Pico Iyer: ‘Best Books’
The June 5 issue of The Week magazine featured a brief column by Pico Iyer entitled simply “Best Books.” I was pleased to find that of the six titles appearing on his list, I had read four. They are:
Pico Iyer and I apparently share a deep interest in Graham Greene; Iyer has even written a book on the subject called The Man Within My Head (2012). In his review in the Wall Street Journal, Allan Massie sums Greene up shrewdly:
Greene was drawn to causes to which he could never fully commit himself. He was a Catholic convert who took the baptismal name of Thomas, the apostle who doubted. He found his reputation as “a Catholic novelist” irksome and made of this discomfort and his doubts one of his best novels, “A Burnt-Out Case” (1960). He championed commitment against indifference, perhaps because indifference offered him the stronger temptation, and he accordingly felt deeply the evil that can stem from it. The narrators of both “The End of the Affair” (1951) and “The Quiet American” (1955) are men ravaged by an inability to believe who consequently harm others and also themselves.
Or, as Dante puts it:
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
I highly recommend the 2002 film The Quiet American starring Michael Caine. His was a moving and powerful performance in a film that was so relentlessly tense that I don’t think I could sit through it today.
In re Thoreau, do yourself a favor and visit lovely Concord, Massachusetts, where his spirit resides peaceably, along with those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and other illustrious notables of America’s literary past. Take along with you Jane Langton’s delightful mystery God in Concord.
Also highly recommended: Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls.
And then, of course, there’s the quiet power of Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
For my write-up of Too Much Happiness, click here.
As for A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s chronicle of the unremitting cruelties that characterized Indian society in the mid-1970s was just plain excruciating. I read it soon after it came out in 1995, and I was devastated. It was brilliant. But it’s one of those novels that you have to recommend to people with a caveat: It will probably break your heart. I know it did mine.
So: The other two title’s on Pico Iyer’s list: One is The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 
I love Dickinson’s poetry and have read several books about her, in which her letters have been quoted. Coming as they do from the pen of this undisputed genius, these missives are obviously worth seeking out. And if you buy into the fiction that Dickinson’s life was quiet and uneventful, may I recommend Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon.
Iyer’s final title is In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I’ve made several attempts at the first volume, Swann’s Way, and never gotten much farther than the first few pages. Ergo, I will let Pico Iyer have the final word:
Some writers show us the self; some give us the world. Proust saw through both with enough cool poise to fashion the wisest, deepest — and funniest — handbook to life this side of a Buddhist sutra.
Marcel Proust
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Art
I recently took a week long course on art inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This was a wonderful experience.
Here are just a few of the paintings we studied:
The Rape of Europa, by Noel Nicolas Coypel
Jupiter and Io, by Antonio da Coreggio (Can you discern Jupiter’s face? Hint: look closely at Io’s face.)
Many are the ways the wily Jove sates his seemingly endless desire! Here is Rembrandt’s Abduction of Europa:
This is one of the few mythological subjects painted by Rembrandt.
The Rape of Europa
This masterpiece by Titian is owned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We’re lucky to still have it; the thieves who perpetrated the notorious theft of March 18, 1990 kindly left it behind. There was some hope that when Whitey Bulgur was finally apprehended in 2011, that he might reveal knowledge of the whereabouts of the missing art. But apparently he did not; if he possessed any useful knowledge on the subject, it’s gone with him to the grave.
Meanwhile, the museum is currently offering a $10 million dollar reward “…for information leading to the recovery of the stolen works.”
Anybody know anything?
Empty picture frames remain in place – sad reminders.
**************************
Mercury and Argus, by Velasquez. This one of the last paintings Velasquez did. I find it utterly haunting; Mercury is preparing to kill the hundred-eyed Argus. He has seen too much.
Deucalion and Pirrha, by Giovanni Maria Bottala. Following the Great Flood, humanity is being reborn from those rocks this man and woman have been commanded to throw behind them.
This is a huge, delicious subject. There’s more to come.
‘And what is so rare as a day in June….’
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;From The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell
This is a happy, even joyous poem, for a decidedly not joyous time. Yet it may be a worthy consolation.
Yesterday, when I stepped outside to retrieve the paper, I was greeted by a day of almost unearthly beauty: shining sun; cool, still air; intense blue sky…perfect. And yet, of course, it was very much of this earth, this very earth, which at this moment is so torn by grief and pain.
[O have mercy on us, Great Creator….]
Meanwhile, I attempted to capture the sound of the neighborhood woodpecker plying his trade. You have to strain most awfully to hear him:
Of course, I have never seen one. I would be the world’s worst birdwatcher. Neither of the following photos were taken by me. They are ‘possibles’ for woodpeckers here in the Free State:
Downy woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker
(At times, these feathered creatures may be heard rat-a-tat-tatting on the house. In those moments, we refer to them as Aluminum-siding peckers, or just Siding peckers. When they choose to engage in this activity when one is trying to nap, they are called Clueless peckers, or possibly Annoying peckers.)
Anyway, one is eternally grateful for clear, dry mornings, rare as they are in these parts. Just a few mornings ago, I was greeted by this, on our west-facing windows:
Has anyone written a poem about humidity? Probably, but I don’t know it. Music has certainly been written about spring and summer:
The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, by Maria Tatar
This is an odd, and oddly appealing, little book. It is comprised of a lengthy introduction – 62 pages including notes – followed by 21 short tales, all variations on the Snow White story.
As I wrote in a previous post, Maria Tatar’s introduction consists of the following:
An analysis – at times, a psychoanalysis – of the Snow White story and its different meanings and iterations in a variety of cultures.
It must first be stipulated that the Disney film, released in 1937, created the template for this fairy tale as it has come down to us at present. That film in turn relied as its source on the story as told by the Grimm Bothers in the 1812 edition of their fairy tale collection.
Here is a scene from the Disney movie:
This was the first full length cel animated feature length film in the history of motion pictures.
Maria Tatar discusses how the reader is affected when, as she picturesquely terms it, “we trip across a trope:”
There are narrative tropes (“woman in peril…” ), but there are also the tropes that folklorists refer to as motifs, instantly recognizable that connect to other tales and produce a pleasing resonance, for example “haunted castle,” “impossible tasks,” or “hedge of thorns.” These tropes not only arrest our attention but also draw us into a force field that demands intellectual engagement by challenging us to make connections, draw contrasts, and consider how the trope is deployed.
So, as you can readily perceive from the above, this book may ostensibly be about a fairy tale, but it demands an adult engagement with the material being presented. In fact, as she later observes, “That brilliant allegory of aging, bewitching in its artistic virtuosity, reminds us that just as much is slipped into fairy tales for grown-ups as for the young, even more in many cases.” Continuing in the same vein:
It is easy enough to put t he story of Snow White in dialog with other myths – Demeter and Persephone, to cite just one example – with its daughter abducted and taken to the underworld, only to return, seasonally, in a move that signals resurrection and renewal. What is important in these narratives – all bits and pieces of what anthropologists tell us is a larger myth about life and death as much as about beauty – is how they draw from the same storytelling arsenal to take on the great existential mysteries as they try to create counternarratives to the reality that all living beings must die.
Well, this is deep stuff. Psychology, philosophy, religion, teleology – all are evoked in this quest. I found Tatar’s ruminations on these questions, profound and thought provoking. And it helps greatly that her writing is quite simply beautiful.
The introduction takes up nearly half of the book. The remainder consists of 21 stories which are variations on the Snow White tale. As absorbed and delighted as I was by the introduction, I’ve found the stories tough going. They vary from fanciful to grotesque, and after a while, I was surprised to find them somewhat irritating. So far, I’ve read seven of them, widely spaced, of necessity.
Even so, I recommend this unique and fascinating volume. And I am especially grateful for the picture inserts. They serve as a reminder of the transcendent art of the great illustrators. There is the enchanting Schneewittchen (Snow White), at the top of this post, by Alexander Zick, a German artist of the 19th and early 20th century. And these:
by Victor Paul Mohn
by Thekla Brauer
by Katharine Cameron
by Lothar Meggendorfer
by Jesse Willcox Smith
by Hans Makart
by Maxfield Parrish
There are many more.
In her review of The Fairest of Them All in one of my favorite magazines, Literary Review, Lucy Lethbridge concludes:
Shocking yet familiar, these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book that follows Snow White’s trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.
Solace in Beauty
I am deeply sorry for the pain being felt by many people right now in this country.
I fear that the beauty of this first day of June little avails aching hearts. So I would like to offer some words, sounds, and images of beauty, as possible solace.
Willem Kalf (1619-1693), Pronk Still Life with Holbein Bowl, Nautilus Cup, Glass Goblet and Fruit Dish
About the chambered nautilus, Wikipedia tells us this:
Nautilus shells were popular items in the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities and were often mounted by goldsmiths on a thin stem to make extravagant nautilus shell cups, such as the Burghley Nef, mainly intended as decorations rather than for use. Small natural history collections were common in mid-19th-century Victorian homes, and chambered nautilus shells were popular decorations.
Here is a cutaway view showing the configuration of the shell’s chambers: 
In his eponymous poem, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrests a deeper meaning from this curious artifact:
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,Sails the unshadowed main,—The venturous bark that flingsOn the sweet summer wind its purpled wingsIn gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,And coral reefs lie bare,Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.****************Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;Wrecked is the ship of pearl!And every chambered cell,Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,Before thee lies revealed,—Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!*****************Year after year beheld the silent toilThat spread his lustrous coil;Still, as the spiral grew,He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,Stole with soft step its shining archway through,Built up its idle door,Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.**************Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,Child of the wandering sea,Cast from her lap, forlorn!From thy dead lips a clearer note is bornThan ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!While on mine ear it rings,Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—*********************Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,As the swift seasons roll!Leave thy low-vaulted past!Let each new temple, nobler than the last,Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,Till thou at length art free,Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!****************
Books to the Ceiling 