Paging All Bookworms! discussion

YEAR GOAL: 135 books/25 nE, 33,000 pages

Jan. 4

1. Lázló Krasnahorkai, Satantango [1985, Eng. tr. 2012] 275 pages [Kindle]

Lázló Krasnahorkai is the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Satantango was his first novel. It is a rather difficult novel which apparently is intended to illustrate that life is a chaotic flux of images and sensations which the mind (i.e. the reader) has to choose among in order to construct a world that seems to (but perhaps actually doesn’t) make sense. It piles up random details while leaving out the information which might (or might not) allow it to be a real narrative.

The book follows the actions and dialogue of about a dozen people living in a small village which is decaying because the “mill”, the main source of employment and income, has been shut down a decade earlier, and all those who had enough energy or ambition have long since left. Two men, Irimiás and Petrina, who were thought to have died, have suddenly returned, and the other characters at the beginning are awaiting them in a long scene in a bar. Obviously, everyone has different expectations and opinions about them, and the reader is equally unsure who they really are. Are they a pair of con men, police informants, or brilliant leaders who will save the villagers and create a new age of prosperity? Everything we think we understand is undercut, and the ending further defeats our attempt.


Jan. 8

2. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition [1944, pub. 1947 (Dutch), this Eng. tr. 1991] 368 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]

Given the current rise in antisemitism worldwide, I have decided to read some of the better-known works on the Holocaust, beginning with The Diary of Anne Frank as it commonly referred to, which is probably all most younger Americans have read about the Holocaust (with the possible exception of Maus or The Book Thief). Most people have probably read Anne Frank in high school, but it wasn’t on the curriculum at my high school, whether because it wasn’t yet considered a “classic” in the 1960s or (more likely) because the right-wing school board was antisemitic, and I never found the opportunity to read it later.

If there is anyone who hasn’t read it, it is the diary of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam who, together with her parents, another couple and their teenage son, and later a friend of her father, are in hiding in a hidden annex behind her father’s office. Although the people in the “Annex” and their helpers had heard rumors of the death camps, the diary itself ends the night before their arrest (a few months before the liberation of the Netherlands) and so has no actual description of the concentration camps; it is an account of the anti-Jewish campaign under the German occupation in the Netherlands, where the Franks had fled from the Nazis in Germany itself, and their attempt to hide from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators, which was successful for over two years.

What surprised me in reading the book was that, in addition to the descriptions of the Holocaust, which I expected, it is also an expression of the ambivalent attitudes of a maturing teenager towards her parents, exacerbated by the fact that she could never get away from her family and escape to her friends, schoolmates or teachers. This by itself in addition to the information about the Holocaust would make it an important read both for teenagers and parents of teens.

I will be following it up with at least Ellie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, the Maus graphic novels, and two or three books by Primo Levi; I may also read a couple books on the rise of fascism which have been recommended to me lately (Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business and Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany in particular.) Although I do not identify the current US regime with fascism, the attacks on immigrants and the mass deportations, including to work-camps in El Salvador, seem to represent the same sort of combination of fear, hatred, and simple cowardice as the hunting of Jews in the late thirties and forties.


Jan. 11

3. Lázló Krasnahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance [1989, Eng. tr. 1998] 322 pages [Kindle]

The Melancholy of Resistance is not the most difficult novel I have ever read, but it is probably in the top ten. Perhaps it is not so much difficult as deliberately obscure. It opens in the same kind of decaying and depressive town as Satantango. The style is also somewhat similar, although it piles up subjective rather than objective details. The viewpoint is distributed in a kind of “stream-of-consciousness” style among four major characters: the old and fearful Mrs. Plauf, her mentally retarded son Valuska, the retired musicologist Ezter, and his estranged wife Mrs. Ezter.

The book is usually described as “postmodernist fiction”, but it is in my opinion a clear example that much of what is called “postmodernism” today is largely just a development of what fifty years ago was called “existentialism”. This is most obvious in the consciousness of Ezter, which reminded me of Sartre’s La Nausée; he goes from believing in global “meanings”, to a consciousness of “meaninglessness”, to the epiphany that every particular thing has its own individual “meaning” just as itself. He eventually “chooses” his own meaning in his relationship with Valuska.

The main action of the novel concerns a “circus”, really just an exhibition with a dead whale and an alien or demonic creature we never actually see called “The Prince”. The “circus” is accompanied by a group of followers who under the influence of the “Prince” engage in the meaningless destruction of the town and brutal killing of many people. This may be an allegory of the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the chaos of post-Stalinist Hungary, but above all it represents the irrationality of life. The role of the con-artists in Satantango is here played by Mrs. Ezter, who, in her own opinion, is responsible for everything that happens, manipulating events to reach some sort of power. Krasznahorkai has said that all his works, or at least the principle novels, are successive approximations to the novel he wanted to write.



Jan. 13

4. Elie Wiesel, Night [1958, Eng. tr. 2006] 133 pages

One of the earliest and best-known accounts by a survivor of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel’s Night exposes the brutality of the German concentration camps. There is really nothing I can say about a book like this; the horrors speak for themselves. Wiesel later received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in seeking justice for the victims of the Holocaust.


Jan. 14

5. Elie Wiesel, Dawn [1960, Eng. tr. 1961] 87 pages

Wiesel’s first two novels, Dawn and Day, were added to the memoir Night to form a trilogy.
Dawn is focused on a moral dilemma. The protagonist is a terrorist (Wiesel correctly uses the term); a survivor of the Holocaust, he has been recruited by “The Movement” to fight against the British in Palestine. The British are about to execute a captured terrorist, and the protagonist has been ordered to execute a captured British soldier in reprisal. Although as a soldier he is used to killing combatants, to kill an unarmed prisoner creates a moral conflict. He imagines himself as an SS executioner, and then tries to rationalize the need for killing this prisoner, going back and forth throughout the night as his human conscience wars with his loyalty to the “Movement”.

The description of the situation is very strange. Wiesel refers in his later (2006) preface to the edition I read, to “one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland.” There is no mention of the fact that their “ancestral homeland” was also the current homeland of another people. He describes the situation in the novel itself by saying that a Jewish country was occupied by British colonialism (as if he were writing about somewhere like Ireland), and one of the characters consoles the protagonist by assuring him that as soon as the British leave, there will be peace and his children will grow up in a normal situation. Given the actual situation in Palestine at the time, and the subsequent eighty years of Israeli/Palestinian history, could anyone really have had that illusion (to say nothing of in 2006)?

Leaving that aside, the moral questions he raises about political violence are perennial ones, and the book dramatizes them in a very moving way.



Jan. 15

6. Elie Wiesel, Day (previous tr. as The Accident) [1961, Eng. tr. 1962] 117 pages

In the last book of the trilogy, originally titled The Accident, Wiesel begins with the protagonist in the hospital in critical condition following being hit by a taxi. The novel then returns in a flashback to his first meeting with his girlfriend, Kathleen. The book continues to alternate between the two times, his recovery in the hospital and the development of his relationship. We soon realize that he is a Holocaust survivor, and that he is haunted by guilt and shame about his past. Today there is a name for that — survivor’s guilt. At the time, this was not understood, and this book is one of the first descriptions of it.

Jan. 18

7. Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life [1999] 491 pages

As I have mentioned a couple months ago, my eighteenth-century literature reading is up to the Marquis de Sade. I am finishing up with this biography and a special journal issue on Sade, before going on to Sébastien Mércier and Choderlos de Laclos in French and MacKenzie in English. Sade, brilliant and perverted, philosopher and pornographer, has been an enigma to twentieth-century scholars. Gray’s book is a fairly good biography which tries to place his life in the context of the history and society of the ancien régime and the French Revolution and its aftermath. There is much interesting material, although her understanding of history is rather superficial, and she is very opposed to the Revolution, perhaps due to a lack of objective distance from her subject. There was not as much about his writings as I had hoped for, but this is necessary background.

Jan. 20

8. Rudolph Erich Raspe, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen [1786] [Kindle] 204 pages

I found another classic eighteenth-century book for free on Amazon. [I took the pages from a different Kindle edition as the one I “bought” did not have the physical pages listed.] Raspe’s book was the original version of the Munchhausen tales, from which the other versions, including the expanded German translation by Burger which I read long ago, were all derived. Although Raspe was a German author, he wrote the book in English while in exile due to some roguish activities. This book is divided into two parts; the first part, or at least the first four or five chapters, is essentially the book by Raspe, which is one of the most comic novels among all the “classics”, while the second part consists of several sequels by various anonymous hack-writers and is fairly mediocre and more satirical than comic.

If you aren’t familiar with these stories, they are all completely true, just like the speeches of our current national leaders. Among the most famous are the time he stops in an empty field of snow, and hitches his horse to a pole sticking up out of the snow. In the morning, he wakes up in the middle of a village, with his horse hanging from the steeple of a church. Apparently, the village was completely covered by snow which due to a sudden change of weather had all melted overnight. Another story is when he was hunting and ran out of shot. He quickly ate a number of cherries and used the pits as shot. He hit a stag in the head but did not manage to kill it. The next year he hunts in the same place and finds a stag with a cherry tree growing out of its head. Another famous story is how he enters an enemy town in pursuit of fleeing soldiers, and stops to water his horse. The horse keeps drinking and drinking without stopping; he turns around and sees that half his horse is missing, having been cut in half by the portcullis being lowered as he was entering, and the water is just running out the back. He finds the other half at the gate and stitches the horse back together.

Jan. 21

9. Littérales, v. 46, 2019: Sade: roman et philosophie 148 pages [in French]

If the biography by Gray tries to put the Marquis into the historic context of the years before, during, and after the Revolution, this special issue of the journal Littérales tries to put his writings into the context of eighteenth-century philosophical novels. It contains eight articles, including the introduction: Colas Duflo, “Introduction. Sade et l’histoire du roman à ambition philosophique”; Fabrice Moulin, “L’orgie sans la dissertation: le statut du discours philosophique dans Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome”; Jean Goldzink, “La philosophie dans Aline et Valcour; Élise Sultan, “Juliette philosophe: vers un au-delà du libertinage”; Stéphanie Pujol, “Le principe de lésion. Le discours politique et moral de Sade à la lumière de Montesquieu et de Rousseau”; Jean-Christophe Abramovici, “La prise de parole philosophique dans le roman sadien”; Audrey Faulot, “Manon défloré ou les impossibles Mémoires de Justine: la parodie romanesque comme instrument philosophique dans Les Infortunes de la vertu, Les Malheurs de la vertu et La Nouvelle Justine de Sade”; and Mladen Kozul, “Sade, le libertinage et la durée”. The most interesting was the article by Faulot on Sade’s novels as parodies of Prevost’s Manon Lescaut and Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne.

Jan. 21-22

10. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I. My Father Bleeds History [1986] 159 pages (Graphic novel format)
11. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began 136 pages [1991] (Graphic novel format)

Continuing with my reading min-project on the Holocaust, I read this two volume “graphic novel”. Actually, like most of the very few books I have read in this format, it is really non-fiction. Spiegelman tells the story of his father and partly of his mother from the beginning of the war in Poland to their liberation at the end of the war, a period during which the father was first in a POW camp, then later in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and eventually Dachau, and the mother was also in Auschwitz and later in another camp whose name he can’t remember. The younger Spiegelman embeds this into the later life of his father, as an old man in the United States, who is telling him the story, and we see how his experiences have distorted his life even much later on.

I would recommend this, together with the diary of Anne Frank, as a good introduction for teenagers to the events of the Holocaust (I wouldn’t recommend it to younger readers), but it also is worth reading for adults as well.

Jan. 23

12. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World [1666] 102 pages [Kindle]

The Blazing-World is often described as the first work of science fiction, or more conservatively the first work of science fiction by a woman (was there any earlier science-fiction by men? I don’t know of any; everything I have read earlier than this that has been called science fiction is basically just utopian fantasy.) To be honest, its claim to be science fiction rests on a small portion of the book, in which one of the protagonists, who has become Empress of the Blazing-World, establishes scientific societies, which then discuss in a rather absurd way the science of the day (just before the first publications by Newton) and this is probably meant as a satire on the Royal Society. Most of the book is fantasy or allegory. The novel was first published as an appendix to her non-fiction work, Observations on Experimental Philosophy. It is a short, fun read, obviously very much what you would expect from a duchess under the Restoration.

I found this short biographical sketch on the Folger Shakespeare Library website:
“Anna Battigelli, the author of Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind and professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, wrote the following about Cavendish for a 2012 Folger exhibition, Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700:
“Cavendish’s life was shaped by the trauma of the English civil wars. She was a maid of honor to the unpopular Queen Henrietta Maria, with whom she fled into exile. In exile, she married England’s most eligible bachelor, William Cavendish, later Duke of Newcastle, with whom she lived in Paris and Antwerp for sixteen years before returning to London in 1660. With no children and all the resources of her husband’s literary and scientific salon, Cavendish threw herself into the emerging discipline of science, even as she produced fourteen volumes of plays, poems, biographies, scientific treatises, romances, and satire. Hers was a mind on fire — so much so that she would wake her scribe in the middle of the night to take dictation. Her compulsive writing compensated for her pathological shyness. In her books she engaged and challenged her age’s leading thinkers. She satirized the Royal Society, the court, and social conventions. She forwarded copies of her lavish folio volumes to universities and members of the aristocracy. Remarkably, she arranged for an invitation to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, the only woman of her era allowed entrance into this circle of men.”