Books

I first encountered P.J. O’Rourke’s writings as a teenager in a copy of Modern Manners my father encouraged me to buy while we were browsing the secondhand offerings of an offbeat little bookstore (looking back, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would part with such a book). “You should get that, he’s funny,” dad said. That evening, I read some G-rated excerpts to my traditionalist parents, who laughed out loud. For me, it was love at first quip. I finished the rest of Modern Manners in one sitting, completely taken by a style of writing I found blended the best qualities of a person. It was smart, perceptive, clever, sensitive and, of course, good-humored. Reading P.J. O’Rourke inspired me to want to write in a way that informs and entertains.

At CNN, Leah Asmelash laments the demise of many “long-standing” literary magazines. “The Believer,” she writes, which was started in 2003, “was once at the top of the literary magazine game. A leading journal of art and culture, the Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers.” But the University of Nevada, which has housed the magazine since 2017, announced that it was shutting it down: “In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school's College of Liberal Arts called print publications like the Believer ‘a financially challenging endeavor.’” Oh, boy. Leslie Jamison, an icon? The Believer, a publication that “launched careers”?

Some fiction, regardless of how intimately tethered to a time and place, is timeless. And the work of Agatha Christie certainly seems that way. Christie's novel Death on the Nile is now receiving renewed cinematic treatment under the expert hand of Kenneth Branagh, with the film scheduled for release on February 11. This follows the success of Branagh’s 2017 adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, which grossed $351 million against a production budget of $55 million. “Rest assured," says Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s novel Five Little Pigs. "I am the best!” The same might be said of Christie herself, the world’s all-time bestselling fiction author.

One of the things I did during my nine-month hiatus from Prufrock, the email newsletter I send three times a week (if you aren’t a subscriber, why not give it a try?) was to cycle the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. I started in Cherokee, North Carolina, rode to the start of Skyline Drive, Virginia, and back. It took two weeks — one at the beginning of the summer and one at the end — and I clocked over 900 miles and 100,000 feet of climbing. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I loved it and will never do it again. Cycling is an ideal way to experience a landscape. You feel the ups and the downs. Walking has a pleasure of its own, but with cycling you can experience an entire region — in all its subtle variety — in a single day.

Readers of The Spectator World probably think they are quite au fait with the culture wars. J.K. Rowling, Joe Rogan, even Dr. Seuss — writers and celebrities who have been canceled quickly roll off the tongue. But what if “cancellation” had more dramatic implications than just a Twitter account bursting with notifications? In 1975, the unpublished poet Annegret Gollin encountered a rather different kind of culture war: she was arrested at a music festival and told that she could either spend two years in a prison cell or become an informant for the Stasi. Gollin chose to become an informant, but was a brilliantly ineffective one — she told over a hundred of her friends that she was supposed to be spying on them — and she ended up in prison seven years later.

We live in an explainer age. Pundits, bloggers, TV hosts, professors, journalists, and scientists love to explain why whatever is happening is happening. Visit the New York Times, for example, and you’ll find articles explaining who Boris Johnson really is, why kids are behind in school (no great mystery there) and how to help them, and why the Omicron variant of COVID-19 really isn’t milder. The Atlantic, which loves to explain things, too, also has an article on why “Calling Omicron ‘Mild’ Is Wishful Thinking.” Wondering “Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard”? The Atlantic has an answer for you. Curious about “The Real Reason Americans Aren’t Isolating”?

Did you read Proust in lockdown? Lockdown, it seemed, offered the eons of vacancy apparently required to finally get around to À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, aka “The Big One”: a book to be attempted only by the pretentious one percent in the discharge of their services to intellectual snobbery. I did. I read it twice. I read it because it’s always a pleasure and a novelty, and because I want to get it made as a long-form television series. Proust is perfect for TV: better than anything else, the format can show the passage of time. This is the sine qua non of any Proust reckoning, and it has defeated all attempts so far to make the book into a feature film. We are doing well.

The experience of having Covid is, by now, well-documented. You spend seven to ten days in your room or house feeling ill and sorry for yourself. The world outside becomes a distant dream, and one of the few pleasures of spending twenty-four hours a day in bed is the time to read. This winter, the Omicron bell tolled for me — as it seemed to do for half of the global population. I was very lucky with the virus: after two days of unbelievable complaining and texting everyone I knew to tell them I was either like Beth in Little Women or a fevered Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, I recovered from my gothic heroine-like swoon and set about ploughing through novels. At the outset, there were endless articles and tweets about what one should read during a pandemic.

Siri Hustvedt, Mothers, Fathers, and Others (Simon and Schuster, 304 pages) An essay by Honor Jones for The Atlantic went viral last month. It was entitled “How I demolished my life” and was a how-divorce-altered-me piece, something of a bildungsroman for the fortysomething woman. One paragraph in particular caused enormous offense on social media: How much of my life — I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind — had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. Many found the essay galling because it intellectualizes a decision that many married couples go through.

Gene Wolfe’s sci-fi novella, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, was published fifty years ago this year. It is a minor masterpiece. Set in the town of Port-Mimizon on the imaginary planet of Saint Croix, the story follows a family who are descendants of French colonizers. A sister planet, Saint Anne, was also colonized by the French. The original inhabitants of both planets were shapeshifters, and one of the early questions of the novella is whether the current inhabitants of both planets are in fact French or shapeshifters who, according to one theory, killed the would-be colonizers and permanently took on their form. The story is narrated by one of two brothers, who live in a large house on 666 Saltimbanque.

It never occurred to me that one day, I would review Bambi (the novel). If it had, I would not have expected that its story and backstory would, among other surprises, include the Nazis, a communist, pornography and talking leaves. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film had been preceded by a novel. Felix Salten wrote Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde in Vienna, where it appeared as a newspaper serial in 1922 before being published in book form in Germany the following year. It debuted in America in 1928 as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, translated by none other than Whittaker Chambers, already a communist, but not yet in the Soviet agent phase of his astoundingly protean career.