd, an astronomer, seems to have been remarkably open, with each aware of the other’s flirtations. After her husband took a teaching job at Amherst College, the Todds enjoyed the patronage of their influential neighbors, the Dickinsons. Mabel Todd was soon engaged in an emotional—and ultimately physical—affair with Austin Dickinson, who was twice her age. Dobrow suggests that this pair truly were soul mates, trapped in unhappy, or at least unfulfilling, marriages to others. Yet Todd also appears to have been quite self-centered in her pursuits. Her only child, Bingham, was raised by her grandparents until she was 8 years old, and when she came to live in Amherst with Todd, she was a victim of the damaging atmosphere generated by her mother’s affair—even if she didn’t fully understand what was going on at the time.

Emily Dickinson herself is a shadow figure in the story told here, much as she remained largely in the shadows of her own home in life. Indeed, Todd never met the poet face-to-face, despite living across a meadow from Dickinson and maintaining an intimate relationship with her brother. After the poet died, Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia, discovered the trove of poems the poet had never shared with the world, and she entrusted Todd with the task of getting them published. Todd found new purpose in this mission, but some of her decisions—including what Bingham would later call “creative editing,” such as changing some of Dickinson’s singular syntax and grammar—remain controversial. Still, Todd and Bingham’s role in preserving this great American poet’s writing is immeasurable. Their commitment to publishing and promoting their erstwhile neighbor’s work continued well into the 20th century, even as the family weathered personal crises.

This narrative of Todd’s and Bingham’s lives is elegantly and movingly told, if overly detailed at times. Both women were perhaps pack rats, and Dobrow encountered the blessing and the curse of 700 boxes of primary source material—hundreds of thousands of pages—among their private papers. She has done an admirable job sifting through the detritus to distill the essence of these women, their work and the world they inhabited.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate, not only for her brilliant, sui generis poetry but also for the reclusive life she lived. Yet just beyond the door of her self-constructed hermitage, all manner of intrigue and scandal was afoot, as her married brother, Austin, carried on an affair with his also-married neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, for more than a decade.

FictionWorld Fiction

Well Read: Rethinking a classic

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

The old stories stay with us—ancient legends, fables and fairy tales provide the fodder and archetypes for today’s fantasy fiction, superhero movies and Disney musicals. The story of Aladdin is one of the best loved and most adapted of those tales (there are dozens of film and TV versions of the story in English alone), yet its origins are clouded. As professor Paulo Lemos Horta points out in the introduction to Aladdin, a sparkling new translation of the tale by poet Yasmine Seale, the story was introduced to the West via 18th-century France as part of the wildly popular One Thousand and One Nights, translated by Antoine Galland, who claimed the story came from a manuscript given to him in 1709 by a Maronite Christian traveler from Aleppo. Scholars were long suspect of this origin story, until the recent discovery of the memoirs of Syrian adventurer Hanna Diyab, which validate Galland’s version of events.

Whatever its provenance, the story has been adapted, altered, bowdlerized and Robin William-ized over the centuries. Salman Rushdie even uses it in The Satanic Verses. Seale’s elegant new translation of Aladdin restores the tale to its roots. Tapping into her own Syrian-French background, Seale has worked from both Arabic and French sources to produce her captivating translation.

Aladdin, told here with the deceptively simple cadences of classic storytelling, is the tale of a poor tailor’s son who lives with his widowed mother “in the capital of one of China’s vast and wealthy kingdoms.” (This intriguing Chinese connection often has been lost over the years—most film and stage adaptations seem to set the story against an Arab-influenced, Middle Eastern or vaguely Mogul backdrop.) The young Aladdin has developed wild tendencies, and though he is on the cusp of manhood, he still embraces the indolent ways of a street urchin. One day, a Maghrebi magician pretends to be his uncle, and under the guise of showing his nephew the beautiful gardens outside the city walls, he takes Aladdin to a remote room hidden beneath a stone. Giving him a magic ring, the magician sends Aladdin into the room to gather treasure, after which he intends to leave the boy for dead. But Aladdin outwits the magician and takes the jewels he finds, as well as a magic lantern he discovers, and escapes back home. Slowly, Aladdin’s good fortune begins to dawn on him and his mother. When he spies on the sultan’s beautiful daughter, Badr al-Budur, he vows to marry her. With his newfound wealth and the power of the jinnis who inhabit the ring and the lantern, Aladdin is able to win her hand and build a great palace. But the magician—and his equally nefarious brother—will resurface to cause Aladdin all manner of trouble.

This new translation of Aladdin is steeped in magic.

Some aspects of the story will be familiar to lovers of the tale, while others may surprise. Seale crafts a delightful narrative that taps into the simple wonders of the story, evoking the mesmerizing voice of Shahrazad who, of course, is telling this cliffhanger-filled yarn to her sultan husband in order to keep herself alive.

This new translation of Aladdin, steeped in magic and stripped of some of the phony adornments that have diluted its essence over the centuries, is a delightful retelling of the dreams and adventures of the wily young peasant boy who matures to become a beloved ruler.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This new translation of Aladdin is steeped in magic.

Biography

Well Read: January 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

American readers’ Western bias has left the Chinese poet Li Bai less well-known here than in his native land, where he is considered a foundational writer. The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, a new biography of the poet by author Ha Jin (Waiting, The Boat Rocker), is a worthy corrective and an engaging introduction to the poet’s life and work. 

Considering that Bai (also known as Li Po) lived from 700-762 A.D., a surprising amount is known about his life, although much of that information is shrouded in inconsistencies, myths and questions with answers that are forever lost to time. Jin does an admirable job sorting the wheat from the chaff. He asserts that there are three versions of Bai: the actual man, the self-created image and the legend shaped by history and culture.

There is little information available about Bai’s childhood, but it is believed that his father was Han Chinese while his mother was from an ethnic minority tribe. This mixed parentage, Jin feels, allowed Bai room for self-invention. Bai’s father was a successful merchant in China’s western frontier, and he hoped his son would secure an influential government position. Bai had other ideas, however, and he spent much of his life traveling as a kind of minstrel, seeking Daoist enlightenment and composing poems, about a thousand of which survive today. Jin tells us that Bai had no strong feelings of attachment to any one place, and his rootlessness is central to much of his poetry. 

“As a constant traveler, his essence would exist in his endless wanderings and in his yearning for a higher order of existence,” Jin writes. “He was to roam through the central land as a miraculous figure of sorts, as people later fondly nicknamed him the Banished Immortal.”

Yet Bai had an earthy side—he drank freely, married numerous times and fathered children. He was a lover of women, but while he was the quintessential romantic poet, he did not seem to love any real woman with the level of passion that appears in his poems.

As Jin traces Bai’s lifelong journey, he provides a healthy sampling of poems, which are meditative and philosophical, often sensual, sometimes rapturous. Jin acknowledges that the perfection of the poems is frequently lost in translation (the original Chinese versions are also provided), but readers will still see why Bai’s poems have spoken for centuries to other poets (Ezra Pound’s loose translation of “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is one of the modernist’s most famous poems) and readers alike.

The Banished Immortal is an affectionate and thoughtful portrait of a complicated man and a master poet. 

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage and has been modified from the print original which incorrectly attributed Li Bai's life to 700-762 B.C. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

American readers’ Western bias has left the Chinese poet Li Bai less well-known here than in his native land, where he is considered a foundational writer. The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, a new biography of the poet by author Ha Jin (Waiting, The Boat Rocker), is a worthy corrective and an engaging introduction to the poet’s life and work. 

Nonfiction

Well Read: February 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

A new collection of essays and speeches from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison solidifies her legacy as one of America’s most thoughtful and important writers.

Toni Morrison is such a peerless, masterful storyteller that it is easy to forget she is also one of our most engaged and engaging public intellectuals. Her new collection of essays and speeches, The Source of Self-Regard, reminds us of the breadth and depth of her concerns. Morrison ruminates on and illuminates the political, racial, social and literary issues that have long informed her work with a singular combination of curiosity and confidence. 

Because many of the 40-plus pieces Morrison gathers here were first delivered as speeches at conferences and commencements, they tend to be short, yet brevity does not preclude remarkable expansiveness of thought. This volume is divided into three sections: The first explores political and moral realities through the lens of globalism, racism and the sources and meanings of identity. The second section, anchored by the longest and weightiest pieces in the book, is self-explanatorily called “Black Matter(s).” The final section, “God’s Language,” offers meditations on art and literature (both Morrison’s own and others’). These organizing divisions can prove imprecise, however—it is impossible for this deep-seeing writer to stop the seepage of her vast and broad concerns between one section and the next. And we would not want her to.

Morrison considers the work of a disparate array of fellow writers, including James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe and Toni Cade Bambara. She parses works such as Beowulf, Cinderella and American slave narratives. Yet it is in the moments when she offers glimpses into the genesis of her own remarkable fiction that the magic of what might be called Morrison’s “reverse prism” takes hold, as she reveals how all of the scattered rays from her pursuit of understanding converge into the laser point of her narratives. “We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom,” she writes in the title essay. “And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you’ll see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be . . . how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without data, is just a hunch.”

As with any such collection of pieces spanning decades, The Source of Self-Regard contains repetitions, and interest may ebb and flow with a reader’s individual concerns. But ever-present in this collection is the consistency of vision and the powerful writing that readers have come to expect from the inestimable talent of this American original as she continues to navigate the thorny task of integrating history, of creating art, of learning to belong.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A new collection of essays and speeches from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison solidifies her legacy as one of America’s most thoughtful and important writers.

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