Notes--Shantaram fr NYer

Bedside Reading
November 6, 2006
In conjunction with the Fall Books issue, a handful of regular contributors discuss what’s on their night tables.
Sasha Frere-Jones
First on my list is “The Writer of Modern Life,” by Walter Benjamin. It’s depressing to be a critic within a hundred years of Benjamin: he got there first on so many things. The poet Charles Baudelaire died twenty-five years before Benjamin was born, in 1892, but Benjamin writes about him as if they were there together in nineteen-twenties Berlin, making a ruckus. For Benjamin, Baudelaire represented “the modern.” That doesn’t mean that he claims Baudelaire wrote “about” modernity but that his poetry embodies it. For example, Benjamin notes the influence on Baudelaire of new technologies such as photography, and writes that “Baudelaire was his own impresario,” an artist who knew that his poems were commodities even before they were done. I’m also revisiting “Housekeeping,” by Marilynne Robinson. A recent paperback edition of it has sprung up in stores, and I bought it in an airport. It would not be hard to make the story of two repeatedly abandoned girls touching or sad, but Robinson is relentlessly careful in her word choices and leaves no room for generalized mood or sentiment. Robinson’s images (two girls skating until dark on a frozen lake with their dogs, a mother who moves almost invisibly through her own house) are of a piece with the many attempts to render a family living in the endless American interior, but they never become sad cowboy boilerplate. Lastly, “Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn”: I don’t have any jones for the Spanish Civil War or Ernest Hemingway’s social circle, but, in the political fog bank of 2006, it is heartbreaking to read about an educated young woman from a well-off family who is hopeful enough to let herself become politically radicalized by the plight of the poor in the South. The writing etches stylish, unforgiving circles around that of her famous friends, if you can forgive a certain amount of hand-wringing and messy plaints of the self.
Malcolm Gladwell
I’ve just read Michael Lewis’s “The Blind Side,” which I think is my favorite Lewis book ever (and I’ve loved them all). I’ve just started Michael Tolkin’s “The Return of the Player,” because I ran into Tolkin at a party and he seemed really, really funny—and the book does not disappoint. It’s hard to go wrong with a book that has, as one of its characters, a man with seven hundred and fifty million dollars who is desperate to become a billionaire. Next up is the new Don Winslow thriller, “The Winter of Frankie Machine.” I’m an avid thriller-reader and have recently become hooked on Winslow, the way I got hooked on Lee Child a few years ago. I’m also working my way through the great love of my life, which is the British magazine Car, which (The New Yorker excepted) I think might be the best magazine in the world. Imagine a car magazine, photographed and laid out as beautifully as Vogue, that reads as though it was written entirely by overeducated, slightly snotty, and hilarious Englishmen in their twenties. What’s not to like?
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisJill Lepore
Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” was first published in 1868. In 1926, my grandmother bought a copy for her daughter, who fobbed it off on her little sister, my mother, who gave it to me in 1973, when I was seven. That I never managed to read it is one of the greater embarrassments of my childhood. “I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits,” Jo snaps at Amy on page 3. “Hear, hear!” I must have said, already sick of those drippy March girls, Jo excepted, since that’s where I slammed the book shut, marking my place with a yellow yarn hair ribbon yanked from a pigtail not necessarily my own. The ribbon was still there when I brought the book to bed last week, and tried again. Jo, like Alcott, is dead clever, even more than she seems, but I still can’t stand it. Starting it too early, at the age of seven, and too late, by about a hundred years, seems to have ruined it for me. Underneath “Little Women” on my nightstand is a book that my own seven-year-old left there: “The Adventures of Captain Underpants,” by Dav Pilkey. He bought it at a yard sale this summer, for a nickel. It’s not a canon-buster, that’s for sure, and it could fairly be said that it lacks any literary merit whatsoever, but it’s not niminy-piminy, either. (It’s on the A.L.A.’s top-ten list of most frequently challenged books, attacked “for anti-family content, being unsuited to age group and violence,” i.e., using a slingshot to hurl “fake doggy doo-doo” at a supervillain.) My boy, that’s my boy, read it too fast to need a bookmark.
Mary Ellen Mark
I’m a huge fan of nonfiction, and am currently reading “The Shadow of the Sun,” by Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of the great journalists of our time. It’s a wide-ranging study of post-colonial Africa, but each episode is told in such a clear and vivid manner that it is instantly accessible to anyone. On the lighter side, I’m having fun with David Sedaris’s “Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules,” and, in preparation for a trip to India, I am immersing myself in “Shantaram,” the epic novel by Gregory David Roberts, about a man who escapes an Australian prison and flees to Bombay. Parts of the story are based on the author’s life, and it is hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction, which makes for an entertaining read. His lush descriptions of the locales remind me of the time I spent in India during my youth. Finally, I always have a book of Irving Penn’s photographs close to hand (“Platinum Prints”). Penn is, simply put, a master.
Lorrie Moore
Despite the hoopla surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” I was unprepared for two aspects of it that no one had mentioned to me: how funny it was, and how feminist. (The ending, in which the widowed mother, shed of her marriage, is now ready to make a better life for herself at the age of seventy-five, is like a stiletto of ice slipping neatly into, and then between, the ribs.) On my bedside table now is Franzen’s “The Discomfort Zone,” a wondrous book of lively, intelligent, intimate—and funny—narrative essays, which has received in the Times two of the most bewildering reviews I’ve ever read. Franzen is never the hero of his own anecdotes, and he observes the world (and himself) the way the baby of a family often does: with a kind of ruthless, custodial affection. He is able to see how three different centuries have converged upon Americans and how disorienting that can be. Even the cover charms: on the jacket is a Victorian “Map of a Man’s Heart,” reprinted from McCall’s and looking like some jokey geography thought up by Lewis Carroll, with its “Broad Range of Interests,” its “Province of Deep Thought,” its “Memory of Mother Moat” and “Ravine of the Limited Take-Home.” There are few ways in, though the “Tunnel of Fetch and Carry” will get one across the memory of mom. It all makes me think that people do not have the wit and humor that they used to.
Paul Muldoon
I like to keep a shelf of books that might keep me, in the sense that I might use them as the basis of a poem or a lecture, or both. I’ve recently become particularly interested in bardic forms and am studying Eleanor Knott’s “An Introduction to Irish Syllabic Poetry of the Period 1200-1600,” with a view to trying to incorporate some Irish models into English. In a similar mode, I’m reading Gordon Hall Gerould’s “The Ballad of Tradition,” by way of limbering up for a lecture on Yeats and the refrain. Yet another yellowed book I’m working my way through is “The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World,” edited by Albert B. Friedman. On an altogether different tack are “Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle,” by Massimo Polidoro, and “Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship,” by Bernard M. L. Ernst and Hereward Carrington.
Nick Paumgarten
“Memoirs: Duc de Saint-Simon,” abridged and translated by Lucy Norton, Volume I, 1691-1709. Working on this week’s story about Robert Greene, a Sun King buff who wrote “The 48 Laws of Power,” inspired me to give this one a go at last. The precise observations of court etiquette and behavior, the accounts of obscure maneuverings and wranglings, and above all the character studies and turns of phrase are just wonderful. By the time I get to 1709 it’ll probably be 2009, but, anyway, I find that it goes well with Season 4 of “The Wire.” Next is “Oracle Bones,” by Peter Hessler. Hessler was a classmate of mine in college, and for a while I was his editor here. I’ve been a fan all along. “Oracle Bones” is his latest; it was just nominated for a National Book Award. I’m familiar with some of it, from the magazine. The structure of the book is very cool. He tells stories about various characters making their way in modern China, and intersperses these with examinations of ancient artifacts and texts. Out of it all comes a deeper, more complicated portrait of twenty-first-century China than we tend to get elsewhere. And he’s really funny, in his dry, Missouri way. Then, there is “Storm and Sorrow in the High Pamirs,” by Robert W. Craig. Craig, an old mountaineer and the founder of the Keystone Center, in Colorado, tracked me down after I wrote a story about skiing, two years ago. It turned out that he knew some people in my family. He sent my father a copy of this one, which was published in 1977, and it has finally made its way to me. It’s an account of a series of attempts on two peaks in the Pamirs, Lenin and Communism. The Soviets invited climbing teams from a dozen countries. Fifteen people died. It became a horrible but interesting mess. If you’re into mountain-climbing books, and I am, Craig’s account is a classic.
David Sipress
When I opened Peter Behrens’s “The Law of Dreams,” last month, I thought, Oy vey, not another bleak, depressing, potato-famine, Irish-persecution, struggling-immigrant story. But I wound up loving this novel. The storytelling is terrific, the writing lyrical, often startling. Granting equal time to the Brits, I simultaneously devoured “Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England,” Juliet Barker’s fascinating, detailed account of that mother of all upsets. Who knew that a decent English archer could shoot twenty arrows a minute? Or that Henry’s actual words to his troops as he sent them into battle were “Fellas, let’s go”? At the moment, I’m enjoying Kate Atkinson’s latest, “One Good Turn,” her follow-up to “Case Histories”—both highly literary detective novels. Speaking of which, I was pleased the other day to discover a previously unread Maigret mystery by Georges Simenon, “A Man’s Head,” in a little, square-shaped paperback that slips nicely into the pocket for the all-important subway reading. Finally, I’ve been indulging in one of my favorite bedtime activities, reading in the dark—listening, that is, to Jeremy Irons’s sly, hilarious reading of “Lolita,” on an unabridged CD. This amazing book turns out to be even more subversive than I remembered from the first time I read it, thirty years ago. What’s next? Julia Child’s “My Life in France.” Yum.