Charles Baudelaire, _Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose_

 I HAD READ a large handful of these in anthologies, but had never read the whole book through--the flight to Paris seemed a good opportunity.

Are they great? Well, yes. You knew that. "Any where out of the world" remains a particular favorite.

They seem important, too, in their implicit cancellation of the idea that poetry is purely and simply verse. If poetry is not purely and simply verse, what is it? Baudelaire's preface/dedication emphasizes aspects of the language: "musicale sans rythme et sans rhyme, assez souple and assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, de la conscience." [my translation: "musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt itself to the movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, of consciousness."] Is it a discourse's ability to respond to or model the lability of our interiority that makes it poetry? 

Perhaps also its ability to respond to or model the lability of urban life, as Baudelaire goes on to say: "C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes enormes, c'est du croisements de leur innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant." ["It is above all living in large cities, it is the intersections of their countless communications, that gave birth to this artistic obsession."] I'm guessing Baudelaire's example was crucial as Eliot made his way towards an English poetic of the city.

Some of the pieces herein, appearing today, might be called "flash fiction" or "lyrical essays," which goes to show how what an immense legacy Baudelaire has. We continue to ask what poetry is if it is not verse, and the attempts at answers continue to be generative.

George Packer, _The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America_

 I READ ABOUT 100 pages of this the year it was published (2013), but, not finding it all that engaging, I dropped it at that point. In 2017 it was often cited as helpful in explaining the forces that had elected Trump (cf. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land); that made sense, insofar as the book looks at how working-class white Americans came to feel betrayed and forgotten, but did not inspire me to pick up the book again. Then I read that the book contained, in its later pages, an excellent profile of Peter Thiel. Okay, I thought--I will read that, at least.

Peter Thiel is an important backer of Vance's campaign for the Senate in Ohio, and my recurring nightmare is that Thiel's deeper-than-deep pockets and Vance's remarkable story and canny rhetoric will combine to create a politics that unites Trump's base with no-kidding, naked-fist authoritarian politics. Without a loose cannon like Trump at the head of the movement, what might happen? I fear some "it can happen here" nightmare.

So, I needed to know more about Thiel. Packer's profile (contained in the three chapters titled "Silicon Valley") is indeed excellent. It gives us a relatively familiar figure: brilliant nerdy kid (Dungeons and Dragons) gets elite education (Stanford), discovers conservative politics (Ayn Rand), makes an unfathomable amount of money as founder/early investor in what  grow to be internet colossi (PayPal, Facebook), and decides to remold American society.

The surprises: Thiel is gay (which might have made him more sympathetic to the situation of the marginalized and excluded, but no, seems not to have) and highly interested in achieving immortality (which might line him up as a potential Great American Eccentric, à la Howard Hughes).

But are my anxieties quelled? Not so much. Coming to this right after Vuillard's l'ordre du jour, I was wondering if Thiel could do for Vance what Krupp did for Hitler. Was January 6 just our Kapp Putsch? Just a prologue to the real tragedy? 

Éric Vuillard, _L'ordre du jour_

THIS WON THE Prix Goncourt in 2017. It is not a novel, precisely, but a récit, a narrative form familiar in the French literary tradition but elusive of definition, like novelle in the German literary tradition, I suppose.

It's a narrative, but not exactly fiction, and not exactly not fiction. It has no invented characters, so far as I can tell. All the characters actually existed, and what they say and do seems largely based on documents, to a large extent their own memoirs or testimony (at Nuremberg, say). Vuillard very occasionally slips into the sensoria of the historical actors in the way historical fiction usually does, as when Austrian Prime Minister Schuschnigg is awakened by his valet on the morning of March 11, 1938--

Il pose ses pieds par terre. Le parquet est froid. Il enfile ses mules. On lui annonce de vastes mouvements des troupes allemands.

[He puts his feet on the ground. The parquet floor is cold. He puts on his slippers. He is told of vast movements of German troops.]

--but typically he eschews such devices. The narration does not aim at being historically objective--it has an attitude, sometimes a bristling one--but Vuillard generally confines himself to documented facts. 

The first and last chapters have to do with how the major German industrial concerns decided to go along with the Nazis (who promised stability, big spending on armaments,  and the suppression of labor unions). The second chapter is about Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, the British government's pre-eminent advocate of appeasing Hitler, and his meeting Göring and Hitler himself before the war. The main part of the book, though, is about the Anschluss, the political union with Nazi Germany that Austria was bullied into, or succumbed to under the threat of military force, or rushed to embrace--Vuillard gives us evidence for all three of those possibilities. 

I've wondered whether novelists use World War II settings for their fiction so frequently not only because WW II novels are popular, but also because the setting is a quick way of lending gravitas to a plot. Having World War II in the background instantly creates moral weight, significance. Civilization in the balance, fatal decisions, lives of millions at stake--World War II is one of those unusual actual historical events that rises to the plot stakes of a Marvel superhero movie, and those stakes give the fiction's characters' actions and decisions an epic scale.

Vuillard seems intentionally to go against the grain of all that, though. Everyone, even the political leaders--especially the political leaders, come to think of it--seems egotistical, shortsighted, petty, gaffe-prone. British response to the German troop movements is delayed because the German Ambassador won't leave a state dinner, instead keeping everyone listening to his tennis stories. The fearsome mechanized German military machine breaks down in the mountain passes, creating a  bottleneck. There is lots of film footage of the Austrian crowds cheering Hitler, but it was all edited by Goebbels's team, so we have no idea  how faithfully it records anything. 

Someone occasionally makes a stand--Wilhelm Miklas, president of Austria, stalls a bit before consenting that several crucial state posts be filled by Nazi sympathizers--but just about everyone comes off as a bit shabby: weak, hypocritical, dishonest. No great heroes, no great villains. Even Hitler gets mistaken for a valet.

Vuillard so consistently undermines the usual epic tonality that I wondered, is that why he got the prize? Is he trying to break the paradigm, and succeeding? Not quite as interesting as Les Onze, but L'ordre du jour does show there is life in the old dog of historical fiction yet.

Solmaz Sharif, _Look_

 WHEN I BUY books, I always intend to read them, but rarely do I read them right away. They typically land on some shelf or in some stack as I promise myself I will soon find the opportunity...you can imagine how it goes. It usually takes some kind of occasion or spur to get the book off the shelf and into my hands. In this case, it was the publication of Sharif's second book and its attendant buzz. I thought, geez, I guess  it's time I read the first book.

It's a strong one. Sharif is Iranian-American, and the book reflects both her own family's experience of the lengthy and terrible Iraq-Iran war and the U.S.'s military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her language tends to be spare, pared down, exact, with a scattering of lyrical bright spots.

The surprising element is that throughout the book Sharif stirs in terms and phrases from U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Their presence in the text is signaled by block capitals: 

His father grew very quiet

His father would

HEAVY DROP sob

behind a closed door

His father was a

PERSON ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE EFFECTS

A PILLBOX of opium

in his sock drawer.

The incongruity of the military terms would, you might think, sink the enterprise, given their clunkiness and their Orwellian tendency to hide or blur a grim actuality--their being the exact opposite of what poetry is supposed to be, we might say--but Sharif makes them work in a kind of counterpoint to the grace and clarity of her own voice. Perhaps the military terms' indigestible rigidity makes clearer that the family's suffering and the suffering of whole peoples occur within constraints they did not choose, in terms they do not get to set. 

A really convincing first volume. Yes, I have already bought Customs. I hope to read it before the third appears.

Pierre Michon, _Les Onze_

 A UNIQUE AND for me powerful novel, although it took me a good while to catch on to what was happening. It's a historical novel, I suppose we would say, but on new and surprising lines, like Alvaro Enrique's Sudden Death or Laurent Binet's HHhH, both of which it predates.

It reads like an unusually literary work of art history. Les Onze ("The Eleven") is, we learn, a painting of the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) during their brief but historically crucial tenure as chief authority of the revolutionary French Republic, a period often known as the Reign of Terror. The painting is the work of François-Élie Corentin, the "Tiepolo of the Terror," and now hangs in a room all by itself in the Louvre. The first part of the book is devoted in large part to Corentin's biography and to accounts of the painting's current placement, surrounded by plaques of background information, as well as some details about the members of the Committee, the best-remembered being Maximilien Robespierre.

As I read, I would occasionally Google Corentin, hoping to get an image of Les Onze or of his other paintings or just some supplementary information about him, and kept getting no results other than the novel Les Onze itself. My frustration had no source but my own dim-wittedness, for it turned out, as I should have seen, that Corentin and his painting are entirely Michon's invention. Michon's imagined biographical details about Corentin, his description of the painting, even his description of the painting's museum setting, were so persuasive that I took them as real.

So, we have a historical novel about the French Revolution, but not at all engineered in the way historical fiction typically is. Nonetheless, short (132 pages) and peculiar though it is, it gives us a more sharply focused idea of what the revolution was about than the much longer, much more populated novels about it do (e.g., those of Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Trollope, and their many 20th century successors). For Michon, the revolution is about a migration of authority and power from the sacred to the secular. He captures this in describing the scene of the painting's commission, for instance, but also in describing the (mainly frustrated) literary careers of the members of the committee and the way arts and letters, in some respects, moved into the place in the culture that religion had occupied.

Robespierre, I gather, came up in the recent French presidential election, since the leading left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sometimes cited Robespierre with approval, especially for his redistributivist principles, which brought outcries from those who associate him mainly with the guillotine. But Michon's novel seems less about political particulars than about a watershed moment, a tectonic shift in our basic social assumptions. 

Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif has long been my very favorite novel about the French Revolution, but now I would say it's Les Onze.

Jonathan Balcombe, _Super Fly_

 I WAS SUFFICIENTLY enchanted by Sheldrake's Entangled Life to attempt a deeper dive into pop biology books. This one arrived as a Christmas present, a happy instance of a holiday present rhyming with one's current interests.

Super Fly is devoted to flying insects, a class of being much larger and more varied than I had any idea. It is witty, informative, and well-written...it does suffer in comparison to Enchanted Life, though, I would say, but that's a high bar. 

Still, pretty darned informative. Chapter 3, about flying insect intelligence (capable of quite a bit more than I expected, so far as memory and problem-solving go) and Chapter 8, about flying insect reproduction (a good deal weirder than I expected) were especially illuminating.

Edna O'Brien, _The Little Red Chairs_

 SPOILER ALERT, LET me note, since I can't think of a way to write about this novel without noting the curveball that occurs at its midpoint.

The first half is set in a small, somewhat isolated town in Ireland. A stranger arrives, apparently eastern European in origin, and sets up shop as a sex-therapist or life coach or new age guru or masseur--anyway, he's a hit, even with the nuns and priests. He is a special hit with Fidelma McBride, not exactly middle-aged but no longer young, leader of the local book club, a woman of sensibilité.

There are signs that the new arrival, Dr. Vlad, has a complicated past and may not be what he claims to be. Fidelma is married, making her interest in him, which soon becomes sexual, adulterous. Still, I thought we were headed towards an Irish Music Man with Vlad as Harold Hill and Fidelma as Marian the Librarian--the simple virtues of the small town will redeem him, he will redeem the small town from its hidebound narrowness, life will proceed happily....

No such luck. Vlad is a war criminal, a kind of  Radovan Karadzic figure. He is spotted, arrested, hauled off to the Hague for his trial. Fidelma is pregnant, but she is found by Vlad's former body guards, who (in revenge for what they see as his betrayal and abandonment of them) abort the fetus and nearly kill her. Shattered, she ends up in London, where she slowly and painfully reassembles what she can of her selfhood.

This is the only O'Brien novel I have read. Philip Roth, a longtime fan, called it her masterpiece. Maybe it is. She certainly throws a mean curveball.