Earlier this month I finished Jutta Person's Esel, a thin German-language volume of cultural history about donkeys and anthropomorphic interpretations of them by everyone from Roman satirists through Christian theologians to German romantics. My uncle M. gave it to me as a birthday present last year because donkeys are my favourite animals. Now another birthday gift, Paul Auster's 4321, is lined up to read next.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji, are also read, and although both were undoubtedly good, I won't write reviews at present because they'd be too half-baked.
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| Cover of A Hundred Million Years and a Day via Gallic Books/Belgravia Books |
In a big geographical leap, I've moved to reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, a French hit novel that is set at various times in the first half of the 20th century, It is written from the perspective of a solitary, dry-souled ivory tower paleontologist — written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated sublimely and award-winningly by Sam Taylor. Perhaps because my French literary frame of reference is small, the atmosphere and the setting remind me of Marcel Pagnol and the spare style reminds me of Le grand Meaulnes. It's also well thought out; sometimes time-hopping in books is so tediously confusing that I want to gouge out my eyes, but here the back and forth — as the details are filled in — adds genuine suspense.
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The book I'm most enthusiastic right now because it makes me happy is Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey by Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro. A basic knowledge of musicals or of mid-20th century film is enough to make its revelations understandable.
The aim of the authors is to tell us exactly what we want to know: each chapter is grouped quite tightly around a specific musical. Fortunately the gossip is generous and not mean-spirited. We hear that Jerome Robbins, a god of sorts among choreographers, was tremendously unpleasant; but we are also told that this was because he was unhappy.
In general Avian (from whose perspective the book is written) and Santopietro express modern views. Avian, in his eighties, makes little attempt to present a great man's (or woman's) sadism as ideal or even as a useful evil. He presents it as a flaw, but as a flaw whose owner still deserves sympathy.
I love the old-fashioned turns of phrase in the book, too, however: 'great gal', or "[... q]uicker than you can say “West Side Story,” Audrey set her cap for Michael and snagged him."
It feels twee or reductive to call Avian delightful, but the adjective comes to mind anyway.
The authors are friendly raconteurs, as we see not just there, but also when they wink at the audience with sentences like this vignette from an unsuccessful play production:
Act Two contained a King Lear ballet—yes, you read that right—and I was completely at sea.
Avian also mentions his experience of 1960s drug culture in a characteristically wholesome way:
I tried pot for the first time and thought, “Hmm, this sure is a lot of fun. And creative.”
He died in January this year, as I was startled to learn when reading his Wikipedia biography.
Readers who want memoirists to disembowel their private lives might find this book not for them, but fans of Broadway, or of 20th century American film star history, and perhaps also fans of New York City's social history in general, will probably love this. National Public Radio included it in their list of the best books of 2020.
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"Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer Bob Avian dies aged 83" by Adrian Horton (January 22, 2021) [Guardian]
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As part of my research into the history of the earliest decades of the 20th century, I have also jumped into the World War I chapters of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's Autobiography. Published well after that War, when the Cold War was still on, it is like the oak in Jean de la Fontaine's fable — not in that its roots touch on the realm of the dead, but rather that its roots touch on the realm of Victoria and an era of absolute British aristocratic privilege that seems utterly absurd now.
I first read the autobiography when I was a teenager struggling with my own opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He was briefly an imaginary posthumous mentor.
And now — even as I wince at his views on relationships during the passages about Lady Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell; even as I find him overprivileged in one passage, and mindbogglingly out of touch in another; and even though I don't admire his catty moments — in general it feels like his intelligence, his wonderful turns of phrase, and his dedication are not in doubt. And his insights on political and social celebrities are also great, if partial, gossip.
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| Cover of Why Men Fight (1917) via Wikimedia Commons |
Here is a passage where he has been imprisoned due to his activism against the First World War, in a rather posh prison division thanks to the intervention of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour:
I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. [...] I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [...] and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.
(Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1978. p. 256)
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I'm also reading Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, about a large midcentury American family that included a high number of sons with schizophrenia. I am struggling with it. As a takedown of the conformist 1950s ideal of domestic bliss, or of the unalloyed joys of military service and being in a military family, I think Hidden Valley Road is the most effective.
I would like it better if the family could have written their own history. It's not much fun of reading their lives as a psychological literature exercise. From my amateur armchair perspective, I like it better when we acknowledge that we can follow some of the thought patterns of the more conspicuously mentally ill, for example.
I've known people who are genuinely healthy in mind, like the psychological equivalent of an amazingly athletic person. In most cases I would say, however, that we are participants in, and not observers of, the human battle for logic, reason and proportionate emotional reactions. If we don't acknowledge that, it's unhealthy for ourselves and harmful to others.
