… the most telling fact is that Galyl was the only injectable compound of “arsenic and phosphorus” around. Various pharmacopoeias, national formularies, and pharmaceutical dispensaries of the 1910s and ’20s all indicate the same thing — no other medication fits Joyce’s description, nor could he have received separate injections of arsenic and phosphorus because both elements are highly toxic — probably lethal — even in relatively small doses. The unavoidable conclusion is that Joyce’s doctors gave their sickly patient Galyl in 1928. James Joyce was treated for syphilis.
My own experience has been that reading is reading, usually. Some electronic versions of poetry don't work because they don't really duplicate the poem. But I have a Kindle, and I have the Kindle app on my iPad. I have written about ebooks. But I've been reading since I was a child. It is second nature to me.
Attention is something that must be paid. Paying attention is not unrelated to discharging a debt, to offering tribute, to giving the entity that demands the attention something akin to cash. When you tell someone to pay attention, you are trying to take something from him, something that, one might assume, he does not wish to give: his focus, his presence of mind, his full being. Is it possible that paying attention is akin to paying tribute? When someone asks you to pay attention, he is imposing authority on you. Perhaps it is not that we can’t get ourselves to focus on this or that matter, but simply that offering attention is felt as a challenge, a burden. “I made myself pay attention, even though what he was saying was boring.” “It wasn’t easy to pay attention to him, but I did.” There’s a tribute involved. There’s a tax. There’s a debt. Do you understand? Are you paying attention to me? We can take satisfaction in paying a bill, or getting rid of a debt, but it is never exactly a joy.
But when something is truly interesting, one naturally pays attention.
The horror of life that Lear communicates is something deeper and more constant than the particular actions of its dramatis personae. The same is true of Oedipus’s self-blinding, or for that matter Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: We can only appreciate these stories if we imagine our way into them, rather than demanding that they come obediently to us.
In any case, even though I am no longer young but still a bit foolish, I am now intrigued by those forty-year old lines, and I invite you to become a catalyst for the revived creative effort. You tell me what lines ought to follow the opening. Let us collaborate on getting the story written. Be the muse!
The post dates to when monarchs needed the praise of scribes. It is a souvenir from the past. Let's keep the government out of poetry — or at least keep the remuneration to a butt of sack. (I did once, however, try my hand at the British laureate's official duties.)
Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
These all sound like good questions to me, with the possible exception of tho one:
(1) In evolutionary principle, traits that lead to more surviving children proliferate. In practice, when people learn how to have fewer or no children, they do. Whole industries exist to provide condoms, diaphragms, IUDs, vasectomies, and abortions, attesting to great enthusiasm for non-reproduction. Many advanced countries are declining in population. How does having fewer surviving children lead to having more surviving children? Less cutely, what selective pressures lead to a desire not to reproduce, and how does this fit into a Darwinian framework?
Perhaps what we see as advancement, by making life easy, takes away the drive to maintain it.
A tendency she perceived in Catholicism of demanding instant answers exasperated her. To her, faith was a “walking in darkness” rather than a theological explanation of mystery. As a result of her long battle with sickness she knew about suffering and sorrow, and an awareness of possible early death gave urgency to her tone.
In typical Laurasian mythology, the act of initial creation is followed by the first gender-based beings, usually Father Heaven and Mother Earth, who give rise to subsequent deities. Once heaven and Earth are separated from a primordial "darkness" or "chaos", Earth can be prepared for the arrival of the first humans, often by the slaying of a dragon or serpent – a recurring theme in northern Laurasian mythology, whether it is the Nordic stories of Beowulf, the Navajo folklore of the American south-west, the Egyptian god Seth who fights the reptilian Apophis, the Mesopotamian Marduk triumphing over Apsu, the Indian Lord of Thunder Indra killing the serpent Ahi, or the Japanese Shinto god of the sea, Susanowo, who rids men of the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi – not forgetting the Chinese goddess Nuwa and the black dragon, and of course our own dragon slayer, St. George.
The author adopts a disapproving tone throughout and then ends the article by saying it's a compliment because Seinfeld has made America a "meaner, funnier place". Besides being two-faced, the author's point rather jumps the gun. I don't think any artistic property can make or unmake anything in America. Leave that aside too, the argument itself is facile. The insanity spoken about the character in The Raincoats is a matter of humour not because the show shows a meaner side of America but because it wants to stress how uncommon random kindness has become. So uncommon that it gets laughs.
Not long before he died, Watts confessed to a friend that he didn't much like himself when he was sober. That's never a good sign. But he was indeed entertaining. Bernard Iddings Bell wrote to Watts when Watts left the Episcopal priesthood, warning him that he would regret the move. I suspect he did.j
David Mitchell is not the first writer to use Twitter to produce innovative fiction. The Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole has become an internet phenomenon after his seeding of fractured stories on the social networking site. Mitchell’s story, “The Right Sort”, does something new again. The experience of a boy with a Valium addiction going to visit a mysterious benefactor is told in 140-character nuggets, because being on Valium “breaks down the world into bite-sized sentences. Like this one. All lined up. Munch-munch.”
No resemblance to his former self: it is here that the hidden kinship between Augustus and its two predecessors lies. A strong theme in Williams’s work is the way that our sense of who we are can be irrevocably altered by circumstance and accident. In his Augustus novel, Williams took great pains to see past the glittering historical pageant and focus on the elusive man himself—one who, more than most, had to evolve new selves in order to prevail. The surprise of his final novel is that its famous protagonist turns out to be no different in the end from this author’s other disappointed heroes; which is to say, neither better nor worse than most of us. The concerns of this spectacular historical saga are intimate and deeply humane.
Mughniyeh was, for Hezbollah, a heroic figure in what they call “the resistance.” No word is more sacred for Hezbollah, which has sought to portray itself as a “national resistance” rather than another sectarian militia. When I started out in journalism, I was more willing to use this word without quotation marks; it seemed preferable, after all, to the alternative, “terrorism.” Today, I am more skeptical of terms like “resistance,” “armed struggle” and “solidarity.” When I read these words, I want to ask: What do they actually mean, and what do they conceal? What do the people who use these words actually do? What does the word “resistance” mean if it can describe a Sunni-based insurgency against Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite-based insurgency in Lebanon that is fighting to crush that uprising? What ambitions, what goals, lie behind floating signifiers like “resistance”? What do those who hold up its banner hope to achieve? Mouloud Feraoun, an Algerian novelist who kept an extraordinary diary of the Algerian war before he was murdered by the OAS in 1962, put it well when he stated: “Sometimes you start asking yourself about the value of words, words that no longer make any sense. What is liberty, or dignity, or independence? Where is the truth, where is the lie, where is the solution?”
Though my Latin is every bit as poor as one would expect of someone who studied it one night a week with an ex-Jesuit after working all day in Boston, I’ve been deeply influenced by the classical poets, not to mention Dante. One of the great satisfactions of trying to write poetry is the experience it gives of toiling in the same, long tradition that Homer, Virgil, and Dante worked and developed before me. So, as I think of it, here are three particular joys of poetry: first, that sense of drawing the whole of truth, goodness, and beauty together in the unity of the art work; second, of being informed by it; and, third, the filial communion with the dead that participating in a tradition affords to us, that keeping of faith.
I believe that a review of mine of three books of poetry, including one by James Matthew Wilson, will run in The Inquirer on August 3.
The city we have now is the one we deserve, the coagulation of money. I’m very pissed off because I love cities and yearn for them, and I can’t live in them now—and not just because I can’t afford to. My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity. The sort of city where—I’ve just been reading Richard Cobb on 1930s Paris—a burglar, a banker, a taxi-driver, an academician, a modiste, and a pushcart vendor might all fetch up together in a corner banquette at the end of the night. That won’t happen again unless we have some major, catastrophic shakeup, like war (at home) or depression, and do we want either of those?
No one was therefore surprised when, on being released from prison in 1990, Mandela asked to see Gordimer. And it was no ‘for courtesy’s sake’ meeting. In an amazing piece on Mandela written for The New Yorker, six months before Mandela’s death, Gordimer says: “I suppose I thought, with a writer’s vanity, that the great man wanted to talk about Burger’s Daughter. We were alone in Johannesburg, some few days later. It was not about my book that he spoke but about his discovering, on the first day of his freedom, that Winnie Mandela had a lover. This devastation was not made public until their divorce, six years later.”
This book sounds interesting and provocative enough to deserve serious attention. But so much that I hear about race seems grounded in theory and statistics rather than experience. My first wife and I and her four kids spent 20 years in a neighborhood that was maybe slightly more black than white. Looking back, it could have have been Anyneighborhood, USA. Our next-door neighbors were black and about the nicest neighbors you could hope to have. One day, though, the lady of the house talked to me about a gang that had started congregating across the street from us. It was getting bigger and louder and more unruly. She told me they were afraid to do anything because of possible reprisals. I was something of a wild man in those days, so I did something about it. End of problem. Funny thing, though. When I lived there, as often as not we didn't even lock the front door. Not too long ago I drove by the old manse and noticed how so many houses now had ADT signs. My point, I guess, is that peaceful neighborhoods have less to do with race than with just common humanity.
Darling begins by asserting that it will address the world in the wake of September 11 and try to bring the writer’s Catholicism into a better relation with its desert brother Islam. Happily, it soon abandons that somewhat rote mission for a much more ungovernable and unassimilable wander across everything from the decline of the American newspaper to the debate over gay marriage, from Cesar Chavez to the world of camp. Five of the ten essays have appeared already in magazines, such as Harper’sand The Wilson Quarterly. But as in all his books, Rodriguez throws off a constant fireworks display of suggestions and reveals more in an aside than others do in self-important volumes. As you read, you notice how often Don Quixote keeps recurring, and death notices, and meditations on the “tyranny of American optimism,” each one gaining new power with every recurrence, and reminding us of how the pursuit of happiness leaves us sad. The overall mosaic is far more glittering than any of its parts.
Glenn's comment, and the comments engendered by it, represent a visualization of that legendary trope, "word of mouth," the book review most likely to float or sink your book.
Why do some people become full and rejuvenated when basking in the meticulous details? Is there something about the visceral lawlessness of old time blues that makes them feel music differently? Does collecting or wallowing in the obscure fulfill a human need to master the world, whether as an action of an expression of expertise? Or is it a trap, comparable to Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” where obsessive collection results in inevitable despair or destruction? Petrusich levels, by her own admission, some shaky Asperger’s charges near the end of her book, but her vivacious reporting is better at answering these questions more than any armchair psychoanalysis.
Higher or lower, pedantry is pedantry. This piece reminds me of the letters of complaint about the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson used to get from the humor-challenged. I don't think anyone is looking to Weird Al for philological insight. Lighten up, fella.
Mr. Yankovic’s late-career success marries the satirical approach to music he’s been plying since the late 1970swith the most up-to-date thinking in online marketing — a content bombardment, financial backing by popular websites and a catchy hashtag, #8videos8days.
… we face a revolution in reading not unlike the one Gutenberg introduced almost 700 years ago. Nowadays authors are coached on "building your brand" more than on improving their writing. Publishers care more about website stats and Twitter followers than the quality of an author's work.
I try to read my poems as if they were dramatic monologues, which they often. It seems to work. E. E. Cummings, though, had a very stylized manner, which also worked. Some poets just don't have good reading voices. Wallace Stevens tends to sound as though he's proofing legal brief. And best not go the Dylan Thomas route unless you have the voice.
Any sensible human learns early in life that living is a performing art and that one creates, as an actor might, a role for oneself. One's truth is the truth from that perspective. Authenticity and exhibitionism are not the same thing.
The thing to remember is what Naomi and I have learned from this six-and-a-half-year journey: life is not a matter of peak experiences, of amazing sights and even more amazing thrills, but of small pleasures—a good meal, a good book, good company, good conversation. Right there is where life needs to take hold of the gravely ill again.
I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.
I went to Penn's graduate school for one semester. Except for the guy who taught research methods, whose name I forget, it was a complete waste of time and money.
Actually philosophical speculations have led to a great deal of good science. Einstein’s musings on Mach’s principle played a key role in developing general relativity. Einstein’s debate with Bohr and the EPR paper have led to a great of deal of good physics testing the foundations of quantum physics. My own examination of the Copernican principle in cosmology has led to exploration of some great observational tests of spatial homogeneity that have turned an untested philosophical assumption into a testable – and indeed tested – scientific hypothesis. That’ s good science.
Anyone with an Internet connection and some spare time can anonymously post vitriolic Jew hatred on message board after message board without fear of reprisal for what they really thing about the Jews. Vile hashtags such as #HitlerWasRight and #HitlerDidNothingWrong recently trended on Twitter.
I have lately begun to think that the world is in the greatest danger since the 1930s, but that no one in authority today has anywhere near the stature of anyone back then.
Writers about the Great War had to grapple with … loss of innocence in their work, a painful business that enriched their art. By contrast, writers who took the Second World War as their subject were not so shocked by the inhumanity of war, the incompetence of generals, or the cynicism of politicians. They came to their war harder, colder, less susceptible to ideals. Plus, they had a cause that needed no justification, whereas many British writers about the Great War ended up ambivalent or downright negative about their participation – another dilemma that deepened their work.
Plato actually expressed two contradictory views of imaginative writing, as Mr. Seaton explains. The Plato of "The Republic" distrusted poets because, of course, they lied. Homer said things happened that didn't happen. The Plato of the "Symposium," by contrast, allowed that poets can be and often are inspired by the gods.
It has long seemed to me that Plato's "Republic" is a vast exercise in irony, reducing to absurdity the notion of a purely rational society by showing how imprisoning such would be.
In contrast, the logic of the romantic is that the centre of gravity in human life has to be outside of oneself to be meaningful. If it's all about my choices, then human life has withered to the dimensions of my paltry imagination.
I have had an uncommon acquaintance, starting — but not ending — from the time, around age 11, I discovered the body of someone who had killed himself near our house. I think Father Fraser is quite right.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
Poetry is an organism, and a dynamic one. It has existed, over its long history, in both expanded and contracted states in terms of its readership. There are moments in its history when it is cherished even by those who can’t read; other times it is perceived as such an elite form that no one without what he imagines to be the correct training so much as approaches it. This historical moment is a contracted one—few people read poetry who aren’t writing it themselves—but poetry is a tough and plucky organism: Expanded times will come again, perhaps very soon. I don’t worry about poetry a bit. It always survives. It expands when it is needed, and the right reader will always be able to find it. There will always be someone who needs what it contains. It will always be the suited salve for someone.
After Pearl Harbor, America First disbanded. Bob Stuart reported to Fort Sill for artillery school, while many of the interventionist polemicists who had baited America Firsters as dreamy peaceniks found that wartime journalism better suited their talents.
When I learned that David had cancer, I reacted the same way I’ve always reacted to bad news: with denial. That’s why I’m writing this the same way I wrote all of my term papers for David’s classes—at the last minute, trying not to cry, while my roommate smokes marijuana and listens to Sublime. (OK, not the last part.) If I get too sincere, too sentimental, David will literally board a plane to Texas right now and start throwing books at my head, so I’ll keep this short: He didn’t just teach me how to be a good person, and he didn’t just teach me to love literature, he also, quite literally, saved my life. I really do love him like a father, and that’s not just because he is very old (which he is), but because he taught me how to be brave. I’m not there yet, obviously. But when I do get there, It will be because of him.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
The first two volumes of this massive online undertaking come out this month. The first, subtitled Apprentice Years, 1905–1918 (co-edited with Jewel Spears Brooker), collects Eliot's earliest known writings, from his student papers at the Smith Academy in St. Louis, where he was born; to those of his Harvard University career, including his undergraduate papers and notes, 26 unpublished graduate essays, and his doctoral dissertation; to two years of various reviews following his move to London in 1916. The second volume,The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926 (co-edited with Anthony Cuda), finds Eliot maturing into a formidable thinker and writer. This volume contains reviews he wrote for the Athenaeum literary magazine on a variety of topics, as well as the early years of the Criterion, the journal he founded in 1922 and which included his landmark "The Waste Land" poem in its debut issue.
I remember, as a kid in the early days of TV, watching the news and seeing reporters trying to keep with President Truman as he took his constitutional around Lafayette Park.
He married the academic Alice Crawford in 1988 and they have two children, but, he says, for a time they didn't think they'd be able to have children "and I found that difficult as I wanted very much to become a father". He addresses the subject in his 1996 collection, Masculinity, "at a time when there was much talk of damaged masculinity in Scottish writing in books such as Trainspotting. I wanted to do something different and I was glad to get those poems out. Poetry has to talk about love, although, as quite a repressed person in some ways, I initially found it easier to write erotic poetry in Scots, partly because I thought it would be safer if people didn't understand exactly what was going on."
Adult Poetry Workshop: Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, Ryerss’ Poet-in-Residence is conducting this workshop. Space is limited. Contact Diane at diane.sahms.guarnieri@gmail.com. Fee: $20
I actually don't think there is much chance that any significant majority of the citizenry will take up mindfulness. Not being baby-boomer, I came to all of this by a different route — Emerson, Kerouac, st. Francis de Sales (The Introduction to the Devout Life). These days, for me, it comes down to saying the rosary. But it is true that the state will seize upon anything to keep the people distracted from its failings.
Being in a rock band having become just another in the repertoire of clichés currently afflicting the young, a novel like this seems perfectly suited to the times. A great one might be built around someone who discovers he isn't the artist he took himself to be, which has got in the way of his knowing who he is. He would arrive at this realization by abandoning his artistic pretensions, realizing that art actually is not about the artist, that the artist is simply an amanuensis, great only in the quality of his transcription.
The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.
The important conundrum that Malcolm imparts in her short and magnificently complicated volume is why we bother to read or write journalism at all if we know the game is rigged. The thorny morality can extend to biography (Malcolm’s The Silent Woman is another excellent book which sets forth the inherent and surprisingly cyclical bias in writing about Sylvia Plath). And even when the seasoned journalist is aware of ethical discrepancies, the judgmental pangs will still crop up. In “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (contained in the marvelous collection, Forty-One False Starts), Malcolm confessed her own disappointment in how Ingrid Sischy failed to live up to her preconceptions as a bold and modern woman. Malcolm’s tendentiousness may very well be as incorrigible as McGinnis’s, but is it more forgivable because she’s open about it?
I have a strangely dispassionate regard for details, which prompts me to simply chronicle the purported facts of a matter. I also do not like to insert myself into anything I write (hence, the fondness for the third-person in the poetry I write). Like this piece, I prefer to leave the conclusions up to the reader.
The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.
… In other words, what the late Lucy Dawidowicz called “the war against the Jews” (in her book of that title) was of greater importance to Hitler than the war against the Allies. That was “what the war was really about.” And that, according to Evans, more than anything was why Germany lost the war.
If someone is really interested in whether or not God exists, I’d say the best way is to have a little humility and experiment, with an open mind and heart, with the paths that Christians have claimed take you directly to him, in the ways that have worked. If someone isn’t willing to do such a thing, and insists that a discussion about painting be one about mathematics, then the conversation isn’t going to go anywhere.
I must be out and about today starting in just a few minutes. I still arrange the donation of books from The Inquirer to the Philadelphia Prison System and the Family Court. I am arranging one of those this afternoon and have an appointment beforehand elsewhere. So I'll do my next blogging this evening. I am a busier old man than I had intended to be.
My wife and I have lately taken up afternoon strolls together, and usually end up sitting for awhile on a bench in a nearby park — yes, two old people on a park bench; it's come to that. Anyway, this afternoon, I was there, but she had business in town.
When I reread The Man With the Golden Gun, before I wrote my own James Bond continuation novel, Solo, I did so very conscious of its diminished reputation; but, as I read, I found my opinion steadily changing.
I fail to see in the conversation about conversation anything resembling what our greatest civil rights leaders tried so hard to inculcate: black pride. I am deeply committed to forging change for black people, especially poor ones. I salute the crumbling of the War on Drugs; I cheer Senators Corey Booker and Ron Paul for their recent commitment to prisoner reentry policy; I will continue to argue for educational strategies that actually work for poor (black) kids. But I reject the idea that none of this change truly matters until America achieves an elevated degree of moral sophistication about black people’s past, present, and future—and that this enlightenment, once attained, would somehow create unprecedentedly rapid and effective policy changes. I further submit that the call for this all-encompassing awareness constitutes an unintended diminishment of black people. I cringe under the implication that we, and only we, need such exquisitely calibrated treatment in order to succeed under less than perfect conditions.
And it is this very anger that explains why a conservative literary revival, along the lines Bellow desires, is not going to happen. For anger is a not a conservative emotion. Genuine conservatism is something much broader and deeper than a political orientation; it is a temperament, one that looks to the past with reverence and the future with trepidation, and which believes that human nature is not easily changed or improved. Defined in this way, conservatism is in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature. David Foster Wallace, the leading novelist of his generation, was a champion of earnestness, reverence, self-discipline, and work—never more so than in his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, whose heroes are hard-working accountants. Dave Eggers made his name with a memoir about raising his younger brother after his parents died, a hip but deeply earnest hymn to family values. Zadie Smith excels at the conservatism of comedy, which resolves differences in laughter and exposes human follies with an indulgent understanding.
The "watching the future with trepidation" bit does not gel. Let's take any example, say technology. Conservatives adopt it with as much relish as the next person.
… one of [William Cullen Bryant's] greatest achievements has gone unrecognized by schools, universities, and even scholars of American literature. Bryant was the most inventive short-story writer between Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. Now, after decades of neglect, those fictions have become available in a trade paperback, scrupulously edited and annotated by Frank Gado, professor emeritus of Union College in upstate New York.
“The government really needs to get its message out to the American people, and it knows that the best way to do that is by using the American news media,” said Shanker. “The relationship between the government and the media is like a marriage; it is a dysfunctional marriage to be sure, but we stay together for the kids.”
The media take on the government should be adversarial across the board. Fair, no harsher than necessary, and no toadyism.
Nostalgia can be a pleasure but is rarely helpful, while the recent enthusiasm for world anthologies encourages the crazy idea that we can all understand anything from anywhere with no need for context. Perhaps what a literature syllabus might usefully do would be to give students an idea of the shifting relations between writer, community and reader, and the role books can play in building our sense of ourselves and others. So, some fine reads from our own tradition – Gove’s choices seem no worse than others – and some examples of writers from other countries, or who seek to mediate between cultures, or create stories that float free from specific cultures altogether.
… this book is not a panoramic view of that turbulent period; it’s the intimate story of a real historical figure. Margery Kempe was a controversial mystic whose tales of visions and refusal to follow the “script” for married women won her some admirers -- and many powerful enemies.
Traditionally, God’s necessity is not logical necessity but some kind of metaphysical necessity, or aseity. Unlike Hume, I don’t think this is a silly or incoherent idea, any more than I think mathematical Platonism is silly or incoherent. As it happens, I am not a mathematical Platonist, and I do have conceptual difficulties with the idea of metaphysical necessity. So in the end, I am not sure that the Christian God idea flies, but I want to extend to Christians the courtesy of arguing against what they actually believe, rather than begin and end with the polemical parody of what Dawkins calls “the God delusion.”
The dialectical area Ruse sketches is precisely where genuinely fruitful dis cuss ion can take place.
If I'd been an academic, I'd have almost certainly focused on that period of European history between 1880-1914. In Paris, it was the Belle Epoque, but elsewhere, it was the beginning of the end: of empires, of civility, of custom. In Middle Europe, across that expansive land over which Franz Joseph cast an aging eye, the turn of the century brought with it a new sort of nationalism, one that would forge nations from the ruins of empire.
...Which is where Joseph Roth enters the scene. Born in 1894, Roth witnessed the rise and fall of that most regal experiment, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it's in The Radetzky March that he chronicles its collapse. I can't remember the last time I was so enthralled by a novel of this sort: part history, part literature, Roth's book is the story of gentility gone awry, of war lurking in the shadows, of civil war in the waiting.
The Radetzky March isn't the only of Roth's novel to touch on these themes: Flight Without End, for instance, gets at the dislocation associated with both the Russian Revolution and First World War. But Radetzky is all the better because of its scope, its ambition: indeed, it takes the Austro-Hungarian Empire as its topic, and it stops at nothing to get at its nature, its character, its leadership, and fall.
This is how a novel of this sort should be written: it reaches for a moment of unique historical value, and tells a complex story via intersecting narratives: some focused on families, others on the nobility and the kaiser himself. The result is an emotional tale of history in the making, of empires exposed: both for what they were, and for who they were. They were, after all, people: and the von Trotta clan - central to Roth's narrative - are emblematic of the struggles, the contradictions, that emerged at the start of the last century. These struggles were linked with war, it's true, but they had to do with something else, too: the arrival of modernity.
The last word is for Roth, whose lamentation for the Old World is palpable:
"And so Herr von Trotta seemed like some character from a province that was historically rather than geographically remote, like a ghost from the Fatherland's past, the embodied pang of a patriotic conscience."
