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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 7, 2007

CAAF: 5×5 Books That Take You There by Nicola Griffith

August 7, 2007 by cfrye

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from author Nicola Griffith, whose gripping novel Always is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
When I read I want to immerse myself in the word world: to taste it, hear it, feel it on my skin. I want the people and places and modes of thought to invade my mirror neurons–to persuade me, just for a while, that this narrative is my lived experience.
I grew up with the notion that ‘escapist’ reading was intellectually inferior to coolly analytical text, but now I’m on the side of Tolkien: those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the jailers. Now I’ll read anything, as long as it’s good, as long as it gives me that sense of multiplication, of time travel and life extension.
1. All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Poetic bricolage brimming with energy. With cinematic jump cuts and scene notes, Logue reimagines the first battle of the Iliad, renaming familiar characters and gleefully mixing imagery that’s historically accurate and wildly anachronistic (arrows carve tunnels through people’s necks the width of a lipstick, Idomeneo would ‘sign a five-war-contract on the nod’). As I read I felt dust gritting under my palms and blood in my mouth. An experience as startling as a flick in the eye.
2. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. in collaboration with Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s American partner). The physical embarrassments of age, memories of cold skin and hot fires of youth, the awfulness of no longer being able to hunt. With brilliant precision, Yourcenar delineates the physical and cultural environment’s influence on character. (For insight into Yourcenar’s life and work, see Joan Acocella’s lovely essay.)
3. A History of the English Church and People by Bede (for maximum culture shock, try the Plummar/Sherley-Price edition with its mind-bogglingly literal mid-twentieth century introduction). Here is an eighth-century English monk inventing the notion of cultural history in the short, snappy one- or two-page chapters I thought had been first used by twentieth-century bestsellers. Now I’m wriggling with excitment at the imminent arrival on my doorstep of a new complete translation of the 20-book The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated by Barney, Lewis, Beach, and Berghof. This was the Wikipedia of Bede’s time–his version of time travel. Want to know why architects used green Carystean marble to panel libraries, or whether amber is born of the sap of poplar or pine? Look no further.
4. The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. The first book, Master and Commander, is essentially the opening chapter of a 20-volume novel set against the naval engagements of the Napoleonic wars. Jane Austen on a boat. Although the quality dims over the last five volumes, the first fifteen are faultless. I marvel at, to quote A.S. Byatt, O’Brian’s ‘prodigal specificity’, his humane touch, his humor and subtlety, the perfect balance of exuberance and restraint, his unerring eye for the exact word, the comic detail, and his ability to delineate changes in the friendship between two men with the same authority as volatile politics in South America or a brutal cutlass fight. I was utterly swept away by these books, and returned delighted and increased.
5.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. A chapter in the history of a world that never was but should have been. As we travel with hobbits and dwarves we taste elven bread and good honest beer, smell the fumes of Orodruin and the existential rot of the marshes of Mordor. The book is stuffed with satisfactions: hobbit delight in a good snug hole in a sandy bank, dwarfish appreciation of a beautiful cavern, the soul-stirring gallop of the perfect horse. The film adaptation was enormous fun–at times even moving–but it lacked understanding of the Anglo-Saxon burdens of noblesse oblige and elegy which lie at the book’s heart. Journeying with Tolkien in print is stunning; when we get to the end and come back, home looks different.

TT: Almanac

August 7, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Only someone who sees other people as having intrinsic value can make friends. This does not mean that his friends will not be of instrumental value. But their instrumental value depends upon the refusal to pursue it. The use of friends is available only to those who do not seek it. Those who collect friends for utility’s sake are not collecting friends: they are manipulating people.”
Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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