Rudy Giuliani's favorite biographies of leaders

Did Giuliani really begin reading a biography of Churchill at 2:30 a.m. the night after the 9/11 attacks?

So he says.

Gripped as he was by the book, that volume is not even his favorite Churchill biography. That distinction belongs to Churchill: A Study in Greatness by Geoffrey Best, tops on Giuliani's list of his favorite five biographies of political leaders.

Click here to see Giuliani's other selections.

Too busy to read the entire book? The BBC has a brief account by Professor Best of Churchill's World War II leadership here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fiction that fed Dutch's wanderlust

When he is not advising the blog on Australian cultural issues, Friend of the Blog "Dutch" is a diplomat in the service of a major world power. He is also an inveterate reader.

Those characteristics have conspired to produce a wonderful essay about books that have colored his wanderlust. "Dutch" writes:

The novels of Arthur Upfield probably ignited my biggest bout of wanderlust, in this instance to head out for Australia. It's a fair bet to say that those books changed my life decisively, more so than any other I've read. Though, I couldn't know that at the time and certainly not for anything having to do with the novels themselves.

I dug into them immediately and I still remember the delicious feeling of being transported across thousands of miles and decades of time. I remember so many nights laying on my single mattress on the floor in my graduate student hovel, blissfully transported to outback Australia with Bony, the half-caste detective. The descriptions of the clarity of the piercing cerulean sky and its contrast with the red dirt made me want to see the Land Down Under. His descriptions of the night time sky there as a deep blackness shot through with billions of bright and shiny diamonds made me ache to see that for myself and stare at its immensity.

When I did finally get there it was nothing like an Arthur Upfield mystery, of course, since his were set in the parched and isolated rural Australia of the 1940s and 1950s. I was spending all my time in modern 1990s suburban Canberra and urban Sydney. But that began a whole new love affair of a different kind and on several levels of meaning, too. I still think it's a pretty wonderful place to stare at the sky night or day and to do so many more things closer to earth. I doubt I could ever live in the outback after spending just a short time there, but now I also know I'm probably happier in urban/suburban Australia than anywhere else in the world.

Reading Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series has really whetted my appetite to return to Edinburgh for a stroll through New Town. And while I'm sure John Harvey's Nottingham is not a great tourist wonder, I'd pay quite a lot to sit at the Italian espresso stall in the city market and have a coffee and talk with his DI Charlie Resnick.

Patricia Highsmith in her Ripley series creates a wonderful sense of place in the French countryside. The mental pictures her prose created made me long to walk through Tom's scenic village, call in at the tobacconist for the evening papers, share an espresso with Tom (while of course absolutely never turning my back on him). I've never really spent much time in France, but she makes it sound wonderful. I'm not sure I'd feel safe being an overnight guest, but Tom's country estate also seems like a place that would be beautiful to see. I remember thinking how civilized—what an odd word choice to associate with a sociopath, I know—it would be for Tom and me to go through the French doors leading to the slate terrace to sit and have a pre-dinner aperitif while we gazed out at the woods beyond and discussed his collection of Derwatt paintings. The Talented Mr. Ripley is, of course, a wonderful book, but its portrait of Italy is also pretty darn seductive.

Alan Furst ignites a similar wanderlust for me for Paris, in addition to making me wish we had time machines, to go back to the Paris of 1937-1942 era. Of course, we do have them and they are Alan Furst novels!

Reading the great Nick Hornby's High Fidelity made wish I lived around the corner from Championship Vinyl in London, so I could hang out there. I'm sure Barry would have quickly banished me forever though since my musical tastes would have surely offended him.

The reverse of wanderlust, whatever that might be called, happened for me when I visited Buenos Aires. I'd never read any Jorge Luis Borges, but wandering the bohemian and cosmopolitan streets of B.A., hanging out in the cafes in Palermo Viejo and Recolleta, eating the food, admiring the stunning architecture, savoring the quality of everyday life there, meeting the warm and proud Portenos, eavesdropping on their animated conversations, drinking the wine--all of it made me fall in the love with the city and the country and want to read their great master and come to know through his eyes and writing the city he loved so much. Did I mention the food?!

Here's a great Larry Rohter article from the New York Times along those lines.

Alan Judd's Short of Glory made me long to see the world from a perspective as a diplomat. He is such an entertaining (and underappreciated) writer. I remember laughing so hard at certain points in the book that I was crying. The fictional African country he creates, which is supposed to be South Africa I believe, is so real and wonderful and yet heartbreaking that it made me want to set out and see it for myself. The world of a diplomat he creates is equally seductive. Alas, now that I've been doing it for 12 years I realize what a load of crap that was, but there are certain nights when I have captured a bit of Juddian Glory. I remember an especially interesting dinner party where I was sitting with a wonderfully engaging group of dinner companions. The conversation and wine flowed freely and joyously. The laughter from really good stories still echo in my memory.

After reading Alan Judd and then finally making it into the Foreign Service, I thought that every night of my life would be like that great dinner party. Of course, life is not like that and my life as a diplomat is very far removed from that. Ninety-nine percent of our time we are simply bureaucrats, just like any other, only we get Dengue Fever and lots of fun intestinal parasites, the office building where I work is intermittently attacked by mobs of muslim fanatics, and people shoot my colleagues and blow them up in bombings. Even if every night can’t be like an Alan Judd novel, there’s still a mountain of books waiting to open new worlds to me, and that’s a very comforting thought, indeed.

That's a wonderful essay.

I've read many of the books "Dutch" recommends here--at his urging--and can attest to the quality of his recommendations.

Many thanks to "Dutch" for sharing those insights about fiction and travel.

--Marshal Zeringue

William T. Vollmann's ten favorite books

Looking for a schema with which to evaluate your favorite books? Try William T. Vollmann's.

First, consider his key:

A = Perfect Language
B = Construction of a coherent, alien (to me) world
C = Profound investigation of love
D = Richly complex pattern
E = Revelations about memory vs. loss
F = Political lessons
G = Erotic Beauty

Then plug in the appropriate variable for each book. Two examples from Vollmann's list:

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (D, E, G)
Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Gengi (A, B, C, D, E, F, G)

Interesting. Click here to see the remaining eight titles on Vollmann's list as well as a brief interview.

Vollmann's Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award. Click here to read his acceptance speech.

Daniel Lukes praised Europe Central in the Times Literary Supplement:

Vollmann intends the reading of his works to be an emotionally traumatic experience, and Europe Central is harrowing, in part because of its depressing subject, but also because of the raw and often sadistically insightful way the material is treated. To portray the novel as a thoroughly ominous and doom-laden affair would be unfair, however; Vollmann is still a master storyteller and bravura stylist, and he sustains and constantly reignites interest over the course of this lengthy book. He is well served by his acute eye for emotional impact and the now trademark literary cubism of his style--first-person "collective" narrators, dispassionate reportage, see saw chronology, biographical music criticism, prismic Faulkneresque interior monologue, and more. Overkill is still largely Vollmann's preferred method of literary construction. "Can music attack evil?", Shostakovich asks one of his lovers, while grappling with what will become one of the struggles of his life: how to avoid capitulation to the regime. "Certainly not", she answers. "All it can do is scream." And there is a lot of screaming here.

Thankfully, there are passages of beauty and intensity amid the wintry corpse-laden gloom in Europe Central.

Interested in another take on The Tale of Genji? See Jane Smiley's view here.

--Marshal Zeringue

T.H. White's Arthurian cycle

The latest installment in Jane Smiley's series is T.H. White's Arthurian cycle.

T.H. White's The Once and Future King is steeped in learning and literature, and yet it is not quite respectable in the way that the works of, say, Kingsley Amis or Virginia Woolf are. Maybe it has been contaminated in the minds of critics by popularity and Walt Disney animation. Nevertheless, it is a serious work, delightful and witty in many ways and yet very sombre overall.

Click here for a basic synopsis of what develops with King Arthur, Queen Guenever, Sir Lancelot and the rest in these books.

Smiley:

White's novel is intense and rich. The first volume, which tells the story of Arthur's education (he is transformed into several animals and birds), is a treasury of English natural history and increasingly obscure forms of sport, such as falconry and boar hunting. The same is true in the third volume, which tells how Lancelot became the greatest knight. White writes: "Uncle Dap was the only one in the family who took Lancelot seriously, and Lancelot was the only one who was serious about Uncle Dap. It was easy not to be serious about the old fellow, for he was that peculiar creation which ignorant people laugh at a--genuine maestro. His branch of learning was chivalry." And then White shows convincingly what a maestro of chivalry would know and how he would think. White uses the inherent flexibility of prose to deliver a lot of information, not only background information that makes it easy for the modern reader to picture 12th- and 13th- century England, but also good analogues to modern society--jousting as a form of cricket, for example--that work not only to clarify what might be confusing, but also to show the continuity of English life from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

The Once and Future King is about male society, but White is not a misogynist. His portrait of Guenever is sympathetic and rich. Of particular note is the moment when Lancelot and Guenever first fall in love. They are out hawking, and Guenever makes a mistake in her task of helping Lancelot with his hawk. He rebukes her, and then, when her feelings are hurt, he suddenly recognises that "she had been giving kindness, and he had returned it with unkindness. But the main thing was that she was a real person". The recognition of common humanity is the source of their inconvenient and passionate love.

Interested in King Arthur but hate reading? The History Channel will broadcast "Quest for King Arthur" on June 24th: click here for more details.

For a brief biography of T.H. White, click here.

To read earlier entries in the Smiley series, click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zadie Smith wins the Orange prize

Some weeks ago I asked: Do women deserve a book prize of their own?

The folks at the Orange prize clearly think they do, and Zadie Smith won their award this year for On Beauty.

She had been shortlisted for both of her previous novels, White Teeth in 2001 and The Autograph Man in 2003.

Interested in more facts about Zadie Smith? Click here.

On Beauty was also nominated for the Man Booker Prize last year. It didn't win but, even though I thought it was a fine book, I don't think that was so unfair. And I doubt that anyone will ever say that 2005 was the Booker Prize's "Henry Fonda" year.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mockingbird"

Didn't get enough Harper Lee news with yesterday's post on the Jane Austen of south Alabama?

Then check out the Salon review of Charles Shields' Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Margot Mifflin writes:

Though [Mockingbird is] ostensibly about the author, whose Alabama family and Southern racial consciousness inspired "To Kill a Mockingbird," it's also about Lee and Capote, childhood friends who grew up to become symbiotic figures, both personally and artistically, during the '60s. Both were precocious children out of step with their peers, whose slippery grip on gender was a social liability. As Shields puts it, "she was too rough for the girls, and he was too soft for the boys." Each had emotionally absent mothers: Capote's was a self-absorbed social climber; Lee's was chronically depressed, though in her more functional youth she'd played piano at Capote's 16-year-old mother's wedding. (To embroider this family quilt, Capote's father came on to Lee when she was a teenager and she responded by punching him in the nose; Capote hated Lee's gossipy mother, and parodied her, at age 10, in a story called "Mrs. Busybody.")

According to this review, a large part of the real value of the biography is the original inquiry into the Lee/Capote relationship.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Tom Wolfe became dull"

The last two years have not been all that kind to Tom Wolfe. Sure, he sold (literally, many) tons of his latest (2.4 lb.) book. And he had some pretty famous fans.

But he came out on the poor end of this duel. And he wasn't exactly conspicuous in the poll to name "the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years."

Now Chloë Schama says Wolfe has become dull.

When Tom Wolfe delivered the Jefferson Lecture last month people waited outside for nearly an hour in order to get the best seats possible.
....
But the way he addressed the pressures operating among black people and young people in his lecture was feeble; his barbs were blunt blows compared to his earlier incisiveness. There is, by definition, nothing inventive about a stereotype, and stereotypes were rampant in Wolfe's comments. The famous entertainer has always been somewhat offensive, but now he has grown dull.

Read Schama's entire essay here (free registration required).

Schama may be wrong. Click here to read the lecture for yourself. And click here for a sampling of more positive reactions to the speech.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Jane Austen of south Alabama

Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is such a popular favorite that every six months or so some related event summons it forth in pop culture news. Last year it was Harper Lee's supporting role in the Truman Capote/In Cold Blood story which hit the big screen as Capote.

Now it's the release of Mockingbird, the new biography of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields.

Can this life really sustain a book-length biography?

The Independent's reviewer equivocates:

Harper Lee was at the height of her fame as the bestselling author of To Kill A Mockingbird when, in the early 1960s, a librarian at her old university, an all-girls establishment in Alabama called Huntingdon College, puzzled over why he could find almost no information about her. So he wrote and asked if she wouldn't mind providing some biographical details so she could be appropriately honoured by her alma mater.

Lee's response was oddly revealing. It was quizzical, light-hearted, self-deprecating--and almost completely unhelpful. "I'm afraid a biographical sketch of me will be sketchy indeed," she wrote. "With the exception of M'bird, nothing of any particular interest to anyone has happened to me in my 34 years."

Then:

The sum of our knowledge of Lee is pushed only so much further--barely one-sixth of the book covers the years after 1962 and the release of the Oscar-winning movie of Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck. But we do get a sense of an unusual, complex woman who never sought fame and quickly decided she did not like it, a woman who relied on a few very close relationships to help her achieve her ambitions and struggled when those relationships faltered.

Harper Lee's last major interview was given to Roy Newquist in March 1964, for his book Counterpoint. Its last line: "All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama." Click here to read the interview.

Click here to read the New Yorker 's review of Shields' Mockingbird.

Serious Mockingbird enthusiasts and architectural history buffs should track down the Summer 2003 issue of Alabama Heritage (the contents, sadly, not available online) which includes a fascinating article, "The 'Mockingbird' Courthouse," by Delos Hughes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten novels influenced by Shakespeare

Regular visitors to the blog know I'm interested in twice-told tales--stories that owe a strong debt to earlier, usually famous, stories. (See here, here, here, and here.)

Noting that "there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare" and therefore "a top 10 list of novels influenced by Shakespeare might look identical to a top 10 list of novels full stop," Matt Haig has composed his top 10 list of novels influenced by Shakespeare.

At the top of the list:

1. Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike. There are a lot of nods to the Bard in Updike's work. The Witches of Eastwick clearly drew on the 'weird sisters' in Macbeth, although added more sauce to the cauldron. Gertrude and Claudius is a prelude to Hamlet and draws on the ancient Scandinavian legends that first inspired Shakespeare to flesh out a life for Gertrude. She famously doesn't say much in the original play, but triumphantly emerges here as a warm and clear-headed woman who sees life 'as a miracle daily renewed'.

2. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Smiley's prize-winning novel transferred the story of King Lear to the American mid-west, with brutal results. If you take on Lear, you've got to be able to rise to the challenge and Smiley doesn't flinch from the dark heart of the story. Indeed, she heads deep into that darkness with the suggestion that Lear sexually abused two of his daughters.

Click here to read about the other eight selections.

--Marshal Zeringue

The thriller that scared Stephen King

In a featured blurb for Thomas Perry's Nightlife, Stephen King writes: "I can't imagine any reader finishing this and thinking he or she didn't get his money's worth. And it's scary! I say that with deep admiration."

When Stephen King says a book is scary you might think of a once-friendly-St. Bernard-turned-killer or any number of other terrifying, otherworldly forces.

But Nightlife isn't scary like a Stephen King novel: rather, it's scary like Shakespeare is scary, its menace is all too believable in this world of ours.

Nightlife's villain is real and believable, and that makes her psychopathology all the more compelling. Not that this kind of killer lurks on every corner. But two of the things I like about Perry's thrillers are that he develops characters instead of caricatures, and there are very few of those plot moments that make me think, "as if that would happen" or "Why doesn't the killer just [whatever]?" Even excellent thriller writers have to occasionally flirt with improbable actions and incredible coincidences, and there are a couple of times when it seems that Perry will take that way out. But not many.

I usually like my thrillers more rather than less plausible, and Perry delivers.

There is more that I wanted to write about this novel but every day that I've not done so feels like a day that I'm cheating a reader who might enjoy the thriller as much as I did. So click here to read Janet Maslin's review (with which I more or less agree) to find out more about the story.

To read an excerpt from Nightlife, click here.

I have more to write about one of Perry's characters (from a different novel) in the blog's embryonic series on the coolest women in crime fiction written by men, so stay tuned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Atkinson's top ten novels

I've praised Kate Atkinson's Case Histories as my favorite novel of 2004.

And her top 10 novels?

1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps the best American novel (although see '10') or the best novel about America and the hollowness at the heart of the dream. The closing paragraphs of 'Gatsby' are surely some of the most poignant and powerful ever written.

Click here to learn about her other nine selections.

--Marshal Zeringue

My favorite novel of 2004

My favorite novel of 2004 was Kate Atkinson's Case Histories.

The publisher's summary does not do justice to the book but click here to read it if you must.

Click here to read an excerpt.

Jacqueline Carey wrote a good review of Case Histories for the New York Times:

Three case histories open the book: each presents a crime that suggests an escalating degree of female culpability. In the first, a 3-year-old disappears one summer night as she sleeps in a tent next to one of her older sisters. (Complete innocence.) In the next, a teenager is stabbed as she helps out in her widowed father's law office. (She's not a virgin, so possibly she brought it on herself? Was there a connection between her and her unknown assailant?) In the final crime, a husband is felled by an ax during an argument with his wife. (Complete guilt; inexplicable silence from the accused.) Of course, nothing is as it seems.

Case Histories was favorably reviewed in a number of major publications. In addition to Carey's, another review very much in tune with my assessment is Timothy Peters' at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award and earned her many fans. I think Case Histories is far superior to that first novel: if you read Behind the Scenes and were not overwhelmed (as was the case with me), do yourself a favor and give Case Histories a try.

--Marshal Zeringue

The first rule of Book Club is....

What happens when partisans of The Great Illinois Novel run into supporters of The Great Florida Novel?

Click here for the whole bloody story.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Battlestar Galactica" creator's favorite sci-fi novels

Ron Moore, the creator and executive producer of the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica series, lists five of his favorite science fiction books.

Click here to see all five choices. And #1?

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (Putnam, 1961). In part a retelling of the Christ story as seen through a science-fiction prism, this sprawling social commentary tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a son of human colonists lost in the first manned flight to Mars. Raised by Martians, Michael has been returned to Earth, before whose society, and foibles, he stands uncomprehending. Soon enough, he is a victim. It says something about the complexity and intellectual edge of Stranger in a Strange Land that it remains one of the few science-fiction classics to have escaped adaptation by the movie industry. The book is very much of its time, the 1960s, in the way its central story of Valentine's reintegration into human society challenges organized religion and gender roles. Not to mention its embrace of those swinging '60s themes, free love and group sex. An emblem of this book's influence: the word grok"--Martian for complete, instinctive understanding--has entered the language and a dictionary or two.

Not a sci-fi fan? Neither am I, particularly.

Think Battlestar Galactica is a cheap and cheesy Star Wars knockoff from your youth? Well, so did I when Friend of the Blog Kurt van der Walde recommended the series to me.

Boy, was I wrong.

Salon's Heather Havrilesky sells the show better than I can:

"Battlestar Galactica" is much, much better than you can possibly imagine. The battle scenes are claustrophobic and paranoia-inducing, with the enemy always hidden from view but omnipresent in the imagination, thanks to closely framed, hand-held shots. The power struggles are complicated and nuanced like the ones you find on "The Sopranos." The soundtrack is odd and moody and completely unique as far as TV soundtracks go. The stakes are always high, and there's an incredible amount of action in each episode--you never feel like the characters are just spinning their wheels, or the situations are repeating themselves, as you do with so many other dramas. The show takes a deeply ambivalent approach to religion: The Cylons attack in the name of their god, which makes them a little bit like fundamentalist Christians or Islamic extremists, but the president of the humans also embraces some pretty odd beliefs and so-called ancient prophecies.

What's most remarkable about "Battlestar Galactica" is that it's populated by distraught, fallible characters who fumble around in the dark and make big mistakes, but never lose our sympathies. Many of them aren't likable or even easy to understand, but we're offered some way of seeing the world through their eyes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Cunningham on John Updike

In an earlier post I wrote:

I don't race through an Updike novel--because I too often stop to reread a page or paragraph, to marvel at his artistry. There never seems to be word out of place, a sentence that might be written in any other, better, way. He's a magician.

The novelist Michael Cunnigham does a much better job of explaining Updike's talent than I did.

On the level of language, I couldn't name a better living writer than Updike. To me, his prose strikes a rare and perfect balance between virtuosity and humility. I'm a sucker for big beautiful language (as Nabokov said, trust a murderer for a fancy prose style, and good novelists are murderers in a sense), and am at the same time conscious of a fine line between sentences that are fabulous in and of themselves and sentences that are fabulous in service of the story and its characters. I'm not bothered by it, but you could absolutely say that the prose of [Toni] Morrison, [Don]DeLillo, and [Cormac] McCarthy (not [Philip] Roth) runs to the show-off-y; even the mannered. Updike to me is always deploying his considerable gifts for the purposes of illumination, and not as a demonstration of his considerable gifts.

Exactly.

Updike's latest novel, Terrorist, will be released in the coming week. Click here to read Charles McGrath's interview with him in the New York Times.

--Marshal Zeringue

The singular Chuck Palahniuk

By the time you read this my friend, Candice, will be dead. We've been friends, members of the same writers' workshop, since 1990, reading and editing each other's work one night each week until she was diagnosed with cancer at 44. I've seen every draft of every book Candie's written. One of her short stories, The Man with the Scars, she brought for review each Thursday night for a year, some 50 rewrites, until I could recite all 18 pages from memory.

So opens Chuck Palahniuk's essay in the Guardian, "Till Death Do Us Part."

"Cycle" horror stories, he argues, are "comforting the same way porno is comforting: you already know how they're going to end. The actor will achieve a loud orgasm or die. In a slasher film he or she will likely do both."

In all [cycle movies/stories], an individual is trapped by an established cycle of events that doom and destroy. From their story you can imagine that same cycle or process stretching into the past or future, destroying an endless chain of similar people, all of them denying the dire nature of their circumstances until their fate is inevitable.

It's an interesting enough argument.

It's almost as if a victim in a cycle movie is more than a fictional casualty, she's more like a sacrifice to keep the rest of us safe. By witnessing his or her death, the rest of us feel more safe. Like watching the strangers who suffer and die on the television news every night. In hurricanes and rebel insurrections. We've seen the cycle run its course, and this time we weren't the one who drew the wrong lot and had to perish.

If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering. Even if it's just the death of our innocence--the petty, vain, plotting person we've always been--just seeing that ego destroyed provides a kind of relief.

I'll buy that. Yet what makes the article so Palahniukian is the invocation of the (presumably) real Candice and her imminent--well, now, her very recent--expiration from cancer, and the fact that it bookends an argument about horror movies.

Palahniuk fans--and I'm one of them--love how he hits us with what we don't expect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"

"THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard."

So opens Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), subject of the latest installment of Jane Smiley's adventure in reading. She writes:

The story seems simple. Two wealthy couples, one American and one English, meet at a spa in Germany and spend several years in comfortable friendship until it is revealed that the American wife and the English husband are carrying on an affair that the English wife knows about but the American husband does not. After the deaths of the adulterers, more and more is uncovered about both the conduct and the emotional meaning of the affair. The story is narrated by the American husband and is in some sense a detective story, but he is no investigator. The facts come to him unwillingly, since he would have preferred from the beginning not to know; the suspense depends not on what has happened, as dramatic as it turns out to be, but on the narrator's unfolding interpretation of the passionate emotions manifested in very small gestures or brief remarks.

The novel's exalted reputation rests not so much on the story but with its style. Smiley:

There are those who believe that The Good Soldier is one of the few stylistically perfect novels in any language, and perhaps what Ford was alluding to in his remarks about references and cross-references is this sense that the contradictory and complementary meanings in every paradoxical sentence are entirely understandable because he has made sure a clear explication of his fictional situation--the psychologies of his characters, the interweaving of character and event, intention and chance.

I read The Good Soldier too long ago to remember much about it except that while I could see what this "style" fuss was about, it was not a style that particularly appealed to me.

Click here to read the entire Smiley article. To read earlier entries in this series, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

"Male writers are certainly capable of the most pompous dedications," writes Susan Johnson, "and Ford Madox Ford would be hard to beat." Click here to see if you disagree.

For a free download of The Good Soldier, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron Howard's favorite fictional character

So Ron Howard, director of The Da Vinci Code, sometimes goes a little too heavy with the score in his films. Still, it's hard to think of a person who has had a better career in Hollywood.

And his favorite fictional character?

Hint #1: It's the guy who said, "Stand back, sissies, you're using my oxygen" (in the book) and "Get out of my way son, you're usin' my oxygen" (in the movie).

Hint #2: This character was created by the author of what may be The Great Oregon Novel.

If that doesn't tell you who it is, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

America's "War and Peace?"

James Webb, former secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration and author of eight books including a novel about the Vietnam War, is now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia.

Over at the Wall Street Journal he lists his favorite books on the military. Click here for the titles and supporting arguments.

First on his list is Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer (1968), which is, according to Webb, "Quite simply, America's War and Peace."

Hmmm....

Martin Levin reviewed the novel for the New York Times: "If this is not the Great American Novel . . . at least it's a mighty big American novel. It represents some 50 years of war and peace, and a surprisingly large chunk of it throbs and pulsates like the real thing."

Myrer died in 1996. His obituary included this item:

Looking back on his own wartime service, Mr. Myrer said: "World War II was the one event which had the greatest impact on my life. I enlisted imbued with a rather flamboyant concept of this country's destiny as the leader of a free world and the necessity of the use of armed force. I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised."

Webb is running against the incumbent George Allen. Allen's favorite book? Reportedly, it's Winning Strategies by George H. Allen (his father).

Earlier I posted an item on Victor Davis Hanson's list of "the definitive books on the battles of the 20th century." Click here to read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Loiterature

There's an interesting review essay about a sub-genre of travel writing called "loiterature" in the Financial Times by Professor Jeremy Treglown of Warwick University. Loiterature is travel writing based on exploring the routes taken by earlier, more famous, travelling writers.

It starts with "exploration [which] involves emulating a predecessor: not only acknowledging the fact that the journey isn’t new, but measuring current experiences against those of a different person and time."

It also usually entails retailing what the author has learned about herself on these more recent travels.

Among other books, Treglown reviews "the comedian and Hollywood psycho-therapist" Pamela Stephenson's luxury yachting on the path of the South Pacific voyage that Robert Louis Stevenson made from San Francisco to Western Samoa with his wife and family; Christopher Ondaatje's tracking through Sri Lanka where Leonard Woolf lived (and wrote about) as a colonial servant; and Bernard-Henry Levy's not-very-successful attempt to replicate Tocqueville's journey through America.

Click here to read Treglown's essay--and the sooner the better, since the FT doesn't allow much free access.

--Marshal Zeringue