Summer books (21-24)
Aug. 14th, 2012 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslant21. Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Stacy Schiff
Schiff is fast becoming my second favorite biographist (no one will ever surpass Hermione Lee!), I loved her Cleopatra and Vera was no disappointment. In Schiff's analysis and storytelling, Vera emerges from her self-imposed self-effacing disguise, mostly, but retains a hell of a lot of mystery all the same. If I have one quibble it's that occasionally what Schiff reads with complexity and nuance may be cynically summed up as "occasionally Vera confused her pronouns when writing or ghostwriting letters" even though yes, I agree, it is also a fascinating study of a unique marriage and a unique intellectual pairing and yes, the pronoun confusion *is* more than confusion, it's where you see how her mind became confusingly twinned with his. What a life -- an ex-patriate from Tsarist Russia, railing against Communism her whole life, intimidating nearly everyone, deeply in love. She kept him afloat through his weird working habits and their itinerant life. I simultaneously wished to meet her and was afraid, knowing that based on her extraordinary pre-revolutionary Russia education (so intense!), and based on her attitude towards the American students she and her husband taught, they would have thought I was worse than a dilettante, even with fancy college learning. Americans just look...awfully stupid by comparison, when you've been raised quadrilingually and memorized Latin taxonomy from age 4 and can recite every poem by heart etc etc. Go read this! It is an awesome biography and she is a fascinating woman. (And now I want to go find more of Schiff's back catalogue to read, too. Though I did go to pick up Nabokov's "Ada" and it was dense and I dropped it. Many critics agreed. And in case you're interested, no, Schiff never does provide an explanation for why Nabokov wrote about Lolita-esque characters and relationships on and off for most of his writing life...but then perhaps that's because her book is mainly about Vera, not about Vladimir.)
22. Kindred, Olivia Butler
This pick was the happy result of strolling down the scifi aisle in my local library, looking for recognizable authors. This was the first book of hers I'd read, and it was excellent, and wrenching and deceptively simple: time travel and slavery and time paradoxes and unexplained things and social commentary on slavery etc. And yet all of that is unspoken subtext, really I was so engaged with the story itself the whole time -- and maybe that's her genius. (And it occurred to me, the Time Traveller's Wife ripped off this concept, in a less successful fashion, all the confusing relationships without any of the social realness of visiting the past and all its differentness.)
23. Foreskin's Lament, Shalom Auslander
This was a mostly forgettable book -- picked up after hearing a chapter on an old This American Life episode. Autobiographical musings on an orthodox Jewish childhood under a pretty epically horrible father, and later rebellions against religion, and returning to the fold, and leaving it again. The title in question comes from the overarching story he uses to frame his recollections, his wife's pregnancy and how they wrestle with whether to circumcise, what does it all meeeeeeean etc. This is a hard topic for me to read about, I won't lie, and a lot of the worst parts were totally glossed over (like the nurse who says to them "infants don't feel pain" LOLOLOLOL sob) and eventually they did circumcise but medically, not by a mohel, and it was this horrible rift with his family, super awkward etc and then no conclusion about it. I wasn't sure why I kept reading it, after a while; I wanted it to become a deeper story, and ultimately it disappointed, not just because of the painful circumcision storyline. Having so recently read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," it was an unfortunate contrast. Auslander is occasionally hilarious, but not really out to make an interesting meaning out of his experiences, and not really funny enough to make the entire book worth it, to me. Also, it's probably pretty impossible to write a book about circumcising your baby that I will not feel horribly triggered by, so that's just me and not the book, but I don't think I'm exaggerating -- it's an okay book, not great.
24. Shtetl, Eva Hoffman
Books about Jews! It is my theme of the summer! After being less than satisfied with Hoffman's "After Such Knowledge" earlier this summer, onto her more relatable history of shtetls in general and the shtetl of Bransk in particular. Though perhaps it's more accurate to say that this is a pretty comprehensive history of "hey what the hell happened in Poland since the 1100s" with reference to the Jews but not wholly focusing on them. I remember hearing so many jokes about the Polish in the 80s/90s, what was up with that? Because didn't the Nazis hate the Polish pretty epically? Except also the Jews hate the Poles too? So who are we aligning ourselves with, exactly? Poland looms pretty large in Hoffman's individual history, as the locus of the Holocaust and of the violence and painful erasures immediately post-war, which I don't think I'd ever really grasped as part of WWII history, in school. She does a good job of pulling out the complex attitudes of modern Polish individuals in Bransk, or residents who emigrated later, many of whom express contradictory attitudes, either "The Jews were awful and took advantage of the Poles, but also, I really liked them and we always brought food to the ghetto, later" or "the Poles are all deeply anti-semitic and were/are terrible people but also we got along so well and took care of each other." None of the interviewees found contradictions in expressing these sentiments. She uses these modern interviews (published 2007) together with the historical record, and the interviews are more on the periphery. The bulk of the book is the long crazy history of Polish nationalism and the shifting economic trends that influenced anti-semitism, and how Poland kept getting split up by competing powers who never bothered to declare war (twice!), and how the political parties were in such chaos whenever they tried to reconstitute the state. What a mess. This was well written, relatable, fascinating history, and Hoffman portrays a very touching portrait of pre-war Jewish culture, in particular the sabbath experiences. Highly recommended.
Schiff is fast becoming my second favorite biographist (no one will ever surpass Hermione Lee!), I loved her Cleopatra and Vera was no disappointment. In Schiff's analysis and storytelling, Vera emerges from her self-imposed self-effacing disguise, mostly, but retains a hell of a lot of mystery all the same. If I have one quibble it's that occasionally what Schiff reads with complexity and nuance may be cynically summed up as "occasionally Vera confused her pronouns when writing or ghostwriting letters" even though yes, I agree, it is also a fascinating study of a unique marriage and a unique intellectual pairing and yes, the pronoun confusion *is* more than confusion, it's where you see how her mind became confusingly twinned with his. What a life -- an ex-patriate from Tsarist Russia, railing against Communism her whole life, intimidating nearly everyone, deeply in love. She kept him afloat through his weird working habits and their itinerant life. I simultaneously wished to meet her and was afraid, knowing that based on her extraordinary pre-revolutionary Russia education (so intense!), and based on her attitude towards the American students she and her husband taught, they would have thought I was worse than a dilettante, even with fancy college learning. Americans just look...awfully stupid by comparison, when you've been raised quadrilingually and memorized Latin taxonomy from age 4 and can recite every poem by heart etc etc. Go read this! It is an awesome biography and she is a fascinating woman. (And now I want to go find more of Schiff's back catalogue to read, too. Though I did go to pick up Nabokov's "Ada" and it was dense and I dropped it. Many critics agreed. And in case you're interested, no, Schiff never does provide an explanation for why Nabokov wrote about Lolita-esque characters and relationships on and off for most of his writing life...but then perhaps that's because her book is mainly about Vera, not about Vladimir.)
22. Kindred, Olivia Butler
This pick was the happy result of strolling down the scifi aisle in my local library, looking for recognizable authors. This was the first book of hers I'd read, and it was excellent, and wrenching and deceptively simple: time travel and slavery and time paradoxes and unexplained things and social commentary on slavery etc. And yet all of that is unspoken subtext, really I was so engaged with the story itself the whole time -- and maybe that's her genius. (And it occurred to me, the Time Traveller's Wife ripped off this concept, in a less successful fashion, all the confusing relationships without any of the social realness of visiting the past and all its differentness.)
23. Foreskin's Lament, Shalom Auslander
This was a mostly forgettable book -- picked up after hearing a chapter on an old This American Life episode. Autobiographical musings on an orthodox Jewish childhood under a pretty epically horrible father, and later rebellions against religion, and returning to the fold, and leaving it again. The title in question comes from the overarching story he uses to frame his recollections, his wife's pregnancy and how they wrestle with whether to circumcise, what does it all meeeeeeean etc. This is a hard topic for me to read about, I won't lie, and a lot of the worst parts were totally glossed over (like the nurse who says to them "infants don't feel pain" LOLOLOLOL sob) and eventually they did circumcise but medically, not by a mohel, and it was this horrible rift with his family, super awkward etc and then no conclusion about it. I wasn't sure why I kept reading it, after a while; I wanted it to become a deeper story, and ultimately it disappointed, not just because of the painful circumcision storyline. Having so recently read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," it was an unfortunate contrast. Auslander is occasionally hilarious, but not really out to make an interesting meaning out of his experiences, and not really funny enough to make the entire book worth it, to me. Also, it's probably pretty impossible to write a book about circumcising your baby that I will not feel horribly triggered by, so that's just me and not the book, but I don't think I'm exaggerating -- it's an okay book, not great.
24. Shtetl, Eva Hoffman
Books about Jews! It is my theme of the summer! After being less than satisfied with Hoffman's "After Such Knowledge" earlier this summer, onto her more relatable history of shtetls in general and the shtetl of Bransk in particular. Though perhaps it's more accurate to say that this is a pretty comprehensive history of "hey what the hell happened in Poland since the 1100s" with reference to the Jews but not wholly focusing on them. I remember hearing so many jokes about the Polish in the 80s/90s, what was up with that? Because didn't the Nazis hate the Polish pretty epically? Except also the Jews hate the Poles too? So who are we aligning ourselves with, exactly? Poland looms pretty large in Hoffman's individual history, as the locus of the Holocaust and of the violence and painful erasures immediately post-war, which I don't think I'd ever really grasped as part of WWII history, in school. She does a good job of pulling out the complex attitudes of modern Polish individuals in Bransk, or residents who emigrated later, many of whom express contradictory attitudes, either "The Jews were awful and took advantage of the Poles, but also, I really liked them and we always brought food to the ghetto, later" or "the Poles are all deeply anti-semitic and were/are terrible people but also we got along so well and took care of each other." None of the interviewees found contradictions in expressing these sentiments. She uses these modern interviews (published 2007) together with the historical record, and the interviews are more on the periphery. The bulk of the book is the long crazy history of Polish nationalism and the shifting economic trends that influenced anti-semitism, and how Poland kept getting split up by competing powers who never bothered to declare war (twice!), and how the political parties were in such chaos whenever they tried to reconstitute the state. What a mess. This was well written, relatable, fascinating history, and Hoffman portrays a very touching portrait of pre-war Jewish culture, in particular the sabbath experiences. Highly recommended.
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