The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa

"Don Fabrizio grew calm again; his nephew was looking at him with the affectionate irony which youth accords to age. 'They can allow themselves to be a bit nice to us, as they're so sure to be free of us the day of our funerals.' He went with Tancredi to look at the 'foreign peaches.' The graft with German cuttings, made two years ago, had succeeded perfectly; there was not much fruit, a dozen or so, on the two grafted trees, but it was big, velvety, luscious-looking; yellowish, with a faint flush of rosy pink on the cheeks, like those of Chinese girls. The Prince gave them a gentle squeeze with his delicate fleshy fingers."

Lampedusa's book is like those peaches: ripe, heavy, soaked in the Sicilian sun. Each scene is densely sensual, as if you can almost touch the baroque drawing rooms he describes, the strawberry lips of a raven-haired beauty, the gleaming knobs of a golden telescope, the white cakes studded with green pistachios. It is a past world brought richly, almost decadently, to life; but it is also a world that is everywhere tinged with an impending sense of loss.

The Leopard begins in May 1860 during the Risorgimento, a movement that sought to unify the states of Italy in a single nation. The plot focuses on the Salinas, an aristocratic family led by Don Fabrizio. He is described as being "very large and strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was a constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop."

Don Fabrizio is the unchallenged master of his domain, but knows that his power is ebbing with the sweeping changes unleashed by the Risorgimento. He sees it most keenly in the engagement of his nephew, Tancredi, the scion of a prestigious yet bankrupt noble clan, to a woman whose father, Don Calogero, has used the new levers of power to become a wealthy landowner. The engagement is one of the many compromises Don Fabrizio makes to ensure the survival of his way of life, even while acknowledging that this steady dilution will also seal its doom. As Tancredi says to him, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Don Calogero is emblematic of the new world order: crass, unsophisticated, obsessed with money. He cannot appreciate an old ballroom the way only a consummate noble like Don Fabrizio can: "It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten."

When The Leopard was first published (posthumously; it was famously rejected by several publishers during Lampedusa's lifetime) in 1958, it apparently caused a great stir in Italian political circles. One can easily see why this paean to aristocracy would rile more democratic-minded folk, especially those whose ancestors shed blood to shepherd Italy into the modern era. This might be a case in which an outsider's perspective proves valuable. With no emotional attachment to Italian history, we can see that The Leopard is not so much about politics or class warfare; it is an elegy for a world that, for all its imperfections, is now extinct, and a recognition that our own world would be the poorer if we forgot it once existed.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Volume One by William Shirer

"One of the few instructors Hitler seems to have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove to teach him science. Gissinger later recalled, 'As far as I was concerned, Hitler left neither a favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. He was by no means a leader of the class. He was slender and erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like that of a consumptive, his gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant.'"

Volume One of Shirer's classic history of Nazi Germany recounts the life and times of a young Adolf Hitler; the birth of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) amidst the political chaos, economic ruin, and national humiliation that befell Germany following World War I; the almost-comical failure of Hitler's first power grab, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment; and a brief overview of German history and intellectual thought, which not only had a direct impact on Hitler's famous Weltanschauung (or "worldview"), but in Shirer's opinion also made Germany a fertile ground for Hitler's ideas.

Shirer's book is immensely readable and full of fascinating tidbits. For example, I wasn't aware that Hitler's original title for Mein Kampf, which he began writing in prison, was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. It is a revealing anecdote: the crudeness of the title betrays a lack of formal education, while the juxtaposition of himself against a mentally inferior and dishonorable world smacks of megalomania. Mein Kampf itself, quoted at length by Shirer, is similarly instructive, with its deranged theories on the Aryan master race, ultra-nationalism, syphilis (yes, syphilis), and Lebensraum, which means "living space." (Hitler thought it vitally necessary to have much more of it, which explains some of his later expansionist policies.)

If only we could write off Hitler as a mere crackpot! If only he had remained the young bohemian in Vienna who went everywhere in a shabby black overcoat, with no money, no job, and no talent to become the artist he so badly wanted to be. If only the NSDAP had remained the tiny German Workers' Party, one of the hundreds of political clubs that were all the rage during the Weimar Republic, many of which turned out to be as harmless as the rock bands now proliferating in Williamsburg. The group was led by the failed painter Hitler, a locksmith, a drunken poet, an ex-soldier, and a self-described economist who had written tracts railing against "interest-rate slavery."

But this pitiful band of losers created Nazism, the great scourge of Europe. And this is why even as we learn of Hitler's humble origins, and recognize his naive dreams of artistic glory, he never emerges as a man of flesh and blood. He remains a demon obscured by his aura of evil, as well as one of those phenomenal forces of the human race that have appeared only half a dozen times throughout history. Hitler had a mother, just like the rest of us, but somehow I don't believe it.

As you read passages of Mein Kampf, it is hard not to be impressed by his unquenchable thirst for power. Even as a young man, he saw himself as the creative political genius who would become lord of the earth, and restore Germany to greatness. He was the one man chosen by Providence who "with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses...until from the shifting waves of a free-thought world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will." In this day and age, when so many regimes couch their totalitarian intentions in Orwellian double-speak, it is perversely refreshing to read a straight-up call for dictatorship, and mercilessly violent means of attaining it. How the rest of Germany embraced Hitler's Weltanschauung, and how the world came to know of it, is a story for later volumes.

Locos - Felipe Alfau

One must bear in mind that these people are creating their own life and standards, and are still novices at the game. In other words, the reader is expected to sit back and watch this procession of strange people and distorted phenomena without even a critical eye. To look for anything else, or to take seriously this bevy of irresponsible puppets and the inconsistency of the author, would not be advisable, as by doing so and imagining things that might lend themselves to misinterpretation, the reader would only disclose, beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of a common tragedy.

Let us, then, take the author at his word, and consider this book of stories without even a critical eye, treat it as an amusement akin to watching a TV show of which you are not particularly fond, heedlessly dipping into a narrative arc of which you are unaware, considering each episode as a self-contained thing, the characters and the events imprisoned within the small portion of time that you bestow upon each story your disinterested attention. So, one day, you might read the story of a professional beggar, who goes out each day dressed in his uniform of rags, only to come home at night not to some hovel on the street, but a well-appointed apartment in a luxury apartment building. On another day you might read the story of a fingerprint expert, who is so convinced that fingerprints don't lie, that he allows himself to be put in prison for a murder he did not commit, simply because his fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime. Or on another day you might read the story of the woman who is so obsessed with death that she dies each year for a month or two at a time, only to rise again, until her obsession threatens to leave her dead for more time than she is alive, so she must attempt to commit suicide to cure herself of her obsession. There are eight such stories, each with its own quirky premise, each with strange twists of narrative, each with characters, as the title suggests, who are crazy. And as Alfau asserts, each story can be read alone and not in relation to the others that are told. Careless reading is the preferred mode of consumption. If you read the book in this way, the stories are entertaining, original in their conception and amusing in execution, a warm entertainment for some cold and lonely evening, bed time stories perfect for passing the time before sleep. In other words, light reading.

But, then, should you take such disclaimers seriously? It recalls Montaigne's blithe ironic pose: "...and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject." Alfau admits that there is some method to the book's madness, and that the "pages have been numbered clearly and the stories arranged less clearly in a conventional order" which he finds more or less appropriate. So what is the reader to make of the fact that the stories tend to share the same characters, that they each reference a shared pool of events, that there is a tenuous thread that seems to connect each of the narratives? Most curious of all, though, is the author's presence in every story, his insistence on the distinction between real people and the characters he sets in motion, his frequent protestations that he is not to blame for his characters' actions. He admits in the prologue that he has completely lost control. All of this seems to beg for a more careful reading of the book, an attempt to get at what, exactly, he means by the common tragedy that underlies this comedy of gestures.

Complications set in immediately. If you step back and try to consider the work as a whole, attempt to see the novel that is constructed of these eight stories and the curious prologue, the impression made is one of a mound of pieces from several disparate puzzles. Nothing fits. Characters shift. Time, seemingly, does not exist. In one story a woman named Lunarito is a murderer, in another she is the victim of some murder. In one story a poet named Garcia is a crass and opportunistic young man, in another, in the same time period, he is an unhappy and sensitive child. One character actively takes over the telling of one of the stories and becomes confused, wondering whether he is a real being or some fictional entity, and despairs when he comes to the conclusion that he is neither. In another, a real person seeks to become more real by becoming a character in a story. There is a curious logic at work, a vague understanding on the part of the reader that although nothing seems to make sense, there is a key just waiting to be found. But as you, the ambitious reader, try to sort and sift the puzzle pieces, and unlock this curious jewelry box of a novel, just as you think you discover a key to the lock, the lock disappears. It is not dream-like, though it shares that uneasiness of purpose that dreams seem to embody. It is not a mystery, although you feel like a detective tracking down leads, establishing alibis, positing schemes.

Ultimately, it seems the tragedy Alfau refers to is one of creating stories, of crafting coherent tales, but that statement seems to miss the mark in so many ways. It is not a story about stories, it is not a novel about writing. In the end, in much the same way that At Swim-Two-Birds, the Flann O'Brien novel in which characters band together and plot against their author, it is an amusing tale of the richness of the imagination. And even that sentiment, in the face of this wonderful book, seems to fall flat.

The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan by Ivan Morris

"It is essential that the hero be prepared for this sublime end so that when the moment comes he will know precisely how to act and not be swayed by his instinct for survival or other human weakness. His final, blazing meeting with his fate is the most important event of his life. To continue fighting against all odds and to acquit himself properly at the end will give validity to his previous efforts and sacrifices; to die badly will make a mockery of everything that has lent meaning to his existence. 'Think constantly of your death!' were the last words that the loyalist hero, Masahige, is said to have spoken to his son before committing harakiri in 1336..."

The notion that one must die well is not confined to the Japanese. Montaigne once wrote that "all the other actions of our life ought to be tried and tested by this last act. It is the master-day, it is the day that is judge of all the rest..." But no country on earth has absorbed this notion so deeply as Japan, whose obsession with the art of dying has become as familiar as the words harakiri and kamikaze. And while Montaigne imbues death with a life-affirming humanism, seeing in it an opportunity to "speak plain" and to show what is "good and clean in the bottom of the pot," the traditional Japanese concept of death, with its perverse focus on suicide, can be so impassioned that it verges on religious ecstasy. As Morris writes: "Hagakure, the most influential of all samurai treatises ever written, combines the characters for 'dying' (shini) and 'going mad' (kurui) into a single word, shinigurui ('death frenzy'), and enjoins this ardent state on the warrior; for he cannot hope to accomplish any great deed until he has first 'surmounted himself' by discarding the cautious dictates of reason and self-interest."

Death, the ultimate failure, is the focus of Morris's book. He recounts the tales of nine of Japan's greatest heroes, each of which is used as a lens to view historical periods stretching from the fourth century to the nineteenth. (There is also a final chapter discussing kamikaze pilots, who drew much of their inspiration from these legendary figures.) Their stories are strikingly similar: they experienced a meteoric rise in fame and influence before dying a glorious death in the face of certain defeat, which invariably came at the hands of those in positions of power. Furthermore, whatever agendas these heroes championed, whichever side they chose, were brutally crushed by their enemies in martyrdom's aftermath. In fact, as Morris shows, their deaths often hastened the destruction of their causes, and redounded to the immense benefit of their oppressors, who went on to do the less romantic business of ruling Japan.

For the most part, the men who ended feudalism and established the military government of the shogunate, who later transformed Japan into a world power during the Meiji Restoration, who engineered all the major changes that would define Japan's historical course -- these are the country's villains. The heroes are the ones who died in futile gestures, attached themselves to lost causes, and were on the wrong side of history from the very beginning. If it were to play out this way in America, there would now be national holidays on General Lee's birthday, and a widespread disdain for that worldly striver, Abraham Lincoln.

What could explain this reverence for total failure? What does it say about the Japanese psyche? Morris, often citing the writings of the heroes themselves, many of whom had a penchant for poetry, highlights certain hallmarks of the Japanese hero. He is, above all, a man of sincerity, so wedded to his beliefs that he cannot deign to take the practical measures and compromises that will offer him a chance of success. He obeys only the impulses that stem from his deepest emotions, which makes him appear irrational and rash to the outside world. He recognizes the ephemeral nature of human life, which, like the iconic cherry blossom, blooms vividly just before its petals are scattered to the wind. And it is through death, particularly suicide, that the hero expresses his purity of intention, and his rejection of the debasing machinations of the material world.

It is, at first glance, a worldview that is horribly nihilistic. What would Montaigne, the probing rationalist of his inner life, say to this sweeping dismissal of human experience? But as you read Morris's book, it becomes less perverse, more human, and almost poignant. The strongest chapter in the book deals with the kamikaze pilots, who eagerly volunteer to sacrifice their lives even though they know that the war is lost, and that their flimsy aircraft will do nothing more than plop in the ocean. They write farewell letters to their parents, and drop in the envelopes fingernail parings and locks of hair -- all that will remain for their burial. The devout fealty expressed in these letters, as well as the intense gratitude they feel toward their parents, sheds a more noble light on the Japanese consciousness and its relation to the outer world. As one ardent suicide bomber puts it:

"You attach too much importance to life. Imagine that the whole world were to disappear except for you. Would you really want to go on living? If a human life has any important meaning, it is because of some relationship with other human beings. From this springs the principle of honour. Life rests on this idea, as exemplified by the conduct of our ancient samurai...who consciously devote their lives to serving something outside themselves."

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

"Scobie thought: what are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her -- don't wear that dress, don't say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I've made of her. She wasn't always like this."

The Heart of the Matter is set in a West African town by the ocean, during World War II. The town is occupied by the British, but there are Indians and Syrians there, too, as well as the natives -- it is the original Tower of Babel in the words of one character. The British authorities are primarily occupied with the ships that come to port, searching each to prevent the smuggling of diamonds to Axis forces. A precarious sense of order prevails during the day, as the book's main character, the policeman Scobie, tends to both war-related matters and local law enforcement. But underneath the blank smiling face of a native (or an Englishman) stirs something sinister, which emerges under the cover of darkness in the form of illicit transactions, plots of intrigue, and bloody crimes committed on the wharf.

We are, of course, not only in West Africa, but the familiar territory of Graham Greene. And, true to form, the town is not just a far-flung colonial outpost, but the battlefield of a man's soul. The Nazis, the diamond smuggling, a war that killed millions -- these serve as a background for Scobie's struggle, which stems from that most commonplace of difficulties: an unhappy marriage.

Scobie is a good man. He does not lie, he does not cheat, and he strives to do the least amount of harm. He is, like Greene, a converted Catholic. Like any good man with a modicum of power he is weighed down by a sense of responsibility, for the orderly upkeep of the town, the well-being of his servants, and, above all, the happiness of his poor, suffering wife, the object of mockery described in the passage above. And, like any good Catholic, he blames himself for her misery, for keeping her in this stifling town for fifteen long years, amidst fatuous expatriates who are determined to preserve the etiquette of the clubs and boarding schools of their homeland.

Scobie's crisis begins when he falls for another woman, a young widow whom he pities as much as his wife. This sets off a series of events in which the good man, little by little, succumbs to the evil that is everywhere around him, and to which so far he has been immune. It is an old story, but what sets this one apart is the cause of Scobie's downfall, which is not the classic temptation of sin, but Scobie's drive to be good. It is the religion he makes of his wife, who embodies his vow to be a better man, and the sin for which he must atone. But she does not want his sacrifice, and yearns to escape his overbearing pity, which mirrors the conundrum that Scobie himself confronts as he grapples with God: who, in the end, shoulders the cross? The one martyred, or the one for whom the sacrifice was made?

The Rabbi of Lud - Stanley Elkin

As a rabbi, I'm a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferance and lenities--all their official documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters' knacks, the oilers' and operators' known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.
-pg 98

 As a writer, Stanley Elkin's a sucker for jargon, for the vocabulary of vocation, all the catchphrases and customary utterances that are found in every profession, be it disc-jockeying, franchising, shit-shoveling, God-fearing, or, in this case, this book's particular obsession, the burying of Jewish dead. The speaker in the above passage is Jerry Goldkorn, the puppet through which Elkin's voice moves like that first, animating Word, the not-rabbi rabbi of the not-town of Lud, a community buried in a vast Jewish graveyard in New Jersey, which consists primarily of an ever-growing population of dead people and the few residents and businesses required to service the needs of the recently deceased. As far as being a rabbi goes, Goldkorn is sub-par, his calling to the service of God more an accident than some conscious decision; his Hebrew is so bad, his grasp of ritual and custom so tenuous, that to become ordained he was forced to go to an offshore yeshiva on a small atoll in the Maldives. The plot, such as it is, centers around Goldkorn's insistence on living in Lud and his daughter Connie's insistence that they leave. He likes the life; it's easy, he makes decent money, he has few responsibilities. She hates the life; she has no friends, the surrounding grave haunt her dreams. When she demands that the family leave the place and Goldkorn insists that they stay, Connie fabricates a silly story that rocks the community with outrage, and then she runs away. The Rabbi of Lud then enters a crisis of his curious, failed faith, examines his motivations for shying away from the world in a city of graves, and, in the end, the family, once again reunited, decides to stay.

There isn't much about the story that moves, per se. In this, it is perhaps one of Elkin's weakest books. All of his stories are animated by his distinctive voice; in the weaker ones every character seems infected by the mind of Stanley Elkin--they all speak the same way. For lovers of dramatic arc and emotional denouement, probably fifty percent of his books will rub them the wrong way. But that voice! It deserves reverence; listening to it as it infects your inner ear, like some virus, like, as in The Living End, the sweet impregnating song of God, is like entering a mind that has a vocabulary that multiplies the reader's by fifty times. And sometimes it's enough. But here, as in some of his other books, it's not. Despite the fact that Elkin has produced books moved solely by language and succeeded, where gimmicks and gags are piled up and pushed forward by an engine of stellar prose, some of his books end up as failures, too. The failures end up leaving the reader flat, wondering what, after the laughs, after all the fun, the point of it all was; whereas the successes leave the reader agog at the possibilities of language, how it can create and sustain a convincingly absurd world and deliver a hefty dose of pathos in the process. George Mills, perhaps his best book, which shares many of the themes of The Rabbi of Lud (and some some similarities of structure), is an example of a much better story, chock full with gags and gimmicks and wildly inventive narrative twists and turns, and it also has the benefit of having a level of language that is rarely equaled and perhaps never surpassed. This book, in comparison, seems a second-rate effort. But, keep in mind, second rate for someone who is undeniably a master.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

"...and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad."

The story of Thomas Sutpen, who one day in 1833 appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, "on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine"; who by mysterious means secures from an Indian the best land in the county, and proceeds with unflagging fury, with the assistance of a pack of wild slaves clothed in nothing but caked mud, to construct the grim mansion that serves as the centerpiece of the plantation known as Sutpen's Hundred; who by the same indomitable will wins the hand of Ellen Coldfield, with whom he has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith; and who, by carrying and disseminating the sin of slavery, wreaks destruction on his family and himself, and curses the descendants of Yoknapatawpha.

Sutpen's motivation, the reason behind his unflagging fury, is one of the great mysteries of the novel. The story's narrators, perpetually astonished, and perhaps not unlike Faulkner himself, are driven by one question: Why? It is one of Absalom's greatest literary legacies, how the legend of Sutpen is invented and reinvented by different narrators as they strive to find that kernel of truth which will explain the inexplicable. And it is not only the tale of Sutpen that is told and retold, but that of Judith and Henry; Ellen and her sister Rosa; Sutpen's half-black child Clytie; and Charles Bon, the young man from New Orleans who has a mind to marry Judith. By telling their stories over and again, in circular iterations, Faulkner is not merely trying to achieve a Rashomon-like effect of different perspectives. Rather, his characters become as large as an Agamemnon or Persephone, mythic figures who cast their shadow over all storytelling, and who change depending on the storyteller.

Reviewers often describe books as "triumphs," which has always mystified me (a triumph over whom? over what?). But Absalom truly feels like a triumph, the triumph of willing something to life that resists it, as Faulkner pursues his quarry with the same indomitable determination that spurs his main character. To put it crudely, he starts big and he stays big, and it is a joy (a joy verging on despair) to see him pull it off, to read 400 pages of prose that never lets up in intensity, that barrels forward with relentless venom and beauty.

And even in the book's few moments of repose, the music of his writing is always there, that wonderful music of the inner ear: "He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking..."