To Youth and Back
We’ll start in Italy, where Domenico Starnone’s Trick sends aging illustrator and artist Daniele Mallarico from Milan to his boyhood home in Naples to mind his 4-year-old grandson, whose parents are speaking at a mathematics conference and are simultaneously undergoing a marital crisis. Over four days, Daniele finds himself baffled by the energy and determination of young Mario and also by the boy’s natural drawing ability, which underlines the loss of Daniele’s own youthful creativity. At one level, the novel’s events are familiar to any childminder. Battles over cellphones, television, and food culminate in a scene in which Daniele is locked out on the apartment balcony and dependent on a willful but confused child to rescue him. Young Mario vacillates between unusual self-confidence and childish confusion, and clings to what he “knows” are the ways things should be done.In the end, Mario’s parents return, having triumphed both academically and personally, while Daniele has come to terms with the arc of his life and embraced the gifts of his grandson, forming a new bond. In the book’s final paragraph, Daniele’s daughter praises a drawing she thinks is her father’s, to which Daniele says, “‘My grandson did it,’ I said proudly, but Mario shouted out, practically at the same time, ‘I copied Grandpa.’”
Sadder and Wiser
In Judas, Israeli writer Amos Oz also brings a new person into a home. Shmuel Ash, “around twenty-five, shy, emotional, socialist, asthmatic, liable to veer from wild enthusiasm to disappointment and back again,” and in need of work, is hired to assist an aging teacher, Gershom Wald, and his widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia. Through months of conversations, primarily with Wald, Ash learns about the futile efforts of Atalia’s father, Shealtiel Abravanel, to lead Israel toward a more conciliatory path before the 1948 war. The conversations about Abravanel are paralleled by Ash’s half-abandoned scholarly work on the biblical Judas, whom he believes to have been “the only Christian who believed in Jesus’ divinity until his final moments on the cross … the only Christian who died with Jesus and did not outlive him.”Meanwhile, Wald contrasts his own views with Abravanel’s, maintaining that “we were not born to love more than a handful of people,” and that peace between Arabs and Israelis is impossible. But he also concedes, “blessed are the dreamers, and cursed be the man who opens their eyes … Thanks to the dreamers, maybe we who are awake are a little less ossified and desperate than we would be without them.”
In the end, Ash leaves a sadder and a wiser man, but outwardly little changed, as are the inhabitants of the somber house. Oz’s detailed physical and character descriptions, as well as his trenchant dialogue, make the book absorbing even when, as Samuel Johnson said of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, “if you were to read for the story you would hang yourself … you must read for the sentiment.”
From the Outside In
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone is filled with action and with strangers—African refugees who are now languishing in contemporary Berlin. We see these men through the eyes of Richard, a newly retired classics professor, whose interest is piqued by reports of the men’s encampment in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. At first a curious spectator, Richard becomes increasingly involved with these stateless men and the bureaucratic labyrinth they inhabit. As he comes to know them, empathy for them and indignation at their treatment leads him to take action, and to enlist his previously indifferent neighbors in supporting the refugees as best they can against a government happy to use every legal maneuver to evade its moral duty.By the novel’s end, Richard sees modern Germany as a sorry degeneration from the hospitality of its Teutonic forbears, as well as from the humane mores of the refugees. A German immigration attorney, who shares Richard’s long view, reads to him and an African client from Tacitus’ Germania: “It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door ... It makes no difference that they come uninvited; they are welcomed just as warmly. No distinction is ever made between the acquaintance and the stranger as far as the right of hospitality is concerned.” One of the refugees puts this more directly: “ ‘It’s possible that [my] people who grow up here soon won’t remember what culture is.’ ‘Culture?’ Richard asks. ‘Good behavior.’ ”
Into the Mind of a Doctor
In Night Train to Lisbon, Swiss philosopher-novelist Pascal Mercier sends yet another academic on a surprising quest. Bern schoolteacher and multilingual scholar Raimund Gregorius, known to his students as “Mundus,” the impeccable teacher and “most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school,” is walking to school when he encounters a woman, who may be contemplating suicide, on a bridge over the Aare River. At the end of their brief meeting, when he asks her nationality, she replies, “Portugues.” That afternoon he enters a bookshop, picks up a Portuguese book, Um Ourives das Palavras (A Goldsmith of Words), and becomes intrigued by a sentence the store owner translates for him: “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us—what happens with the rest?” He abruptly leaves his former life and takes the title’s train to learn more about the author, one Doctor Amadeu Prado.What he finds is a complex and remarkable man, now long dead: a doctor, a writer, a figure in the resistance to the Salazar dictatorship, and a man who affected almost everyone he met as deeply and permanently as he now has Gregorius. Mercier interweaves Gregorius’ quest with extensive quotations from Prado’s book and from other writings he discovers, which have been kept by Prado’s school friends, his sister, and others in the resistance. The doctor, he learns, faced two enormous moral dilemmas: between his medical oath and his politics, and between his politics and his humanity. He wrestled with questions of existence itself by writing, because “You’re not really awake when you don’t write. And you have no idea who you are. Not to mention who you aren’t.”
Revisiting Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife relocates the story of Beowulf and the magnificent hall of Heorot to a lavish contemporary exurban development, Herot Hall. Its citizens are not merely self-absorbed, but constantly engaged in a verbal war of all against all: in-law against in-law, neighbor against neighbor, insiders against outsiders. Their favorite toast is, “Here’s to us, and people like us.” While lauding themselves for the exclusive glories of their suburb, they collectively ask, “Who wants to live in the city, anyway? The guns! The knives! The lack of human compassion!”Into this dystopia comes the stranger—a traumatized, battered female veteran of the Gulf Wars, who hides from the world with her son Gren in a mountain cave overlooking this smug community.
Many readers will enjoy unravelling the Beowulf allusions: the mere, the severed arm, the names: Roger, Willa, Gren; and police officer and “hero” Ben Woolf. But Headley adds novelty: Grendel is only a normal boy (though “born with teeth”), a child of his mother’s rape, who looks with interest and envy at the world below them and its privileged youth. In this version, women hold the power of “civilization.” They are “the reason men can live at all, running corporations, announcing wars. Every man has a woman at home, and every woman plots the course of the universe, putting it into his breast pocket, like a note attached to a kindergartner, sending him out into his day.” It is the women, not the lord of Heorot, who send Ben Woolf into battle against the “monsters” who threaten their world, simply by existing. Herot tries to impose itself on the untamed world beyond it, provoking a cataclysm that cries out for cinematic re-creation.
Five strangers, five journeys, and five worldly works for today.
Read any good books lately? Tell us—and your peers—about them!
Tell us about it in a few sentences: Why did you like it? What made you want to read it? What was your biggest takeaway? Did you have a favorite line?
It can be nonfiction or fiction, work-related or not, a recent best-seller or a time-honored classic. Email us at [email protected] with your 100-word "review," and we'll consider it for a future issue.