Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday February 19, 2011
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THE SUBLIME ENGINE: A Biography of the Human Heart
Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon
Rodale
ISBN 978-1605295848
242 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Becky Krystal
More than any other body part, the human heart has both baffled and awed generations of doctors, priests, poets and ordinary people.
Not even the brain evokes such complex reactions, Stephen and Thomas Amidon argue in "The Sublime Engine."
Their chronicle of this vital, mysterious organ begins in ancient Egypt and ends in a futuristic 2021, intertwining literature, religion, medicine and a variety of other fields. Combining their professions as a novelist (Stephen) and cardiologist (Thomas), the brothers begin each chapter with a narrative that sets up a given era and its understanding of the heart: for example, a 17th-century young man with a hole in his chest that leaves the organ in full view, a 20th-century physician who performed the world's first cardiac catheterization on himself. Occasionally, the relationship between these vignettes and the chapter's main business is strained. More compelling are the passages that bring literature, including Shakespeare's plays, "Frankenstein" and "The Scarlet Letter," into the mix. The writers also manage the scientific threads of their story without any textbook-like dryness. Their documentation of scores of cardiac maladies, however, is enough to prompt anyone to check her own heart rate.
Becky Krystal can be reached at krystalb(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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UNDER THE SUN: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022465
554 pages
$35
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
With the publication in 1977 of his first book, "In Patagonia," the virtually unknown British writer Bruce Chatwin became an instant literary celebrity, and remained one until his death 11 years later of complications arising from AIDS. Today, more than two decades later, his star has dimmed a bit -- as always happens in literary circles, a few vultures have flown in to gnaw away at his corpus -- but when one considers that between 1977 and 1988 he published five books, and that these have been supplemented by four more posthumous ones as well as three biographies, he remains a formidable if enigmatic presence.
Now we have this fat collection of letters, edited by his widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, and Nicholas Shakespeare, the author of "Bruce Chatwin" (1999), the most recent of the biographies. There is some lovely stuff in it, but it makes a less significant contribution to that corpus than its immense bulk would suggest. To be sure, it gives a strong sense of the "itchy feet" that kept Chatwin forever on the move throughout his adult life, of the passionate commitment he had to his writing and the obsessive care with which he refined it, of the complexity of his emotional and sexual relationships.
But there is also a huge amount of ephemera -- terse postcards, itineraries, money matters -- that could and should have been pruned to its essence. Like "Saul Bellow: Letters," published last fall, "Under the Sun" reminds us that not everything written by an accomplished writer merits publication, and leaves one wishing that the editors had exercised more discrimination in making their selections.
Chatwin was born in England in 1940 to middle-class parents who clearly treasured him and gave him strong emotional support throughout his life, as he wended his somewhat quixotic way toward the writing career that ultimately awaited him. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he worked at Sotheby's, where he was only intermittently happy but where he met Elizabeth Chanler, an American, whom he married in 1965, and where, the editors report, he learned "how to look at and handle a work of art, describe it concisely and to judge its market value," lessons that assumed increasing importance as he developed a style of writing that depended heavily on acute observation of the physical world. In 1966 he left Sotheby's to study archaeology, which he did in Edinburgh for a couple of years without getting a degree.
Instead he went to work as a feature writer for the magazine section of the Sunday Times, then one of the hottest, hippest publications in British journalism, and set off on the travels that ultimately made him mildly famous. At the same time he worked steadily on what he intended to be a book about nomadism, examining "what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness."
To a prospective editor he said, "The question I will try to answer is 'Why do men wander rather than sit still?'" Chatwin's real subject, however, was not nomadism but himself. Back when he was still at Sotheby's, he told a friend, "Change is the only thing worth living for. Never sit your life out at a desk. Ulcers and heart condition follow," and he followed his own counsel to the letter. In 1972, interviewing the noted designer and architect Eileen Gray (for a profile that never got written), he noticed a map of Patagonia in her salon and said, "I've always wanted to go there," to which she replied, "So have I. Go there for me." Whether it is really true, as he claimed, that he wired his editor at the Times, "GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS" remains an engaging mystery, but go there he did, at the end of 1974.
The book that resulted is a minor classic, but an unclassifiable one. It was commonly received, by reviewers and readers alike, as a travel book, but Chatwin resented being pigeonholed. To a friend he said: "Of course, 'In Patagonia' isn't meant to be a travel book, but. ... I have been so browbeaten by people saying it is a travel book that I half came to believe it -- or believed that I had failed in my purpose -- to write an allegorical journey on the classic pattern (narrator goes in search of beast etc)."
Doubtless the pigeonholing was inevitable, since in "In Patagonia" and his subsequent books Chatwin always sought out exotic or little-known places. His chief interest may not have been to give readers armchair tours of these places, but that is what many of them found in these books, and who can blame them? He does not seem to have believed, as his friend and contemporary Paul Theroux did, that it is the journey, not the destination, that matters, but he took readers on journeys all the same, and many people were more than happy to travel with him.
Those who knew him were more or less equally enchanted and vexed by him. One friend wrote that he was a demanding visitor, expecting to be fed, running up vast long-distance telephone bills: "At the end of the visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about 4 pounds), saying he hadn't used the 'phone much. But his friends didn't mind because we were so fond of him, though he was selfish and self-centred like most artists are." One of his male lovers said: "There was nobody like him. He was gorgeous and he knew it. To be clever, witty and bright is a devastating combination." A fellow writer recalled a couplet by Oliver Goldsmith:
"And still they gazed and still the wonder grew/ That one small head could carry all he knew."
He was a charmer, but he was also full of himself and given to occasional tart (and sometimes contradictory) opinions. He felt that he got more perceptive reviews in the United States than in England; he cherished his American editor, Elisabeth Sifton, as an alter ego; and he happily accepted American royalties, yet he saw the Unites States as "the most corrupt decadent country in the world, well on the way to ruin, if you ask me." Perhaps so, but a far stronger case can be made for this: "English newspapers are dreadful. Unreadable, so why should one presume to write for them? The besetting sin of all English writers is their fatal attraction for periodicals, their fascination for reviews, and their passion for bickering in print." Let's close, though, with this marvelous passage, written from Afghanistan in 1963 when he was young and unknown:
"What is extraordinary in this last outpost of untrammelled orient is that all are Western. A genius has bought up a gigantic horde of American ladies dresses and has sold them here. A student of modern fashion could find no better museum of modern dress. From Maine to Texas, from Chicago to Hollywood the wardrobes of thousands of American ladies over forty years are hanging into the breeze. Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo pink crepe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the War in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams all to be closely concealed under her yashmak."
Wow.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE HEMLOCK CUP: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life
Bettany Hughes
Knopf
ISBN 978-1400041794
484 pages
$35
Reviewed by Steve Donoghue
When Bettany Hughes published her study of Helen of Troy in 2005, skeptics had good cause for doubt that anything worthwhile could be made out of such a hackneyed and intangible subject -- and yet Hughes was vindicated: The result was searchingly intelligent and quite beautifully written. In her newest book, "The Hemlock Cup," she visits a subject almost as mythological as Helen and, if anything, more frequented, the 4th-century Athenian philosopher Socrates -- and she triumphs again. This is history -- and historical reconstruction -- exactly as it should be written.
The figure of Socrates, at least in broad outline, will be familiar to anybody who's ever taken a Freshman Lit. course: Physically ugly and mentally astute, Socrates the thinker and seeker after "the good" gathered about himself a circle of friends and followers who thrilled at his questioning of societal precepts, were entertained by his demolition of pretentious debating partners, and very likely simply enjoyed his company.
For decades, while his city underwent war and hardship and defeat and civil war and political restructuring, Socrates settled himself in the agora and talked of inner things, the essence of things. Some of his words were taken down by acolytes like Plato and Xenophon; some of his mannerisms were mocked by playwrights like Aristophanes; the master himself, a man Hughes claims "we can all benefit from getting to know a little better," wrote nothing himself, but his recorded dialogues, his "Socratic method'" of relentless questionings, have become indispensable pieces of our Western mental furniture.
Hughes revisits all of this with the panache of a born explainer, enthusiastically filling out the world of ancient Athens, "a city where the eyes have it. Visual references are stitched through the language -- old women were called 'gauna,' literally 'hot milk-skin'; you spoke not of being good but of appearing good; the most precious possession in the city were the well-born, pulchritudinous young men, the kalos k'athagos -- the 'noble in mind and appearance.'" She takes readers through the torturous birth and early crises of Athenian democracy, and she's refreshingly even-handed about the resentment such a democracy might feel toward somebody like Socrates: "Gallingly, this cocky philosopher doesn't seem to take the privilege of a fair trial seriously. The man who is accused of poisoning democracy with words has a chance to use words in self-defence, yet he acts the dolt, the innocent. He refuses to play word-games. Socrates' professed ignorance of typical democratic activity might have been endearing to start off with, but by this stage in his life, and with the troubled back-story of Athens, it has become intensely infuriating."
Her book is divided into eight segments or "acts," and the final one, "The Trial and Death of Socrates," is the highlight of the book, a masterpiece of dramatic presentation. Our author has made a series of canny stylistic decisions, and they pay off. Throughout the book, she intersperses italicized quotes from the various Socratic dialogues at key stress-points in her narrative -- Socrates acts as his own Greek chorus on every page, and the effect is mesmerizing. Hughes has also chosen to reserve her more personally passionate outbursts for the book's end-notes, where she can address the issues in more evocative language than the main book's sober historical analysis allows: "Nowadays we look anxiously for our enemies; for anarchists, terrorists, capitalists, communists, nihilists. But Socrates reminds us of the uncomfortable truth, that the enemy is always within. It is down to us. That it is not 'their' fault, but 'ours' has to be his single most important, and hard-to-swallow, philosophy."
As thought-provoking as that is, it's easy to agree with the decision to relegate it to an end-note, and for some readers, it's always been equally easy to understand why Athens would have wanted to do something similar to Socrates himself: It must have been extremely annoying to be told the enemy is always within while the Spartans are burning your warehouses and setting up military checkpoints in your marketplace. This tension between "the good" and the real is given full respect in this beguiling book, and the Socrates Hughes creates is ultimately a towering yet intensely human figure. He lives and speaks again in these pages: It's a singular accomplishment.
Steve Donoghue is the managing editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WINTER GHOSTS
Kate Mosse
Putnam
ISBN 978-0399157158
265 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Anna Mundow
In her 2005 blockbuster, "Labyrinth," Kate Mosse plunged her protagonist into a cave in the French Pyrenees that turned out to be a portal to the medieval past. The plot abounded in skeletons and secret symbols that eventually revealed the fate of the region's Cathar people and -- somewhat predictably -- the wonders of the human heart. In "Sepulchre,"Mosse returned to the Languedoc of 1891 where the legend of a Visigoth tomb, a demon and a tarot pack led visitors into the mystical past. The author is now writing "Citadel," the final book in this trilogy, but in the meantime, "The Winter Ghosts," a slim and affecting novel, once again reanimates the history of France's persecuted Cathar sect.
This time around the innocent abroad is Freddie Watson, a sensitive young Englishman who travels to the Pyrenees in 1928 to recover from the death of his brother in World War I. Freddie is following medical advice and his own forlorn belief that in France there will be "no one to disappoint." Because, as his parents' mourning reminds him, Freddie is not the man his brother was. "It was a thin line between heroism and arrogance," Freddie recalls, "and George had always walked it." But when George's ghost appears, unannounced and fleeting, Freddie is left both comforted and newly bereft.
A larger haunting awaits him, though, as we can tell from Mosse's portentous descriptions. "The sun falls early in those high valleys," Freddie notices as he approaches a mountain village, "and the shadows were already deep." Like any self-respecting hero, he rashly drives across a mountain pass in bad weather, lured by "a whispering, almost like singing" that he senses in the air. "The others have slipped away into darkness," the voice calls, and soon Freddie is knocked briefly unconscious when his car leaves the road. He struggles on foot through the woods, hearing the voice and glimpsing a mysterious woman on a hillside before reaching a village whose bloody history will eventually explain these apparitions.
Here Freddie's adventure becomes a fairy tale as much as a ghost story. "The air was thick with smoke from the open fire burning at the far end of the room," he observes when he arrives at the village feast. "A thousand candles scattered light and shadow from metal sconces on the walls, ever shifting, ever dancing." An ethereal beauty named Fabrissa enthralls Freddie and then astonishes him when she begins to speak of his dead brother. Suddenly, sword-wielding soldiers appear.
Mosse devotees will guess correctly that Freddie's search will lead him to long-buried evidence of an ancient crime and to personal redemption. It is a familiarly comforting conclusion to a stark yet lyrical tale.
Anna Mundow is a literary correspondent for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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