I posted my last entry in this series exactly a year ago; now it’s time to survey my haphazard 2025 reading. I started off the year with Simenon’s Maigret and the Old Lady, because we’d seen a television adaptation; it was as enjoyable as you expect Simenon to be. My Russian reading began with Alexander Veltman’s Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию [Virginie, or a journey to Russia] (LH) and left off there for quite a while (I’ve been finding it hard to choose novels that hold my attention). Because I was watching Jacques Rivette’s (very long) Joan the Maid (Jeanne la pucelle), I found myself reading Helen Castor’s excellent Joan of Arc: A History, which starts with Agincourt and presents Joan in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and the complex politics of her time rather than just tramp over the well-trodden ground of her vision, rise, and fall, and I finally got a decent sense of that stuff. (As it happens, my wife and I are now watching Rivette’s four-hour La Belle Noiseuse, which I last saw when it came out in the early ’90s, so I’ll probably be reading the Balzac story it’s based on.) I read Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, which didn’t rock my world but was enjoyable and informative. My wife and I chose Olivia Manning’s School for Love for our nighttime reading and enjoyed it (LH). Because I loved Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea (I strongly recommend his autobiographical films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, which are even better), I read its source material, Terence Rattigan’s play of the same name, which I liked (we talked about Rattigan here). I started Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes and greatly enjoyed it (LH), but for whatever reason set it aside — I hope to get back to it someday.
I liked Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States so much I gave a copy to my history-minded grandson for his birthday; it’s a great help in figuring out how we got where we are today. For Russian reading, I turned to a couple of stories by Leonid Andreev (LH), then Gorky’s The Lower Depths (LH). My wife and I read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and liked it a lot (I wrote about the title here but for some reason never reported on the book). I started Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here but gave up on it — Lewis just isn’t a good enough writer to hold my attention. I read Zamyatin’s На куличках [The back of beyond] (LH), and as always when I read something of his I think “I really have to read more Zamyatin.” I read Maria Rybakova’s Анна Гром и ее призрак [Anna Grom and her specter], about a Russian émigré and suicide in Berlin who writes letters from her ghostly postmortem existence to the man she loved; I started out liking it but became disillusioned — as I wrote Lizok:
But the device that at first seemed interestingly original, having the book be a series of posthumous letters sent by the protagonist to Wilamowitz, the man she loved, is really just a device, with no consistent principle other than the endless repetition of how much she loved him. For a while there’s a series of letters about a boat that comes to pick her up (with only the boatsman, Sempronius, aboard to chat with her), then she drops that and starts recounting in detail how she met Wilamowitz and how their relationship progressed, which he presumably already knows. And Wilamowitz is not an interesting guy: he’s your standard-issue Pechorin type, coldly intellectual and uninterested in closeness (but very blond and handsome!). I can only take so much blathering about how he’s so perfect and how could she ever hope that he (etc. ad nauseam). I mean, it’s Rybakova’s first book and she was in her early twenties when she wrote it, so it’s not surprising that it’s jejune, but I look forward to moving on.
I read Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, which struck me as forcibly as it had half a century earlier; Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, which I reported on in this thread; and Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (LH). Then I turned to Jon Fosse’s Septology, which was highly recommended to me in this thread; I liked the first part very much and am looking forward to reading more. I loved David Daiches’ Two Worlds (LH). I started Aksyonov’s Остров Крым [The Island of Crimea] but it wasn’t what I had hoped for and I let it slide. My wife and I read Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love (LH) and enjoyed it, following it with Tessa Hadley’s Free Love (LH) and Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love (I swear the love triplet was a coincidence!). I was bowled over by Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (LH). I read Benjamin Paloff’s Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (LH) and Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919 (LH), both from the estimable Northwestern University Press. Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник [The Light and the Dark] was a disappointment. Happily, I was able to end the year on a high note with Stephen Bruce’s brilliant translation of Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], which you should all run out and read!
Sinclair Lewis was indeed a hack propagandist not known for the lapidary quality of his prose. The immediate political-hack context of _It Can’t Happen Here_ is IMHO often misunderstood. It’s not a generic worrying-about-Fascism-because-it’s-the-Thirties tract. It’s a tract more specifically aimed at justifying the murder of Huey Long the previous year, written on behalf of the political claque that had benefited from Long’s murder. Which is not to say that a presidential victory by Long in 1936 would necessarily have led to positive results, only that it’s slimy to make out the conveniently-murdered as even worse than they actually were even if they were no angels.
I find the mythologized Joan of Arc and her various cultural/political influences in the 19th/20th century sufficiently fascinating that I don’t want that debunked by attention to the actual/historical Joan of Arc, yet I will accept that that’s a legitimate subject of scholarship.
It’s a tract more specifically aimed at justifying the murder of Huey Long the previous year, written on behalf of the political claque that had benefited from Long’s murder.
Thanks, I hadn’t been aware of that.
I don’t want that debunked by attention to the actual/historical Joan of Arc
Oh, it’s not a matter of debunking — she comes out of it thoroughly admirable, if not very sensible — but rather of putting her in a context that explains what the hell was going on with the various factions struggling for power (mainly Charles, the Burgundians, and the English). It’s very confusing and I welcomed the exegesis.
i’m not sure i see the lewis so mechanically – certainly he had long in mind, but i think he was thinking well past him*. to my mind, lewis does the best job of anyone in depicting what american fascism looks like, which is all the more impressive because it had yet to fully flower (i’m thinking, in contrast, about how badly phillip roth failed at that, despite 70-odd years advantage, in The Plot Against America). the writing is not my favorite – too self-conscious to be actually sentimental, but too apologetic to not try hard at it, which only makes things worse – but the book does manage to get that picture across quite clearly. and its early chapters are eerily precise in their depiction of both 2016-17 and 2024-25, in the way octavia butler’s Parable books are over a longer timeframe.
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* to me it’s in the small set of polemical novels that capture the landscape well enough to escape the original intent; others are claude mckay’s Amiable With Big Teeth, steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, and i could argue delany’s Hogg.
lewis does the best job of anyone in depicting what american fascism looks like […] its early chapters are eerily precise in their depiction of both 2016-17 and 2024-25
Yes, I read enough to be impressed by that, but I just couldn’t stomach the thing as a piece of writing. It’s like Turgenev at his worst, when he’d gotten tired of bothering to write good novels and just wanted to get stuff off his chest.
i can entirely understand that! there are pages of it that are nothing but clunker after clunker, and scenes that perhaps could work on the nineteenth-century stage (or its inheritor, the internationalized telenovela*), but not in a 20thC novel.
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* i can’t really recommend it, but watching Muhteşem Yüzyıl / Magnificent Century has been making me think a lot about genre, sentiment, and robertson davies.
I don’t know that I would *watch* the thing itself, but I would definitely *read* a piece on “how Robertson Davies foreshadowed big-budget Ottoman-history telenovelas.” (A college classmate of mine who went into the television industry had something to do with the Turkish adaptation of the _The Nanny_ sitcom, but that’s a bit different …)
Big-budget Ottoman-history telenovelas — they’re extremely boring. I tried to watch one once. Once.
They’re popular enough that lots of people have learned Turkish by watching them, though.
Of Lewis I have only read Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Both share one background villain, the upper class of American society of that time, merciless in preservation of its power. In Babbitt, the titular character, technically a member of that society, is too weak-willed to not conform. Elmer Gantry, on the other hand, is too utterly immoral to not follow the path to power offered by that society (is he like the central character of ICHH?)
In both books, I like the language of the characters, spoken, written, and thought. Lewis had an ear for satirizing the language of technically educated but ignorant people, and he spent a long time researching the milieu where his novels occur (businessmen and preachers, respectively). Despite that, I feel dirty after reading those books, because he is so preachy: the villains so villainous, the good guys so good, the victims so miserable. I don’t like transparent moralizing.
At the time Lewis received the Nobel Prize it seems maybe too early to assume that most of the Swedes in charge of awarding the prize had good reading knowledge of English. I wonder if he was well-served by translators who made him seem a more elegant writer if encountered in German or French ( assuming he wasn’t actually translated into Swedish-as-such)? OTOH, I see that only two years later they gave the Nobel to another English-language novelist, namely John Galsworthy. I daresay Galsworthy’s star has faded more sharply than Lewis’. I cannot off the cuff remember actually knowing anyone whom I knew to have actually read any of his novels, and I have certainly not done so myself. I do remember from the 1970’s that some BBC costume-drama television adaptation of some of his books was always being shown on PBS, but not that anyone thereby felt inspired to go read the underlying books.
It is by contrast only my own philistinism and lack of cosmopolitanism that makes me unfamiliar with the Swedish poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt, who won the literature Nobel in between Lewis and Galsworthy.
Thanks to the glories of the internet, btw, I have now learned that Lewis did have an indirect influence on poetry in that he provoked Vachel Lindsay to write a pretty bonkers piece titled “Babbitt Jamboree,” which is included in the 1926 collection _The Candle in the Cabin_ which may be pretty bonkers overall.
In Lucky Jim, someone is telling someone to stop talking as in a Galsworthy dialogue (i.e. nakedly noncommittal IIRC). From this I gather some people still read him in the 1950s, but didn’t think much of him. Probably some people read him after each time a TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga was made. I never have.
When I were a lad, our local small public library (such things were then common) stocked a fair number of translations of the novels of Halldór Kiljan Laxness. In consequence, I may be one of the few non-Icelanders to have read more than one of them.
It did occur to me even then that Laxness’ Nobel Prize may have been related in some way to his Scandinavianness, though the unremitting bleakness of the novels and his socialism may have helped.
Notable lapses of commission in awarding the prize to English-language works, besides Galsworthy*, include Pearl S Buck and Winston Churchill (seriously, for literature?)
Russell is probably pushing it for literature, too, though worth a prize of some sort, sure. Kipling, I think, is actually arguable: his rebarbative politics tend to blind people to his sheer artistic skill. (As I’ve said before, The Female of the Species is far and away the best poem opposing women’s suffrage I have ever read.)
Of Bob Dylan we do not speak.
Lapses of omission tend to be more open to argument. Graham Greene seems to have had personal enemies on the committee … (itself, surely a claim to eminence: how many of us can say we have personal enemies on the Nobel Prize Committee? How cool is that?)
* The television series based on his novels, The Forsyte Saga, was wildly popular back about fifty years ago in the UK. Like, watercooler stuff, except that I don’t think we actually had watercoolers in the UK in those days.
The Forsyte Saga, was wildly popular back about fifty years ago in the UK.
And had its own spin-off The Fosdyke Saga, “a classic tale of struggle, power, personalities and tripe”
Yes, that wildly popular tv version of the _Forsyte Saga_ was what I was referencing above. Apparently it had a successful late Sixties broadcast in the U.S. on NET (the predecessor to PBS), which was instrumental in leading to the set-up of the long-running _Masterpiece Theatre_, a social-climbing scam in which the Americans would pay the BBC modest amounts of money for the U.S. rights to what British audiences would have understood to be shite-to-middlebrow television content which would then be broadcast to American audiences as posh-and-educational. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_(TV_series)#History
I suppose a Sinclair Lewis of the Seventies could have done a whole bit about the comically-unreflective Anglophilia of the supposedly liberal-and-cultured U.S. suburban bourgeoisie.
I, Claudius, at least, was legitimately Very Good. (And Extremely British, like Robert Graves himself.)
Had I been consulted, I would have suggested Up Pompeii! as a suitable accompaniment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyr_play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Pompeii!
@AntC: Who knew? The Fosdyke Saga in the UK and Fearless Fosdick in the US, both parody comic strips (the latter within Li’l Abner). I guess the name is objectively funny.
A new version has been on TV recently, but I haven’t really heard anything about it. It’s all a bit mixed up in my head with Poldark, anyway.
rozele : I think it was an episode of Muhteşem Yüzyıl that I watched.
I watched Yo, Claudio, dubbed in Spanish, in Madrid circa 1979. It was Very Good. Even dubbed.