*The Stonemason

The Stonemason -Cormac McCarthy
I would like to say, “the best book I’ve read in years.” And I can say it, and mean it, in certain terms. A book that makes NYU’s rejection a must. A book that solidifies my deepest religion. A book that makes me stand up and turn around and admire what it is I’m sitting on.
“The audience may perhaps be also a jury. And now we can begin. As the mathematician Gauss said to his contemporaries: Go forward and faith will come to you.”
“And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.”
“He says that to a man who’s never laid a stone there’s nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong.”
And does this echo of Marilynne Robinson… I’m sure he must have read Housekeeping. Or at least he sees something kindred in the dirt of fiction… “In what tense do you speak of those who have vanished? You don’t speak of them. You are simply enslaved to them.”
“Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He’ll find me.”
“The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be somehow justified thereby. That if enough of the world’s weight only pass through his hands he must become inaugurated into the reality of that world in a way to withstand all scrutiny.”
“Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?”

*Housekeeping

Housekeeping -Marilynne Robinson
Here then, is the female sentence. Here then, is the female story arc. Without hesitation, but with complete, creeping patience, Robinson accepts her sentence, paddles once, and spinning into the middle of a deeply cold and sad lake, the story shows us the comedy and the slow despair of both abandonment and utter, resplendent, unique love. The details that Robinson chooses. The philosophy. The Biblical cry of Ruth and the song of Miriam and the religion of Cane. She doesn’t show us, the book is not written to be read, it is merely a testament and we stumble upon it, fortunate us, and gander as if it were a mountain suddenly in view, or a stunted tree in a blooming orchard, a helicopter low in the sky, a falling leaf in late August. But there is no sadness to be had for a mountain, or for a plant, or even for a helicopter. It is only curiosity. And somehow she makes me laugh, though I promise I never broke a smile while reading her book. She is obviously coeval with McCarthy. But I would never call her a sidekick. For they are both unique. Both, thank God, I believe, writing beyond gender. Though Cormac has his moments. Though Marilynne has her moments.
This is what I would call modern American fiction:
“That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.”
This is what we might call post-luminescent:
“In the course of the days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair and rag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.”
“What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
“If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair.”
“…so prophecy is only brilliant memory.”
“By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
She is a gem. A find. I am happy that, amazingly, again, this year, I find a find.

*A Room of One's Own

A Room of One’s Own -Virginia Woolf
Perhaps now more than under other titles it is obvious that this booklog is more than a series of review but also, (see February’s review of The Prophet) obviously, a sort of self-chronicle. I flew to Philadelphia to visit with my father and visit and interview with NYU. It was a big reading weekend. I finished Remembrance of Things Past and started A Room of One’s Own on the first flight. Before even getting on the flight I remembered my knife in my pocket and bought an envelope to mail it back to myself. Not an omen, but a submission to defenselessness. I paid five dollars for a small bottle of red wine, and I blame the expenditure on Virginia Wolf. My father and I, the day after arrival, in a yuppy corner of downtown Philly, finished a bottle of Chianti and trucked page by page through my novel. New York City the next day by train and touristing with Joel and Simcha and up til four in the morning East Village in the afternoon and then NYU open house followed by informal, successful interview with assistant director. The school impressed me. Excited me. I finished Woolf’s essay on the train back to Trenton. Couldn’t sleep the night, read Marilynne Robinson by the half-light, awake before six, delayed flights, stuck in Denver, finish Housekeeping after they shuffle us back off the plane still in Denver, then open Stonemason and finish it streaming over the Rockies, Nevada, Yosemite, all in one flight. (see last August’s Child of God) When I finally, spent, walk back into my Berkeley house a letter from NYU postmarked the day I left for Philly, tells me that they don’t want me. So now I keep looking sidelong at my bookshelf. It’s me and you baby.
No! I don’t consider books sentient in that respect. But I do admit some sadness. Not sadness. Shadowboxing. Roiling. I’m not waiting for anything. Maybe there isn’t a sentence yet for a woman. But if that were true then neither is the contemporary sentence completely masculine. Now, who knows what sex we are. Then, 1929, I’m not sorry for anything. Maybe there was a dichotomy. I do believe in progress. I know that Virginia Woolf is part of our progress. I know that she’s in me whether I like it or not. I know because of her essay I excused myself and simpered to the back of the cabin and paid five dollars for a mini bottle of Chilean Cabernet. I know that my writing will never be the same. I know she promotes Proustian androgyny. I know that without it there will be no writing at all. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female, only art, not art, nothing, not nihilism, fullness, a seed, by the Grace of God.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

*Time Regained

Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past -Marcel Proust
Thom Conroy recommended to me reading Proust and then added, “It will change your life.”
It did.
His notions of time and courage, of love and despondency, I feel are so near to my own that I don’t know if his many million words substituted my own understanding or if, in his eloquence, he reached a level of translatable, glossolalic, transmogrifying, universal truth that my nascent balks at the world are necessarily, not to any genius of my own, in tune to. Yet I know, I know that we are kin. In the same way that the old, forgetful, wiry, stumbling character of Marcel remembers as if Time were no chasm to be bridged, the ferruginous, clear ringing of the gate’s bell as Swann finally took leave of his parents for the evening and young Marcel had only the dreamy, swaddling glory of being embraced and kissed by his soporific mother to look forward to, I know that there is a brotherhood, a pledge and almost a religion shared between Proust and I that needs traverse no lacuna of time or dismemberment of ocean.
His androgyny is commonly accepted, but I think that Proust takes his art not only to the substratum of ambisexuality, but to a place that is truly beyond gender, beyond Greek or Jew, beyond today or tomorrow. It is a spirit that is beyond exhaustion, not triumphing over it. It is a patience that has looked into the face of beauty and found nothing left to wait for. There is nothing to wait for, the fanning of these pages like billows plushing oxygen into the burning bush. Look hard.
Perhaps I am exaggerating, for surely, the opus is flawed, but there leaves in me and in Proust and in the world not a reflection of the glory of the world, but a veritable modicum of Gloria itself.
“We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.”
Nice to see Apocalypse Now pilfer matching Wagner’s Valkyries to a raid of zeppelins. (p. 781)
“phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs.”
“A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? … a fragment of time in pure state.”
“The railway, according to this mode of thinking, was destined to kill contemplation and there was no sense in regretting the age of diligence.”
“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.”
“Oblivion is at work within us.”
“A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.”

*The Idiot

The Idiot -Fyodor Dostoevski (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
My initial impression was that Dostoevski wrote a pointless novel. Which was a good impression. Especially after the obviously tendentious Crime and Punishment, and the ponderously philosophical, though it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, Brothers Karamazov. So, at first, The Idiot felt like ahh, here is a book without a purpose, not trying to prove that God is in all of us or disprove Hell or flick Earth off our shoulders like the midge that it is, but just letting Dostoevski play upon a theme, let him run with the darkness of his spine, harping over and again weakness, depravity, trembling, jealousy, epilepsy, impudent young men and murder. And I was thrilled. Distracted. Lost track of a few names. Mildly disappointed by the ending. Humdrum translation. And it seemed to me by the end, that indeed it was a pointlessly intended novel, which is beautiful, but there was an element of haste to the plot that didn’t let it soar like his other books. Which is unique, because in both Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, the climax comes early and there is a lot of repercussion that follows, but none of it ever bores. Yet in The Idiot, the text slowly churns forward and half-climaxes at the very end, which, somehow took away from all of the excitement.
Dostoevski the man, though, I love him.
“’they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese,’ Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. ‘An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: “You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,” and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender’s eyes.’”
“Roman Catholocism is even worse than atheism itself.”
“all this Europe of yours, it’s all one big fantasy.”
The Idiot is Mother Russia in full stride.

*Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -Tom Stoppard
What I liked least about it was the transition between Stoppard’s writing and the extant text from Shakespeare. The old was just so obviously better than the new. The concept was nice. Some of the dialogue wit and snappy, it’s just that, no offense, Shakespeare is the superior writer. And I mean, by superior, actually, genuine. And I mean by genuine mindfulness of death. And I don’t mean mindfulness of death as tragedy, but the essence of comedy, where Shakespeare wrote humorously because of his imminent darkness whereas Stoppard, so it seemed, wrote humorously out of humor, or hyper-self-consciousness, or, gad, boredom (po-mo-ism). Well, it went fast.
In his own words (he did hit the mark a few times):
“We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it… out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure (he reflects, getting more desperate and rapid.) A Hindu, a Buddhist and a lion-tamer chanced to meet, in a circus on the Indo-Chinese border. (He breaks out.) They’re taking us for granted! …”
“…truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured.”
and I can’t help repeating, of course, Shakespeare, not Stoppard, “You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, escept my life…”

*Hamlet

Hamlet -William Shakespeare
It is oft argued that Shakespeare is a master of craft. Rereading Hamlet, though rich in wit and poetry, I am convinced not of his mastery of form, but that his plays are undying because of their topic. What, then, is the topic of Hamlet? (There certainly has been much concoction to the answer of this question. Nonetheless,) Passion. Love. Madness. Syncretism. Art. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. It drives a spike through my heart though.
I had the inkling that Dostoevsky attempted to write Hamlet’s reciprocal and came up with Crime and Punishment. I have many inklings. So have we all.
“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”
“brevity is the soul of wit.”
“You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life.”
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
“equivocation will undo us.”
“there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

*Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund -Hermann Hesse
Grandiose and dry. Compared to Steppenwolf, Glass Bead Game, and Siddhartha, this book was overly conceptual and weak in character. A light philosophical read, in which the strict duality of human nature was thornily jammed into a merely scholastic oneness of nature. There were gems, of course. There was an overall, arching grace emanating from Hesse’s intellect. I thought very much of Heather and I, as Narcissus and Goldmund, respectively. But gladly we don’t fit into those scientific ingots.
“He thought that perhaps fear of death was the root of all art.”
“Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one’s senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible? Perhaps there were people for whom this was possible. Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.”
and my favorite, a sentence that reminds me of Cormac,
“You are not to think about whether God hears your prayers or whether there is a God such as you imagine.”

*Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe -Daniel Defoe
Battling between the strictures. What I liked best. What an enjoyable read. How pleased I am to have read this book. I can clearly see how Melville must have enjoyed this as well, not only because he and Defoe haunted the same obsessive sea drama, but in their freedom of story-telling. Lists, repetition, continually reminding the reader of what has happened, and then, of course, the singularity, or linearity of the telling. Though Melville was able to shift perspectives, and Defoe was not, they both kept the reader so focused on one action at a time, to the “minutest detail”, as if we were pancaked against a door watching the novel through our peepholes, and what falls down our hallway, pirates, parrots, misadventure, cannibals, whales, shipwrecks, et cetera, that we never tire of our singular view. I still am a little baffled that the book didn’t end when Robinson got off the island, and continued on for a fifteen page adventure in the snowy mountains of France fighting giant packs of wolves. But, so I read it. As I resolve myself to read this year the best books in the world, I’m happy and fortunate to have commenced with such a classic.
“… that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.”
We cannot forget the line drawing of Defoe that is on the first page of the Signet Classic, a snub-nose wicker face man with a voluptuous, curly wig… “and the desires were so moved by it that when I spoke the words my hands would clinch together and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crushed it involuntarily…”
and the conclusion of the novel,
“I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.”