Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday February 22, 2011
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MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books
Arnold Weinstein
Random House
ISBN 978-1400065868
442 pages
$27
Reviewed by Roger Rosenblatt
If there is a riddle attached to the riddle of the Sphinx, it is why no one but Oedipus was smart enough to solve it. Luckily for readers, Arnold Weinstein has made more of the riddle than I have with "Morning, Noon, and Night," his study of literature as it illuminates the three stages of being human. The substance of this book is an ecstatic celebration of the gifts that great books bring to our lives. The shadow of the book is Weinstein's own life which, either because of his inborn diffidence or too much hard labor in a classroom, hides within the text like a Shakespearean character behind an arras. When, from time to time, this character peeks out, we want more of him, and are reminded of something that unwittingly undercuts Weinstein's thesis -- that literature, for all its value to life, is not life.
But first to the thesis, the idea that great works are indispensable to living young, old and in between. The idea is neither new nor is it meant to be, though the tripartite structure suggested by the lady-lion riddler offers Weinstein an orderly way to deal with it. Neither the thesis nor the writers invoked to support it could have a more thoughtful or careful proponent.
He brings more than a first-rate mind to the likes of Balzac, Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway, the Bronte sisters, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Alice Walker, Jean Rhys and other major and minor leaguers. He brings them a loving heart. Thus he sees more than most critics have seen in Dickens' Pip, for example. Rather than reading "Great Expectations" merely as a primer on moral maturity, he unearths Pip's deep sorrow and examines the boy's many lifelong wounds. At the outset of the novel, Pip is in a cemetery, staring at the gravestones of his mother and father. Weinstein peers into his soul: "Getting clear of the dead may not be easy."
Looking at the end of life, he presents a brilliantly sympathetic understanding of Hemingway's maritime old man, seeing Santiago not as an abstraction of courage, but rather as the living, feeling being whose body is corrupted with age. Santiago must make use of his hard-earned knowledge of fishing -- lines, winds, currents -- to battle the marlin in "The Old Man and the Sea."
He must use bone and muscle. Any old man who once was an athlete knows the value of moving slowly. Weinstein's Santiago shows us every practiced gesture employed in staying nobly alive.
Which brings me to Weinstein's own practiced gestures and their effect on his book. The best teachers we have are those who worry about the material in public, and we students overhear them. Clearly Weinstein is a wonderful worrier, and his book shows it. Yet there is another book within this one, whose author says some remarkably telling things when you least expect them. Such as: "You never quite forget the beauty you long ago had, a beauty whose every feature you remember with bitterness."
Such as: "Enduring love is the daily effort to convert insentience into sentience, silence into language, indifference into interest, lumps of flesh into people sharing food, wine, and conversation around a table." And such as: "I look back at my own education, and want to weep."
This last confession makes us want to weep for Weinstein's hidden book in "Morning, Noon, and Night," for it hints of his own imaginative life, born of reading. He calls the present work "the most personal" he has written. Yet there is evidence of a far more personal and moving book pacing around off-stage -- one that does not defer to the great texts, but rather tells of a life they inspired, perhaps failed. That is, a professor's memoir minus the professorial caution or modesty or whatever -- the story of the fellow who believes that enduring loves can turn insentience into sentience.
Weinstein has a bad habit of diluting assertions with the word "arguably," the professor's arras. The book I wish for him, and for his readers, has no "arguably" in it. Arguably, he has written the best book ever on the practical and spiritual uses of literature. When he reads that sentence, I hope he shudders.
Roger Rosenblatt's most recent book is "Unless it Moves the Human Heart."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE MAGNETIC NORTH: Notes from the Arctic Circle
Sara Wheeler
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374200138
315 pages
$26
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
The Arctic, which is the subject of Sara Wheeler's smashing new book, "The Magnetic North," has been many things: a homeland for hunter-gatherers, a stomping ground for trappers, an object of me-first exploration, a jail for political dissidents, a sentry post in the Cold War, a sinkhole for pollution and a site of mineral extraction. Deploying an inquisitive mind and a crisp, witty prose style, Wheeler takes the reader on an informative and ultimately tragic tour of a region in the throes of drastic change.
"The Magnetic North" proceeds in a geographical circle, from the Russian Arctic to Alaska and Canada, to Greenland and Scandinavia, and back to Russia at the end. As Wheeler fills in background on the places she visits, American and British readers may encounter some familiar episodes. Among these is the 19th-century hunt for a Northwest Passage by the inept Sir John Franklin, whose expedition came to a gruesome end when starving participants took to eating the corpses of colleagues who preceded them in death. Wheeler makes the story fresh, however, by emphasizing the reaction of Charles Dickens back home. The most influential writer in England simply willed out of existence the Inuits' testimony about what they had found at the explorers' last camp on King William Island in Canada: kettles holding human cutlets. The exploring party couldn't have been cannibals, Dickens decreed in a magazine article. "The noble conduct and example of such men ... outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber."
Also well-known is the story of how indigenous people were converted by Christian missionaries, educated to read and write (though not in their own language), and discouraged from mastering the outdoors skills that had allowed their forebears to survive for millennia in one of the world's most demanding environments. Wheeler's account makes clear that the same disastrous severing occurred throughout the Arctic. Her critique of Canada's policies could just as easily apply to Russia, the United States, Sweden -- every nation that has asserted jurisdiction over the Far North: "I began to understand that wherever the state intervened in the ... Arctic, which was almost everywhere, the mechanics of the system moved in an arbitrary, aimless fashion, like the hands of a clock disconnected from the machinery behind the face."
Other places and sagas in the book will be new to most Westerners -- such as the survival of a monastery on an island in Russia's White Sea. The institution withstood Stalin's Terror in the 1920s and '30s, and the revival it has enjoyed since the fall of communism elicits one of Wheeler's rare outbursts of optimism. In the monks' staying power, she saw "a humanity that eluded articulation, and I had sensed it everywhere in the muddled and lovable Arctic."
Wherever she goes, Wheeler exhibits a knack for summing up people, places and things memorably. She describes Rockwell Kent, the American painter and illustrator who fell in love with the Far North, as Greenland's Gauguin, "who saw his Tahiti in the starlit winters of Igdlorssuit." She corrects those who assume that scenery without trees, mountains or valleys must be dull: "The interior of an ice sheet is the most mesmerizing of all polar landscapes." She evokes the futile battle against insects: "The pages of my notebook tell their own story, encrusted with flattened mosquito and blackfly corpses and splotches of my own blood. The bugs bit us even as we wore jackets with full-head net hoods and peered out at the landscape through a veil of brown mesh."
Only once did I part company with her. Changing planes in Pond Inlet, at the north end of Baffin Island, she dismisses the village as "bleak." But with its outlook on a bay and beyond that Bylot Island, which is dominated by a sinuous glacier, Pond Inlet is one of the world's most beautiful places. How Wheeler could have missed this is a puzzlement.
"The Magnetic North" gives ample coverage to the damage being done to the Arctic by pollution and global warming, but for an account of the effects on a specific creature, readers should turn to Kieran Mulvaney's illuminating "The Great White Bear."
Mulvaney has ventured far from his home in Alexandria, Va., to watch polar bears, notably in northern Alaska and on Hudson Bay. He tells unsettling tales of human-bear encounters, including one that the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen survived only because his dog got involved. That anecdote ends with Amundsen relating his surprising thoughts during what he feared might be his last seconds of life: "I lay there wondering how many hairpins were swept up on the sidewalks of Regent Street in London on a Monday morning!"
Polar bears are imperiled because they use ice floes as platforms from which to hunt seals and on which to haul up and rest -- and not only is Arctic ice disappearing at a fearsome rate, but it's hard to see what could reverse that trend. As a result, polar bears may be reduced to relict populations in the High Arctic and Greenland by the middle of this century. Beyond that, one hardly dares look.
Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE GREAT WHITE BEAR: A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear
Kieran Mulvaney
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547152424
251 pages
$26
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
The Arctic, which is the subject of Sara Wheeler's smashing new book, "The Magnetic North," has been many things: a homeland for hunter-gatherers, a stomping ground for trappers, an object of me-first exploration, a jail for political dissidents, a sentry post in the Cold War, a sinkhole for pollution and a site of mineral extraction. Deploying an inquisitive mind and a crisp, witty prose style, Wheeler takes the reader on an informative and ultimately tragic tour of a region in the throes of drastic change.
"The Magnetic North" proceeds in a geographical circle, from the Russian Arctic to Alaska and Canada, to Greenland and Scandinavia, and back to Russia at the end. As Wheeler fills in background on the places she visits, American and British readers may encounter some familiar episodes. Among these is the 19th-century hunt for a Northwest Passage by the inept Sir John Franklin, whose expedition came to a gruesome end when starving participants took to eating the corpses of colleagues who preceded them in death. Wheeler makes the story fresh, however, by emphasizing the reaction of Charles Dickens back home. The most influential writer in England simply willed out of existence the Inuits' testimony about what they had found at the explorers' last camp on King William Island in Canada: kettles holding human cutlets. The exploring party couldn't have been cannibals, Dickens decreed in a magazine article. "The noble conduct and example of such men ... outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber."
Also well-known is the story of how indigenous people were converted by Christian missionaries, educated to read and write (though not in their own language), and discouraged from mastering the outdoors skills that had allowed their forebears to survive for millennia in one of the world's most demanding environments. Wheeler's account makes clear that the same disastrous severing occurred throughout the Arctic. Her critique of Canada's policies could just as easily apply to Russia, the United States, Sweden -- every nation that has asserted jurisdiction over the Far North: "I began to understand that wherever the state intervened in the ... Arctic, which was almost everywhere, the mechanics of the system moved in an arbitrary, aimless fashion, like the hands of a clock disconnected from the machinery behind the face."
Other places and sagas in the book will be new to most Westerners -- such as the survival of a monastery on an island in Russia's White Sea. The institution withstood Stalin's Terror in the 1920s and '30s, and the revival it has enjoyed since the fall of communism elicits one of Wheeler's rare outbursts of optimism. In the monks' staying power, she saw "a humanity that eluded articulation, and I had sensed it everywhere in the muddled and lovable Arctic."
Wherever she goes, Wheeler exhibits a knack for summing up people, places and things memorably. She describes Rockwell Kent, the American painter and illustrator who fell in love with the Far North, as Greenland's Gauguin, "who saw his Tahiti in the starlit winters of Igdlorssuit." She corrects those who assume that scenery without trees, mountains or valleys must be dull: "The interior of an ice sheet is the most mesmerizing of all polar landscapes." She evokes the futile battle against insects: "The pages of my notebook tell their own story, encrusted with flattened mosquito and blackfly corpses and splotches of my own blood. The bugs bit us even as we wore jackets with full-head net hoods and peered out at the landscape through a veil of brown mesh."
Only once did I part company with her. Changing planes in Pond Inlet, at the north end of Baffin Island, she dismisses the village as "bleak." But with its outlook on a bay and beyond that Bylot Island, which is dominated by a sinuous glacier, Pond Inlet is one of the world's most beautiful places. How Wheeler could have missed this is a puzzlement.
"The Magnetic North" gives ample coverage to the damage being done to the Arctic by pollution and global warming, but for an account of the effects on a specific creature, readers should turn to Kieran Mulvaney's illuminating "The Great White Bear."
Mulvaney has ventured far from his home in Alexandria, Va., to watch polar bears, notably in northern Alaska and on Hudson Bay. He tells unsettling tales of human-bear encounters, including one that the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen survived only because his dog got involved. That anecdote ends with Amundsen relating his surprising thoughts during what he feared might be his last seconds of life: "I lay there wondering how many hairpins were swept up on the sidewalks of Regent Street in London on a Monday morning!"
Polar bears are imperiled because they use ice floes as platforms from which to hunt seals and on which to haul up and rest -- and not only is Arctic ice disappearing at a fearsome rate, but it's hard to see what could reverse that trend. As a result, polar bears may be reduced to relict populations in the High Arctic and Greenland by the middle of this century. Beyond that, one hardly dares look.
Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Enough About Love
Herve Le Tellier
Other
ISBN NA
$14.95
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
It's almost upon us: the most romantic day of the year -- or the biggest con job since P.T. Barnum, depending on your view of Feb. 14. (Still, some of us will accept any excuse to eat chocolate.) It's also the season for love stories, poems and cards dripping glitter and sentiment. While these five novels might sound like the equivalent of a heart-shaped box, they are more for those who like their candy spiked with cayenne pepper. There isn't a conventional romance in the bunch. In fact, I defy Hallmark to create a greeting card to cover some of these scenarios.
1. What could be more romantic than falling in love in Paris? Unless you are already married, in which case it's a little more complicated, as in Herve Le Tellier's "Enough About Love" (Other; paperback, $14.95). It's got not one, but two love triangles: Thomas, a therapist, falls in love with a married attorney at the same time that Anna, one of his married patients, is smitten by a writer working on a novel called "Abkhazian Dominoes." ("You really do go to great lengths to make sure your books don't sell," Anna tells him. "Put 'love' in the title.") Le Tellier writes about middle-aged desire and its consequences with empathy and humor.
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews books for the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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