John Banville, _Snow_

 I'VE READ NINE novels by Banville, but never, until this one, any of his mysteries. As it happens, this is the first of his mysteries to be published under his own name, rather than the pen name "Benjamin Black." One review I read suggested that Banville made an exception this time because of the gravity of the issue in the novel's background: pedophilia in the priesthood and the Irish Roman Catholic Church's extraordinary efficiency in covering it up.

He may also have decided to put his own name on it just because it's really, really good. I do not read many mysteries and enjoy even fewer, but I was impressed by this one. It has a lot of Banvillean virtues: diamond-eye social observation, masterly prose, and a first-person chapter from the point of view of Father Tom, the pedophiliac priest, that is absolutely convincing and absolutely chilling, pure Dostoevsky.

There was also a small but perfect gift for readers who, like me, lean more to the literary Banville. Snow is falling for a great deal of Snow, which called to my mind Joyce's classic short story, "The Dead." I was delighted when Strafford, the novel's detective, dropped an allusion to Joyce's early masterpiece in a phone conversation with his superiors:

    "Where would he have gone to? Is it now snowing down there, like it is here?"
    "Yes, Chief. Snow is general all over Ireland."
    "Is it?"
    "It's a quotation--never mind."
    Strafford could hear his superior breathing down the line. Hackett valued Strafford, but also considered him  too clever by half.

That's all, but it's plenty. If you recognize the quotation, you know it occurs in the devastating final paragraph of Joyce's final story, and that the snow that falls both on Gabriel Conroy's Dublin and on Michael Furey's graveyard in Galway falls alike on "the living and the dead," that Gabriel has just learned the lesson that the living and the dead constitute a whole, that the past is always ineradicably with us. The past is still very much part of the present for the boys, now men, that Father Tom abused--PTSD, we could also call it--and that little Joycean inflection explains why Snow is the perfect title for Banville's novel.

Jonathan Beecher, _Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848_

I DO PLAN to attempt to scale Christopher Clark's magisterial Revolutionary Spring at some point, but this one is really the perfect book on 1848 for me. As Beecher's title indicates, he focuses on writers who lived through and wrote about the events in Paris of that year; a few of them, Alphonse de Lamartine and Marie d'Agoult, are no longer much read, but most are still heavy hitters: Marx, Flaubert, Hugo, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen (if Tom Stoppard writes plays about you, surely you are a heavy hitter).

Okay, why did I love this book? First, Beecher is staggeringly well-informed about each writer, but avoids getting mired in pedantic detail (which could easily happen in writing about a historical phenomenon with the documentary record this one has). Every chapter is gracefully written and skillfully paced. Had Edmund Wilson written a book about Paris in 1848, it would probably be as good as this one, but I'm not sure. That's how well made it is.

Second, I have been enjoying following up my reading of Beecher by turning to the writers themselves. Marie d'Agoult, whom I never would have picked up without having been tipped by Beecher, turned out to be a brilliant, engaging writer, and I am in the middle of seeing a whole new side of Tocqueville--the cool, judicious tone of Democracy in America almost disappears from his memoir of 1848. Herzen awaits, and I am hankering to re-read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and A Sentimental Education. I may even try Napoleon le Petit even though I tend to find Hugo tiresome.

Third, Writers and Revolution gave me a kind of refracted perspective on our own turbulent times. Think of the last sixteen years--the elation and high hopes of Obama's election, only to have our souls stomped on by the election of Trump, then the flaming up of hope with Biden, and then the looming shadow of authoritarianism with Trump 2.0.  In 1848, France went through just as precipitous, just as cardiac-arresting a political roller-coaster in just ten months. Beecher shows that it marked all of these writers, who were all eyewitnesses, for life. And boy, do I get that.

Halle Butler, _The New Me_

NICOLE FLATTERY'S REVIEW of Butler's recently-published Banal Nightmare made me curious enough to check whether my local public library had a copy--they did not, but they did have The New Me, Butler's second novel, published in 2019.

Is there a burgeoning genre about educated, intelligent, talented young women in their later 20s, stuck in a profoundly stressful and unpromising office job in a major city and currently without any likely romantic prospects, who decide to chart a new course for their lives in some way and end up making a worse hash of things? Lexi Freiman, Catherine Lacey, Lauren Oyler, and Christine Smallwood all seem to working this particular vein of ore--even Robyn Schiff's book-length poem Information Desk may fit, in fact. Some kind of new archetype is forming.

Millie, the main character of Butler's The New Me, has a temp job she thinks is leading to a full-time job. We, the readers, know it is not. Millie also seems self-deluded about her ability to drink less and to get her exercise program started. She does not seem recovered from her break-up with almost-fiancé Jamie (who may also have died by suicide--I wasn't sure about this), and her best friend seems to be in the relationship mainly to have someone to get drunk with. Things go from bad to worse and Millie turns up at her parents' place.

I had a hard time judging Butler's tone here. Is Millie an object of satire? She is a terrible judge of her own situation, so the narrative sometimes seems to be laughing behind her back (as it were). I did, however, feel bad for her a lot of the time, and I was sorry things went as completely amiss for her as they did. 

In this respect, Millie reminded me of Elif Batuman's Selin, in The Idiot. Ridiculous but lovable? Lovably ridiculous? Someone whose self-created catastrophes we chuckle at because we know she will grow up and turn out fine? Or another lost soul in the city? A new archetype is definitely forming.

 

Sally Keith, _Two of Everything_

 I WROTE A review of this for another and much more respectable blog, and that review will probably be posted in a few weeks or so, so in this space I am not going to say much more than thank you, Sally Keith, for your fine book.

Two of Everything is a kind of memoir-in-poems of Keith and her partner going through the process of adoption.  (The partner is called "Amor" in the book, which I don't think is her actual name, but talk about resonant....) This always delicate process is even more delicate for same-sex couples, so the book is full of frustrations, disappointed hopes, and dead ends. What a payoff, though--"December Light," the book's final section, is radiant with joy. 

Word of mouth is bound to help this book; I can't imagine anyone reading it and not recommending it.

Jana Prikryl, _Midwood_

 What most struck me about Prikryl's second collection of poems, No Matter, was its being quite different from her first, The After Party; this, her third, is not much like either. Like No Matter, it feels stylistically unified (all short poems, with a remarkably consistent voice), but even more than the earlier book it seems intended to be taken as an integrated whole. The "you" of the poems, for instance, seems like the same person throughout, and the twenty-four poems titled "Midwood" interspersed through the book read like a sequence thanks to shared arboreal imagery. 

However, Midwood also has the range in time and space of The After Party, making it quite different from the here-and-now focus of No Matter. Much of the book seems set in Italy (e.g., the seven poems titled "The Noncello," a river in Italy). but Canada, New York City, and the town in Czechia where Prikryl was born all figure as well. The remembered and the anticipated get almost as much attention as the present, as though Prikryl as picking up on the poet-as-river idea that crops up in Heidegger's analyses of Hölderlin.

At the same time, the paratactic crops up, as in Adorno's analyses of Hölderlin. Here is "Midwood 3":

Out of the garment of the land
            it is not spring, why then you say
rank, but isn't 
an oracle around perimeter of which 
the words their lipid speeds pull from
and here so on the face of it
reserve, is it a reservoir
            if spill headfirst another's shape

Prikryl avoids end-stop punctuation throughout (no periods, question marks, exclamation points, or even semi-colons), which does a lot to unify the voice of the volume but also creates an unmoored effect in the syntax. The reader never knows for certain whether one line continues the sentence of the preceding line or starts a new sentence. 

Sentences thus unanchored and adrift were rare in Prikryl's earlier work, but I really liked the effect. I assumed from the outset that the title Midwood alluded to Dante's famous and unbeatable figure for a midlife crisis, that we were with Prikryl in una selva oscura without map or compass...unanchored and adrift, in sum. Where are we, and how the hell did we end up here?

Midlife crisis looms especially in the Noncello poems, which seem to be about an adulterous affair. I am not at all positive about that, but adultery or infidelity seemed to be hovering behind the lines, as in Jorie Graham's The Errancy. 

And the self-doubt of a classic midlife crisis? Plenty of that, too, as when the trees in "Midwood 20" are "like me // annoying strivers / in constant danger of making bad choices." 

Thomas Bernhard, _Correction_. trans. Sophie Wilkins

 I have read a good handful of stories by Bernhard, but this was my first Bernhard novel. I chose it for a somewhat perverse reason: I had read that its sentences had the highest score on someone's "difficulty of reading" index. The sentences of Correction are long, true, but are not complex in the way that (say) Proust's or Faulkner's or Broch's are; they extend over whole pages because the narrator keeps interrupting himself to explain, or qualify, or revise, so the effect is more one of garrulity than complexity. The prose is not all that hard to read.

It's a worthwhile read, though. The (unnamed) narrator is writing to explain to us the life and work of his brilliant friend Roithamer, one of the sons of a wealthy and prominent family and a polymath of genius.  His final project was to build a cone-shaped dwelling for his sister in the center of a forest on or near their family estate. He completes the project, but his sister dies before she can move in, and Roithamer then kills himself--his suicide is the "correction" of the title.

I don't think the preceding paragraph would count as a spoiler, by the way--we learn of all these events within the first few pages. There is no suspense in the novel, nor plot, really--just the intelligent-but-not-brilliant narrator doing his painstaking, constantly self-correcting best to understand and help us understand his terrifyingly brilliant friend (based on Ludwig Wittgenstein). Rough analogues might be Serenus Zeitblom in Mann's Doctor Faustus trying to explain Adrian Leverkühn to us, or Lenù trying to explain Lila in Elena Ferrante's quartet, or even Jeffrey Cartwright trying to explain Edwin Mullhouse in Stephen Millhauser's strange and wonderful Edwin Mullhouse.

Bernhard's vision of the situation is a bit darker than Millhauser's, Ferrante's, or Mann's, which should come as no surprise. Genius is pain, as John Lennon explained to Jann Wenner back in 1970, and the pain in Correction is as bottomless as Roithamer's genius.

Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

 THE ENGLISH VERSION can be found in Notes to Literature, Volume II, if you are interested. Dates from 1960. Heidegger only crops up in the essay a few times, but he is definitely in Adorno's crosshairs.

I found this a demanding read, with its paragraphs sometimes stretching past the two-page mark and sentences such as "The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation." Hmm, okay. After three passes at such pronouncements, I tend to give up and plunge ahead, hoping things will clear up later. In other words, if you want a truly accurate précis of Adorno's argument, you will have to look elsewhere than here.

A few points emerged for me, though. The content of a poem is not what it explicitly states, Adorno writes--that is, not simply equivalent to the propositions it makes. How things are said matters as much as what is said. The form is part of the content. So far, so good--Heidegger would not dissent from that, I imagine. However, when Adorno writes, "Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message] violates poetry's mode of  truth by violating its illusory character," I have a feeling he sees Heidegger as one such violator.

Heidegger definitely might dissent from the next part of Adorno's argument, which is that the form of Hölderlin's later poems (the Hymns, mainly) is dialectically engaged with (what we will call) the propositional content of the poems. That is, the sentences of the poems may be saying one kind of thing, but the form of those sentences--their parataxes, the ways they scramble or abandon classic Ciceronian sentence construction--is saying another kind of thing, posing a challenge to the propositional content of those very sentences. Thus, the truth content of the poem is not at all identical to the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions of the poem. 

I'm not in a position to judge how strong Adorno's evidence for this argument is, relying as I do on English translations of Hölderlin. But it made sense, as a general argument, and lines up with the widespread tendency to see Hölderlin as anticipating the ruptures of literary modernism (Adorno sees him a precursor to Beckett, for instance). 

I had not read Adorno on poetry before this--apart from his famous parenthetical aside that writing it after Auschwitz was barbaric--and I have to admit I was enlightened and impressed. I will have to build up some stamina before attempting another, though.