Robert Weibezahl

NonfictionLiterature

On Nineteen Eighty-Four

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Nineteen Eighty-Four became an instant bestseller when it was published 70 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and it has remained a perennial favorite, selling an estimated 40 million copies worldwide. Its title, of course, has become synonymous with totalitarianism, political doublespeak and the loss of individual rights and freedoms. In the weeks following the 2017 presidential inauguration, sales of the book rose an estimated 950% in the U.S.—yet it is perhaps singular among books in that its dystopian warnings have been embraced and exploited by both the left and the right. The fascinating origins and complex legacy of this enduring masterwork are chronicled in an arresting new book, On Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Whitbread Award-winning biographer D.J. Taylor.

Dividing the narrative into three sections—before, during and after—Taylor first considers the man, born Eric Blair in British-occupied India, who reinvented himself as George Orwell, a progressive journalist and novelist who struggled for book sales. He also struggled with poor health and, by the time he was writing the book that became Nineteen Eighty-Four in the mid-1940s, was wracked with the debilitating symptoms of tuberculosis. After the death of his wife, he took his very young son to live on Jura, a remote island in the Hebrides, where the weather was hardly conducive to curing an insidious lung disease. Many days he could not get out of bed, much less write. But he pushed on for months and years, eventually producing a manuscript that expressed his terrifying vision of a possible future, in some ways recognizable as postwar London. As Taylor recounts the harrowing details of Orwell’s physical decline, he contemplates how his state of mind, in the end, may have shaped that vision.

Seven months after the book was published, Orwell died, missing the chance to enjoy the financial prosperity that eluded him for his whole life. The book, however, did not die. On the contrary, it quickly took on a life of its own, and in the latter part of his engaging account, Taylor considers the ways Nineteen Eighty-Four has been interpreted (often misinterpreted) and has influenced our culture. He points to “the novel’s versatility, its continuing relevance to a world that Orwell had no way of foreseeing. As time moved on, then so did the prism through which critics—and ordinary readers—tended to regard it.” 

As we navigate our own often  Orwellian reality of autocracy, political discontent and crafted truths, Taylor ponders what the great writer might have made of “alternative facts” and those who embrace them. The answer, he suggests, is not a simple one.

Nineteen Eighty-Four became an instant bestseller when it was published 70 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and it has remained a perennial favorite, selling an estimated 40 million copies worldwide. Its title, of course, has become synonymous with totalitarianism, political doublespeak…

NonfictionLiterature

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

Review by Robert Weibezahl

It’s hardly surprising that a recent spate of books has lamented the lost art of book-reading in our distracted digital age. Writers and readers know best what such a loss could mean. 

But when Leah Price, a professor of literature and the history of books, began exploring the subject, she discovered that our perceptions of a glorious past of reading books are not entirely accurate. The way we read now hasn’t changed as much as we might think. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading, Price counters the biblio-doomsayers with an incisive look at what the archives reveal about books and reading—then, now and moving forward.

In her professional capacity, Price has spent plenty of time among the dusty, forgotten vestiges of the reading past. She’s scrutinized the marginalia in antique school primers and the fingerprint stains on old library books. Studying books can make it hard to venerate texts, Price writes. She’s discovered, for instance, that in old copies of Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century doorstop of a novel Clarissa, the sex scenes are often well-thumbed, while long passages describing pastoral landscapes are in pristine condition. This would suggest that our romanticized reader of the past was just as prone to skimming for the “good bits”—21st-century eBooks just make the process a little easier.

Pundits have been writing about some version of the book’s demise since at least the 19th century, Price finds. But in truth, the future of literacy doesn’t hinge on “whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium but rather [on] the interactions through which we get our hands on books—and even more fundamentally, the interactions that awaken a desire for them.” Ultimately, she believes the experience of immersing oneself in a world made of words can only survive if readers continue to carve out the places and times to have words with one another.

Price takes this affectionate study of the history and future of reading in many disparate directions. She ventures into both contemporary psychiatry and the modern-day “archeology” of preserving and exploring Harvard’s remote library stacks. She takes us across centuries to the time of religious scribes, the innovations of Gutenberg and the digital success of Fifty Shades of Grey. She contemplates the reality that the challenge of reading today is not the availability of books, as it once was, but finding the time to read.

Eye-opening and filled with delightful nuggets of truth, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books offers no nostalgia for a more tranquil reading past but rather a hopeful glimpse into an essential reading future.

It’s hardly surprising that a recent spate of books has lamented the lost art of book-reading in our distracted digital age. Writers and readers know best what such a loss could mean. 

But when Leah Price, a professor of literature and the history of books,…

NonfictionBiography

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

Review by Robert Weibezahl

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, November 2018

Ireland is a small country, and it seemed even smaller a hundred-some years ago when giants of literature roamed the narrow Dublin streets, routinely crossing paths and sharing friends, social connections and antagonists. As novelist and critic Colm Tóibín walks the neighborhood south of the River Liffey, where he has lived since his student days, he draws connecting lines between shared locations haunted not only by three of the greatest writers his nation has produced—Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce—but by their fathers as well. William Wilde, John Butler Yeats and John Stanislaus Joyce were three very different men, yet they shared more than the streets around Merrion Square. Each sired a literary genius and possessed formidable, and in some cases unfulfilled, talents. And these fathers all came to influence their sons’ work in varying ways.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know offers richly drawn portraits of these fathers and sons, illuminating the influence rippling between generations. While Oscar Wilde may have inherited his sharp wit from his mother, William Wilde was a doctor, influential amateur archaeologist and writer whose hubris-laced court case involving alleged sexual indiscretions offered an eerie premonition of what would befall his son. John B. Yeats was a talented painter cursed with an inability to finish a canvas. His escape to New York to live out his life (funded by his son) did not preclude his voice permeating some of his son’s seminal poetry. Joyce’s father, a drunkard and raconteur, infiltrates Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses at every turn, as Joyce probes their complicated relationship, “evoking its shivering ambiguities, combining the need to be generous with the need to be true.”

As charming as it is illuminating, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know provides a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius.

 

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

As charming as it is illuminating, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know provides a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius.

NonfictionLiterature

A Fitzgerald compendium

Review by Robert Weibezahl

F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography, although readers can feel his presence in the guises of his stand-in narrators, not least of all Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. As the pre-eminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald—born 115 years ago on September 24—freely borrowed from his own experiences, as well as those of his wife, Zelda, and many of his friends, in writing his evocative fiction. Twice during the last decade of his life, Fitzgerald did consider putting together a collection of some nonfiction pieces he had written for magazines, but as editor James L.W. West III tells us in his introduction to A Short Autobiography, the idea was shot down by legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins. 

Seventy-some years after Fitzgerald’s untimely death, West has at last realized a version of the writer’s intention. Though not by any measure an autobiography (the title for the book is taken from one of the shorter pieces—a pithy catalog of a year’s drinking that ran in The New Yorker in 1929), this charming compilation of unfamiliar pieces does manage to provide an illuminating and varied portrait of the writer and the man. The essays span the length of Fitzgerald’s relatively short career, beginning in 1920 and ending with a piece he was writing at the time of his death.

A Jazz Age icon tells his own story.

The earliest essays in the book have an archness befitting the undoubtedly cocky young man who took the literary world by storm with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Two companion essays, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing,” published less than six months apart in two 1924 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, are brilliant, tongue-in-cheek depictions of his and Zelda’s spendthrift ways. With a similar self-aware insouciance, albeit one tempered by age and professional disappointment, “One Hundred False Starts” (1933) will speak to anyone who has put pen to paper. “An Author’s Mother,” from 1936, though couched as a story about someone else, undoubtedly reflects the painful truth that his own mother never accepted his chosen profession as respectable: “An author was something distinctly peculiar—there had been only one in the Middle Western city where she was born and he had been regarded as a freak.”

There are repetitions and recurring themes, understandable since these pieces were written independently over many years and, given the nature of magazine pieces, regarded as largely disposable. Fitzgerald reiterates the idea that his generation was soft, the result of having been raised predominantly by mothers. His views on modern “girls” are complicated at best, wavering between admiration and disapproval. A piece about Prince­ton and another written after the death of his father, both published posthumously, underscore a nostalgia for a certain American gentility that he sees as a vague memory.

One of the finest pieces is the last, “My Generation,” not published until 1968. Those who hold dear the story and literature of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “The Lost Generation” will welcome Fitzgerald’s retrospective take on his World War I compatriots, trudging reluctantly into middle age, still holding onto an America that has disappeared. “So we inherited two worlds,” he writes, “the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time.” An imitable Fitzgerald passage, to be sure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography, although readers can feel his presence in the guises of his stand-in narrators, not least of all Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. As the pre-eminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald—born 115 years ago on September 24—freely…

FictionWorld Fiction

An Afghan odyssey, told in an unforgettable voice

Review by Robert Weibezahl

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles is a small book with a big story to tell. Billed as a novel, it is the largely true story of a young Afghan refugee’s rootless five-year journey across two continents. Enaiatollah Akbari shared his experience with Italian novelist Fabio Geda, who has reconstructed the events into a compelling narrative that maintains the youthful voice of this remarkable boy. Already a bestseller in Italy and France, the book has now been deftly translated into English by Howard Curtis.

This searing story of a boy’s struggle to survive has become an international sensation.

When Enaiat is about 10 years old (an exact record of his birth date does not exist), his father is killed by bandits while driving a truck to Iran. The Pashtun owners of the truck’s merchandise threaten to exact repayment for the goods by taking away Enaiat and his younger brother, so his mother smuggles him across the border into Pakistan, leaving him behind and returning alone to their isolated Afghan village. On his own in a strange land, the boy is forced to find menial work. Hearing that things are better for Shia Muslims in Iran, Enaiat pays a trafficker to smuggle him across the border, the first of many arduous journeys on which he will embark. Working on construction sites in Isfahan, in perpetual fear of being rounded up as an illegal and sent back to Afghanistan, he dreams of making his way to Europe.

The first leg of that trip to the West involves a month-long trek over the frozen mountains between Iran and Turkey, followed by three claustrophobic days packed with some 50 others in a hidden compartment beneath the bed of a truck. His travels from Turkey to Greece and then Venice are equally harrowing. Ultimately, he lands in Turin, and, with the help of some benevolent Italians, is educated and granted political asylum.

The details of Enaiat’s five-year ordeal, undeniably eye-opening and disturbing for Western readers, are perhaps no more or less astonishing than those that countless refugees could tell. What makes In the Sea There Are Crocodiles so persuasive is the boy’s voice, beautifully captured by Geda. Enaiat is resilient and resourceful, to be sure, but also sanguine and wise. He encounters adversity and altruism with equal equanimity, accepting his fate without self-pity. Forced to live independently and by his wits, the boy quickly sheds any vestiges of childhood, and readers must remind themselves that while he is struggling to survive, his counterparts in America and Europe are still cocooned in middle school. In the end, when Enaiat is finally able to track down his mother, telephone her and speak to her for the first time in years, their inarticulate conversation underscores not only the miles between them, but the lifetime that has passed in less than a decade. It is a heartbreaking moment that subtly underscores the plight of the displaced persons of the world, far too numerous to count.

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles is a small book with a big story to tell. Billed as a novel, it is the largely true story of a young Afghan refugee’s rootless five-year journey across two continents. Enaiatollah Akbari shared his experience with Italian novelist…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The third and final movement in Cusk’s literary symphony

Review by Robert Weibezahl

In the trilogy of intriguing novels that she completes with Kudos, Rachel Cusk has routinely subverted essential ideas of narrative and storytelling. Each book is made up of a series of monologues about both intimate and public concerns, which are delivered by passing characters and filtered through the lens of a deceptively impassive witness (a writer, Faye, whose sketchy personal details align closely to Cusk’s own).

On first encounter, the novels seem to have very little plot (arguably, the second book, Transit, has the most), but far from random, their episodic forward momentum makes them curiously hard to put down. In Outline, Faye travels to Greece to teach a writing course, and in Transit she moves back to London, newly divorced, to renovate a flat. The third book finds her attending two writer’s conferences, each in an unidentified European location at once faceless and unique. Kudos might be seen as Cusk’s response to Brexit—the specter of that controversial decision hovers over the novel, which in part is about impossible choices we must all eventually make about staying or leaving. There are also ripples of other contemporary discontents—the encroaching dissatisfaction of once-privileged white men, the perennial gender divide and the death of literature in our postliterate world.

On one level, Cusk lampoons the insular literary world, with its intellectual puffery and self-congratulatory prize giving (i.e. kudos), as she deviously exiles Faye to far-flung backwaters. But Cusk, like Faye, refuses to undermine the seriousness that lurks beneath the sometimes inappropriate, sometimes self-important, often uncomfortable observations of those she meets. “The human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it,” one characters says, and ultimately this truth is what Cusk tirelessly seeks to circumvent. In the end, one can’t help but hear echoes of E.M. Forster’s elusive advice: Only connect.

 

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

In the trilogy of intriguing novels that she completes with Kudos, Rachel Cusk has routinely subverted essential ideas of narrative and storytelling. Each book is made up of a series of monologues about both intimate and public concerns, which are delivered by passing characters and filtered through the lens of a deceptively impassive witness (a writer, Faye, whose sketchy personal details align closely to Cusk’s own).

Nonfiction

Letters to the editor

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Reading the 40 years’ worth of letters between Tennessee Williams and his publisher and confidante James Laughlin that has been collected in The Luck of Friendship, one cannot help but wonder how much of the present-day literary legacy is no longer being preserved in our age of ephemeral emails and tweets. It is a pity, because correspondence such as the one collected here can open a rare window to the day-to-day lives of the writers we admire, reminding us that they are human and subject to the same quotidian concerns and larger fears that we all face. This benefit may be particularly true with someone like Williams—who retains a larger-than-life reputation for being a troubled artist, and whose personal angst certainly plays out before us on the stage in his great dramas, but who, as these letters show, had a charming wit, a keen mind and an endearing lust for life.

Williams and Laughlin, the founder of New Directions publishing, met when they were young men, just starting their literary careers in New York. While Williams is remembered as one of our greatest playwrights and Laughlin as a visionary publisher, in those early years the two young men saw themselves first and foremost as poets. They were very different—gay and straight, Southerner and Yankee, struggling artist and wealthy heir—but formed a bond over their shared love for experimental, forward-thinking writing. Laughlin agreed to publish Williams’ work. With the exception of The Glass Menagerie—which Bennett Cerf of Random House laid claim to based on a $100 advance he had paid in 1940 as an option on Williams’ future work—all of Williams’ output would come from New Directions.

The majority of the letters gathered here are from Williams’ pen, but co-editor Peggy L. Fox, Laughlin’s longtime right hand at New Directions, fills in the gaps with interviews she conducted with her boss before his death. The story the volume tells is one of artistic perseverance, loyalty and trust, painting a portrait of a friendship that was less intimate than wholly engaged. Clearly, Laughlin’s support was one of the keys to Williams’ success and survival through both good times and bad.

It is not surprising that Williams’ letters in particular, though written informally and most likely with little thought of posterity, occasionally sing with the sweet song that elevates his best plays to greatness. “So much of the time writing is like digging for water in a desert,” he writes in 1944, not long before The Glass Menagerie launched his career. “It is wonderfully gratifying when there is a spring and someone offers you a cup to catch it.” As The Luck of Friendship reveals, James Laughlin was the bearer of such a cup.

Reading the 40 years’ worth of letters between Tennessee Williams and his publisher and confidante James Laughlin that has been collected in The Luck of Friendship, one cannot help but wonder how much of the present-day literary legacy is no longer being preserved in our age of ephemeral emails and tweets.
Nonfiction

Escapism at its pulpiest

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Those of us “of a certain” age may well remember the British thrillers of the 1950s and ’60s, with their suggestive cover art (mild by current standards) promising suspense, action and a touch of sex. It was the heyday of this particular slice of postwar popular culture, dominated most famously by James Bond, of course, but calling on the talents of a slew of writers. Mike Ripley’s entertaining and enlightening new book, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, offers a thorough history of a golden age of British spy and adventure fiction that flourished between 1953 and 1975.

Ripley, a thriller writer himself, explores two subgenres: adventure thrillers, of the type Alastair MacLean and Hammond Innes wrote, and spy thrillers from the likes of Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John le Carré and scores of others. And he achieves a number of goals in this breezy yet exhaustively researched study. Foremost, he considers the root cause of this pop literary boom, zeroing in on the British populace’s desperate need for a bit of excitement in what he calls the “grey and austere” 1950s in “a supposedly victorious wartime nation whose empire was starting to crumble.” The British needed diversion, but also (perhaps foolishly optimistic) reassurance that they still “ruled the waves” in some capacity. Fictional adventures set during the recent war and during the unfolding Cold War allowed the Brits to lay claim to relevance. The glamorous, globe-trotting exploits of Bond and his imitators also gave people an escape from their drab lives and let them live vicariously. The 1960s would bring even more exotic and complex thrillers as the real-world ideological war between East and West.

Ripley also offers some fascinating glimpses into the publishing business, and the egos and aspirations of writers who vied for the top spots on bestseller lists around the world. Adding to the fun, the book is illustrated with dozens of vintage books covers that will strike a nostalgic chord for those who remember reading—or perhaps their parents reading—the originals. Two substantial appendices offer fairly comprehensive portraits of 16 major players—including Frederick Forsythe, le Carré and Deighton—and a survey of many minor voices as well. Sadly, Ridley himself acknowledges the dearth of women in a genre that was then quite squarely a man’s world, although he (too briefly) touches on at least two distaff glass ceiling-breakers: Helen MacInnes and Palma Harcourt.

Ridley posits an interesting question when he asks, “Was it a Golden Age or an explosion of ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ pulp fiction which reflected the social revolution—and some would say declining morals—of the period?” He lets the reader decide, although this enthusiastic celebration of these writers and their books, many if not most of which are long out of print, suggests Ridley resides in the former camp. And why not? Escapism can be a form of art, and the desire for a bit of diversion in dreary or challenging times seems like a worthy pastime to which we can all relate.

Mike Ripley’s entertaining and enlightening new book, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, offers a thorough history of a golden age of British spy and adventure fiction that flourished between 1953 and 1975.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The second installment in Rachel Cusk’s literary trilogy

Review by Robert Weibezahl

With Transit, the inspired British writer Rachel Cusk continues a trilogy of spare and elusive novels she began with Outline. The narrator of these books is a woman writer called Faye, a name that, appropriately, means confidence or trust—for these novels comprise a series of episodes wherein the narrator remains an aloof interlocutor, prompting thoughtful confessional stories from others while revealing little about herself. 

The basic setup—divorced mother of two boys (Faye) moves back to London where she embarks on the renovations of a ramshackle house—provides a nominal structure, as well as two seemingly conflicting qualities: humor and a creeping fatalism. This relocation is just one meaning of the word “transit” explored, though, as the different characters she encounters speak of life changes both bold and banal. With a therapist’s remove, Faye draws out the stories—an old boyfriend left behind 15 years before, a gay hairdresser settling into middle age, a cousin who escaped a bad marriage and is now navigating the uncertain waters of a new one, a bestselling memoirist with a nightmare boyhood to expunge, the displaced Albanian and Polish men working on her flat. Taken individually, these confessionals are singularly entertaining, because Cusk is an unequaled observer of what takes place on the periphery, and she has a keen ear for hearing and recording the ways that people reveal themselves both through what they say and what they do not. Yet it is the cumulative effect of these narratives that gives this largely plot-free novel its power. 

With literary sleight of hand, Cusk is playing narrative tricks, and Transit, like Outline before it, slowly reveals much about Faye, too, no matter how concealed she tries to remain. Transit is a brilliant meditation on change, freedom and the ways we construct our lives, one true or false narrative at a time.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With Transit, the inspired British writer Rachel Cusk continues a trilogy of spare and elusive novels she began with Outline. The narrator of these books is a woman writer called Faye, a name that, appropriately, means confidence or trust—for these novels comprise a series of episodes wherein the narrator remains an aloof interlocutor, prompting thoughtful confessional stories from others while revealing little about herself.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Putting life on ice

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Don DeLillo’s novels are not for the faint of heart. Though not especially complex in style—he writes with a spare, arid lyricism—they have continually challenged readers with a dark worldview tied to the here and now. DeLillo is about to turn 80, so it might not be surprising that his new novel, Zero K, centers on death. Ever the visionary though, he has taken the subject in an unusual direction: the world of Cryonic suspension, where the dying are frozen, to be resurrected in the future when medicine has caught up to their maladies.

The novel is narrated not by one of the dying (except in the sense that we are all dying), but by Jeffrey, the 30-something son of billionaire Ross, whose second wife, Artis, is close to death. The three travel to a remote desert facility in a former Soviet republic where her “Convergence” will take place. Unsurprisingly, the state-of-the-art compound is an odd, futuristic place, isolated and conducive to meditative rumination, inspiring Jeff to all manner of thoughts about life and death (the first half of the novel, perhaps consciously, is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). As Artis approaches her final hours, Ross decides that he will expedite his own death in order to be with her. His procedure will take place in an area called Zero K, shorthand for absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. 

 Zero K is about death, and the ageless question of whether we should have control over our own mortality, but it is equally about life and the complications that unite to make each of us who we are. Jeff is a highly flawed individual, struggling with OCD and obsessed with words, forever battling feelings of paternal abandonment and the inability to form lasting relationships. When he does enter a tentative romance with a woman, a single mother with a teenage son she adopted as an orphan from Ukraine, the novel seems to go in a new direction. But it circles back to the Convergence in its final pages, striving for a measure of optimism and hope amid a narrative of inevitability and despair. Ever uncompromising in his assessments, DeLillo has written another uneasy dissection of how we live and all we struggle to overcome. Still, one can’t help but notice that if spelled out with a cardinal number, the book’s title becomes “OK.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Don DeLillo’s novels are not for the faint of heart. Though not especially complex in style—he writes with a spare, arid lyricism—they have continually challenged readers with a dark worldview tied to the here and now. DeLillo is about to turn 80, so it might not be surprising that his new novel, Zero K, centers on death. Ever the visionary though, he has taken the subject in an unusual direction: the world of Cryonic suspension, where the dying are frozen, to be resurrected in the future when medicine has caught up to their maladies.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A lover’s buried secrets exposed

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Edna O’Brien, one of the jewels in the crown of Irish literature, has long given voice to her homeland’s tragic lyricism. At 85, O’Brien has lost none of her talent or fire. Indeed, her new novel, The Little Red Chairs—her first in a decade—may be the fiercest work of her estimable career.

Arriving in a small, off-the-beaten-track village in the west of Ireland, Vladimir Dragan sets up shop as a holistic healer. Handsome and darkly charismatic, the aging man charms the women of the community, particularly Fidelma, once the town beauty and now the 40-ish wife of an older man. Fidelma’s great sadness is never having had a child, and Vlad comes to represent her last chance to fulfill that dream. Soon pregnant, Fidelma has her happiness shattered when the past catches up with her mysterious lover. Vlad is arrested as a war criminal—a savage master of evil responsible for thousands of violent deaths during the Bosnian war. His exposure and extradition shocks the villagers, but Fidelma’s devastation goes beyond emotional despair as she endures an unthinkable act of retribution. 

The Little Red Chairs takes its title from a 2012 memorial installation in Sarajevo where 11,541 red chairs represented every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425-day siege. O’Brien comes at the story from many points of view—not only Fidelma and Vlad’s, but also those of others in the town, including an immigrant kitchen worker who is the first to recognize the war criminal—masterfully imbuing the novel with texture that complements the complexity of its collision of history and culture. 

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Edna O’Brien, one of the jewels in the crown of Irish literature, has long given voice to her homeland’s tragic lyricism. At 85, O’Brien has lost none of her talent or fire. Indeed, her new novel, The Little Red Chairs—her first in a decade—may be the fiercest work of her estimable career.
NonfictionEssays

A treasured poet on life, love and writing

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Maxine Kumin, who died last year at 88, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist and children’s book author who served as U.S. poet laureate and bred horses on her New Hampshire farm. Kumin’s memoir, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, comprises five essays, four of which first appeared in American Scholar and Georgia Review. These charming recollections will now reach a wider readership in book form.

As the title signals, Kumin’s father was a pawnbroker, and her mother was a music teacher. The family was Jewish, but lived in the largely Protestant Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. To add to the odd-man-out scenario, young Maxine attended Catholic grammar school. When she left home for college at Radcliffe, her “parochial Jewishness fell away.”

On a blind date in the final days of World War II, she met Victor Kumin, a young engineer who was working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After some wartime separation and a few hard-to-arrange trips to the Southwest, the couple began a long, enduring marriage. After early years in Boston, they moved to their rural retreat, which Kumin named Pobiz Farm in a wry reference to the “poetry business” that was occupying her time.

Within this skeletal framework of a life, Kumin writes luminously about the everyday episodes that often found their way into her poems. The Pawnbroker’s Daughter has a comfortable rhythm, a feeling that one is sitting and hearing these quotidian details firsthand from the late-in-life Kumin, perhaps while foraging for mushrooms alongside her in the woods or by the fire on a winter’s day. Heartening rather than elegiac, this endearing volume is a lovely last expression of a formidable writer’s art.

Maxine Kumin, who died last year at 88, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist and children’s book author who served as U.S. poet laureate and bred horses on her New Hampshire farm. Kumin’s memoir, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, comprises five essays, four of which first appeared in American Scholar and Georgia Review. These charming recollections will now reach a wider readership in book form.
NonfictionLiterature

Life lessons from the ‘Great Books’

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Once a staple on the bookshelves of middle-class American homes, The Great Books of the Western World originally comprised 54 volumes of readings selected as essential to a liberal education. The series, with its notable exclusion of women and writers of color, fell out of favor with the advent of political correctness and a more inclusive cultural view. Yet, as Matt Burriesci suggests in Dead White Guys, there is still much that can be learned from these white European males. “The Great Books of the Western World are not interested in promoting our illusions, and they do not care about authority,” he writes. “They are neither gentle nor polite. They teach you how to see through illusions, and they demand that you question both yourself and your masters.”

Dead White Guys is at heart a series of letters to Burriesci’s daughter, Violet, written for her to open when she turns 18 in 2028. It began as he cleared his own set of Great Books, acquired years before at a flea market for $50, to make way for the nursery for baby Violet. Taking a break, he picked up volume one and started reading. What he discovered in its pages was timeless, sometimes challenging wisdom that he knew would one day serve his daughter well. The result is 26 lessons about values—from Plato on doing right and wrong to Plutarch on leadership to Marx and Engels on whether capitalism works—that he hopes will allow the future Violet to find her own place in the world.

Each letter begins with Burriesci sharing some personal history or truth with Violet—tales of his own misguided ambitions, career failures and youthful indiscretions, as well as happy memories of his own childhood in a gentler, vanishing time. These thoughts then spur a visit to one of the seminal Great Books texts, distilling key points to their fundamentals. Far from stuffy or academic, Burriesci’s brief essays are often witty, iconoclastic and disarmingly frank (he does not shy away from calling Aristotle a racist, for instance, or from musing about the Founding Fathers, “What idiot would pick a fight with the British Empire?”).

Burriesci’s reading tour skews toward the ancients (the book is nearly half done before he gets to St. Augustine), with Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and Montaigne getting the lion’s share of consideration. Shakespeare is represented singly by Hamlet, and, by necessity, there are many other omissions: Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, Kant and Freud, among them. Indeed, with the exception of Hamlet, the book steers away from fiction and drama entirely, focusing instead on philosophical and political works.

Still, these are Burriesci’s letters to his own daughter, so he gets to choose whatever dead white guys he finds most germane to the lessons he hopes to impart. The point, after all, is for Violet, and each of us, to find our own way through the great books and through life.

 

In Dead White Guys, Matt Burriesci distills the timeless, sometimes challenging wisdom of The Great Books of the Western World into 26 lessons for his young daughter.

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