None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, a civilization decided to throw a party on the Iberian Peninsula, and the guest list included Jews, Muslims, and Christians in an arrangement so improbable that posterity christened it "convivencia," which is Spanish for "everyone eventually stops getting along." Peter Cole's "The Dream of the Poem" is the crash course in what those five centuries of coexistence, persecution, exile, and fitful genius produced. A corpus of Hebrew verse so unexpected, so charged with Arabic meters and biblical vocabulary, that the great historian S. D. Goitein required three words to describe it. "The Spanish miracle" was his verdict.
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱
Somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, a civilization decided to throw a party on the Iberian Peninsula, and the guest list included Jews, Muslims, and Christians in an arrangement so improbable that posterity christened it "convivencia," which is Spanish for "everyone eventually stops getting along." Peter Cole's "The Dream of the Poem" is the crash course in what those five centuries of coexistence, persecution, exile, and fitful genius produced. A corpus of Hebrew verse so unexpected, so charged with Arabic meters and biblical vocabulary, that the great historian S. D. Goitein required three words to describe it. "The Spanish miracle" was his verdict.
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱
Italy has a charming national hobby: rewriting its own résumé. Simon Levis Sullam's The Italian Executioners rips that résumé apart.
The year is 1943, Mussolini has fallen, and the newly reborn Republic of Salò, that grotesque puppet state dangling from a German fist, has made Jew-hatred its founding ideology. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona formally declares Jews foreigners and enemies.
Giovanni Preziosi, a defrocked priest who had already gifted Italy its first translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back in 1921, returns from Berlin having been personally received by Hitler, and takes charge of the General Inspectorate of Race. His twenty-one-person staff catalogs "racial status," spreads antisemitic propaganda in schools, oversees property confiscations, and publishes a journal devoted to the study of Jews as a civilizational threat. The country that today wrings its hands about Zionism was, at this moment, running a meticulously Italian genocide, and Sullam intends to introduce you to every smiling bureaucrat behind it.
Meet the cast of enthusiasts. Giovanni Martelloni, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, moonlights as both a writer of scholarly-toned antisemitic newspaper articles and a hands-on confiscator who personally kicks in doors.
Giocondo Protti, a distinguished Venetian radiologist, takes to the lecture circuit describing Jews as "a spiritual monstrosity afflicting the soul of the world in the same way that cancer is a biological monstrosity," to public acclaim and possible Nazi funding.
In Venice on December 5, 1943, as young pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli enchants an audience at La Fenice, Italian police are compiling the final arrest lists for the following night's roundup of over 160 Jews, conducted street by street with the help of racial registers the state itself had built since 1938. Brescia's local newspaper greets the operation as cause for "great satisfaction."
A Resistance-adjacent network near the Swiss border turns out to be a criminal enterprise selling Jews to the Germans at 2,000 lire per head. The informers include business partners, students who denounce their own teachers, a sixteen-year-old who plants a Communist flyer in a Jewish professor's briefcase, and a stage designer named Bruno Pastacaldi who cheerfully passes the anonymous mail along each morning.
The postwar settlement is where the story achieves its particular flavor of comedy. Gaetano Azzariti, president of the tribunal that administered the racial laws from 1938 to 1943, goes on to become minister of justice, then a judge on Italy's Constitutional Court, then its president, a position he holds until his death in 1961.
Mario Cortellini, Venice's Deputy Commissioner for Jewish property seizures, is appointed postwar head of the Office for the Recovery of Jewish Property, making him the designated guardian of the treasure he personally looted.
Giovanni Martelloni's 1950 trial ends in acquittal for all sixty-eight defendants. The Resistance, lasting eighteen months and involving a minority of Italians, spawns dozens of commemorative centers; Fascism, a two-decade mass phenomenon, spawns very few.
Italy glides from the "era of the witness" straight to the "era of the savior," celebrating the courageous few who hid Jews, and conveniently bypassing the era in which tens of thousands of Italian police officers, clerks, journalists, doctors, and neighbors decided, often voluntarily and for a fee of up to 9,000 lire per head, to do exactly the opposite. A country now vocal about the “crimes” of Zionism has yet to officially acknowledge its own.
Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of contemporary history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, a fitting perch for a scholar excavating the city where Italian police rounded up Jews in December 1943 while the opera house stayed open for business.
His book is a short, furious act of historical accounting, and its central message is as uncomfortable as a Fascist bust in a constitutional court hallway. Italy did this to its own Jews, Italy enjoyed doing it, and Italy then hired the people who did it to run the postwar republic.
A country whose officials today drape anti-Zionist rhetoric in the language of human rights, while their own Holocaust Remembrance Day legislation carefully avoids naming the Italian police forces responsible for the deportations, is a country still deep in the business of selective memory. The hypocrisy is architectural in its ambition: condemn Israel, skip the chapter on Preziosi.
The book is thin, the indictment is fat, and the gap between them is where Italy's moral reckoning went missing decades ago and apparently has no forwarding address.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Italy has a charming national hobby: rewriting its own résumé. Simon Levis Sullam's The Italian Executioners rips that résumé apart.
The year is 1943, Mussolini has fallen, and the newly reborn Republic of Salò, that grotesque puppet state dangling from a German fist, has made Jew-hatred its founding ideology. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona formally declares Jews foreigners and enemies.
Giovanni Preziosi, a defrocked priest who had already gifted Italy its first translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back in 1921, returns from Berlin having been personally received by Hitler, and takes charge of the General Inspectorate of Race. His twenty-one-person staff catalogs "racial status," spreads antisemitic propaganda in schools, oversees property confiscations, and publishes a journal devoted to the study of Jews as a civilizational threat. The country that today wrings its hands about Zionism was, at this moment, running a meticulously Italian genocide, and Sullam intends to introduce you to every smiling bureaucrat behind it.
Meet the cast of enthusiasts. Giovanni Martelloni, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, moonlights as both a writer of scholarly-toned antisemitic newspaper articles and a hands-on confiscator who personally kicks in doors.
Giocondo Protti, a distinguished Venetian radiologist, takes to the lecture circuit describing Jews as "a spiritual monstrosity afflicting the soul of the world in the same way that cancer is a biological monstrosity," to public acclaim and possible Nazi funding.
In Venice on December 5, 1943, as young pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli enchants an audience at La Fenice, Italian police are compiling the final arrest lists for the following night's roundup of over 160 Jews, conducted street by street with the help of racial registers the state itself had built since 1938. Brescia's local newspaper greets the operation as cause for "great satisfaction."
A Resistance-adjacent network near the Swiss border turns out to be a criminal enterprise selling Jews to the Germans at 2,000 lire per head. The informers include business partners, students who denounce their own teachers, a sixteen-year-old who plants a Communist flyer in a Jewish professor's briefcase, and a stage designer named Bruno Pastacaldi who cheerfully passes the anonymous mail along each morning.
The postwar settlement is where the story achieves its particular flavor of comedy. Gaetano Azzariti, president of the tribunal that administered the racial laws from 1938 to 1943, goes on to become minister of justice, then a judge on Italy's Constitutional Court, then its president, a position he holds until his death in 1961.
Mario Cortellini, Venice's Deputy Commissioner for Jewish property seizures, is appointed postwar head of the Office for the Recovery of Jewish Property, making him the designated guardian of the treasure he personally looted.
Giovanni Martelloni's 1950 trial ends in acquittal for all sixty-eight defendants. The Resistance, lasting eighteen months and involving a minority of Italians, spawns dozens of commemorative centers; Fascism, a two-decade mass phenomenon, spawns very few.
Italy glides from the "era of the witness" straight to the "era of the savior," celebrating the courageous few who hid Jews, and conveniently bypassing the era in which tens of thousands of Italian police officers, clerks, journalists, doctors, and neighbors decided, often voluntarily and for a fee of up to 9,000 lire per head, to do exactly the opposite. A country now vocal about the “crimes” of Zionism has yet to officially acknowledge its own.
Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of contemporary history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, a fitting perch for a scholar excavating the city where Italian police rounded up Jews in December 1943 while the opera house stayed open for business.
His book is a short, furious act of historical accounting, and its central message is as uncomfortable as a Fascist bust in a constitutional court hallway. Italy did this to its own Jews, Italy enjoyed doing it, and Italy then hired the people who did it to run the postwar republic.
A country whose officials today drape anti-Zionist rhetoric in the language of human rights, while their own Holocaust Remembrance Day legislation carefully avoids naming the Italian police forces responsible for the deportations, is a country still deep in the business of selective memory. The hypocrisy is architectural in its ambition: condemn Israel, skip the chapter on Preziosi.
The book is thin, the indictment is fat, and the gap between them is where Italy's moral reckoning went missing decades ago and apparently has no forwarding address.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Italy has a charming national hobby: rewriting its own résumé. Simon Levis Sullam's The Italian Executioners rips that résumé apart.
The year is 1943, Mussolini has fallen, and the newly reborn Republic of Salò, that grotesque puppet state dangling from a German fist, has made Jew-hatred its founding ideology. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona formally declares Jews foreigners and enemies.
Giovanni Preziosi, a defrocked priest who had already gifted Italy its first translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back in 1921, returns from Berlin having been personally received by Hitler, and takes charge of the General Inspectorate of Race. His twenty-one-person staff catalogs "racial status," spreads antisemitic propaganda in schools, oversees property confiscations, and publishes a journal devoted to the study of Jews as a civilizational threat. The country that today wrings its hands about Zionism was, at this moment, running a meticulously Italian genocide, and Sullam intends to introduce you to every smiling bureaucrat behind it.
Meet the cast of enthusiasts. Giovanni Martelloni, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, moonlights as both a writer of scholarly-toned antisemitic newspaper articles and a hands-on confiscator who personally kicks in doors.
Giocondo Protti, a distinguished Venetian radiologist, takes to the lecture circuit describing Jews as "a spiritual monstrosity afflicting the soul of the world in the same way that cancer is a biological monstrosity," to public acclaim and possible Nazi funding.
In Venice on December 5, 1943, as young pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli enchants an audience at La Fenice, Italian police are compiling the final arrest lists for the following night's roundup of over 160 Jews, conducted street by street with the help of racial registers the state itself had built since 1938. Brescia's local newspaper greets the operation as cause for "great satisfaction."
A Resistance-adjacent network near the Swiss border turns out to be a criminal enterprise selling Jews to the Germans at 2,000 lire per head. The informers include business partners, students who denounce their own teachers, a sixteen-year-old who plants a Communist flyer in a Jewish professor's briefcase, and a stage designer named Bruno Pastacaldi who cheerfully passes the anonymous mail along each morning.
The postwar settlement is where the story achieves its particular flavor of comedy. Gaetano Azzariti, president of the tribunal that administered the racial laws from 1938 to 1943, goes on to become minister of justice, then a judge on Italy's Constitutional Court, then its president, a position he holds until his death in 1961.
Mario Cortellini, Venice's Deputy Commissioner for Jewish property seizures, is appointed postwar head of the Office for the Recovery of Jewish Property, making him the designated guardian of the treasure he personally looted.
Giovanni Martelloni's 1950 trial ends in acquittal for all sixty-eight defendants. The Resistance, lasting eighteen months and involving a minority of Italians, spawns dozens of commemorative centers; Fascism, a two-decade mass phenomenon, spawns very few.
Italy glides from the "era of the witness" straight to the "era of the savior," celebrating the courageous few who hid Jews, and conveniently bypassing the era in which tens of thousands of Italian police officers, clerks, journalists, doctors, and neighbors decided, often voluntarily and for a fee of up to 9,000 lire per head, to do exactly the opposite. A country now vocal about the “crimes” of Zionism has yet to officially acknowledge its own.
Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of contemporary history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, a fitting perch for a scholar excavating the city where Italian police rounded up Jews in December 1943 while the opera house stayed open for business.
His book is a short, furious act of historical accounting, and its central message is as uncomfortable as a Fascist bust in a constitutional court hallway. Italy did this to its own Jews, Italy enjoyed doing it, and Italy then hired the people who did it to run the postwar republic.
A country whose officials today drape anti-Zionist rhetoric in the language of human rights, while their own Holocaust Remembrance Day legislation carefully avoids naming the Italian police forces responsible for the deportations, is a country still deep in the business of selective memory. The hypocrisy is architectural in its ambition: condemn Israel, skip the chapter on Preziosi.
The book is thin, the indictment is fat, and the gap between them is where Italy's moral reckoning went missing decades ago and apparently has no forwarding address.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Italy has a charming national hobby: rewriting its own résumé. Simon Levis Sullam's The Italian Executioners rips that résumé apart.
The year is 1943, Mussolini has fallen, and the newly reborn Republic of Salò, that grotesque puppet state dangling from a German fist, has made Jew-hatred its founding ideology. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona formally declares Jews foreigners and enemies.
Giovanni Preziosi, a defrocked priest who had already gifted Italy its first translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back in 1921, returns from Berlin having been personally received by Hitler, and takes charge of the General Inspectorate of Race. His twenty-one-person staff catalogs "racial status," spreads antisemitic propaganda in schools, oversees property confiscations, and publishes a journal devoted to the study of Jews as a civilizational threat. The country that today wrings its hands about Zionism was, at this moment, running a meticulously Italian genocide, and Sullam intends to introduce you to every smiling bureaucrat behind it.
Meet the cast of enthusiasts. Giovanni Martelloni, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, moonlights as both a writer of scholarly-toned antisemitic newspaper articles and a hands-on confiscator who personally kicks in doors.
Giocondo Protti, a distinguished Venetian radiologist, takes to the lecture circuit describing Jews as "a spiritual monstrosity afflicting the soul of the world in the same way that cancer is a biological monstrosity," to public acclaim and possible Nazi funding.
In Venice on December 5, 1943, as young pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli enchants an audience at La Fenice, Italian police are compiling the final arrest lists for the following night's roundup of over 160 Jews, conducted street by street with the help of racial registers the state itself had built since 1938. Brescia's local newspaper greets the operation as cause for "great satisfaction."
A Resistance-adjacent network near the Swiss border turns out to be a criminal enterprise selling Jews to the Germans at 2,000 lire per head. The informers include business partners, students who denounce their own teachers, a sixteen-year-old who plants a Communist flyer in a Jewish professor's briefcase, and a stage designer named Bruno Pastacaldi who cheerfully passes the anonymous mail along each morning.
The postwar settlement is where the story achieves its particular flavor of comedy. Gaetano Azzariti, president of the tribunal that administered the racial laws from 1938 to 1943, goes on to become minister of justice, then a judge on Italy's Constitutional Court, then its president, a position he holds until his death in 1961.
Mario Cortellini, Venice's Deputy Commissioner for Jewish property seizures, is appointed postwar head of the Office for the Recovery of Jewish Property, making him the designated guardian of the treasure he personally looted.
Giovanni Martelloni's 1950 trial ends in acquittal for all sixty-eight defendants. The Resistance, lasting eighteen months and involving a minority of Italians, spawns dozens of commemorative centers; Fascism, a two-decade mass phenomenon, spawns very few.
Italy glides from the "era of the witness" straight to the "era of the savior," celebrating the courageous few who hid Jews, and conveniently bypassing the era in which tens of thousands of Italian police officers, clerks, journalists, doctors, and neighbors decided, often voluntarily and for a fee of up to 9,000 lire per head, to do exactly the opposite. A country now vocal about the “crimes” of Zionism has yet to officially acknowledge its own.
Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of contemporary history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, a fitting perch for a scholar excavating the city where Italian police rounded up Jews in December 1943 while the opera house stayed open for business.
His book is a short, furious act of historical accounting, and its central message is as uncomfortable as a Fascist bust in a constitutional court hallway. Italy did this to its own Jews, Italy enjoyed doing it, and Italy then hired the people who did it to run the postwar republic.
A country whose officials today drape anti-Zionist rhetoric in the language of human rights, while their own Holocaust Remembrance Day legislation carefully avoids naming the Italian police forces responsible for the deportations, is a country still deep in the business of selective memory. The hypocrisy is architectural in its ambition: condemn Israel, skip the chapter on Preziosi.
The book is thin, the indictment is fat, and the gap between them is where Italy's moral reckoning went missing decades ago and apparently has no forwarding address.
❤️ 🇮🇱
London, 1886. Mr Utterson, a lawyer of studied dullness conducting his Sunday walks in companionable silence, hears a tale from his kinsman Enfield about a small, repellent man named Edward Hyde who trampled a child in the predawn streets and paid off the witnesses with a cheque bearing the signature of one of London's most celebrated physicians.
The physician is Dr Henry Jekyll, holder of enough honorary letters after his name to fill a small almanac, and Utterson is alarmed to discover that Jekyll's will leaves his entire estate to this same Hyde, in the event of Jekyll's death or unexplained disappearance.
Utterson suspects blackmail and fears something worse, and sets out to find Hyde. What he finds is a figure so off-putting that every witness struggles to describe him. Dwarfish, deformed without a specifiable defect, radiating malevolence.
Hyde keeps a key to Jekyll's back door, draws on his accounts, and occupies a house in Soho, where fog thickens to umber. Sir Danvers Carew, an elderly MP of impeccable reputation, is beaten to death with a cane Utterson once gave Jekyll, and Hyde vanishes. Jekyll retreats from the world, appearing at a window briefly before terror closes his expression and the frame.
Dr Lanyon, once Jekyll's oldest colleague and by this point a broken man, dies weeks after witnessing something he declined to commit to paper, leaving Utterson a sealed document with instructions to hold it until Jekyll's death or disappearance. Both conditions are swiftly fulfilled.
What awaits Utterson and his locksmith inside Jekyll's cabinet is a scene of controlled devastation, a will rewritten in Jekyll's own hand, and two documents that promise at last to explain what Hyde truly is, where he came from, and what the word "disappearance" was always intended to cover.
Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in ten feverish days in 1885, reportedly burning a first draft at his wife Fanny's insistence and producing the version we have in another ten.
The speed shows, and so does the compression. The book is closer to a novella than a novel. Its central idea is too explosive to survive the sprawl of three volumes and a subplot about an inheritance.
❤️ 🇮🇱
London, 1886. Mr Utterson, a lawyer of studied dullness conducting his Sunday walks in companionable silence, hears a tale from his kinsman Enfield about a small, repellent man named Edward Hyde who trampled a child in the predawn streets and paid off the witnesses with a cheque bearing the signature of one of London's most celebrated physicians.
The physician is Dr Henry Jekyll, holder of enough honorary letters after his name to fill a small almanac, and Utterson is alarmed to discover that Jekyll's will leaves his entire estate to this same Hyde, in the event of Jekyll's death or unexplained disappearance.
Utterson suspects blackmail and fears something worse, and sets out to find Hyde. What he finds is a figure so off-putting that every witness struggles to describe him. Dwarfish, deformed without a specifiable defect, radiating malevolence.
Hyde keeps a key to Jekyll's back door, draws on his accounts, and occupies a house in Soho, where fog thickens to umber. Sir Danvers Carew, an elderly MP of impeccable reputation, is beaten to death with a cane Utterson once gave Jekyll, and Hyde vanishes. Jekyll retreats from the world, appearing at a window briefly before terror closes his expression and the frame.
Dr Lanyon, once Jekyll's oldest colleague and by this point a broken man, dies weeks after witnessing something he declined to commit to paper, leaving Utterson a sealed document with instructions to hold it until Jekyll's death or disappearance. Both conditions are swiftly fulfilled.
What awaits Utterson and his locksmith inside Jekyll's cabinet is a scene of controlled devastation, a will rewritten in Jekyll's own hand, and two documents that promise at last to explain what Hyde truly is, where he came from, and what the word "disappearance" was always intended to cover.
Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in ten feverish days in 1885, reportedly burning a first draft at his wife Fanny's insistence and producing the version we have in another ten.
The speed shows, and so does the compression. The book is closer to a novella than a novel. Its central idea is too explosive to survive the sprawl of three volumes and a subplot about an inheritance.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Latimer Grant is a young Victorian man too sensitive for banking, too inarticulate for poetry, too pale for fox-hunting, and possessed of an absolutely catastrophic gift. After a grave illness in Geneva he discovers he can read other people's minds, involuntarily and always at the worst moment. The thoughts of every acquaintance flood his skull like an orchestra tuning permanently, except those of one person.
That one exception is Bertha Grant, a blond, sharp-eyed creature with the warmth of a marble medallion and the conversational style of a dagger wrapped in silk. She alone remains a mystery to him, and because he can hear every other soul on the continent, her closed mind is the most intoxicating thing he has ever encountered. He falls for her with full fervour.
Latimer's brother Alfred, whose inner life consists almost entirely of self-congratulation and equestrian enthusiasm, is already engaged to Bertha. Latimer watches the courtship from inside Alfred's own satisfied skull, which is precisely as awful as it sounds. But Eliot, who has the timing of a superior card-player, arranges Alfred's exit from the story via a horse, a hill, and a concussion, leaving the estate, the income, and the inconvenient question of Bertha's future all to be resolved by a cold April morning and a wedding that the groom has already foreseen in a vision so terrible he shuddered for days.
The marriage is, to no one's surprise except the guests, a sustained and expert catastrophe. Bertha, once legally secured, drops the mystique she wore like a borrowed hat, and Latimer's gift operates on her fully at last: what he finds inside that elegant skull is contempt so thorough it constitutes a kind of artistry.
They inhabit the same house, she brilliant at dinner parties, he shrinking from his own servants whose petty thoughts assault him around the clock. Then a disquieting maid named Mrs. Archer appears, and a visiting doctor named Meunier proposes to conduct a rather unconventional medical experiment on a dying woman. The results of that experiment will surface a secret so cold and specific that even a man who can read minds will be thunderstruck to hear it spoken aloud.
George Eliot wrote "The Lifted Veil" in 1859 while simultaneously being one of the most formidable intellects in Victorian England and a woman who published under a man's name because the era trusted trousers more than talent. Mary Ann Evans chose her pen name because she knew exactly how thick the veil over women's minds was kept by respectable society, which gives the story's central metaphor a unique biographical edge.
Total knowledge of another person destroys the very thing that makes love possible. Latimer can hear every soul except Bertha's, and that silence is what he worships. The moment the veil lifts and her inner life floods in, what remains is a cold room with bad wallpaper.
Eliot compresses seven years of marital ruin into a few paragraphs. There is genuinely little to say about misery that compounds daily. Every era produces people who fall in love with their own projections. The Victorian corset merely gave the delusion better posture. Today the same mechanism runs on curated social media profiles, which are just flashy veils.
Foreknowledge offered Latimer precisely zero protection against desire. He absorbed the warning, shuddered appropriately, and proceeded regardless, which is what people have always done with good advice. My advice to you is to read this short genius work.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Latimer Grant is a young Victorian man too sensitive for banking, too inarticulate for poetry, too pale for fox-hunting, and possessed of an absolutely catastrophic gift. After a grave illness in Geneva he discovers he can read other people's minds, involuntarily and always at the worst moment. The thoughts of every acquaintance flood his skull like an orchestra tuning permanently, except those of one person.
That one exception is Bertha Grant, a blond, sharp-eyed creature with the warmth of a marble medallion and the conversational style of a dagger wrapped in silk. She alone remains a mystery to him, and because he can hear every other soul on the continent, her closed mind is the most intoxicating thing he has ever encountered. He falls for her with full fervour.
Latimer's brother Alfred, whose inner life consists almost entirely of self-congratulation and equestrian enthusiasm, is already engaged to Bertha. Latimer watches the courtship from inside Alfred's own satisfied skull, which is precisely as awful as it sounds. But Eliot, who has the timing of a superior card-player, arranges Alfred's exit from the story via a horse, a hill, and a concussion, leaving the estate, the income, and the inconvenient question of Bertha's future all to be resolved by a cold April morning and a wedding that the groom has already foreseen in a vision so terrible he shuddered for days.
The marriage is, to no one's surprise except the guests, a sustained and expert catastrophe. Bertha, once legally secured, drops the mystique she wore like a borrowed hat, and Latimer's gift operates on her fully at last: what he finds inside that elegant skull is contempt so thorough it constitutes a kind of artistry.
They inhabit the same house, she brilliant at dinner parties, he shrinking from his own servants whose petty thoughts assault him around the clock. Then a disquieting maid named Mrs. Archer appears, and a visiting doctor named Meunier proposes to conduct a rather unconventional medical experiment on a dying woman. The results of that experiment will surface a secret so cold and specific that even a man who can read minds will be thunderstruck to hear it spoken aloud.
George Eliot wrote "The Lifted Veil" in 1859 while simultaneously being one of the most formidable intellects in Victorian England and a woman who published under a man's name because the era trusted trousers more than talent. Mary Ann Evans chose her pen name because she knew exactly how thick the veil over women's minds was kept by respectable society, which gives the story's central metaphor a unique biographical edge.
Total knowledge of another person destroys the very thing that makes love possible. Latimer can hear every soul except Bertha's, and that silence is what he worships. The moment the veil lifts and her inner life floods in, what remains is a cold room with bad wallpaper.
Eliot compresses seven years of marital ruin into a few paragraphs. There is genuinely little to say about misery that compounds daily. Every era produces people who fall in love with their own projections. The Victorian corset merely gave the delusion better posture. Today the same mechanism runs on curated social media profiles, which are just flashy veils.
Foreknowledge offered Latimer precisely zero protection against desire. He absorbed the warning, shuddered appropriately, and proceeded regardless, which is what people have always done with good advice. My advice to you is to read this short genius work.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Luke Rhinehart, the pen name of George Cockcroft, published "The Dice Man" in 1971 as a mock autobiography, a form chosen with full satirical intent. The book claims to be the confessions of a great man who will be misunderstood, and it proceeds to make that prediction come spectacularly true.
Rhinehart the character tells us in the preface that his style will be random, that distortions will be embraced, and that a well-told lie is a gift of the gods, then asks us to take everything that follows seriously. A text about the dissolution of the self that keeps dissolving its own reliability.
A bored psychiatrist, sitting at a poker table after midnight in 1968 New York, decides to let a die govern his actions. The first command is rape. Rhinehart goes downstairs, announces his intention to his neighbour Arlene Ecstein with flat sincerity, and she, after some negotiation, cooperates.
Here the book lays its most provocative card on the table, face up and grinning. The treatment of sexual assault as a zany domestic caper is a genuine moral failure, one that the novel wears with nonchalance as a philosophical position. It is not. It is a period artefact, soaked in the same testosterone-drenched utopianism that made the 1970s simultaneously revolutionary and revolting.
The book believes, with the cheerful totalitarianism of Nietzsche, that sex is the primary site of human liberation. This belief is as dated as motel bathroom wallpaper.
The novel's satirical targets are numerous but the central one is psychiatry itself. Rhinehart practices nondirective therapy, a method he describes with accurate and affectionate contempt as making the analyst resemble a redundant moron.
His colleague Ecstein publishes clear and brilliant books demonstrating that the key to therapeutic success is accident. Dr. Mann, the authoritative father figure, dispenses wisdom from an armchair while crumbling potato chips onto the table and charging by the hour.
The profession Rhinehart is abandoning was already built on chance pretending to be method, and the dice merely strip away the costume. When Rhinehart begins insulting his patients, assigning them exercises in humiliation and transgression, he is doing what his training already did, only faster and cheaper. The satire is accurate. The comedy is cruel. The two are indistinguishable.
The self is already a performance, already a set of habitual choices cpnstructing an identity. Rhinehart cites Jung, Nietzsche, Chuang-Tzu and van den Berg in his epigraphs, and his dice therapy is a comic operationalisation of ideas already circulating in the counterculture of 1968.
This period document sketches the ridiculousness of every liberation philosophy available to it, from Zen to radical therapy to free love, to drugs and alcoholism, to gambling and investing, with the affection of an author who has tried them all and found them wanting, and the mischief of a man who has tried them all and found them amusing.
The dice do not free Rhinehart into happiness or wisdom. They free him into chaos, legal jeopardy, the destruction of his marriage, and a grandiosity so total it becomes indistinguishable from psychosis.
The liberation the die promises is genuine. The liberated man is a fugitive composing his memoir in hiding. The book does not look away from this consequence, and this is where its profundity ambushes the reader who came only for the laughs.
The supporting characters are drawn with a comic brush. Ecstein, short and rotund and brilliant, researches the rape of his own wife as a case study and publishes the results. Lillian Rhinehart, described as a female Don Quixote after being tossed in a blanket, responds to her husband's abandonment by rolling a die, taking a lover, and enrolling in Columbia Law School, and she is the sanest person in the book. Arturo Toscanini Jones, committed to a psychiatric ward for throwing hand grenades at Young Conservatives, has a better grip on the terms of his situation than any of his doctors. Eric Cannon, the messianic teenager with long hair and rimless glasses, escapes through a Broadway theater.
These characters are grotesques, but grotesques with mortgages and families and genuine grievances, and that separates Cockcroft from the merely absurdist tradition he is raiding.
Despite the considerable handicap of its sexual politics, Rhinehart creates a theology, a sacred text called "The Book of the Die," a congregation of dicepeople, and a missionary impulse that spreads from Manhattan to Missouri. When a correspondent writes to ask how to raise her daughter in the faith. The dice become God in an arbitrary, indifferent, and surprisingly difficult to disobey form.
This religion works as well as the others. It provides community, meaning, and the consolation of surrendering personal responsibility to a higher power that cannot be blamed, reasoned with, or sued. That the higher power is a cube of painted plastic is a reductio ad absurdum of all religion, an honest account of how faith has always operated.
Plenty to think about and plenty to cringe over.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Luke Rhinehart, the pen name of George Cockcroft, published "The Dice Man" in 1971 as a mock autobiography, a form chosen with full satirical intent. The book claims to be the confessions of a great man who will be misunderstood, and it proceeds to make that prediction come spectacularly true.
Rhinehart the character tells us in the preface that his style will be random, that distortions will be embraced, and that a well-told lie is a gift of the gods, then asks us to take everything that follows seriously. A text about the dissolution of the self that keeps dissolving its own reliability.
A bored psychiatrist, sitting at a poker table after midnight in 1968 New York, decides to let a die govern his actions. The first command is rape. Rhinehart goes downstairs, announces his intention to his neighbour Arlene Ecstein with flat sincerity, and she, after some negotiation, cooperates.
Here the book lays its most provocative card on the table, face up and grinning. The treatment of sexual assault as a zany domestic caper is a genuine moral failure, one that the novel wears with nonchalance as a philosophical position. It is not. It is a period artefact, soaked in the same testosterone-drenched utopianism that made the 1970s simultaneously revolutionary and revolting.
The book believes, with the cheerful totalitarianism of Nietzsche, that sex is the primary site of human liberation. This belief is as dated as motel bathroom wallpaper.
The novel's satirical targets are numerous but the central one is psychiatry itself. Rhinehart practices nondirective therapy, a method he describes with accurate and affectionate contempt as making the analyst resemble a redundant moron.
His colleague Ecstein publishes clear and brilliant books demonstrating that the key to therapeutic success is accident. Dr. Mann, the authoritative father figure, dispenses wisdom from an armchair while crumbling potato chips onto the table and charging by the hour.
The profession Rhinehart is abandoning was already built on chance pretending to be method, and the dice merely strip away the costume. When Rhinehart begins insulting his patients, assigning them exercises in humiliation and transgression, he is doing what his training already did, only faster and cheaper. The satire is accurate. The comedy is cruel. The two are indistinguishable.
The self is already a performance, already a set of habitual choices cpnstructing an identity. Rhinehart cites Jung, Nietzsche, Chuang-Tzu and van den Berg in his epigraphs, and his dice therapy is a comic operationalisation of ideas already circulating in the counterculture of 1968.
This period document sketches the ridiculousness of every liberation philosophy available to it, from Zen to radical therapy to free love, to drugs and alcoholism, to gambling and investing, with the affection of an author who has tried them all and found them wanting, and the mischief of a man who has tried them all and found them amusing.
The dice do not free Rhinehart into happiness or wisdom. They free him into chaos, legal jeopardy, the destruction of his marriage, and a grandiosity so total it becomes indistinguishable from psychosis.
The liberation the die promises is genuine. The liberated man is a fugitive composing his memoir in hiding. The book does not look away from this consequence, and this is where its profundity ambushes the reader who came only for the laughs.
The supporting characters are drawn with a comic brush. Ecstein, short and rotund and brilliant, researches the rape of his own wife as a case study and publishes the results. Lillian Rhinehart, described as a female Don Quixote after being tossed in a blanket, responds to her husband's abandonment by rolling a die, taking a lover, and enrolling in Columbia Law School, and she is the sanest person in the book. Arturo Toscanini Jones, committed to a psychiatric ward for throwing hand grenades at Young Conservatives, has a better grip on the terms of his situation than any of his doctors. Eric Cannon, the messianic teenager with long hair and rimless glasses, escapes through a Broadway theater.
These characters are grotesques, but grotesques with mortgages and families and genuine grievances, and that separates Cockcroft from the merely absurdist tradition he is raiding.
Despite the considerable handicap of its sexual politics, Rhinehart creates a theology, a sacred text called "The Book of the Die," a congregation of dicepeople, and a missionary impulse that spreads from Manhattan to Missouri. When a correspondent writes to ask how to raise her daughter in the faith. The dice become God in an arbitrary, indifferent, and surprisingly difficult to disobey form.
This religion works as well as the others. It provides community, meaning, and the consolation of surrendering personal responsibility to a higher power that cannot be blamed, reasoned with, or sued. That the higher power is a cube of painted plastic is a reductio ad absurdum of all religion, an honest account of how faith has always operated.
Plenty to think about and plenty to cringe over.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Adele Bertei boards a Greyhound from Cleveland in July 1977 carrying a burlap-wrapped Fender Duo-Sonic, two thrift-store suits, a hundred dollars, and a shorn head. The ideal punk curriculum vitae for the world's most aggressive job application.
Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.
The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.
Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.
Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.
After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.
Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.
The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.
Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.
The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.
Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.
The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Adele Bertei boards a Greyhound from Cleveland in July 1977 carrying a burlap-wrapped Fender Duo-Sonic, two thrift-store suits, a hundred dollars, and a shorn head. The ideal punk curriculum vitae for the world's most aggressive job application.
Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.
The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.
Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.
Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.
After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.
Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.
The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.
Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.
The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.
Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.
The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Barcelona, 1974. Natàlia Miralpeix, approaching forty and carrying twelve years of voluntary exile in Paris, Rome, and the English provinces, flies home to a city that greets her by shrieking at its own reflection. Two days prior, the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed by garrotting, and her English friend Jimmy had to look up the method in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Natàlia is a photographer who observes life from the dry side of the glass. She returns, she says, because if she stays away any longer she never will come back. The Barcelona she finds is guttered, tarmacked, its beloved old bars replaced by banks with glacial façades. El Oro del Rhin, where she once spent whole afternoons sipping coffee with a bright-eyed communist named Emilio Sandoval, is gone.
She moves in with her widowed Aunt Patrícia, who has channelled widowhood into dyed hair, painted nails, cigarettes, and ice-creams "tall as cathedrals." Her brother Lluís, married eighteen years to Sílvia Claret, lives nearby in a flat he insists ought to look perpetually ready for a design magazine. Lluís also drove Natàlia to a clinic once, while she writhed from the aftermath of an abortion, and told her to use her head next time. She has a great deal to be coming back to.
The book moves through three generations of the Miralpeix family with elegance. The young Natàlia, still in her Roman dress and hair updo for a student theatre production of Plautus, is swept up by Emilio Sandoval, an Andalusian communist of great handsomeness, abundant conviction, and a family that owns half of Almería. He applies her stage make-up with one hand and philosophy with the other, teaches her to "scratch beneath the country's filth," and eventually gives her crabs along with his political awakening. Their love is fugitive, conducted in doorways near Santa Maria del Mar, conducted on borrowed married beds, always interrupted by a key in a lock.
Aunt Patrícia in her younger years, returning early from a documentary about German Übermenschen to find her husband Esteve and his friend Gonçal breathing like rustling leaves under a satin bedspread, has her own interrupted story entirely. And Sílvia, presiding over Tupperware parties while scrutinising nicked crystal and moth holes her husband Lluís is too self-satisfied to perceive, performs maintenance on a love that has long since worn through at the seams.
Joan Miralpeix, Natàlia's father who shed his communist past, reducing it to a couple of books still shelved in his library, is another matter altogether. He is in a psychiatric institution outside Barcelona, and Natàlia's return to the city converges, with Montserrat Roig's refusal of chronological mercy, toward the moment she goes to collect him.
The institution has its own black market, its own escaped poet who quotes Kant and Schopenhauer and resembles Miguel Hernández, its own annual festival at which patients from the men's and women's wings are allowed to mingle while security guards hunt for couples in the overgrowth with flashlights.
Joan sits in a well-lit room with a barred window and a poplar tree outside, bald and pink-skulled and chattering like a child about Judit, his long-dead wife, whom he is certain is still alive because her photograph on his nightstand says so.
The title of the book comes from a Jean-Baptiste Clément song about the brief, blazing season of contentment that follows revolution. Emilio used to say, "I can't wait for the cherries to bloom." The question Roig poses, across three generations and a country still choking on a dictatorship it keeps swallowing, is whether that season ever truly comes, or whether the song is all there is.
Montserrat Roig was born in Barcelona in 1946, wrote in Catalan under a dictatorship that preferred her silent, published her first fiction at twenty-five, conducted landmark interviews with the survivors of the Nazi camps, and died of cancer in 1991 at forty-five. She packed more into those years than most writers manage in eighty, which makes the critical long neglect of her in the Anglophone world a verdict worth appealing.
The Time of Cherries is a book about waiting, and about the costs of waiting too long. Private life and political life are the same life. Joan Miralpeix shed his communist convictions and took up Catholic authoritarianism instead, a spiritual change that cost him his children and eventually his mind. Emilio Sandoval talked revolution and billed Natàlia for the consequences. The women maintained the households, the bodies, and the silences that the men generated.
Franco has been dead fifty years and the garrotting wire is in a museum, yet women across the world still patch the nicked crystal and cover the moth holes while their Lluíses demand the flat look ready for a design magazine.
A beautiful, chaotic mess.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Barcelona, 1974. Natàlia Miralpeix, approaching forty and carrying twelve years of voluntary exile in Paris, Rome, and the English provinces, flies home to a city that greets her by shrieking at its own reflection. Two days prior, the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed by garrotting, and her English friend Jimmy had to look up the method in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Natàlia is a photographer who observes life from the dry side of the glass. She returns, she says, because if she stays away any longer she never will come back. The Barcelona she finds is guttered, tarmacked, its beloved old bars replaced by banks with glacial façades. El Oro del Rhin, where she once spent whole afternoons sipping coffee with a bright-eyed communist named Emilio Sandoval, is gone.
She moves in with her widowed Aunt Patrícia, who has channelled widowhood into dyed hair, painted nails, cigarettes, and ice-creams "tall as cathedrals." Her brother Lluís, married eighteen years to Sílvia Claret, lives nearby in a flat he insists ought to look perpetually ready for a design magazine. Lluís also drove Natàlia to a clinic once, while she writhed from the aftermath of an abortion, and told her to use her head next time. She has a great deal to be coming back to.
The book moves through three generations of the Miralpeix family with elegance. The young Natàlia, still in her Roman dress and hair updo for a student theatre production of Plautus, is swept up by Emilio Sandoval, an Andalusian communist of great handsomeness, abundant conviction, and a family that owns half of Almería. He applies her stage make-up with one hand and philosophy with the other, teaches her to "scratch beneath the country's filth," and eventually gives her crabs along with his political awakening. Their love is fugitive, conducted in doorways near Santa Maria del Mar, conducted on borrowed married beds, always interrupted by a key in a lock.
Aunt Patrícia in her younger years, returning early from a documentary about German Übermenschen to find her husband Esteve and his friend Gonçal breathing like rustling leaves under a satin bedspread, has her own interrupted story entirely. And Sílvia, presiding over Tupperware parties while scrutinising nicked crystal and moth holes her husband Lluís is too self-satisfied to perceive, performs maintenance on a love that has long since worn through at the seams.
Joan Miralpeix, Natàlia's father who shed his communist past, reducing it to a couple of books still shelved in his library, is another matter altogether. He is in a psychiatric institution outside Barcelona, and Natàlia's return to the city converges, with Montserrat Roig's refusal of chronological mercy, toward the moment she goes to collect him.
The institution has its own black market, its own escaped poet who quotes Kant and Schopenhauer and resembles Miguel Hernández, its own annual festival at which patients from the men's and women's wings are allowed to mingle while security guards hunt for couples in the overgrowth with flashlights.
Joan sits in a well-lit room with a barred window and a poplar tree outside, bald and pink-skulled and chattering like a child about Judit, his long-dead wife, whom he is certain is still alive because her photograph on his nightstand says so.
The title of the book comes from a Jean-Baptiste Clément song about the brief, blazing season of contentment that follows revolution. Emilio used to say, "I can't wait for the cherries to bloom." The question Roig poses, across three generations and a country still choking on a dictatorship it keeps swallowing, is whether that season ever truly comes, or whether the song is all there is.
Montserrat Roig was born in Barcelona in 1946, wrote in Catalan under a dictatorship that preferred her silent, published her first fiction at twenty-five, conducted landmark interviews with the survivors of the Nazi camps, and died of cancer in 1991 at forty-five. She packed more into those years than most writers manage in eighty, which makes the critical long neglect of her in the Anglophone world a verdict worth appealing.
The Time of Cherries is a book about waiting, and about the costs of waiting too long. Private life and political life are the same life. Joan Miralpeix shed his communist convictions and took up Catholic authoritarianism instead, a spiritual change that cost him his children and eventually his mind. Emilio Sandoval talked revolution and billed Natàlia for the consequences. The women maintained the households, the bodies, and the silences that the men generated.
Franco has been dead fifty years and the garrotting wire is in a museum, yet women across the world still patch the nicked crystal and cover the moth holes while their Lluíses demand the flat look ready for a design magazine.
A beautiful, chaotic mess.
❤️ 🇮🇱
The Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, are restless women in a small Midlands colliery town who watch a wedding one spring morning and find themselves scouting the available male talent with an acuity that would impress a field ornithologist.
Ursula, who teaches school, has been circling Rupert Birkin, a school inspector with a gift for metaphysical monologue, a flair for illness, and the romantic habit of declaring that he hates love while clearly being in it. Gudrun, an artist recently returned from London and Chelsea, claps eyes on Gerald Crich, the blond, glacially handsome coal-mining heir, and feels something in her blood that is equal parts terror and appetite.
Gerald Crich runs his family's coal empire with cold efficiency, forces his horse through a railway crossing purely to show he can, and carries the guilt of having shot his brother dead in childhood with the same ease he carries everything else. His father is dying upstairs. In his vigil, Gerald turns to Gudrun with the desperation of a drowning man. Birkin, extricating his person from Hermione Roddice, a tall, predatory woman of the Midlands gentry seeking total possession, secures Ursula through philosophical attrition, proposing by the indirect route of announcing that marriage is a ghastly institution.
The four travel to the Austrian Alps in winter for what will prove to be a slow avalanche of a holiday. In the mountain hotel, Gudrun gravitates towards Loerke, a small, caustic German sculptor with a viper's intelligence. Gerald, sensing this, swings between volcanic possessiveness and a strange, luminous resignation. Gudrun swings between cold cruelty and genuine terror. Birkin and Ursula slip away to find whatever it is Birkin has been lecturing about, leaving Gerald and Gudrun locked in a contest with rules written in frost and a referee who has gone skiing.
D.H. Lawrence wrote Women in Love in 1916, revised it obsessively, and published it in 1920, by which point he had been hounded out of Cornwall on suspicion of being a German spy, had his manuscripts seized, and had a novel banned. Lawrence spent his life arriving at the conviction that industrial civilization was killing the soul, and that sex was the last available religion. Fair enough. Despite the excellent prose and uncanny moments, I think that this book could have used an editor with an axe and a shredder. And there's a prequel???? Dude, chill!
❤️ 🇮🇱
The Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, are restless women in a small Midlands colliery town who watch a wedding one spring morning and find themselves scouting the available male talent with an acuity that would impress a field ornithologist.
Ursula, who teaches school, has been circling Rupert Birkin, a school inspector with a gift for metaphysical monologue, a flair for illness, and the romantic habit of declaring that he hates love while clearly being in it. Gudrun, an artist recently returned from London and Chelsea, claps eyes on Gerald Crich, the blond, glacially handsome coal-mining heir, and feels something in her blood that is equal parts terror and appetite.
Gerald Crich runs his family's coal empire with cold efficiency, forces his horse through a railway crossing purely to show he can, and carries the guilt of having shot his brother dead in childhood with the same ease he carries everything else. His father is dying upstairs. In his vigil, Gerald turns to Gudrun with the desperation of a drowning man. Birkin, extricating his person from Hermione Roddice, a tall, predatory woman of the Midlands gentry seeking total possession, secures Ursula through philosophical attrition, proposing by the indirect route of announcing that marriage is a ghastly institution.
The four travel to the Austrian Alps in winter for what will prove to be a slow avalanche of a holiday. In the mountain hotel, Gudrun gravitates towards Loerke, a small, caustic German sculptor with a viper's intelligence. Gerald, sensing this, swings between volcanic possessiveness and a strange, luminous resignation. Gudrun swings between cold cruelty and genuine terror. Birkin and Ursula slip away to find whatever it is Birkin has been lecturing about, leaving Gerald and Gudrun locked in a contest with rules written in frost and a referee who has gone skiing.
D.H. Lawrence wrote Women in Love in 1916, revised it obsessively, and published it in 1920, by which point he had been hounded out of Cornwall on suspicion of being a German spy, had his manuscripts seized, and had a novel banned. Lawrence spent his life arriving at the conviction that industrial civilization was killing the soul, and that sex was the last available religion. Fair enough. Despite the excellent prose and uncanny moments, I think that this book could have used an editor with an axe and a shredder. And there's a prequel???? Dude, chill!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Thirteen-year-old Agostino spends the opening weeks of a Tuscan seaside summer in a state of pure filial euphoria, rowing his beautiful widowed mother across the glassy morning sea on a flat-bottomed pattino, feeling watched, envied, and magnificent. He lights her cigarettes with tremulous care. He rows while she bares her back to the sun. He adores her with the total, theatrical, slightly unhinged devotion of a loving boy.
Then a tanned young boatman appears on the beach, extends a hand, and the mother accepts the invitation with an ease that feels to Agostino like betrayal, like an eviction. She boards the stranger's boat with the same warm spontaneity she used to reserve for her son. Agostino, suddenly demoted from adored companion to surplus luggage, is dragged along on these rides, seated at the oars with his back turned, listening to laughter he cannot decode, while her wet bathing suit presses against his cheek in a way he finds obscurely unbearable.
His exile from paradise deposits him, through a series of beach accidents and wounded pride, among a rough gang of working-class boys at Vespucci beach, led by Saro, a six-fingered lifeguard of ambiguous appetites, and dominated by Tortima, a bully of cheerful brutality.
These boys know things. They say things. They say them loudly, about women, about bodies, about what men and women do. The gang's other luminary is Berto, a blond Apollonian boy whom Agostino admires with an intensity that puzzles him.
The group includes Homs, a Black boy the others call "the Moor," who serves as the gang's scapegoat and occasional Greek chorus. Together they swim, steal from orchards, sail, fight, humiliate Agostino for his accent and his clean clothes, and introduce him, episode by episode, to the existence of a world his mother's house has kept sealed.
The difficulty is that every scrap of knowledge Agostino acquires about desire and its mechanics transforms his mother further, in his eyes, from a figure of serene maternal majesty into something murkier and more troubling, a woman. He spies on her through a half-open door. He catalogues her body with what he calls scientific curiosity and what Moravia calls something else entirely. He tries to catch her in the act of being compromised by the young boatman, scrutinizing her face and neck for evidence that something has happened on the water. He wills himself to feel contempt. He wills himself to feel nothing. He tells himself, like a mantra, "She's only a woman."
The summer is still going. He has, by his own reckoning, the whole rest of the season to become a man...
Alberto Moravia wrote Agostino in one month in 1942 on the island of Capri. The Fascist censors rejected it. A novel about a thirteen-year-old boy discovering that his mother is a sexual creature was, apparently, too much for a regime that preferred its Italians either heroic or decorative.
Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle in Rome in 1907) had already scandalized the literary establishment with Gli indifferenti at age twenty-one, a novel so cool and pitiless that critics called his prose gray and neutral. He spent the war years hiding in the mountains with his wife, the writer Elsa Morante. He survived. The censors did not.
Innocence is a convenience, and growing up consists largely of losing the right to pretend otherwise. Agostino wants to sever what Moravia calls "the thread of troubled sensuality" binding him to his mother, but the thread is not external. The knowledge he acquires from the gang coarsens him. Each revelation doubles his confusion. He ends the summer older but unresolved.
The particular anguish of discovering that the people we have idealized are bodily, desiring, and indifferent to our worship is permanently relevant. The way Moravia tells it, though, is, as the kids say, suss.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Thirteen-year-old Agostino spends the opening weeks of a Tuscan seaside summer in a state of pure filial euphoria, rowing his beautiful widowed mother across the glassy morning sea on a flat-bottomed pattino, feeling watched, envied, and magnificent. He lights her cigarettes with tremulous care. He rows while she bares her back to the sun. He adores her with the total, theatrical, slightly unhinged devotion of a loving boy.
Then a tanned young boatman appears on the beach, extends a hand, and the mother accepts the invitation with an ease that feels to Agostino like betrayal, like an eviction. She boards the stranger's boat with the same warm spontaneity she used to reserve for her son. Agostino, suddenly demoted from adored companion to surplus luggage, is dragged along on these rides, seated at the oars with his back turned, listening to laughter he cannot decode, while her wet bathing suit presses against his cheek in a way he finds obscurely unbearable.
His exile from paradise deposits him, through a series of beach accidents and wounded pride, among a rough gang of working-class boys at Vespucci beach, led by Saro, a six-fingered lifeguard of ambiguous appetites, and dominated by Tortima, a bully of cheerful brutality.
These boys know things. They say things. They say them loudly, about women, about bodies, about what men and women do. The gang's other luminary is Berto, a blond Apollonian boy whom Agostino admires with an intensity that puzzles him.
The group includes Homs, a Black boy the others call "the Moor," who serves as the gang's scapegoat and occasional Greek chorus. Together they swim, steal from orchards, sail, fight, humiliate Agostino for his accent and his clean clothes, and introduce him, episode by episode, to the existence of a world his mother's house has kept sealed.
The difficulty is that every scrap of knowledge Agostino acquires about desire and its mechanics transforms his mother further, in his eyes, from a figure of serene maternal majesty into something murkier and more troubling, a woman. He spies on her through a half-open door. He catalogues her body with what he calls scientific curiosity and what Moravia calls something else entirely. He tries to catch her in the act of being compromised by the young boatman, scrutinizing her face and neck for evidence that something has happened on the water. He wills himself to feel contempt. He wills himself to feel nothing. He tells himself, like a mantra, "She's only a woman."
The summer is still going. He has, by his own reckoning, the whole rest of the season to become a man...
Alberto Moravia wrote Agostino in one month in 1942 on the island of Capri. The Fascist censors rejected it. A novel about a thirteen-year-old boy discovering that his mother is a sexual creature was, apparently, too much for a regime that preferred its Italians either heroic or decorative.
Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle in Rome in 1907) had already scandalized the literary establishment with Gli indifferenti at age twenty-one, a novel so cool and pitiless that critics called his prose gray and neutral. He spent the war years hiding in the mountains with his wife, the writer Elsa Morante. He survived. The censors did not.
Innocence is a convenience, and growing up consists largely of losing the right to pretend otherwise. Agostino wants to sever what Moravia calls "the thread of troubled sensuality" binding him to his mother, but the thread is not external. The knowledge he acquires from the gang coarsens him. Each revelation doubles his confusion. He ends the summer older but unresolved.
The particular anguish of discovering that the people we have idealized are bodily, desiring, and indifferent to our worship is permanently relevant. The way Moravia tells it, though, is, as the kids say, suss.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Ben Lerner boards a train to Providence, Rhode Island, facing the wrong direction, heading to interview his ninety-year-old mentor Thomas, a legendary European filmmaker and theorist of light. He has a cracked phone, a masked face, and a child named Eva at home who is developing what her school counselor calls "school refusal."
He drops the phone in the hotel bathroom sink before dinner. A drowned phone is already a pun in a book about what gets captured and what escapes, and Lerner is painfully, insufferably aware of this, as he is of every other labored symbol he lays before the reader like a cat depositing dead birds.
Thomas lives on Governor Street in a house dense with daguerreotypes and the residue of a century. His memory has begun its own quiet editorial work, erasing trips, merging decades, all of which sounds more interesting on paper than it reads on the page, where Lerner renders it in the kind of airless, self-conscious prose that acts as therapy for his guilty consciousness as a man and a father.
Thomas muses upon MIDI files and phantom voices, on why blue eyes require a witness to exist, on whether dreams belong to the dreamer at all. The conversation is supposedly electric and candlelit, though "unrecorded," which conveniently frees Lerner from having to make any of it feel genuinely alive.
We visit Madrid, meet Nazis on the Swiss border, consider widowerhood, fatherhood, old age, kingfisher, and glass flowers. All in a short one-day reading. Lerner couldn't sustain even these thin conceits across a full novel's worth of pages.
Lerner has spent four novels, including "Leaving the Atocha Station" and "The Topeka School," building a career out of autobiographical fiction that interrogates the ethics of autobiographical fiction, a recursive navel-gazing loop that was tiresome by the second lap. A MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer finalist, he arrives here not at his sharpest but at his most self-congratulatory.
Lerner's peculiar choice to insert a handful of his Uncle Tom political views into the text without any plot justification or necessity turned this already mediocre collection of half-baked musings from mediocre to absolute garbage. For an actual treatment of these themes in a masterful literary fashion, I recommend reading Eshkol Nevo (for the busy) or David Grossman (for the patient) instead.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Ben Lerner boards a train to Providence, Rhode Island, facing the wrong direction, heading to interview his ninety-year-old mentor Thomas, a legendary European filmmaker and theorist of light. He has a cracked phone, a masked face, and a child named Eva at home who is developing what her school counselor calls "school refusal."
He drops the phone in the hotel bathroom sink before dinner. A drowned phone is already a pun in a book about what gets captured and what escapes, and Lerner is painfully, insufferably aware of this, as he is of every other labored symbol he lays before the reader like a cat depositing dead birds.
Thomas lives on Governor Street in a house dense with daguerreotypes and the residue of a century. His memory has begun its own quiet editorial work, erasing trips, merging decades, all of which sounds more interesting on paper than it reads on the page, where Lerner renders it in the kind of airless, self-conscious prose that acts as therapy for his guilty consciousness as a man and a father.
Thomas muses upon MIDI files and phantom voices, on why blue eyes require a witness to exist, on whether dreams belong to the dreamer at all. The conversation is supposedly electric and candlelit, though "unrecorded," which conveniently frees Lerner from having to make any of it feel genuinely alive.
We visit Madrid, meet Nazis on the Swiss border, consider widowerhood, fatherhood, old age, kingfisher, and glass flowers. All in a short one-day reading. Lerner couldn't sustain even these thin conceits across a full novel's worth of pages.
Lerner has spent four novels, including "Leaving the Atocha Station" and "The Topeka School," building a career out of autobiographical fiction that interrogates the ethics of autobiographical fiction, a recursive navel-gazing loop that was tiresome by the second lap. A MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer finalist, he arrives here not at his sharpest but at his most self-congratulatory.
Lerner's peculiar choice to insert a handful of his Uncle Tom political views into the text without any plot justification or necessity turned this already mediocre collection of half-baked musings from mediocre to absolute garbage. For an actual treatment of these themes in a masterful literary fashion, I recommend reading Eshkol Nevo (for the busy) or David Grossman (for the patient) instead.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Natalie Heller Mills is perfect at being alive. A Harvard-educated daughter of a small-town Idaho evangelical, she has converted her discipline into a five-million-follower empire, farming the domestic ideal of Yesteryear Ranch while two nannies, a producer named Shannon, and a checklist of children quietly hold the scaffolding.
Her husband Caleb, pampered youngest son of senator-cum-presidential-candidate Doug Mills, contributes cheerfully and does very little else. This is the life Natalie has constructed, curated, and captioned, down to the sourdough starter positioned artfully by the kitchen window.
The book alternates between Natalie in her crackling, Instagram-era present and a second storyline set on a farmstead stripped of every appliance, telephone, and decade she has ever known. When the Shannon scandal detonates publicly, exposing Natalie as something the good Christians in the comments find unforgivable, Doug and Caleb close in from two sides, and the pills on the bathroom shelf offer what feels like the only door left in the house.
Natalie walks through it. She wakes up on a homestead that looks disturbingly like her own; children call her Mama, and every last one of them belongs to a century she built in her head.
Part Two follows Natalie on that same ranch as a woman who has convinced herself, her husband, and then a second generation of children that the nineteenth century is the correct century to inhabit.
At what point does a woman performing perfection lose her ability to tell the performance from the crime?
Yesteryear is Caro Claire Burke's first novel, published by Knopf in April 2026, and it dropped into a cultural moment so exactly matched to its concerns that one suspects the publishing gods of running a very tight editorial schedule.
The tradwife phenomenon, the rage economy of social media, the evangelical right, a presidential dynasty: Burke did not invent any of these ingredients. She cooked them together at a temperature that leaves scorch marks.
The book is very good. It is also, at specific intervals, somewhat too pleased with itself, which is a forgivable sin in a debut and a far smaller one than the alternative.
Natalie is acidic, exact in her cruelties, and absolutely convinced that her intelligence exempts her from consequences. She is wrong about that last point, though the consequences she receives are, to put it charitably, of an unusual administrative variety.
The time-slip device sounds like a pitch meeting gone sideways. In practice, it forces the satire to bear weight, to become something with stakes and a body count. A novel that stopped at Instagram critique would be a long magazine article. The ranch in 1855 turns it into a reckoning.
If I were to strip away the dark comedy and the biblical epigraphs and the scenes of Natalie unsuccessfully baking bread, I'd say that the main message here is that the performance of tradition and the actual experience of tradition are two entirely different prisons, and the women who sell the first often do so because they cannot bear the second.
Natalie builds Yesteryear Ranch as a content farm, then finds herself trapped inside the content. Burke is saying that idealized domesticity has always been a product for sale, that buyer and seller have always shared a complicated relationship with the truth of what they are exchanging, and that the children born into the transaction pay a price they did not negotiate.
I did lose myself on the book's ambition to be simultaneously a psychological study, a dark satire, a thriller, a literary time-slip, and a generational drama about mothers and daughters. Burke keeps most of these plates spinning at once, but the thriller elements occasionally crowd the quieter, more interesting material, particularly in the middle sections where Natalie's disorientation in the past produces some genuinely unsettling interiority that the plot seems in a hurry to move past.
The frame device, Natalie in ankle cuffs being interviewed by her college roommate Reena, is very strong, and the book could have leaned into it earlier and more often.
Reena, for her part, glitters so brightly in her few scenes that I ended up wanting more of the minor character and less of the one whose name is on the cover. That said, Natalie on the cover is exactly right. She is the engine, she is the problem, and she is, in Burke's hands, the most interesting kind of monster, the kind who keeps a clean kitchen.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Natalie Heller Mills is perfect at being alive. A Harvard-educated daughter of a small-town Idaho evangelical, she has converted her discipline into a five-million-follower empire, farming the domestic ideal of Yesteryear Ranch while two nannies, a producer named Shannon, and a checklist of children quietly hold the scaffolding.
Her husband Caleb, pampered youngest son of senator-cum-presidential-candidate Doug Mills, contributes cheerfully and does very little else. This is the life Natalie has constructed, curated, and captioned, down to the sourdough starter positioned artfully by the kitchen window.
The book alternates between Natalie in her crackling, Instagram-era present and a second storyline set on a farmstead stripped of every appliance, telephone, and decade she has ever known. When the Shannon scandal detonates publicly, exposing Natalie as something the good Christians in the comments find unforgivable, Doug and Caleb close in from two sides, and the pills on the bathroom shelf offer what feels like the only door left in the house.
Natalie walks through it. She wakes up on a homestead that looks disturbingly like her own; children call her Mama, and every last one of them belongs to a century she built in her head.
Part Two follows Natalie on that same ranch as a woman who has convinced herself, her husband, and then a second generation of children that the nineteenth century is the correct century to inhabit.
At what point does a woman performing perfection lose her ability to tell the performance from the crime?
Yesteryear is Caro Claire Burke's first novel, published by Knopf in April 2026, and it dropped into a cultural moment so exactly matched to its concerns that one suspects the publishing gods of running a very tight editorial schedule.
The tradwife phenomenon, the rage economy of social media, the evangelical right, a presidential dynasty: Burke did not invent any of these ingredients. She cooked them together at a temperature that leaves scorch marks.
The book is very good. It is also, at specific intervals, somewhat too pleased with itself, which is a forgivable sin in a debut and a far smaller one than the alternative.
Natalie is acidic, exact in her cruelties, and absolutely convinced that her intelligence exempts her from consequences. She is wrong about that last point, though the consequences she receives are, to put it charitably, of an unusual administrative variety.
The time-slip device sounds like a pitch meeting gone sideways. In practice, it forces the satire to bear weight, to become something with stakes and a body count. A novel that stopped at Instagram critique would be a long magazine article. The ranch in 1855 turns it into a reckoning.
If I were to strip away the dark comedy and the biblical epigraphs and the scenes of Natalie unsuccessfully baking bread, I'd say that the main message here is that the performance of tradition and the actual experience of tradition are two entirely different prisons, and the women who sell the first often do so because they cannot bear the second.
Natalie builds Yesteryear Ranch as a content farm, then finds herself trapped inside the content. Burke is saying that idealized domesticity has always been a product for sale, that buyer and seller have always shared a complicated relationship with the truth of what they are exchanging, and that the children born into the transaction pay a price they did not negotiate.
I did lose myself on the book's ambition to be simultaneously a psychological study, a dark satire, a thriller, a literary time-slip, and a generational drama about mothers and daughters. Burke keeps most of these plates spinning at once, but the thriller elements occasionally crowd the quieter, more interesting material, particularly in the middle sections where Natalie's disorientation in the past produces some genuinely unsettling interiority that the plot seems in a hurry to move past.
The frame device, Natalie in ankle cuffs being interviewed by her college roommate Reena, is very strong, and the book could have leaned into it earlier and more often.
Reena, for her part, glitters so brightly in her few scenes that I ended up wanting more of the minor character and less of the one whose name is on the cover. That said, Natalie on the cover is exactly right. She is the engine, she is the problem, and she is, in Burke's hands, the most interesting kind of monster, the kind who keeps a clean kitchen.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan-Jewish writer of Lebanese and Polish ancestry, travels to a concentration camp in Calabria called Ferramonti di Tarsia to speak on Holocaust Memorial Day. His Italian host, the eccentric director Panebianco, introduces him at the podium as "Signor Hoffman," mangling his name with cheerful impunity in front of a packed auditorium.
The camp turns out to be a theme park reconstruction. The original ninety-two blocks were demolished in the 1960s to build a highway, and what survives is a tasteful replica of catastrophe, complete with museum entrance fees collected from Calabrian schoolchildren. Halfon, dizzy, nauseated, and still wearing a ridiculous pink coat he bought after an airline lost his luggage, sits in a red armchair on the stage and accepts Panebianco's envelope of dirty bills while thinking about Hiroshima, atomic bombs, and a Japanese woman named Aiko who once read him chalk messages left by survivors on a soot-black wall.
That night, in a bar, over very good gin and very bad news about an actor named Philip Seymour Hoffman who has just been found dead with a needle in his arm, Halfon and a Calabrian graduate student named Marina drink their way through the wad of performance fees, toasting something they know precisely and say nothing about.
In the second section, Halfon travels to Łódź, Poland, armed with a yellow slip of paper on which his dying Polish grandfather once scrawled the address of his childhood home, corner of Żeromskiego and Persego Maja, number 16, captured by the Gestapo in September 1939 as he played dominoes on the street with his girlfriend Mina.
His guide is the extraordinary Agnieszka Maroszek, a heavily jeweled, copper-haired, fur-coated woman who speaks ten languages, takes no money, eats raw herring without chewing, and has spent her life helping Jewish descendants trace the wreckage of that city's two hundred fifty thousand vanished Jews.
Together they visit the building where Halfon's grandfather was born, now occupied by a blond woman who may or may not have once been a porn star. They stand over six empty mass graves dug by Jewish men who fully expected to fill them. They eat kreplach at a Jewish restaurant called Anatevka, where a very blond girl on a wooden scaffold plays the same violin piece from Fiddler on the Roof on a loop for eternity.
Madame Maroszek, who may have been the daughter of Jewish rescuers, or of Jewish denouncers, or of both simultaneously, gives Halfon three books as a parting gift, each one a diary written by a nameless Jew in the Łódź ghetto, and Halfon boards his train carrying, in the pocket of the pink coat, the full weight of everything that has been written down in order to survive.
The final and longest section circles back to Guatemala, to a family secret as murky as the contaminated water of Lake Amatitlán. When Halfon was a boy, he was told that his father's older brother, Salomón, had drowned in that lake at age five. The body was never recovered. The name was never spoken again. Decades later, Halfon drives back to the old lakeside house where his grandparents once lived, finds the same ancient caretaker, Don Isidoro, still faithfully employed after forty years, and begins asking questions.
An old indigenous healer named Doña Ermelinda, who lives beside the lake and converses with a wooden idol called Maximón over open fire, gives Halfon a concoction from a gourd bowl and tells him to remember his dreams, because in them he will understand everything. What Halfon discovers about Salomón, whose names in Arabic, Hebrew, and English were all used by different members of the family, and who died sick and alone in a clinic in New York in 1940 while a photograph of him standing in the snow carries all the testimony his family left behind, is a grief so old and so specific that Hebrew has a dedicated word for it.
The book's horrors arrive with the matter-of-fact delivery of a coroner reading a grocery list. Six mass graves stand open in the Łódź Jewish cemetery, dug by 840 men ordered to excavate their own burial pits, then cheated of their scheduled execution only because the Germans fled first. The graves remain open. Two hundred fifty thousand Jews lived in Łódź before the war; fewer than ten thousand came out. A teenage boy wrote his ghetto diary in the margins of a French novel; his entries stop on August 3, 1944, the day he was deported to Auschwitz. A man named Yankele Herszkowitz stood on trash cans in the ghetto and sang satirical ballads about hunger and death for a few coins, survived Auschwitz and Braunschweig, returned to Łódź, and gassed himself thirty years later.
The E. T. A. Hoffmann episode is the book's sharpest piece of dark comedy. The real Hoffmann, composer of the Nutcracker's source material and public official in Warsaw under Prussian rule, was assigned to name Jewish families who had gone through centuries without formal surnames. Before dinner he gave dignified names; after dinner, pleasant ones; on Lenten Fridays, fish names; after drinking with Prussian colonels, military ones. An entire people's paper identity generated by one bureaucrat's appetite and mood.
Halfon then traces his own surname through an Ellis Island official who chopped it in half, and his Lebanese grandfather's claim that "Halfon" חלפון comes from an ancient word meaning "he who changes his life." The author's name is thus a double amputation that somehow still means transformation.
The soccer stadium in Łódź still sells shirts reading "We hunt Jews here." The graves are still open. The hummingbird, as Doña Ermelinda explains it, still carries the thoughts of man from here to there. Jew hatred is alive and well. Antisemitic calls for the genocide of Jews are still chanted across the globe.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan-Jewish writer of Lebanese and Polish ancestry, travels to a concentration camp in Calabria called Ferramonti di Tarsia to speak on Holocaust Memorial Day. His Italian host, the eccentric director Panebianco, introduces him at the podium as "Signor Hoffman," mangling his name with cheerful impunity in front of a packed auditorium.
The camp turns out to be a theme park reconstruction. The original ninety-two blocks were demolished in the 1960s to build a highway, and what survives is a tasteful replica of catastrophe, complete with museum entrance fees collected from Calabrian schoolchildren. Halfon, dizzy, nauseated, and still wearing a ridiculous pink coat he bought after an airline lost his luggage, sits in a red armchair on the stage and accepts Panebianco's envelope of dirty bills while thinking about Hiroshima, atomic bombs, and a Japanese woman named Aiko who once read him chalk messages left by survivors on a soot-black wall.
That night, in a bar, over very good gin and very bad news about an actor named Philip Seymour Hoffman who has just been found dead with a needle in his arm, Halfon and a Calabrian graduate student named Marina drink their way through the wad of performance fees, toasting something they know precisely and say nothing about.
In the second section, Halfon travels to Łódź, Poland, armed with a yellow slip of paper on which his dying Polish grandfather once scrawled the address of his childhood home, corner of Żeromskiego and Persego Maja, number 16, captured by the Gestapo in September 1939 as he played dominoes on the street with his girlfriend Mina.
His guide is the extraordinary Agnieszka Maroszek, a heavily jeweled, copper-haired, fur-coated woman who speaks ten languages, takes no money, eats raw herring without chewing, and has spent her life helping Jewish descendants trace the wreckage of that city's two hundred fifty thousand vanished Jews.
Together they visit the building where Halfon's grandfather was born, now occupied by a blond woman who may or may not have once been a porn star. They stand over six empty mass graves dug by Jewish men who fully expected to fill them. They eat kreplach at a Jewish restaurant called Anatevka, where a very blond girl on a wooden scaffold plays the same violin piece from Fiddler on the Roof on a loop for eternity.
Madame Maroszek, who may have been the daughter of Jewish rescuers, or of Jewish denouncers, or of both simultaneously, gives Halfon three books as a parting gift, each one a diary written by a nameless Jew in the Łódź ghetto, and Halfon boards his train carrying, in the pocket of the pink coat, the full weight of everything that has been written down in order to survive.
The final and longest section circles back to Guatemala, to a family secret as murky as the contaminated water of Lake Amatitlán. When Halfon was a boy, he was told that his father's older brother, Salomón, had drowned in that lake at age five. The body was never recovered. The name was never spoken again. Decades later, Halfon drives back to the old lakeside house where his grandparents once lived, finds the same ancient caretaker, Don Isidoro, still faithfully employed after forty years, and begins asking questions.
An old indigenous healer named Doña Ermelinda, who lives beside the lake and converses with a wooden idol called Maximón over open fire, gives Halfon a concoction from a gourd bowl and tells him to remember his dreams, because in them he will understand everything. What Halfon discovers about Salomón, whose names in Arabic, Hebrew, and English were all used by different members of the family, and who died sick and alone in a clinic in New York in 1940 while a photograph of him standing in the snow carries all the testimony his family left behind, is a grief so old and so specific that Hebrew has a dedicated word for it.
The book's horrors arrive with the matter-of-fact delivery of a coroner reading a grocery list. Six mass graves stand open in the Łódź Jewish cemetery, dug by 840 men ordered to excavate their own burial pits, then cheated of their scheduled execution only because the Germans fled first. The graves remain open. Two hundred fifty thousand Jews lived in Łódź before the war; fewer than ten thousand came out. A teenage boy wrote his ghetto diary in the margins of a French novel; his entries stop on August 3, 1944, the day he was deported to Auschwitz. A man named Yankele Herszkowitz stood on trash cans in the ghetto and sang satirical ballads about hunger and death for a few coins, survived Auschwitz and Braunschweig, returned to Łódź, and gassed himself thirty years later.
The E. T. A. Hoffmann episode is the book's sharpest piece of dark comedy. The real Hoffmann, composer of the Nutcracker's source material and public official in Warsaw under Prussian rule, was assigned to name Jewish families who had gone through centuries without formal surnames. Before dinner he gave dignified names; after dinner, pleasant ones; on Lenten Fridays, fish names; after drinking with Prussian colonels, military ones. An entire people's paper identity generated by one bureaucrat's appetite and mood.
Halfon then traces his own surname through an Ellis Island official who chopped it in half, and his Lebanese grandfather's claim that "Halfon" חלפון comes from an ancient word meaning "he who changes his life." The author's name is thus a double amputation that somehow still means transformation.
The soccer stadium in Łódź still sells shirts reading "We hunt Jews here." The graves are still open. The hummingbird, as Doña Ermelinda explains it, still carries the thoughts of man from here to there. Jew hatred is alive and well. Antisemitic calls for the genocide of Jews are still chanted across the globe.
❤️ 🇮🇱
See You on the Other Side
Jay McInerney's fourth and concluding chapter in his Calloway tetralogy opens at the Odeon restaurant in TriBeCa, March 2020, where publisher Russell Calloway and his wife Corrine, both just turned sixty, are attending Washington Lee's thirty-fifth anniversary party.
Russell still thinks the pandemic is overblown; Corrine, who runs Nourish New York, a food-rescue charity, suspects catastrophe is two weeks away. Their daughter Storey is opening her Greenpoint restaurant, Condrieu, that very same night, in what turns out to be the single worst week in the city's history to open a restaurant. Washington's son Mingus, a Yale-educated writer of legendary procrastination who has owed his publisher a novel for seven years, is nominally Storey's boyfriend, though his most loyal relationship is with distraction.
The city locks down. Corrine contracts Covid at the Odeon party and spends two weeks quarantined in the bedroom, where Russell leaves trays of toast outside the door while texting Astrid Kladstrup, a young Brooklyn novelist whose manuscript about Lady Emma Hamilton and her older lover shows up in Russell's inbox accompanied by escalating innuendo. He reads it and declares it excellent. Storey fights the governor on outdoor dining restrictions with an op-ed in Air Mail, co-written with Mingus, who promptly resurfaces as a writer and, usefully, as a boyfriend.
Russell manages to stay almost faithful for most of a year, trading suggestive texts with Astrid while rereading Anna Karenina and taking prophylactic Cialis, until one September evening he crosses the Williamsburg Bridge in an Uber to visit her...
I read the book without the preceding three. Coming in fresh, I experienced Russell and Corrine as fully formed people rather than as long-running characters whose history I would be obliged to track. Nothing clouded my reading with backstory or loyalty to earlier versions of these people.
McInerney is writing about a class that takes itself enormously seriously, and he is clearly both inside it and amused by it. The satire only works if the characters are genuinely insufferable on the surface. I laughed with them rather than grinding my teeth at them as I usually do with novels of the uppity.
The historical texture – the pandemic protocols, the restaurant shutdowns, the Page Six ecosystem, the fentanyl crisis dressed up as a dinner party – is perhaps the book's most underrated achievement. McInerney smuggles recent history into domestic drama smoothly and with authenticity.
Jay McInerney made his name in 1984 with Bright Lights, Big City, a cocaine-dusted dispatch from the downtown Manhattan of studio apartments and VIP rooms, written in the second person as though the narrator were too wrecked to claim his own story. He has spent the forty years since refining his territory: the Upper West Side marriage, the literary lunch, the wine that costs too much and the affair that costs more.
Born in 1955 in Hartford, Connecticut, he studied at Williams College, worked briefly as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, and has since produced eight novels, three essay collections on wine, and an ongoing demonstration that one zip code, examined with sufficient acuity, contains the entire tragicomedy of late-capitalist ambition.
See You on the Other Side is a goodbye to a generation that threw terrific parties and a reckoning with what those parties cost. The pandemic is described in the book the way it arrived in reality, as an insult nobody ordered. McInerney's great gift here is the straight face he keeps while placing these gilded people inside a public catastrophe.
A long marriage is a living document, subject to amendment and repair, and love persists through acts of spectacular stupidity. The Page Six era has changed nothing about human appetite or human guilt. McInerney knows this, and he makes you laugh about it before he makes you ache. The marriage resolution is a nail-biter and a tear-jerker.
Now I have to read his other books. This one was excellent 👏
❤️ 🇮🇱
Jay McInerney's fourth and concluding chapter in his Calloway tetralogy opens at the Odeon restaurant in TriBeCa, March 2020, where publisher Russell Calloway and his wife Corrine, both just turned sixty, are attending Washington Lee's thirty-fifth anniversary party.
Russell still thinks the pandemic is overblown; Corrine, who runs Nourish New York, a food-rescue charity, suspects catastrophe is two weeks away. Their daughter Storey is opening her Greenpoint restaurant, Condrieu, that very same night, in what turns out to be the single worst week in the city's history to open a restaurant. Washington's son Mingus, a Yale-educated writer of legendary procrastination who has owed his publisher a novel for seven years, is nominally Storey's boyfriend, though his most loyal relationship is with distraction.
The city locks down. Corrine contracts Covid at the Odeon party and spends two weeks quarantined in the bedroom, where Russell leaves trays of toast outside the door while texting Astrid Kladstrup, a young Brooklyn novelist whose manuscript about Lady Emma Hamilton and her older lover shows up in Russell's inbox accompanied by escalating innuendo. He reads it and declares it excellent. Storey fights the governor on outdoor dining restrictions with an op-ed in Air Mail, co-written with Mingus, who promptly resurfaces as a writer and, usefully, as a boyfriend.
Russell manages to stay almost faithful for most of a year, trading suggestive texts with Astrid while rereading Anna Karenina and taking prophylactic Cialis, until one September evening he crosses the Williamsburg Bridge in an Uber to visit her...
I read the book without the preceding three. Coming in fresh, I experienced Russell and Corrine as fully formed people rather than as long-running characters whose history I would be obliged to track. Nothing clouded my reading with backstory or loyalty to earlier versions of these people.
McInerney is writing about a class that takes itself enormously seriously, and he is clearly both inside it and amused by it. The satire only works if the characters are genuinely insufferable on the surface. I laughed with them rather than grinding my teeth at them as I usually do with novels of the uppity.
The historical texture – the pandemic protocols, the restaurant shutdowns, the Page Six ecosystem, the fentanyl crisis dressed up as a dinner party – is perhaps the book's most underrated achievement. McInerney smuggles recent history into domestic drama smoothly and with authenticity.
Jay McInerney made his name in 1984 with Bright Lights, Big City, a cocaine-dusted dispatch from the downtown Manhattan of studio apartments and VIP rooms, written in the second person as though the narrator were too wrecked to claim his own story. He has spent the forty years since refining his territory: the Upper West Side marriage, the literary lunch, the wine that costs too much and the affair that costs more.
Born in 1955 in Hartford, Connecticut, he studied at Williams College, worked briefly as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, and has since produced eight novels, three essay collections on wine, and an ongoing demonstration that one zip code, examined with sufficient acuity, contains the entire tragicomedy of late-capitalist ambition.
See You on the Other Side is a goodbye to a generation that threw terrific parties and a reckoning with what those parties cost. The pandemic is described in the book the way it arrived in reality, as an insult nobody ordered. McInerney's great gift here is the straight face he keeps while placing these gilded people inside a public catastrophe.
A long marriage is a living document, subject to amendment and repair, and love persists through acts of spectacular stupidity. The Page Six era has changed nothing about human appetite or human guilt. McInerney knows this, and he makes you laugh about it before he makes you ache. The marriage resolution is a nail-biter and a tear-jerker.
Now I have to read his other books. This one was excellent 👏
❤️ 🇮🇱
William T. Vollmann has spent forty years photographing, painting, and printing his way through war zones, brothels, and the Arctic, then generously compiled the results into two $65 volumes for those of us who preferred to stay home.
Volume One is photographs. Volume Two is everything else: drawings, prints, paintings, the full maximalist arsenal. Together they constitute what happens when a writer of prodigious, uncontainable ego decides that prose alone cannot hold him. Insurgents. Refugees. Prostitutes. Inuit teenagers. Tahitian women. A transgender alter ego named Dolores. Bible scenes in which God is female. Vollmann has strong views on suffering, and he has photographed all of it, personally, often at great personal risk.
Essays accompany the images, explaining what photographs can and should say. Vollmann has opinions on photographic "consensuality,” about cyanotypes of marginal figures, about gum bichromate landscapes. Of course he does.
The trouble is that the book is exactly what it promises, and promises are the enemy of surprise. Vollmann writes seriously about technique and wants you to know it. For a writer capable of moral vertigo on the page, the critical prose here stays resolutely on the surface.
Fans will buy it. Fans should. Then they will place it on the shelf beside the seven volumes on violence and the two on climate change, and occasionally open it, and feel the familiar mixture of admiration and exhaustion that Vollmann reliably provokes. Essential it is not. At $65 a volume, empathy turns out to be quite expensive.
❤️ 🇮🇱
William T. Vollmann has spent forty years photographing, painting, and printing his way through war zones, brothels, and the Arctic, then generously compiled the results into two $65 volumes for those of us who preferred to stay home.
Volume One is photographs. Volume Two is everything else: drawings, prints, paintings, the full maximalist arsenal. Together they constitute what happens when a writer of prodigious, uncontainable ego decides that prose alone cannot hold him. Insurgents. Refugees. Prostitutes. Inuit teenagers. Tahitian women. A transgender alter ego named Dolores. Bible scenes in which God is female. Vollmann has strong views on suffering, and he has photographed all of it, personally, often at great personal risk.
Essays accompany the images, explaining what photographs can and should say. Vollmann has opinions on photographic "consensuality,” about cyanotypes of marginal figures, about gum bichromate landscapes. Of course he does.
The trouble is that the book is exactly what it promises, and promises are the enemy of surprise. Vollmann writes seriously about technique and wants you to know it. For a writer capable of moral vertigo on the page, the critical prose here stays resolutely on the surface.
Fans will buy it. Fans should. Then they will place it on the shelf beside the seven volumes on violence and the two on climate change, and occasionally open it, and feel the familiar mixture of admiration and exhaustion that Vollmann reliably provokes. Essential it is not. At $65 a volume, empathy turns out to be quite expensive.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Sophia's mother is gone before the first sentence, mentioned once with offhandedness and then left to exert gravitational pressure on every page that follows. The Summer Book is what grief looks like when a writer is too honest to dress it up and too Finnish to discuss it loudly.
The island has no name. It has granite, moss, peonies, a ravine the children are forbidden to visit, a marsh pool, a well of dubious reputation, and one very old woman who walks with a stick and looks like an immense sandpiper. This is Grandmother, who smokes in secret while pretending to believe she has quit, waters her favorite plants at night while officially holding that small islands take care of themselves, and navigates eighty-year-old legs down dark stairs.
Opposite her is Sophia, who is six, recently motherless, and conducting an ongoing theological negotiation with God that God appears to be losing. In the background, largely silent, Papa builds things, fixes things, reads flower catalogues from Holland and brings home an object described as an enormous plastic sausage that nearly sinks the family boat.
The book moves through summer in episodes, each named for its occasion: "The Magic Forest," "Playing Venice," "The Enormous Plastic Sausage," "Sophia's Storm." A miniature Venice constructed in the marsh pool achieves a population of ant pedestrians and a complete Doge's Palace before the weather renders an opinion. A horrible child named Berenice arrives for a visit. A stray cat establishes residency and pursues a career in mouse homicide. A neighbor builds a monstrous house on the adjacent island. Sophia prays for a storm and receives one so comprehensive that she spends the night convinced she has personally destroyed Eastern Nyland. A summer is a life in miniature, and every life contains more weather than expected.
Jansson gave the world the Moomin books, those beloved Finnish children's stories about soft philosophical creatures living through floods, comets, and the perpetual strangeness of existence with curiosity intact, and The Summer Book is the adult version of the same investigation. The Moomins and Grandmother share a worldview. Pay close attention, expect nothing comfortable, carry your stick.
Jansson lived for decades on a tiny island at the farthest edge of the Pellinge archipelago with her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, and they designed their cottage with four windows, one for each compass point, so they could see what was coming and have time to get used to it. This is also, more or less, the philosophy of the book.
What keeps The Summer Book from tipping into sentiment is a bone-deep structural indifference to consolation. Grandmother knows exactly what is coming for her, and her response is to hide the barometer under the bed at summer's end, label the storage tins in the attic in her own handwriting, and leave notes for hypothetical shipwreck survivors about the location of the coarse salt and the proper operation of the stovepipe. She is preparing for a departure she regards with the pragmatism of a woman who has outlasted most of her luggage.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Sophia's mother is gone before the first sentence, mentioned once with offhandedness and then left to exert gravitational pressure on every page that follows. The Summer Book is what grief looks like when a writer is too honest to dress it up and too Finnish to discuss it loudly.
The island has no name. It has granite, moss, peonies, a ravine the children are forbidden to visit, a marsh pool, a well of dubious reputation, and one very old woman who walks with a stick and looks like an immense sandpiper. This is Grandmother, who smokes in secret while pretending to believe she has quit, waters her favorite plants at night while officially holding that small islands take care of themselves, and navigates eighty-year-old legs down dark stairs.
Opposite her is Sophia, who is six, recently motherless, and conducting an ongoing theological negotiation with God that God appears to be losing. In the background, largely silent, Papa builds things, fixes things, reads flower catalogues from Holland and brings home an object described as an enormous plastic sausage that nearly sinks the family boat.
The book moves through summer in episodes, each named for its occasion: "The Magic Forest," "Playing Venice," "The Enormous Plastic Sausage," "Sophia's Storm." A miniature Venice constructed in the marsh pool achieves a population of ant pedestrians and a complete Doge's Palace before the weather renders an opinion. A horrible child named Berenice arrives for a visit. A stray cat establishes residency and pursues a career in mouse homicide. A neighbor builds a monstrous house on the adjacent island. Sophia prays for a storm and receives one so comprehensive that she spends the night convinced she has personally destroyed Eastern Nyland. A summer is a life in miniature, and every life contains more weather than expected.
Jansson gave the world the Moomin books, those beloved Finnish children's stories about soft philosophical creatures living through floods, comets, and the perpetual strangeness of existence with curiosity intact, and The Summer Book is the adult version of the same investigation. The Moomins and Grandmother share a worldview. Pay close attention, expect nothing comfortable, carry your stick.
Jansson lived for decades on a tiny island at the farthest edge of the Pellinge archipelago with her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, and they designed their cottage with four windows, one for each compass point, so they could see what was coming and have time to get used to it. This is also, more or less, the philosophy of the book.
What keeps The Summer Book from tipping into sentiment is a bone-deep structural indifference to consolation. Grandmother knows exactly what is coming for her, and her response is to hide the barometer under the bed at summer's end, label the storage tins in the attic in her own handwriting, and leave notes for hypothetical shipwreck survivors about the location of the coarse salt and the proper operation of the stovepipe. She is preparing for a departure she regards with the pragmatism of a woman who has outlasted most of her luggage.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Lawrence, the collier's son who grew up in Eastwood watching his barely literate father emerge daily from Brinsley Colliery blackened to the bone, while his former pupil-teacher mother made clear that the pit was a fate to be escaped rather than inherited, packs more marital desolation into thirty pages than most novelists manage in three hundred.
He wrote this at twenty-four. It reads like a man who already knew everything worth knowing about how marriages die, which at that age is either genius or a very unhappy childhood. Ford Madox Ford, on first reading it, declared Lawrence a major writer in the making. Ford was right.
The Bates cottage squats three steps below the cinder track at the edge of Brinsley pit-yard, close enough to the winding-engine that its mechanical pulse marks every hour of domestic waiting. Elizabeth Bates is handsome, imperious, heavily pregnant, and entirely accustomed to her husband Walter's habit of stopping at the pub rather than coming home to his dinner. The chrysanthemums at the garden gate, dishevelled and pink, preside over the whole arrangement with the air of unwilling witnesses.
The evening proceeds with grim comic punctuality. Elizabeth's grey-bearded father pulls up his locomotive long enough to report that Walter was last seen in the "Lord Nelson" bragging about spending half a sovereign. The pudding spoils in the oven. The children are put to bed. The clock is consulted with increasing frequency. Then, somewhere in the dark shift between bitter certainty and something colder, the story changes register entirely, and Lawrence executes the turn with the calm of a much older, much sadder writer.
The pit is destiny. The winding-engine breathes, the coal-dust tattoos itself into living skin, and the mine eventually delivers its verdict on the Bates marriage. Two people can share a bed, a name, and several children while remaining as opaque to each other as strangers on a colliery train. The chrysanthemums that braided themselves through every significant event of Elizabeth's marriage, the wedding, the births, the first drunken homecoming, turn out to have been present at one more occasion she had yet to anticipate.
Lawrence died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having been banned, expatriated, and misread in equal measure. He left behind a body of work that his contemporaries called pornographic and posterity saw as visionary. He wrote his darkest truths closest to home. A physical world rendered with extraordinary precision, and an emotional world beneath it cracking open.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Lawrence, the collier's son who grew up in Eastwood watching his barely literate father emerge daily from Brinsley Colliery blackened to the bone, while his former pupil-teacher mother made clear that the pit was a fate to be escaped rather than inherited, packs more marital desolation into thirty pages than most novelists manage in three hundred.
He wrote this at twenty-four. It reads like a man who already knew everything worth knowing about how marriages die, which at that age is either genius or a very unhappy childhood. Ford Madox Ford, on first reading it, declared Lawrence a major writer in the making. Ford was right.
The Bates cottage squats three steps below the cinder track at the edge of Brinsley pit-yard, close enough to the winding-engine that its mechanical pulse marks every hour of domestic waiting. Elizabeth Bates is handsome, imperious, heavily pregnant, and entirely accustomed to her husband Walter's habit of stopping at the pub rather than coming home to his dinner. The chrysanthemums at the garden gate, dishevelled and pink, preside over the whole arrangement with the air of unwilling witnesses.
The evening proceeds with grim comic punctuality. Elizabeth's grey-bearded father pulls up his locomotive long enough to report that Walter was last seen in the "Lord Nelson" bragging about spending half a sovereign. The pudding spoils in the oven. The children are put to bed. The clock is consulted with increasing frequency. Then, somewhere in the dark shift between bitter certainty and something colder, the story changes register entirely, and Lawrence executes the turn with the calm of a much older, much sadder writer.
The pit is destiny. The winding-engine breathes, the coal-dust tattoos itself into living skin, and the mine eventually delivers its verdict on the Bates marriage. Two people can share a bed, a name, and several children while remaining as opaque to each other as strangers on a colliery train. The chrysanthemums that braided themselves through every significant event of Elizabeth's marriage, the wedding, the births, the first drunken homecoming, turn out to have been present at one more occasion she had yet to anticipate.
Lawrence died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having been banned, expatriated, and misread in equal measure. He left behind a body of work that his contemporaries called pornographic and posterity saw as visionary. He wrote his darkest truths closest to home. A physical world rendered with extraordinary precision, and an emotional world beneath it cracking open.
❤️ 🇮🇱
In 1666, a young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, fresh off the humiliation of being denied his doctorate by the University of Leipzig for reasons as murky now as they were then, trudges through the snowy Bohemian mountains on a philosophical dare he has issued to himself. He has heard of a blind astronomer, and by blind the rumor is exact. The man has no eyes, only empty sockets, and yet he has predicted, to the minute, a total solar eclipse that every other astronomer in Europe has failed to foresee.
Leibniz, a rational optimist, gives the man four possibilities: mystic, madman, cunning fraud, or the most terrifying option, a genuine scientist who sees more with nothing than his colleagues do with two.
The journey, which requires Leibniz to trade his famous wig and silk stockings for a snowdrift and several bewildered goats, ends at a crumbling circular tower balanced on a cliff above the clouds, out of which protrudes a telescope of nearly two hundred feet, creaking in the wind like a disgruntled animal.
Inside the tower, on a three-legged stool beside a fat sleeping cat named Linus, sits the most ancient, bony, and philosophically combative man Leibniz has ever met. The astronomer, who keeps interrupting himself to peer into his colossal tube and jot down columns of numbers with what strikes Leibniz as either great conviction or great theater, has offered to answer three questions before the eclipse arrives: how did he lose his eyes, how does he claim to see, and how did he invent the telescope. All three, he insists, are one question.
The book is a story inside a story inside a story, each layer thick with fathers and sons, ambition and catastrophe, art presented to Emperors who titter and art that ends in rivers.
The astronomer was once the Imperial Astronomer of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, tutor to a murderous mad prince locked in a turret, confidant to a prodigy princess who could master Sweelinck fugues in an afternoon, and son to a sculptor whose entire career collapsed on the evening he peered into his own mirrored box and wept.
That sculptor built a mechanical speaking head intended to dazzle the Emperor and restore the family to glory. The astronomer, sleepless and half-mad from juggling his father's blinking contraption with his own secret studies of lenses and optics, had his own catastrophic epiphany on the night he forgot how to blink, and emerged the next morning with the principle of the telescope.
What he did with the lenses of his father's head, in the Great Hall before Rudolf and all the mathematicians of Europe, is the pivot on which his entire life turns, and on which the entire story of the instrument that Galileo and Kepler get credit for also turns.
Now, sixty-seven years later, two hours before an eclipse that the old man says will also be the day he dies, Leibniz sits in the dark with empty sockets and a sleeping cat and perhaps the greatest unsolved problem in the history of philosophy: whether the mind can ever truly enter another head, and whether what it might find there is vision or a sophisticated imitation.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs graduated from Harvard with a degree in the history of science, wrote for The New Yorker and The Harvard Lampoon, and has produced exactly the book those credentials predict: erudite, formally ingenious, and about four hundred pages shorter than it feels.
The book is a telescope pointed backward. The history of seeing is a history of not looking. The organs of sense are the least reliable part of perception. What we see depends on what we have suffered, what our fathers built and destroyed, what lenses we tore from whose mechanical heads in whose Great Halls. Vision is always a family matter.
We live in an era of cameras pointed at everything and eyes that register nothing. Linus the cat, who sleeps through all of it and opens his eyes only in a brief flash of sunlight, is the true philosopher of the book.
❤️ 🇮🇱
In 1666, a young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, fresh off the humiliation of being denied his doctorate by the University of Leipzig for reasons as murky now as they were then, trudges through the snowy Bohemian mountains on a philosophical dare he has issued to himself. He has heard of a blind astronomer, and by blind the rumor is exact. The man has no eyes, only empty sockets, and yet he has predicted, to the minute, a total solar eclipse that every other astronomer in Europe has failed to foresee.
Leibniz, a rational optimist, gives the man four possibilities: mystic, madman, cunning fraud, or the most terrifying option, a genuine scientist who sees more with nothing than his colleagues do with two.
The journey, which requires Leibniz to trade his famous wig and silk stockings for a snowdrift and several bewildered goats, ends at a crumbling circular tower balanced on a cliff above the clouds, out of which protrudes a telescope of nearly two hundred feet, creaking in the wind like a disgruntled animal.
Inside the tower, on a three-legged stool beside a fat sleeping cat named Linus, sits the most ancient, bony, and philosophically combative man Leibniz has ever met. The astronomer, who keeps interrupting himself to peer into his colossal tube and jot down columns of numbers with what strikes Leibniz as either great conviction or great theater, has offered to answer three questions before the eclipse arrives: how did he lose his eyes, how does he claim to see, and how did he invent the telescope. All three, he insists, are one question.
The book is a story inside a story inside a story, each layer thick with fathers and sons, ambition and catastrophe, art presented to Emperors who titter and art that ends in rivers.
The astronomer was once the Imperial Astronomer of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, tutor to a murderous mad prince locked in a turret, confidant to a prodigy princess who could master Sweelinck fugues in an afternoon, and son to a sculptor whose entire career collapsed on the evening he peered into his own mirrored box and wept.
That sculptor built a mechanical speaking head intended to dazzle the Emperor and restore the family to glory. The astronomer, sleepless and half-mad from juggling his father's blinking contraption with his own secret studies of lenses and optics, had his own catastrophic epiphany on the night he forgot how to blink, and emerged the next morning with the principle of the telescope.
What he did with the lenses of his father's head, in the Great Hall before Rudolf and all the mathematicians of Europe, is the pivot on which his entire life turns, and on which the entire story of the instrument that Galileo and Kepler get credit for also turns.
Now, sixty-seven years later, two hours before an eclipse that the old man says will also be the day he dies, Leibniz sits in the dark with empty sockets and a sleeping cat and perhaps the greatest unsolved problem in the history of philosophy: whether the mind can ever truly enter another head, and whether what it might find there is vision or a sophisticated imitation.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs graduated from Harvard with a degree in the history of science, wrote for The New Yorker and The Harvard Lampoon, and has produced exactly the book those credentials predict: erudite, formally ingenious, and about four hundred pages shorter than it feels.
The book is a telescope pointed backward. The history of seeing is a history of not looking. The organs of sense are the least reliable part of perception. What we see depends on what we have suffered, what our fathers built and destroyed, what lenses we tore from whose mechanical heads in whose Great Halls. Vision is always a family matter.
We live in an era of cameras pointed at everything and eyes that register nothing. Linus the cat, who sleeps through all of it and opens his eyes only in a brief flash of sunlight, is the true philosopher of the book.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Monika Helfer was born in 1947 in Vorarlberg, the westernmost fold of Austria, a region so mountainous that even the sunlight has to apply for a permit. She has written fiction, poetry, and children's books across five decades, is married to the novelist Michael Köhlmeier, and at their dinner table the literary ambition per square meter must require structural reinforcement.
Die Bagage, החבילה published in 2020 and followed by two continuation volumes. The title carries its own etymology as a punchline. "Bagage" in Austrian-German dialect means both luggage and rabble. The men who carried other people's loads for a living were eventually named after those loads, and the name traveled down the generations long after the loads were gone.
Josef and Maria Moosbrugger (a deeply ironic name for two people the village considers anything but holy) raise five children on two cows, one goat, and a quantity of pride that their neighbors find offensive. They live in the last house in the last valley, so far up the mountain that the sun checks out by early afternoon.
In September 1914, a blue envelope arrives, signed by the Austro-Hungarian state, and Josef must march off to a war that the optimists promise will be finished by October.
Josef entrusts his wife to the care of Gottlieb Fink, the mayor, a diplomatically gifted man that agrees to "watch over" the beautiful Maria. The adjunct postman, who has delivered mail to Maria for years, watches Josef leave and allows himself the tiniest, most discreet flutter of hope. Then a stranger named Georg appears at the door, coming from Hannover with a fresh city shirt and the unhurried friendliness that the mountain men, with their terse syllables and their stony expressions, have never quite managed. The family dog, a creature of flawless social judgment, lets Georg scratch his ears without growling. This is, in the context of this household, a five-star review.
Thins evolve into a pregnancy, a furious priest who delivers his theological opinions at full volume with the valley as his congregation, and a village that does its moral calculations with a side of gossip.
The book is told by Monika, Maria's granddaughter, who keeps sabotaging her own chronology with the compulsive honesty of someone who cannot maintain a dignified narrative distance because the material keeps reaching up and seizing her by the throat. She skips ahead to announce fates, then loops back to the moments that made those fates feel inevitable. She interrupts the story of her grandmother's wartime desires to confess a parallel episode from her own youth involving a married man, an American car, and a hand-bite that echoes across the generations with the regularity of a family trait. Bite first, apologize never. The Moosbrugger women have a consistent approach to passion.
Lorenz, the nine-year-old son who inherits the family rifle the morning his father leaves for the front, deserves a book of his own and eventually gets folded into this one, along with Heinrich who smells permanently of cattle regardless of how much soap is applied, Walter the redhead and compulsive charmer who drowns at forty-two, Irma who plans to marry rich and ends up married to a spectacularly dominant blind masseur who communes directly with God, and little Seppel, beautiful and feckless, whose trajectory is the saddest of all and whose story Helfer tells with sublime brevity.
Poverty assigns a name and the name is the sentence. "Bagage" precedes the children into every room they enter for the rest of their lives, applied by a village that considers itself charitable for admiring their resilience while doing absolutely nothing to alter the conditions that require it.
This is the ordinary cruelty that Helfer documents, the kind that wears the face of social observation. She published this at seventy-three, drawing on what her aunt Kathe finally disclosed at past ninety, in the tone of a woman clearing an old debt before the grave closed the account.
The book is short, dense, funny as very sad books can afford to be, and it carries its hundred-year family history without complaint.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Monika Helfer was born in 1947 in Vorarlberg, the westernmost fold of Austria, a region so mountainous that even the sunlight has to apply for a permit. She has written fiction, poetry, and children's books across five decades, is married to the novelist Michael Köhlmeier, and at their dinner table the literary ambition per square meter must require structural reinforcement.
Die Bagage, החבילה published in 2020 and followed by two continuation volumes. The title carries its own etymology as a punchline. "Bagage" in Austrian-German dialect means both luggage and rabble. The men who carried other people's loads for a living were eventually named after those loads, and the name traveled down the generations long after the loads were gone.
Josef and Maria Moosbrugger (a deeply ironic name for two people the village considers anything but holy) raise five children on two cows, one goat, and a quantity of pride that their neighbors find offensive. They live in the last house in the last valley, so far up the mountain that the sun checks out by early afternoon.
In September 1914, a blue envelope arrives, signed by the Austro-Hungarian state, and Josef must march off to a war that the optimists promise will be finished by October.
Josef entrusts his wife to the care of Gottlieb Fink, the mayor, a diplomatically gifted man that agrees to "watch over" the beautiful Maria. The adjunct postman, who has delivered mail to Maria for years, watches Josef leave and allows himself the tiniest, most discreet flutter of hope. Then a stranger named Georg appears at the door, coming from Hannover with a fresh city shirt and the unhurried friendliness that the mountain men, with their terse syllables and their stony expressions, have never quite managed. The family dog, a creature of flawless social judgment, lets Georg scratch his ears without growling. This is, in the context of this household, a five-star review.
Thins evolve into a pregnancy, a furious priest who delivers his theological opinions at full volume with the valley as his congregation, and a village that does its moral calculations with a side of gossip.
The book is told by Monika, Maria's granddaughter, who keeps sabotaging her own chronology with the compulsive honesty of someone who cannot maintain a dignified narrative distance because the material keeps reaching up and seizing her by the throat. She skips ahead to announce fates, then loops back to the moments that made those fates feel inevitable. She interrupts the story of her grandmother's wartime desires to confess a parallel episode from her own youth involving a married man, an American car, and a hand-bite that echoes across the generations with the regularity of a family trait. Bite first, apologize never. The Moosbrugger women have a consistent approach to passion.
Lorenz, the nine-year-old son who inherits the family rifle the morning his father leaves for the front, deserves a book of his own and eventually gets folded into this one, along with Heinrich who smells permanently of cattle regardless of how much soap is applied, Walter the redhead and compulsive charmer who drowns at forty-two, Irma who plans to marry rich and ends up married to a spectacularly dominant blind masseur who communes directly with God, and little Seppel, beautiful and feckless, whose trajectory is the saddest of all and whose story Helfer tells with sublime brevity.
Poverty assigns a name and the name is the sentence. "Bagage" precedes the children into every room they enter for the rest of their lives, applied by a village that considers itself charitable for admiring their resilience while doing absolutely nothing to alter the conditions that require it.
This is the ordinary cruelty that Helfer documents, the kind that wears the face of social observation. She published this at seventy-three, drawing on what her aunt Kathe finally disclosed at past ninety, in the tone of a woman clearing an old debt before the grave closed the account.
The book is short, dense, funny as very sad books can afford to be, and it carries its hundred-year family history without complaint.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.
Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.
The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)
The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.
When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.
Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.
Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.
Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.
He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.
The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.
His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.
Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.
That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.
For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.
The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.
Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.
Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.
The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)
The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.
When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.
Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.
Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.
Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.
He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.
The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.
His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.
Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.
That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.
For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.
The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.
Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Rikki Ducornet, born 1943, has spent her career being the writer that other writers whisper about reverently while publishers quietly panic.
Trafik, subtitled "a novel in warp drive," opens with Quiver, a transitional prototype gestated in a carbon envelope hanging in a nursery of suspended vitamin sacks, and her companion Mic, short for Michelangelo, a bot whose Swift Wheel contains Hollywood films, Japanese aesthetics, and strong opinions about Al Pacino's faucets.
Earth, called First Planet, has been erased by an event called the Noise, leaving its wreckage, Brooklyn gravel, Jurassic sandstone, and powder room ceramics, orbiting in a ring. Between mineral extraction missions, Quiver escapes into the Lights, a virtuality of forests and running paths, where a red-haired stranger keeps streaking past like a comet.
When their current mission ends in a catastrophe involving improperly sterilized boots, bioluminescent spores, and the complete dissolution of an asteroid named Quasi, Quiver and Mic make their decision standing in the kombucha cooler, listening to the vat slosh. They go rogue.
Their destination is Trafik, described throughout as the place that is between, a station in the galaxy where love and green skin await anyone who lingers. Bugs Bunny, serving gamely as an avatar of yore, programs their coordinates.
The book continues through clonal dogs, a Holstein-Friesian cow, a tenquid shuffle that reduces both of them briefly to soup, and a psychic menace that must be scrubbed out of a dream using a wire sponge. Each of these absurdities because each one conceals an argument about embodiment, mortality, the philosophical status of bots, and whether consciousness is origin or performance.
The emotion is supplied by a contraband paperback by Julio Cortázar, gray jade in color, passed to Quiver by a lover who was made to vanish, hidden under a bench in a Moon hallway. In a galaxy without books, owning one is a transgression.
The Lights deliver owls on demand and withhold touch. Trafik, the actual destination, offers a librarian named Data Fig who weeps at the sight of a book and greets visitors with a French kiss, described as a custom on Trafik as common as pie.
Ironically, only Eros and literature survive catastrophe in this slender vertigo of a book.
Two stars, or in the local currency, one contraband Cortázar and a Gender Cracking cocktail. Weird stuff!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Rikki Ducornet, born 1943, has spent her career being the writer that other writers whisper about reverently while publishers quietly panic.
Trafik, subtitled "a novel in warp drive," opens with Quiver, a transitional prototype gestated in a carbon envelope hanging in a nursery of suspended vitamin sacks, and her companion Mic, short for Michelangelo, a bot whose Swift Wheel contains Hollywood films, Japanese aesthetics, and strong opinions about Al Pacino's faucets.
Earth, called First Planet, has been erased by an event called the Noise, leaving its wreckage, Brooklyn gravel, Jurassic sandstone, and powder room ceramics, orbiting in a ring. Between mineral extraction missions, Quiver escapes into the Lights, a virtuality of forests and running paths, where a red-haired stranger keeps streaking past like a comet.
When their current mission ends in a catastrophe involving improperly sterilized boots, bioluminescent spores, and the complete dissolution of an asteroid named Quasi, Quiver and Mic make their decision standing in the kombucha cooler, listening to the vat slosh. They go rogue.
Their destination is Trafik, described throughout as the place that is between, a station in the galaxy where love and green skin await anyone who lingers. Bugs Bunny, serving gamely as an avatar of yore, programs their coordinates.
The book continues through clonal dogs, a Holstein-Friesian cow, a tenquid shuffle that reduces both of them briefly to soup, and a psychic menace that must be scrubbed out of a dream using a wire sponge. Each of these absurdities because each one conceals an argument about embodiment, mortality, the philosophical status of bots, and whether consciousness is origin or performance.
The emotion is supplied by a contraband paperback by Julio Cortázar, gray jade in color, passed to Quiver by a lover who was made to vanish, hidden under a bench in a Moon hallway. In a galaxy without books, owning one is a transgression.
The Lights deliver owls on demand and withhold touch. Trafik, the actual destination, offers a librarian named Data Fig who weeps at the sight of a book and greets visitors with a French kiss, described as a custom on Trafik as common as pie.
Ironically, only Eros and literature survive catastrophe in this slender vertigo of a book.
Two stars, or in the local currency, one contraband Cortázar and a Gender Cracking cocktail. Weird stuff!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Could this be the most inventive and fascinating book ever written?
Somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea, between the seventh and tenth centuries, a powerful nomadic people called the Khazars ran a thriving empire and then, rather inconveniently, converted to an unknown religion and ceased to exist entirely.
The conversion happened because their ruler, the kaghan, had a dream in which an angel told him his intentions were good but his deeds were wrong, and, as any reasonable monarch would, he invited three wise men to explain this to him: a Jewish rabbi named Isaac Sangari, a Christian monk named Cyril (the very Constantine of Thessalonica who gave the Slavs their alphabet), and an Islamic dervish named Farabi Ibn Kora.
Each argued for his faith with considerable ingenuity, deploying parables, coins minted in hell, and pointed remarks about political arrangements, while the Khazar princess Ateh, a woman who died by seeing herself simultaneously in a fast mirror and a slow one, kept intervening with speeches so oblique and devastating that she repeatedly reversed the kaghan's decision.
The outcome of this "Khazar polemic" is the central mystery, for three religions each claim the Khazars chose them, and all three accounts flatly contradict one another.
The book is a dictionary reconstructed from a 1691 edition compiled by a printer named Joannes Daubmannus, who, with the kind of editorial judgment one associates with catastrophe, printed one copy in poison ink. The Inquisition destroyed the rest in 1692, leaving only the poisoned copy and a companion volume in circulation, the latter containing the helpful annotation: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are among the living no longer."
The dictionary is divided into three books, Red, Green, and Yellow, representing Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew sources respectively, each with its own entries on the same names and events, entries that agree on very little.
Threading through all three books are recurring figures: the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect who could slip into other people's dreams and extract fragments of the divine being called Adam Cadmon; Avram Brankovich, a seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat and soldier in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar in the night from a parrot; and Samuel Cohen, a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jew in Dubrovnik who assembles his own Khazar dictionary from his room, whose three souls are so disagreeable toward one another that two of them may end up in hell.
The book's fourth dimension belongs to the twentieth century, where three scholars, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish, have each dedicated their careers to the Khazar question and arranged to meet in Istanbul at the Kingston Hotel to compare their findings.
Dr. Dorothea Schultz is a Slavicist from Cracow who writes letters to herself in Poland. Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia is a man whose trouser leg, by the novel's final gathering, is already dirty in a way that requires explanation. Dr. Isailo Suk arrives with an egg and a gold key that opens a door it has no business opening.
The three scholars carry the same obsession their seventeenth-century counterparts carried, which is to say each holds a piece of the puzzle the other two require, and each is incapable of simply passing it across the table.
The book was printed in two editions, male and female, identical save for seventeen crucial lines, which is the most economical way a novelist has ever suggested that the two sexes experience the same story differently while preserving the polite fiction that they are reading the same book. I read the female edition.
Milorad Pavic, born in Belgrade in 1929, was a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade and one of Yugoslavia's most celebrated poets before he turned, at roughly fifty, to prose. "Dictionary of the Khazars" was his first novel, published in Serbian in 1984.
He died in 2009, by which point he had produced a small body of fiction organized around the conceit that a novel is not obligated to proceed in a straight line, though the line he chose to break was the one that separates reading from being read.
The premise is outrageously fanciful, the detail is rendered in the flat, responsible tone of scholarship. The book's reconstructed preface warns the reader not to touch the dictionary unless absolutely necessary, and advises reading it "the way he catches leap-fever, an illness that skips over every other day and strikes only on feminine days of the week." It then adds, with perfect archival serenity, that essayists and critics "are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out."
The kaghan keeps changing his mind. The princess Ateh keeps intervening. And the Khazars, having converted to one of the three faiths, or possibly all three, or conceivably none, vanished so thoroughly from history that their graveyard by the Danube does not agree with anyone's preferred account of them. As Dr. Isailo Suk wrote before his own mysterious death: "The cemetery is full of broken menorah-decorated pottery... this is a graveyard of an undone and lost people, which is what the Khazars were at this place and perhaps at this time." Everyone wants the Khazars to be their own. Nobody wants them to be Khazars.
Cyril, who "spent the first half of his life fleeing from icons and the second half carrying them like a shield," argues with the elegance of a man who genuinely believes language is the closest thing to God. Samuel Cohen assembles his own Khazar dictionary from 132 manuscript bags in his rented room, writes in his private papers: "I am missing certain names, and as a result some of the letters will not be filled. How I would love to use only verbs instead of nouns for the entries in my dictionary!"
The Khazars believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that these letters converge in dreams to form the body of Adam Cadmon, the primordial being, and that the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect, could slip into the dreams of others to collect fragments of this divine body. The dream hunters are also, by the time you have read three hundred pages, a metaphor for every scholar who has ever tried to reconstruct a destroyed text from footnotes and the testimony of people with something to gain from the reconstruction.
Pavic's intelligence operates on several frequencies at once, and the book's comedy is inseparable from its philosophy. Avram Brankovich, the seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar from a parrot, is described as a man who "changes languages like mistresses" and speaks Spanish in his sleep but the knowledge melts by the time he wakes. His associate Yusuf Masudi, the lutenist who becomes a dream hunter, "strained to speak, as if trying to urinate after having just peed." The kaghan's dream hunter, when asked to interpret the angel's visit, replies: "God knows nothing of you... the fact that an angel appeared and rambled on in your dream only means that it had nowhere else to spend the night and that it was probably raining outside."
A Khazar envoy, who carried the entire history of his people tattooed on his skin for foreign scribes to copy at night, "lived like a living encyclopedia of the Khazars, on money earned by standing quietly through the long nights," and at the end, "his skin inscribed with the Khazar history began to itch terribly... it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history." The man was a book. The itch was a reading.
The main message, if the book will permit such a reduction, is that truth is not a single document but a multiplicity of contradictory ones, and that the act of assembly is itself an act of creation rather than recovery.
Cohen writes: "Perhaps there are two other people somewhere out there in the world searching for me the way I'm searching for them. Perhaps they are dreaming of me, as I of them, and craving for what I know, because my truth is a secret to them, just as theirs is the hidden answer to my questions."
Each of the three books in the dictionary holds a piece of the puzzle that the other two require. Each faith has assembled a version of the Khazar story that confirms what it already believed. The Khazars themselves, who converted to something and then disappeared, remain stubbornly unresolved, a people whose face was, by legend, impossible to remember.
The dream hunters' competition to reassemble Adam Cadmon from fragments scattered across other people's sleeping minds maps with uncomfortable precision onto the contemporary information environment, where every platform, algorithm, and political tradition maintains its own version of the same disputed event and calls it settled.
Pavic wrote the book in Belgrade, between 1978 and 1983, in a country that would spend the following decade destroying itself over exactly this problem: whose version of the past has the authority to organize the present. He knew, as his Khazar envoy knew, that history is the text written on someone else's back, and that the scribes always copy only the sections that interest them. The rest of the tattooed man walks on, into other territories, carrying dispatches nobody requested.
This has to be my favorite book of all time!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Could this be the most inventive and fascinating book ever written?
Somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea, between the seventh and tenth centuries, a powerful nomadic people called the Khazars ran a thriving empire and then, rather inconveniently, converted to an unknown religion and ceased to exist entirely.
The conversion happened because their ruler, the kaghan, had a dream in which an angel told him his intentions were good but his deeds were wrong, and, as any reasonable monarch would, he invited three wise men to explain this to him: a Jewish rabbi named Isaac Sangari, a Christian monk named Cyril (the very Constantine of Thessalonica who gave the Slavs their alphabet), and an Islamic dervish named Farabi Ibn Kora.
Each argued for his faith with considerable ingenuity, deploying parables, coins minted in hell, and pointed remarks about political arrangements, while the Khazar princess Ateh, a woman who died by seeing herself simultaneously in a fast mirror and a slow one, kept intervening with speeches so oblique and devastating that she repeatedly reversed the kaghan's decision.
The outcome of this "Khazar polemic" is the central mystery, for three religions each claim the Khazars chose them, and all three accounts flatly contradict one another.
The book is a dictionary reconstructed from a 1691 edition compiled by a printer named Joannes Daubmannus, who, with the kind of editorial judgment one associates with catastrophe, printed one copy in poison ink. The Inquisition destroyed the rest in 1692, leaving only the poisoned copy and a companion volume in circulation, the latter containing the helpful annotation: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are among the living no longer."
The dictionary is divided into three books, Red, Green, and Yellow, representing Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew sources respectively, each with its own entries on the same names and events, entries that agree on very little.
Threading through all three books are recurring figures: the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect who could slip into other people's dreams and extract fragments of the divine being called Adam Cadmon; Avram Brankovich, a seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat and soldier in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar in the night from a parrot; and Samuel Cohen, a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jew in Dubrovnik who assembles his own Khazar dictionary from his room, whose three souls are so disagreeable toward one another that two of them may end up in hell.
The book's fourth dimension belongs to the twentieth century, where three scholars, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish, have each dedicated their careers to the Khazar question and arranged to meet in Istanbul at the Kingston Hotel to compare their findings.
Dr. Dorothea Schultz is a Slavicist from Cracow who writes letters to herself in Poland. Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia is a man whose trouser leg, by the novel's final gathering, is already dirty in a way that requires explanation. Dr. Isailo Suk arrives with an egg and a gold key that opens a door it has no business opening.
The three scholars carry the same obsession their seventeenth-century counterparts carried, which is to say each holds a piece of the puzzle the other two require, and each is incapable of simply passing it across the table.
The book was printed in two editions, male and female, identical save for seventeen crucial lines, which is the most economical way a novelist has ever suggested that the two sexes experience the same story differently while preserving the polite fiction that they are reading the same book. I read the female edition.
Milorad Pavic, born in Belgrade in 1929, was a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade and one of Yugoslavia's most celebrated poets before he turned, at roughly fifty, to prose. "Dictionary of the Khazars" was his first novel, published in Serbian in 1984.
He died in 2009, by which point he had produced a small body of fiction organized around the conceit that a novel is not obligated to proceed in a straight line, though the line he chose to break was the one that separates reading from being read.
The premise is outrageously fanciful, the detail is rendered in the flat, responsible tone of scholarship. The book's reconstructed preface warns the reader not to touch the dictionary unless absolutely necessary, and advises reading it "the way he catches leap-fever, an illness that skips over every other day and strikes only on feminine days of the week." It then adds, with perfect archival serenity, that essayists and critics "are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out."
The kaghan keeps changing his mind. The princess Ateh keeps intervening. And the Khazars, having converted to one of the three faiths, or possibly all three, or conceivably none, vanished so thoroughly from history that their graveyard by the Danube does not agree with anyone's preferred account of them. As Dr. Isailo Suk wrote before his own mysterious death: "The cemetery is full of broken menorah-decorated pottery... this is a graveyard of an undone and lost people, which is what the Khazars were at this place and perhaps at this time." Everyone wants the Khazars to be their own. Nobody wants them to be Khazars.
Cyril, who "spent the first half of his life fleeing from icons and the second half carrying them like a shield," argues with the elegance of a man who genuinely believes language is the closest thing to God. Samuel Cohen assembles his own Khazar dictionary from 132 manuscript bags in his rented room, writes in his private papers: "I am missing certain names, and as a result some of the letters will not be filled. How I would love to use only verbs instead of nouns for the entries in my dictionary!"
The Khazars believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that these letters converge in dreams to form the body of Adam Cadmon, the primordial being, and that the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect, could slip into the dreams of others to collect fragments of this divine body. The dream hunters are also, by the time you have read three hundred pages, a metaphor for every scholar who has ever tried to reconstruct a destroyed text from footnotes and the testimony of people with something to gain from the reconstruction.
Pavic's intelligence operates on several frequencies at once, and the book's comedy is inseparable from its philosophy. Avram Brankovich, the seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar from a parrot, is described as a man who "changes languages like mistresses" and speaks Spanish in his sleep but the knowledge melts by the time he wakes. His associate Yusuf Masudi, the lutenist who becomes a dream hunter, "strained to speak, as if trying to urinate after having just peed." The kaghan's dream hunter, when asked to interpret the angel's visit, replies: "God knows nothing of you... the fact that an angel appeared and rambled on in your dream only means that it had nowhere else to spend the night and that it was probably raining outside."
A Khazar envoy, who carried the entire history of his people tattooed on his skin for foreign scribes to copy at night, "lived like a living encyclopedia of the Khazars, on money earned by standing quietly through the long nights," and at the end, "his skin inscribed with the Khazar history began to itch terribly... it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history." The man was a book. The itch was a reading.
The main message, if the book will permit such a reduction, is that truth is not a single document but a multiplicity of contradictory ones, and that the act of assembly is itself an act of creation rather than recovery.
Cohen writes: "Perhaps there are two other people somewhere out there in the world searching for me the way I'm searching for them. Perhaps they are dreaming of me, as I of them, and craving for what I know, because my truth is a secret to them, just as theirs is the hidden answer to my questions."
Each of the three books in the dictionary holds a piece of the puzzle that the other two require. Each faith has assembled a version of the Khazar story that confirms what it already believed. The Khazars themselves, who converted to something and then disappeared, remain stubbornly unresolved, a people whose face was, by legend, impossible to remember.
The dream hunters' competition to reassemble Adam Cadmon from fragments scattered across other people's sleeping minds maps with uncomfortable precision onto the contemporary information environment, where every platform, algorithm, and political tradition maintains its own version of the same disputed event and calls it settled.
Pavic wrote the book in Belgrade, between 1978 and 1983, in a country that would spend the following decade destroying itself over exactly this problem: whose version of the past has the authority to organize the present. He knew, as his Khazar envoy knew, that history is the text written on someone else's back, and that the scribes always copy only the sections that interest them. The rest of the tattooed man walks on, into other territories, carrying dispatches nobody requested.
This has to be my favorite book of all time!
❤️ 🇮🇱
A book so thin you can read it on one subway ride and so concentrated it takes a week to clear your system.
Tom is the only person in his entire social circle without a superpower. In a city of 249 superheroes, all of them with secret neuroses dressed up as abilities, Tom is the statistical anomaly, the control group, the one person Hypno has never successfully hypnotized.
He falls in love with and marries the Perfectionist, a woman who can will order into existence through sheer force of need. Then, at the wedding reception, while a brawl breaks out near the shrimp table, a jealous ex leans close to her ear and asks one question. By morning, the Perfectionist cannot see Tom. He has become invisible to her and her alone. To everyone else, he is perfectly visible.
The entire book takes place aboard flight AC117, a cross-country flight from Toronto to Vancouver, with Tom in the seat beside a woman who has booked a one-way ticket to a city where she intends to make everything perfect without him. The sentences cut between the descending plane and a Toronto that flickers through memory in vivid, absurd, and occasionally heartbreaking flashes.
There is Ambrose, the heart mechanic who shows up with a rubber glove and a red rag and performs cardiac repairs on a kitchen table. There is Sleazy Jim, selling myths from inside a trench coat in an alley between two vacant stores. There is an art show where the Projectionist hangs no art on the walls, and the back room contains something every visitor to the gallery should probably prepare for.
Kaufman's superheroes are not the flying, cape-wearing, city-saving variety. They are Toronto residents who work as bike couriers, smoke at kitchen tables, and attend parties where they spend the evening pointing at each other and screaming "Evil! Evil!!"
Their powers are, to a one, personality disorders in spandex. Someday thinks big and procrastinates simultaneously, with consequences that start at five feet four inches and end under a microscope. The Chip cannot remove the chip on her shoulder because only removing it would generate the strength required to remove it. The Frog-Kisser transforms the unlovable into the desirable and loses all interest the moment the transformation completes.
Every superpower in this book is a trap its owner built and moved into voluntarily.
Love between two people requires one of them to ask the right question at the right moment. Hypno's power works because he asks the Perfectionist what she sees in Tom at precisely the instant she has no ready answer. Tom spends six months, six hundred cigarettes' worth of waiting, and one transatlantic descent trying to locate the equivalent question.
This is a Canadian novel in ways that go beyond postal codes. The Canada Council has awarded the Projectionist a grant. The Amphibian, who can survive indefinitely underwater, works as a bike courier for a company called Speedy because, as Kaufman observes with magnificent bluntness, what job is anyone going to give him for that. The Clock can travel in time and considers this entirely unremarkable, pointing out that everyone travels in time constantly and a real superpower would be the ability to stop. This is the Canadian civic disposition rendered as cosmology: a city of people with extraordinary capacities for endurance and self-deprecation, each privately convinced that their neighbour is the actual supervillain.
The book is slight and does exactly what it sets out to do with exactly the material it needs, wastes nothing, explains less than it could, and trusts us to meet it somewhere in the gap between what Tom says and what he means. I loved it!
❤️ 🇮🇱
A book so thin you can read it on one subway ride and so concentrated it takes a week to clear your system.
Tom is the only person in his entire social circle without a superpower. In a city of 249 superheroes, all of them with secret neuroses dressed up as abilities, Tom is the statistical anomaly, the control group, the one person Hypno has never successfully hypnotized.
He falls in love with and marries the Perfectionist, a woman who can will order into existence through sheer force of need. Then, at the wedding reception, while a brawl breaks out near the shrimp table, a jealous ex leans close to her ear and asks one question. By morning, the Perfectionist cannot see Tom. He has become invisible to her and her alone. To everyone else, he is perfectly visible.
The entire book takes place aboard flight AC117, a cross-country flight from Toronto to Vancouver, with Tom in the seat beside a woman who has booked a one-way ticket to a city where she intends to make everything perfect without him. The sentences cut between the descending plane and a Toronto that flickers through memory in vivid, absurd, and occasionally heartbreaking flashes.
There is Ambrose, the heart mechanic who shows up with a rubber glove and a red rag and performs cardiac repairs on a kitchen table. There is Sleazy Jim, selling myths from inside a trench coat in an alley between two vacant stores. There is an art show where the Projectionist hangs no art on the walls, and the back room contains something every visitor to the gallery should probably prepare for.
Kaufman's superheroes are not the flying, cape-wearing, city-saving variety. They are Toronto residents who work as bike couriers, smoke at kitchen tables, and attend parties where they spend the evening pointing at each other and screaming "Evil! Evil!!"
Their powers are, to a one, personality disorders in spandex. Someday thinks big and procrastinates simultaneously, with consequences that start at five feet four inches and end under a microscope. The Chip cannot remove the chip on her shoulder because only removing it would generate the strength required to remove it. The Frog-Kisser transforms the unlovable into the desirable and loses all interest the moment the transformation completes.
Every superpower in this book is a trap its owner built and moved into voluntarily.
Love between two people requires one of them to ask the right question at the right moment. Hypno's power works because he asks the Perfectionist what she sees in Tom at precisely the instant she has no ready answer. Tom spends six months, six hundred cigarettes' worth of waiting, and one transatlantic descent trying to locate the equivalent question.
This is a Canadian novel in ways that go beyond postal codes. The Canada Council has awarded the Projectionist a grant. The Amphibian, who can survive indefinitely underwater, works as a bike courier for a company called Speedy because, as Kaufman observes with magnificent bluntness, what job is anyone going to give him for that. The Clock can travel in time and considers this entirely unremarkable, pointing out that everyone travels in time constantly and a real superpower would be the ability to stop. This is the Canadian civic disposition rendered as cosmology: a city of people with extraordinary capacities for endurance and self-deprecation, each privately convinced that their neighbour is the actual supervillain.
The book is slight and does exactly what it sets out to do with exactly the material it needs, wastes nothing, explains less than it could, and trusts us to meet it somewhere in the gap between what Tom says and what he means. I loved it!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, ostensibly for love, and spent the next six decades being productively punished for it. The Power and the Glory, published in 1940 and based on his 1938 trip to anticlerical Mexico, is the bill that conversion sent him.
A nameless, rum-soaked, hollow-faced priest wanders the banana plantations and malaria swamps of a Mexican state where the government has abolished God by decree. Every other priest has married, recanted, or been shot. This one runs, badly, carrying a battered attaché case, a bottle when he can find one, and a daughter he fathered in a single act of weakness with a woman named Maria.
The daughter is named Brigitta, and she stares at him with such cold clarity that she is more terrifying than any policeman. He says Mass in barns with contraband wine. He baptizes children with whatever water the heat has left behind. He is the worst possible advertisement for his own faith.
Hunting him is the lieutenant, a lean, boot-polished idealist who grew up watching the Church collect pesos from the starving in exchange for paradise futures. He takes hostages from villages and rides through the swamps with his pistol holster winking in the sun hunting for the last Padre. Greene gives the lieutenant all the best secular arguments.
The priest is shadowed, among others, by a yellow-toothed mestizo with feverish eyes. He is sheltered, briefly, by a twelve-year-old English girl named Coral Fellows, who lives on a banana plantation with her vague father and her ailing mother. She is ten years old in competence and a hundred in composure.
This is undeniably a theological book dressed in a thriller's clothing. Grace operates entirely below the threshold of personal merit. The priest is vain, cowardly, compromised, and alcoholic. He is also indispensable. The sacraments he performs in mud-floored huts carry their full weight regardless of the moral condition of the man performing them.
The Mexico of this book is a theological storm. Buzzards perform their civic duties above every plaza, the heat presses down like a hand on the back of the neck, armed men lurk at every river crossing, and churches are converted into government offices, their stained glass sold off to dentists.
Mr. Tench, the melancholy English dentist who opens and closes the book like a pair of brackets, has a Madonna looking out through his mosquito wire at a yard full of turkeys. Sacred and profane have always found a way to room together.
The prose is stripped and exact, the pity is controlled, the irony shoots in both directions simultaneously. A reader who finds institutional religion ridiculous will find this book maddening. A reader who finds it sublime will find this book maddening. I think that Greene aimed for exactly that crossfire.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, ostensibly for love, and spent the next six decades being productively punished for it. The Power and the Glory, published in 1940 and based on his 1938 trip to anticlerical Mexico, is the bill that conversion sent him.
A nameless, rum-soaked, hollow-faced priest wanders the banana plantations and malaria swamps of a Mexican state where the government has abolished God by decree. Every other priest has married, recanted, or been shot. This one runs, badly, carrying a battered attaché case, a bottle when he can find one, and a daughter he fathered in a single act of weakness with a woman named Maria.
The daughter is named Brigitta, and she stares at him with such cold clarity that she is more terrifying than any policeman. He says Mass in barns with contraband wine. He baptizes children with whatever water the heat has left behind. He is the worst possible advertisement for his own faith.
Hunting him is the lieutenant, a lean, boot-polished idealist who grew up watching the Church collect pesos from the starving in exchange for paradise futures. He takes hostages from villages and rides through the swamps with his pistol holster winking in the sun hunting for the last Padre. Greene gives the lieutenant all the best secular arguments.
The priest is shadowed, among others, by a yellow-toothed mestizo with feverish eyes. He is sheltered, briefly, by a twelve-year-old English girl named Coral Fellows, who lives on a banana plantation with her vague father and her ailing mother. She is ten years old in competence and a hundred in composure.
This is undeniably a theological book dressed in a thriller's clothing. Grace operates entirely below the threshold of personal merit. The priest is vain, cowardly, compromised, and alcoholic. He is also indispensable. The sacraments he performs in mud-floored huts carry their full weight regardless of the moral condition of the man performing them.
The Mexico of this book is a theological storm. Buzzards perform their civic duties above every plaza, the heat presses down like a hand on the back of the neck, armed men lurk at every river crossing, and churches are converted into government offices, their stained glass sold off to dentists.
Mr. Tench, the melancholy English dentist who opens and closes the book like a pair of brackets, has a Madonna looking out through his mosquito wire at a yard full of turkeys. Sacred and profane have always found a way to room together.
The prose is stripped and exact, the pity is controlled, the irony shoots in both directions simultaneously. A reader who finds institutional religion ridiculous will find this book maddening. A reader who finds it sublime will find this book maddening. I think that Greene aimed for exactly that crossfire.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Jean-Christophe Krafft arrives in the world on a rainy night beside a Rhine that will run through every page of this book like an unpaid lease, declared ugly by his grandfather Jean Michel before he has had time to form an opinion on the matter, and greeted by his mother Louisa with the magnificent words: "How ugly you are, how ugly! and how I love you!"
The book itself is ugly in the way that living things are ugly: too large, too wet, too insistent, too various, insufficiently edited, and completely impossible to put down or, having put down, to forget. Romain Rolland spent roughly a decade writing it and the reader, embarking on it, should clear a comparable schedule.
Jean-Christophe is a German musical genius of the Beethoven persuasion, which is to say volcanic, tactless, constitutionally incapable of flattering the powerful, and born into a family whose finances are as rickety as his father Melchior's sobriety. Melchior, a violinist of genuine talent and operatic self-destruction, treats the tavern as his primary residence and the family home as an occasional inconvenience, eventually resolving the ambiguity by drowning in the millrace with the completeness of a man who has decided to be thorough about something at last.
Grandfather Jean Michel, who raised Melchior and considers the result a personal affront, compensates by dispensing moral aphorisms with the frequency and accuracy of a broken clock: "There's nothing finer than an honest man," he announces, and pauses, and has nothing further to add, and this is, the book suggests, both his limitation and his dignity.
The child, declared a prodigy, is paraded before the Grand Duke, published, humiliated, educated by poverty, and launched into a world that will spend the next thousand pages trying to break him without quite managing it.
Rolland's writing, at its best, is a sustained act of witchcraft. The scene of the young Jean-Christophe hearing music for the first time as something that lives inside him rather than outside, the prose following sensation before language, before names, before the social machinery of art has had time to arrive and commodify the experience, is as fine an account of musical consciousness as literature has produced.
The death of Uncle Gottfried, the wandering peddler-philosopher who taught the boy that only what is genuinely felt deserves to be sung, is rendered in a single scene of such concentrated grace that one resents having to describe it: Gottfried arrives at a farmhouse, sits on the bench by the door, and dies quietly while the blind girl Modesta talks to him about local news, and the narrative understands, and the reader understands, that this is the correct way to die if you have spent your life insisting that the ordinary is sacred.
Then there is Sabine, the young widow across the courtyard with the sorrowful lips and the closed door at the farmhouse, the chapter of erotic paralysis in which two people stand on either side of a door they cannot bring themselves to open, which is simultaneously the funniest and most excruciating scene in nineteenth-century sexual comedy and also, as Sabine is dead within pages, a grief that ambushes the reader as comprehensively as it ambushes Christophe.
Paris, where Christophe arrives as a fugitive after a brawl with Prussian soldiers that was entirely their fault and entirely his doing, is rendered as a city of magnificent surfaces and structural fraud. The French musical establishment, the critics, the salon-keepers, the boulevard playwrights churning out Rostand, the pseudo-Shakespearean bombast in which King Henri IV submits to assassination because his mistress has grown bored with him, the whole gorgeous, self-satisfied, eloquent machine of Parisian cultural production: Rolland takes it apart with the patience and relish of a man who has spent years attending its concerts and thinking, privately, that the emperor's new clothes have been tailored in a rather familiar cut.
His Paris is a city where intelligence is plentiful and seriousness is treated as a foreign affectation, which Jean-Christophe, being German, is assumed to possess as a racial characteristic along with heavy boots and an inability to appreciate Racine.
The friendship with Olivier Jeannin, the gentle, bookish Frenchman whose dead sister Antoinette loved Jean-Christophe from a concert gallery without his knowledge, her devotion recorded in a small account-book with a date that matches a dedication in one of his scores, is the moral and emotional center of the second half: Krafft und Zartheit, force and delicacy, the Rhine and the Seine deciding, against all political advice, to share a building.
What runs through the whole vast length of it with the force that Rolland kept finding in Beethoven, in the motto borrowed from Beethoven's own hand, "Durch Leiden Freude," through suffering, joy, is the argument that the individual life, lived with absolute fidelity to its own inner law, is the only adequate response to a world organized around comfortable lies.
Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, musicologist, and pacifist who spent decades at the Sorbonne lecturing on the history of music before pouring everything he knew, and everything he believed, into this colossus. He published "Jean-Christophe" in ten volumes between 1904 and 1912, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915 partly on its strength, and spent the rest of his long life being alternately celebrated and scandalised, his pacifism during the First World War earning him the particular contempt of people whose countries were busy destroying each other. He was friends with Tolstoy, Gandhi, Freud, and Stefan Zweig; he corresponded with Gandhi on the ethics of nonviolence; and he seems to have been, temperamentally, precisely the kind of incorruptible idealist he spent 1,400 pages trying to fictionalise. The book he produced is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most ambitious achievements in European prose of the twentieth century: a Bildungsroman the size of a continent, a work of musical philosophy disguised as a biography, a polemic dressed in the clothes of a river.
Rolland writes the inner life of childhood, the way a boy hears music before he understands it, before he can name it, the way sensation precedes cognition, with a fidelity to actual psychological experience that makes most novels about artistic awakening seem performed by comparison. The Paris sections, for all their polemical heat, contain some of the century's sharpest comedy of manners: the portrait of the "Dionysos" review and its gang of wealthy young would-be subversives, Adalbert von Waldhaus condescending to his Jewish colleagues while they cheerfully exploit his money and his name, is a study in mutual contempt operating as social contract that reads as freshly now as it did in 1905.
The music criticism embedded throughout the book is the work of someone who genuinely understood music as a form of moral life. Jean-Christophe's distinction between music that grows from lived experience and music manufactured to satisfy social expectation is the central argument of the entire work, and Rolland makes it through extraordinary drama. Uncle Gottfried's insistence that only things genuinely felt deserve to be sung, delivered by a man who sings badly but means every note, is more persuasive than any number of aesthetic treatises. The account of Jean-Christophe's Paris concerts, his music booed by audiences trained to prefer comfortable cleverness, is historically accurate as a portrait of how new artistic seriousness typically meets the Parisian establishment, and the diagnosis of French musical culture as brilliant, self-referential, and fundamentally decorative has aged well enough to be uncomfortable.
The antisemitism in the book is real, substantial, and demands direct engagement rather than the nervous footnote it sometimes receives. The portraits of the Mannheim circle, the passages describing "the Jews" as a race defined by certain inherited characteristics, the treatment of Judith Mannheim as simultaneously seductive and spiritually sterile, her intelligence described as the "genius of curiosity and boredom," all of this is woven into the text as observation rather than malice, which in some ways makes it worse. Rolland clearly thought he was being fair, even generous, by comparison with the explicit antisemitism of his era. He depicts Jewish intelligence as genuine and formidable, Jewish solidarity as admirable, and he places some of his most sympathetic minor characters in the Mannheim household. But the machinery of racial typology, the assumption that individual psychology is legible as racial psychology, the framing of "the soul of Israel" as something that shines through Judith's eyes independently of who she actually is as a person, all of this belongs to the same intellectual equipment that made the Dreyfus Affair possible, and Rolland knew about the Dreyfus Affair because it happens in the background of his own book. A work so insistent on individual moral integrity, so contemptuous of collective prejudice in every other domain, does itself serious damage by applying racial logic to Jewish characters while exempting everyone else from it. This is a genuine contradiction in a book whose whole argument is that the individual soul is answerable only to itself, and the contradiction is large enough to matter.
The portraits of European cultural and political life from approximately 1870 to 1910 remain genuinely valuable historical documents. Rolland's account of German militarism, its effect on music, on social relations, on the casual brutality that Jean-Christophe witnesses at the village inn, is written by someone who lived inside that culture and observed it with the doubled vision of a Francophile outsider. His Paris is equally alive: the sectarian ferocity of French intellectual life, the way every faction mistakes its local obsession for universal truth, the way the Republic's idealists carry Jacobin absolutism in their bones while proclaiming liberty from every platform, all of this is rendered with the specific, unrepeatable detail of eyewitness testimony. The chapter on the French theater, Rolland's exasperation with Rostand, with the eternal Cyrano and his paste-heroism, with the boulevard's compulsive retreat from anything difficult into something shiny, reads as a document of 1906 that could, with names changed, serve as a document of 2026.
The central messages remain valid in ways that are both encouraging and mortifying. The argument that cultural mediocrity sustains itself through social mechanism rather than aesthetic merit, that critics and institutions reward what is already rewarded, that genuine originality is greeted first with silence, then with hostility, then with retrospective celebration after it can do no further damage, is confirmed by the experience of every subsequent century. The argument that Franco-German, or more broadly European, antagonism is a catastrophic waste of complementary energies, that the friendship of Olivier and Jean-Christophe represents something the political order actively destroys, acquired its full terrible weight in 1914, two years after the book's completion, and has lost none of it since. The insistence that the artist's first obligation is to the truth of inner experience, against every social and commercial pressure toward acceptable production, is as necessary to state now as it was when Rolland stated it, for the same reason: the pressures are identical, only the platforms have multiplied.
What has not aged well, beyond the antisemitism, is the book's eschatological confidence, its faith that suffering gathers toward meaning, that the river reaches the sea and the sea is God. Rolland's mystical resolution, beautiful as the writing around it is, depends on a metaphysics that the century he helped open then proceeded to devastate. The joy "through suffering" that the preface borrows from Beethoven, "Durch Leiden Freude," was tested against evidence that Rolland, writing in 1912, could not yet fully imagine, and the evidence was severe. Beethoven, one suspects, would have written a fifth movement anyway.
What survives all qualification is the scale of the ambition and the frequency with which the execution matches it. Very few novels attempt to hold simultaneously a detailed psychological biography, a philosophy of art, a portrait of two nations at a precise historical moment, a theory of friendship, and a meditation on mortality, and very few that attempt it produce pages as good as the best pages here. The book's influence on the European novel of the twentieth century was direct and acknowledged. Stefan Zweig, who was Rolland's close friend, absorbed its structural ambition; the "roman-fleuve" as a form owes it a substantial debt. That it is now read far less than it deserves is itself a small confirmation of one of its arguments: the cultural marketplace is an unreliable judge of seriousness, and the river, as Rolland kept insisting, goes on moving regardless of who is watching from the bank.
After reading this, one understands why the river keeps flowing: because Rolland, for all his faults and all his grandeur, actually heard it.
Read it. Clear your diary. Prepare to be changed, irritated, devastated, occasionally exasperated by passages of mystico-nationalist fervour that have aged about as gracefully as a Wilhelmine military parade, and then devastated again.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Jean-Christophe Krafft arrives in the world on a rainy night beside a Rhine that will run through every page of this book like an unpaid lease, declared ugly by his grandfather Jean Michel before he has had time to form an opinion on the matter, and greeted by his mother Louisa with the magnificent words: "How ugly you are, how ugly! and how I love you!"
The book itself is ugly in the way that living things are ugly: too large, too wet, too insistent, too various, insufficiently edited, and completely impossible to put down or, having put down, to forget. Romain Rolland spent roughly a decade writing it and the reader, embarking on it, should clear a comparable schedule.
Jean-Christophe is a German musical genius of the Beethoven persuasion, which is to say volcanic, tactless, constitutionally incapable of flattering the powerful, and born into a family whose finances are as rickety as his father Melchior's sobriety. Melchior, a violinist of genuine talent and operatic self-destruction, treats the tavern as his primary residence and the family home as an occasional inconvenience, eventually resolving the ambiguity by drowning in the millrace with the completeness of a man who has decided to be thorough about something at last.
Grandfather Jean Michel, who raised Melchior and considers the result a personal affront, compensates by dispensing moral aphorisms with the frequency and accuracy of a broken clock: "There's nothing finer than an honest man," he announces, and pauses, and has nothing further to add, and this is, the book suggests, both his limitation and his dignity.
The child, declared a prodigy, is paraded before the Grand Duke, published, humiliated, educated by poverty, and launched into a world that will spend the next thousand pages trying to break him without quite managing it.
Rolland's writing, at its best, is a sustained act of witchcraft. The scene of the young Jean-Christophe hearing music for the first time as something that lives inside him rather than outside, the prose following sensation before language, before names, before the social machinery of art has had time to arrive and commodify the experience, is as fine an account of musical consciousness as literature has produced.
The death of Uncle Gottfried, the wandering peddler-philosopher who taught the boy that only what is genuinely felt deserves to be sung, is rendered in a single scene of such concentrated grace that one resents having to describe it: Gottfried arrives at a farmhouse, sits on the bench by the door, and dies quietly while the blind girl Modesta talks to him about local news, and the narrative understands, and the reader understands, that this is the correct way to die if you have spent your life insisting that the ordinary is sacred.
Then there is Sabine, the young widow across the courtyard with the sorrowful lips and the closed door at the farmhouse, the chapter of erotic paralysis in which two people stand on either side of a door they cannot bring themselves to open, which is simultaneously the funniest and most excruciating scene in nineteenth-century sexual comedy and also, as Sabine is dead within pages, a grief that ambushes the reader as comprehensively as it ambushes Christophe.
Paris, where Christophe arrives as a fugitive after a brawl with Prussian soldiers that was entirely their fault and entirely his doing, is rendered as a city of magnificent surfaces and structural fraud. The French musical establishment, the critics, the salon-keepers, the boulevard playwrights churning out Rostand, the pseudo-Shakespearean bombast in which King Henri IV submits to assassination because his mistress has grown bored with him, the whole gorgeous, self-satisfied, eloquent machine of Parisian cultural production: Rolland takes it apart with the patience and relish of a man who has spent years attending its concerts and thinking, privately, that the emperor's new clothes have been tailored in a rather familiar cut.
His Paris is a city where intelligence is plentiful and seriousness is treated as a foreign affectation, which Jean-Christophe, being German, is assumed to possess as a racial characteristic along with heavy boots and an inability to appreciate Racine.
The friendship with Olivier Jeannin, the gentle, bookish Frenchman whose dead sister Antoinette loved Jean-Christophe from a concert gallery without his knowledge, her devotion recorded in a small account-book with a date that matches a dedication in one of his scores, is the moral and emotional center of the second half: Krafft und Zartheit, force and delicacy, the Rhine and the Seine deciding, against all political advice, to share a building.
What runs through the whole vast length of it with the force that Rolland kept finding in Beethoven, in the motto borrowed from Beethoven's own hand, "Durch Leiden Freude," through suffering, joy, is the argument that the individual life, lived with absolute fidelity to its own inner law, is the only adequate response to a world organized around comfortable lies.
Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, musicologist, and pacifist who spent decades at the Sorbonne lecturing on the history of music before pouring everything he knew, and everything he believed, into this colossus. He published "Jean-Christophe" in ten volumes between 1904 and 1912, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915 partly on its strength, and spent the rest of his long life being alternately celebrated and scandalised, his pacifism during the First World War earning him the particular contempt of people whose countries were busy destroying each other. He was friends with Tolstoy, Gandhi, Freud, and Stefan Zweig; he corresponded with Gandhi on the ethics of nonviolence; and he seems to have been, temperamentally, precisely the kind of incorruptible idealist he spent 1,400 pages trying to fictionalise. The book he produced is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most ambitious achievements in European prose of the twentieth century: a Bildungsroman the size of a continent, a work of musical philosophy disguised as a biography, a polemic dressed in the clothes of a river.
Rolland writes the inner life of childhood, the way a boy hears music before he understands it, before he can name it, the way sensation precedes cognition, with a fidelity to actual psychological experience that makes most novels about artistic awakening seem performed by comparison. The Paris sections, for all their polemical heat, contain some of the century's sharpest comedy of manners: the portrait of the "Dionysos" review and its gang of wealthy young would-be subversives, Adalbert von Waldhaus condescending to his Jewish colleagues while they cheerfully exploit his money and his name, is a study in mutual contempt operating as social contract that reads as freshly now as it did in 1905.
The music criticism embedded throughout the book is the work of someone who genuinely understood music as a form of moral life. Jean-Christophe's distinction between music that grows from lived experience and music manufactured to satisfy social expectation is the central argument of the entire work, and Rolland makes it through extraordinary drama. Uncle Gottfried's insistence that only things genuinely felt deserve to be sung, delivered by a man who sings badly but means every note, is more persuasive than any number of aesthetic treatises. The account of Jean-Christophe's Paris concerts, his music booed by audiences trained to prefer comfortable cleverness, is historically accurate as a portrait of how new artistic seriousness typically meets the Parisian establishment, and the diagnosis of French musical culture as brilliant, self-referential, and fundamentally decorative has aged well enough to be uncomfortable.
The antisemitism in the book is real, substantial, and demands direct engagement rather than the nervous footnote it sometimes receives. The portraits of the Mannheim circle, the passages describing "the Jews" as a race defined by certain inherited characteristics, the treatment of Judith Mannheim as simultaneously seductive and spiritually sterile, her intelligence described as the "genius of curiosity and boredom," all of this is woven into the text as observation rather than malice, which in some ways makes it worse. Rolland clearly thought he was being fair, even generous, by comparison with the explicit antisemitism of his era. He depicts Jewish intelligence as genuine and formidable, Jewish solidarity as admirable, and he places some of his most sympathetic minor characters in the Mannheim household. But the machinery of racial typology, the assumption that individual psychology is legible as racial psychology, the framing of "the soul of Israel" as something that shines through Judith's eyes independently of who she actually is as a person, all of this belongs to the same intellectual equipment that made the Dreyfus Affair possible, and Rolland knew about the Dreyfus Affair because it happens in the background of his own book. A work so insistent on individual moral integrity, so contemptuous of collective prejudice in every other domain, does itself serious damage by applying racial logic to Jewish characters while exempting everyone else from it. This is a genuine contradiction in a book whose whole argument is that the individual soul is answerable only to itself, and the contradiction is large enough to matter.
The portraits of European cultural and political life from approximately 1870 to 1910 remain genuinely valuable historical documents. Rolland's account of German militarism, its effect on music, on social relations, on the casual brutality that Jean-Christophe witnesses at the village inn, is written by someone who lived inside that culture and observed it with the doubled vision of a Francophile outsider. His Paris is equally alive: the sectarian ferocity of French intellectual life, the way every faction mistakes its local obsession for universal truth, the way the Republic's idealists carry Jacobin absolutism in their bones while proclaiming liberty from every platform, all of this is rendered with the specific, unrepeatable detail of eyewitness testimony. The chapter on the French theater, Rolland's exasperation with Rostand, with the eternal Cyrano and his paste-heroism, with the boulevard's compulsive retreat from anything difficult into something shiny, reads as a document of 1906 that could, with names changed, serve as a document of 2026.
The central messages remain valid in ways that are both encouraging and mortifying. The argument that cultural mediocrity sustains itself through social mechanism rather than aesthetic merit, that critics and institutions reward what is already rewarded, that genuine originality is greeted first with silence, then with hostility, then with retrospective celebration after it can do no further damage, is confirmed by the experience of every subsequent century. The argument that Franco-German, or more broadly European, antagonism is a catastrophic waste of complementary energies, that the friendship of Olivier and Jean-Christophe represents something the political order actively destroys, acquired its full terrible weight in 1914, two years after the book's completion, and has lost none of it since. The insistence that the artist's first obligation is to the truth of inner experience, against every social and commercial pressure toward acceptable production, is as necessary to state now as it was when Rolland stated it, for the same reason: the pressures are identical, only the platforms have multiplied.
What has not aged well, beyond the antisemitism, is the book's eschatological confidence, its faith that suffering gathers toward meaning, that the river reaches the sea and the sea is God. Rolland's mystical resolution, beautiful as the writing around it is, depends on a metaphysics that the century he helped open then proceeded to devastate. The joy "through suffering" that the preface borrows from Beethoven, "Durch Leiden Freude," was tested against evidence that Rolland, writing in 1912, could not yet fully imagine, and the evidence was severe. Beethoven, one suspects, would have written a fifth movement anyway.
What survives all qualification is the scale of the ambition and the frequency with which the execution matches it. Very few novels attempt to hold simultaneously a detailed psychological biography, a philosophy of art, a portrait of two nations at a precise historical moment, a theory of friendship, and a meditation on mortality, and very few that attempt it produce pages as good as the best pages here. The book's influence on the European novel of the twentieth century was direct and acknowledged. Stefan Zweig, who was Rolland's close friend, absorbed its structural ambition; the "roman-fleuve" as a form owes it a substantial debt. That it is now read far less than it deserves is itself a small confirmation of one of its arguments: the cultural marketplace is an unreliable judge of seriousness, and the river, as Rolland kept insisting, goes on moving regardless of who is watching from the bank.
After reading this, one understands why the river keeps flowing: because Rolland, for all his faults and all his grandeur, actually heard it.
Read it. Clear your diary. Prepare to be changed, irritated, devastated, occasionally exasperated by passages of mystico-nationalist fervour that have aged about as gracefully as a Wilhelmine military parade, and then devastated again.
❤️ 🇮🇱