A skilled first-century Palestinian poet

Suppose the apostle Luke, momentarily transported from biblical Palestine, were to listen in as I told a joke about George W. Bush, Oprah, and a used-car salesman fighting over the last parachute in a plummeting airplane. He would be pretty much guaranteed to miss the unexpected humor of the punchline. I am similarly disadvantaged when I read the parables of Jesus. I don’t know all the things the listeners assumed when Jesus introduced the situation, I don’t know how each character was expected to act and speak, and I am not the slightest bit shocked by the things that shocked his audience.

Kenneth Bailey’s two books Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes, published in the 1970s, were written to help contemporary Western readers overcome these deficiencies. He lived and taught in the Middle East for much of his life, including decades of residence in rural villages. He appears to have written the books in consultation with a large network of Middle Eastern friends and scholars, as well as with his own considerable knowledge and research of ancient Middle Eastern languages and literature.

These books were scholarly, but not at all in an abstract way. Bailey approached the parables of Luke a passage at a time, systematically and thoroughly, teasing out the literary form, the cultural presumptions of the audience, and the response Jesus might have meant to provoke from them.

Because the gospels were not written in the same language that Jesus spoke, and because the existing manuscripts were edited after the evangelists wrote them down, analyzing the original speech of Jesus often involves a fascinating detective quest. Bailey deduces much about the history of the manuscripts simply by analyzing the literary form. Often he includes his own guesses about Aramaic wordplay in the original parable, based on his research of regional languages and cultures. As a literature major and a language aficionado, I found these explorations delightful.

Reading Bailey’s analysis of each parable is intellectually satisfying, but a greater reward is a clearer understanding of Jesus as a person. I was struck when I read the following conclusion to Bailey’s treatment of Luke 16:1–13, in which he rejects textual criticism that would disunite the parable of the unjust steward from the ensuing poem about God and mammon:

Theories that suggest the second block of material to be a gradual collection of early Church comments on the parable prove to be inadequate to the structural and theological nature of the material. The poem is the work of a skilled Palestinian poet in the first century. There remains no reason to doubt that the author was Jesus of Nazareth.

Now maybe I had heard Jesus referred to as a skilled poet before, but if I did I had always gotten the sense that people were repeating things they had always been told were true about Jesus—the party line, so to say—without any supporting evidence. Because he was divine, of course he would be great at everything. Also, these kind of people generally seemed not to know anything about poetry. But with Bailey’s guidance through each passage, with his painstakingly-supplied evidence, I came to a much greater respect for its artistry, and I love the idea that Jesus enjoyed literary wordplay.

What is great about this book is that helps you see for yourself all those well-rehearsed attributes of Jesus: brilliant theologian, quick-witted, subtle, perceptive, compassionate, defender of women and the oppressed, bold, and fascinating. A committed Christian is meant to invest substantial time in getting to know Jesus better, and in fact the main goal of a Christian’s life is to become more like Jesus. But I have always found Jesus very hard to get to know.

Bailey takes the limited, cryptic biblical information we are given and vividly describes the dynamics of each situation. Time after time he brings out Jesus’s criticism of self-righteousness and his teaching of humble reliance on God’s righteousness and mercy. It is one thing to be told that these concepts generate from Jesus’s teaching in a vague, theoretical way. It is another thing to see for yourself how consistent the good news of grace was, and just how boldly and beautifully and surprisingly Jesus proclaimed it.

Paris Out of Hand

This isn’t a book you read from cover to cover. I picked it up from time to time over a few years. And what a pleasure to pick up it was—its deep red cloth cover, its heavy pages with rounded corners, its ornate endpapers, its lovely typography and period illustrations throughout in antique ink colors. The target market is the utterly impractical tourist, anyone fascinated by obscure symbols, absurd ideas, strange quotations, and clever wordplay. Amusement, not significance, was foremost in the production of this book.

My only beef is that such an arch-literate misguidebook, deriving most of its humor from scintillating jeux de mots, should stoop so low as to translate nearly every French phrase. Presumably anyone reading this book would have enough basic knowledge of France (not to mention common sense) to know that artisans means “craftspeople” and that the entrée in France is the first course. Humor is destroyed when it is explained, and the reader finds herself unnecessarily patronized.

Still, this annoyance can be overlooked in the mischievous romp through a Paris of fantasy, where the Hôtel Hélas hands out handkerchiefs with the room key and provides waterproof pens, and where you can choose between the Métro Marquis de Sade with its spiked seats or the Auto da Fée taxi service to convey you from the Folies Berbères nightclub to the Parc les Chênes Andalous.

The Dolphin Theatre murders

Dame Ngaio Marsh was an actress, playwright, and theatre producer, now best known for her mystery novels. The two murder mysteries I read feature Peregrine Jay, a theatre producer at London’s Dolphin Theatre.

Light Thickens, which I happened upon at a book sale, was Marsh’s last book, published posthumously. The murder in the book takes place during a production of Macbeth.

What distinguishes this book is the author’s intense admiration for Shakespeare and the theatre. As you read, you find out what it is like to choose a cast and direct a play. Marsh richly describes the product of the director’s infinite decisions: the staging, the costumes, the roles, the props, the moods, the sounds, the effects. You are treated to the spectacle of rehearsals, staff meetings, and offstage interactions involving the theatre company—a range of personalities from the actors to the props manager to the lighting guy to the child actor’s mother.

Marsh’s description of the play worked like an enthusiastic college professor’s recommendation of a book. Although it takes a long time for the murder to happen, you don’t care because you are enjoying so much the commentary on the unfolding action of the play:

Duncan arrives at the castle. The sound of wings fluttering in the evening air. Peaceful. Then the squeal of pipes, the rumble of the great doors, the opening and the assembly of servants. Seyton. Lady Macbeth a scarlet figure at the top of the stairs. Don’t go in, don’t go in.

I couldn’t help but reread Macbeth at the same time, and of course that was a magnificent experience.

The murder was dark, gruesome, and dramatic, but the mystery itself, the suspenseful hunt for the murderer and motive, was not that great. By the end of the book, though, I was content to have the murder simply be the excuse for such a fine book’s existence.

The book hinted at a previous crime at the Dolphin Theatre, so I proceeded to check out Killer Dolphin from the library. It was more lighthearted, and also highly enjoyable.

In the first couple of chapters, improbable events unfold in an absurd, comic, almost Wodehousian way. Later in the book, the interviewing of the suspects is suspenseful and intriguing, as facts intermittently come to light. Police Superintendent Alleyn has a bigger and more interesting role.

The parts I found the least enjoyable in both books were the petty intrigues among the leading actors. I never felt like I knew the characters well enough to care about their silly disputes. These books are possibly more interesting to theatre fans than to mystery fans, although I thought it was uniquely satisfying to encounter a combination of the two realms.

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro published this book, to great acclaim, before his popular success The Remains of the Day. For a while it seemed to me that the narrator was going to be the same kind of character as the other book’s narrator, and that the story was going to be an equally painful look backwards at the life of a person who failed to do the proper thing at the crucial time.

This book is set in Japan in the years that followed the end of World War II. The narrator, Masuji Ono, is a successful retired artist, the mysterious nature of whose work is a problem for the reader to figure out throughout the book.

Like The Remains of the Day, this book is written in the first person, in a stilted and distant manner, as if the narrator is describing someone else. In one scene this style seems to be a way for Ono to detach himself from the strong emotions he is remembering, and it has the striking effect of heightening the drama for the reader. “I suppose I remained silent for some moments,” he writes. “I must have stood up at around this point, for when I next spoke, I recall I was standing across the room from him, over by the veranda screens.”

For all his scientific detachment, it appears that others do not see Ono the way he sees himself. Ishiguro is a genius of progressive disclosure; what you learn through circular digressions is continually surprising and never absolutely satisfying. What is said and what is not said are equally important.

One remarkable thing about the book is the multiple story lines that repeat and subtly echo each other. Ono is working through the problem of his past at the same time he is facing the problems of his adult daughters’ lives moving forward. And his reflections on his time both as a student and a teacher present a subtly contrasting recapitulation of themes. As he related to his teachers when he was young, so he realizes his students must have related to him when he taught. Some of the dialogues seemed fuguelike within themselves, in their repetition and elaboration of phrases.

The artistry of the writing is apt for the main problem that the narrator explores: the nature of art. Is it enough to flawlessly depict the “floating world” of momentary pleasure? In a crucial conversation Ono and one of his teachers debate the opinion of another artistic friend: “The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning,” says the teacher. Can art be good or bad morally, as well as technically and aesthetically good or bad? How does it serve society?

It was a sad book in many ways, but there was also happiness and humor. I enjoyed the story of a man’s interesting life, the fascinating interplay between the generations, the description of postwar Japan’s collective sorrow, and the philosophical debates about art.

Welcome, Silence

This book by Carol North, published in 1987, is subtitled “My triumph over schizophrenia.” The writer is a psychiatrist whose struggles with schizophrenia began when she was six years old and intensified during college and medical school. Hers is one of the few cases in which her illness was cured by dialysis, and she now practices and teaches medicine.

In my cursory research of schizophrenia, I have never seen dialysis mentioned as a treatment. The book’s happy ending is therefore not going to be attainable by most schizophrenics. Although there are quite a few medicines to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, their side effects are often bad enough that many patients prefer to continue living with their confusion and paranoias.

The book was enormously helpful in understanding the inner life of someone with schizophrenia. In a very matter-of-fact way the author describes the extraordinary activity that was going on in her head and shows how she tried to make sense of the chaos. It is helpful to be aware that while people with schizophrenia often reach confused and erroneous conclusions, they can be founded on very real perceptions.

It struck me how important it was for the author to have people around her. By other people’s reactions to the environment she was able to gauge the reality of her perceptions, and she did this fairly successfully during the healthier periods of her life. Again, I hope this insight can help people in their interactions with people who have this illness. It is important to be patient and kind, realizing that your input is crucial and that any frustration that you have with the person issuing strange statements cannot compare with their own stress and confusion.

I will include an interesting excerpt from the book that shows you how simply and factually the author’s experiences are presented. Here the author has been telling her psychiatrist about the voices that she hears:

“You appear to be having some trouble concentrating on what you’re saying today,” said Dr. Hemingway. “Is there a particular problem?”
“Well, yes. They have sound-effect machines. Like now they are using an Echo Machine that makes both of our voices reverberate, and that bothers me so I can’t think very well. There are other machines like the Barking Dogs Machine and the Helicopter Machine that they can use to produce sounds out of nowhere. Sometimes I can’t tell whether noises are my neighbors or the sound-effect machines.”
I felt creepy talking about the voices. It was like talking about them behind their backs, except even worse because I knew they knew what I was saying about them…
“Do you ever hear your thoughts as if they had been spoken aloud?” Dr. Hemingway asked.
Wow, how does he know about that? Has he been reading my mind? I glared at him.
Finally I responded to his question: “Yes, I hear my thoughts out loud. In lecture. It bothers me.” …
“When was that the last time that happened?”
I felt my skin turning gray and starting to slide off my forearms right there in the psychiatrist’s office. The sensation was so alarming that I couldn’t possibly think to answer his question. It took all my concentration just to hold on to my skin. I was too embarrassed to tell him about my skin problem because I was sure it was a result of mental weakness.
“Is there some reason why you aren’t saying anything?” he asked…
I thought it would probably be better for me to tell him about my skin problem than for him to hear it from the voices or pick it up from my own thought waves. I explained to him that I had been quiet for a minute becasue I had been using all my concentration to keep my forearm skin from sliding off.
He offered up another “Mm-hmm.”

For Your Gifts

This is the fourth in a series of five novels based on the author’s family. The first book, Fields of Glory, amazed me with its meticulous interweaving of mundane descriptions of family members until slowly the light breaks in and you realize that this is a story of monumental importance.

His second book, of which the New York Times reviewer said “it is clear from the first page that Jean Rouaud is a writer who knows exactly where he is going and how to get there,” focuses on the author’s father. The third book is about the author himself, and this book portrays the mother.

As the portrait develops, you realize why this women has done little more than hover in the periphery of the previous volumes. “She will not read these lines,” For Your Gifts opens, and this becomes a refrain: a lament and an explanation, a prerequisite for the book’s existence.

The impressive thing about this book is that it is sad and touching and only reluctantly recriminating. What difficult person could be more complicated for a son to understand than his own mother? He painstakingly sorts through her past, the circumstances that made her the way she is, the person she must have been before her marriage, how many things she lost and left behind before he ever knew her. It is only then that he approaches the motif that shadows every page of his writing, his father’s death, which left his mother a young widow.

It was hard at first for me to like this book. Rouaud’s tortuous sentences, his unremitting sensitivity to every detail and every possible significance of every combination of details, sometimes tire me. Sometimes I feel like his metaphors are too stetched, but then I realize he could be right. I think his striking comparison of death and grief to birth and infancy may be worth considering.

When the author’s father died suddenly at the age of 41, his mother summoned help by knocking on the wall they shared with their neighbor:

It seems that with her fists beating on the wall she made her first appearance, as if all those years spent taking care of her family were a long gestation, a waiting, so that when the moment came . . . being deprived so long of the weight of speech and remembering the drumbeats on TV that made you hold your breath as death approached, she only had that primitive resource to announce her entrance into the world, as if by this announcement of imminent death, pounding like a tragic funeral drum, she signaled, in a way, her birth.

We think that maybe mourning was an excuse, that she was charged with too heavy a load, that all of her sorrow was not necessarily because of the deceased—that she had to bring to this birth the cries of the newborn, to sort through the tears, and to distinguish the formulaic fear of death from the unformulated wail of life. For she cries, our mother brutally abandoned in the December night, just like the one emerging from the waters who is thoughtlessly plunged into the great bath of nitrogen and oxygen. How do you survive this?

Now, she knows an infant’s fragility. She lost her first child at three weeks. One year could have understandably appeared to her an unattainable horizon. One year, while sudden death prowls and a thousand traps, one year to learn to balance and stand upright, which took our ancestors three million years—one year, for any newborn, is the end of the world. And this silence of hers after the disappearance of our spokesperson, which she only broke to ask us what we wanted to eat . . . This silence that we instantly attributed to the event that left us voiceless—we could certainly blame our mother for not being precocious, but how long does it take a child to express itself correctly? Five years? Six? Ten years before being able to choose the right article and to tell stainless steel from aluminum, white glass from colored glass, cut from molded crystal. That’s exactly how much time she took from her stock of years to rediscover the full use of speech.

Like it or hate it, this is a pretty good example of the way this writer stretches your view of things.

I eventually even began to admire the person he was taking such pains to faithfully present. This power to gain sympathy should not be surprising from an author who brings such humor and generous curiosity to his study of death and loss.

I have learned that the translator of Rouaud’s first three books died about six months ago but maybe this gives you time to catch up on those until they find a translator for this one.

Plum Wine

I found this book at a library sale. I enjoy getting books I have never heard of at library sales, maybe partly because of the risk involved. It sounded good: a suspense novel about a young American woman teaching in Japan. Lee Smith called it “memorable” on the cover. I like reading about foreign settings. I myself applied to teach for a year in Japan once, and ended up teaching for a year in France.

In this book review I must be diligent to apply John Updike’s six rules for reviewers, which are well worth reading and following.

Plum Wine is not the book I hoped it would be. It has many merits, such as describing the effects of the atomic bomb on the people who lived in Hiroshima. I learned more than I knew about that particular experience.

The premise is intriguing: a woman who dies mysteriously and bequeaths her scroll-diaries to the American teacher Barbara, who then has to make sense of the gift. It is cute to read about the Japanese people’s efforts to pronounce her name—”Balabala.” But is the book as good as it could be, given what it is? It is hard to pin down what is lacking.

Some of the things that annoy me most about the book are actually very true to life. I was frustrated with the main character because she makes only the most meager, half-hearted efforts to learn Japanese, even though her failure to do so isolates her and magnifies all her problems. However, this seems to be very common among short-term American expatriates.

She has a superficial relationship with the people around her and doesn’t seek their guidance in very important matters. But I experienced a similar estrangement when I lived in France. It was hard for me to obtain guidance from the French people I knew. Whether it is caused by pride or by cultural barriers, this is realistic.

Barbara develops an intense devotion to a Japanese lady she seems to have known only very slightly. This seems contrived to the reader, but it is true that when you are all alone in a foreign country, you can become strongly attached to the people you are thrown together with, especially the other expatriates, without knowing much about their identity back home. We cannot blame the main character for caring deeply about someone she didn’t know very well.

Maybe the most unpleasant thing for me was reading about her unhealthy relationship with a Japanese man. Here Barbara is beginning to get to know Seiji better:

“Would you be interested to see my new work?”
She followed him into the pottery. There were several pieces laid out on a table. All of them had a jagged, unfinished look, a primal quality. “I have made by hand instead of on wheel,” he said as she touched the sharp edges.
“They’re powerful,” she said. “Strongly emotional.”
“Perhaps because I think of you as I make them,” he said. She took his hand and kissed it; he’d never expressed his feelings so openly before.

Of course he turns out to be exactly the kind of cad you sense he is in this passage, and the innocent American girl walks right into his trap. I suppose the story has been repeated over and over again around the world for centuries. It is true and lifelike, I am sure. But I felt like I was taken to a foreign country and then kept in a small room, taken out rarely to see only a few blurry scenes of that world.

The Country of the Pointed Firs

My grandmother gave me a 1968 edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories the last time I visited her, saying that she has read it over and over again. Taped in the flyleaf of her book is a January 1970 column by the Omaha World-Herald’s book editor calling it “lovely, if slight” and praising it along with Middlemarch as an example of beauty that endures. There is also a tiny clipping announcing that Alice Musselman will review this book for an Omaha neighborhood women’s club Wednesday, 2 p.m., at Mrs. T. Tennyson Harris’s home.

There is an address label in the back flyleaf of the book that appears to be that of Alice Musselman herself. Some passages in the book are marked for emphasis, as if for public reading.

The Country of the Pointed Firs was first published in 1896, when Sarah Orne Jewett was about 47 years old and Mrs. Harris, the hostess of the women’s club, was 9. The book review clipping is below the newspaper column, so if we assume that it was taped in afterwards, the widowed Mrs. Harris had to be at least 82 years old at the time of the women’s gathering. It is likely that my copy of the book was there, in the hands of the guest reviewer. I’m not sure where my grandmother got the book.

The only thing I had previously read by Sarah Orne Jewett was “The White Heron,” which seems to be the short story that is always chosen for the anthologies. It is a fine story, but it seems to be a rather limited example of Jewett’s writing, which is otherwise so full of human interactions and details of social life in coastal Maine.

The details are the glory of this book. I learn what it was like to live in another time, and I see fascinating characters portrayed with love and truth, their flaws described with humor rather than judgment.

Here are some examples of details about mundane life that are striking to a modern reader:

I found my luncheon ready on the table in the little entry, wrapped in its shining old homespun napkin, and as if by way of special consolation, there was a stone bottle of Mrs. Todd’s best spruce beer, with a long piece of cod line wound round it by which it could be lowered for coolness into the deep schoolhouse well.

-

“Truth is, I’ve been off visitin’; there’s an old Indian footpath leadin’ over towards the Back Shore through the great heron swamp that anybody can’t travel over all summer. You have to seize your time some day just now, while the low ground’s summer-dried as it is to-day, and before the fall rains set in.”

-

“It’s a dreadful long way to go with a horse; you have to go ‘most as far as the old Bowden place an’ turn off to the left, a master long, rough road, and then you have to turn right round as soon as you get there if you mean to get home before nine o’clock at night. But to strike across country from here, there’s plenty o’ time in the shortest day, and you can have a good hour or two’s visit beside; ’tain’t but a very few miles, and it’s pretty all the way along.”

-

“No,” said Mrs. Hand, speaking wistfully,―“no, we never were in the habit of keeping Christmas at our house. Mother died when we were all young; she would have been the one to keep up with all new ideas, but father and grandmother were old-fashioned folks, and―well, you know how ’twas then, Miss Pendexter: nobody took much notice of the day except to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

Then there are the cute interpersonal insights:

“You must have felt very tired,” said I, eagerly listening.
“I was ‘most beat out, with watchin’ an’ tendin’ and all,” answered Mrs. Todd, with as much sympathy in her voice as if she were speaking of another person.

And finally, the philosophical musings that sometimes seem a bit too grand, but still never fail to keep you thinking about things:

More than this one cannot give to a young State for its enlightenment; the sea captains and the captains’ wives of Maine knew something of the wide world, and never mistook their native parishes for the whole instead of a part thereof; they knew not only Thomaston and Castine and Portland, but London and Bristol and Bordeaux, and the strange-mannered harbors of the China Sea.

In the introduction, the editor says that Willa Cather chose this, when asked, as one of three American novels “deserving of a long, long life,” along with The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. I wonder which authors of our time, 100 years from now, will prove to have captured the world with such sensitivity and thoughtfulness?

Mr. Blue

My edition of this book by Myles Connolly is a really cute, small paperback, and delightful to carry around, but the contents disappointed me. I think it was the loneliness of the main character that left me empty.

He is a young man in New England who takes the commands of Jesus seriously, to sell everything you have and give to the poor, to forsake the normal path of security and comfort for a greater purpose. You sense that he is well-liked by everyone, but you hardly ever meet any of the people that he helps. Most of the author’s encounters with him involve long speeches from Blue about his wild and unrealistic dreams, the kind of talk you may have heard from people in your own life who are mentally unstable.

The introduction to this book compares Mr. Blue to Jay Gatsby. The narrator can’t agree with Blue’s lifestyle, and he doesn’t always understand him, but he still always admires him. To me, Blue just seems incomplete.

Philosophy

Why do I write these incomplete, inconsequential little book reviews? Sometimes I wonder what the point is.

I can think of three reasons. First, I have such a bad memory that writing down my reactions after finishing a book is the only way of ensuring that I have any recollection at all of what I read.

Second, it is a discipline for me as a writer. Sometimes I have time to write a review that is a little more polished than the others, but usually they are simple and undistinguished. The act of sitting down to write at all is usually the hardest thing for writers, and I consider each book review a triumph in that respect.

Third, I would like to be someone who creates more than she consumes. I find myself going crazy with all the information I feel like I should take in, and taking stuff in always seems to take priority. Perhaps I feel like it is a preparation before I am equipped to say anything. But there is no way to consume everything! At some point we must stop. I hate feeling like I am just going from one book to the next without time to reflect and absorb it into my life. These book reviews are a response to what I have taken in, a minor creative endeavor. I submit that if we don’t have time to respond to the books we read, we don’t really have time to read.

In sum, these book reviews are simple, safe, and not too revealing; and perhaps they are somewhat interesting for the few people who read them. I can find nothing to say against the habit of writing them.