Although I loved Crime and Punishment and even enjoyed The Idiot, I confess that I have now failed three times to finish Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the half that I’ve read, but it’s just so thick with ideas, and many of them seem to require a lot of context in order to fathom (or at least appreciate). I hope to finish the book someday, and Peter Leithart’s biography of Dostoevsky certainly encouraged me (and offered some helpful perspective).
Leithart’s approach is not typical for a biography: he constructs dialogues between Dostoevsky and his wives, children, brother, other writers and critics, fellow prisoners in Siberia, and so on–all from various journals and writings of Dostoevsky and others. The book ends up feeling, as a matter of fact, like a Russian novel in some way–the dialogue has that quality and feel. It was odd to me at first, but then it captured me and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Not for the man, but for the translation he authorized, which turned 400 years old last year (did you celebrate at all?).
I just finished Robert Alter’s Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Alter masterfully analyzes the influence of the KJV in Moby Dick, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, my beloved Gilead, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The reason I read literary criticism is in order to deepen my understanding and appreciation of a writer, book, or poem, so that I am not only eager to read the work but will do so with more pleasure. Job well done: Alter stirred my hunger to return to Moby Dick, and helped me to appreciate Robinson and McCarthy’s very different (and yet both dependent on the KJV) styles. (I’m not as eager to jump on Faulkner or Bellow, but just because there’s only so much time and I have to draw the line somewhere.) What’s more, I feel the need to read the King James translation again, which I haven’t done in years.
One other result of the book, at least for me, was an increased distate for translations that fail to capture the rhythm of the Hebrew scriptures.
Can’t wait for Marilynne Robinson’s next book (March 13):
I borrowed this from the Slovak Spectator:
Michalská veža, or Michael’s Tower, can be seen together with the bridge in this replica of a painting by the artist Stankovits from the beginning of the 20th century. This postcard, with a winter motif, was sent as a Christmas greeting; on the back, the sender wishes merry Christmas to an addressee in distant Sweden way back in 1912.
I’ll be there in a month….
Isn’t this a magical scene of Strecno castle above the river Vah?
In his tour de force The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilaztion, Vishal Mangalwadi never mentions Christopher Hitchens. Yet what Mangalwadi argues and demonstrates undermines Hitchens’s anti-religious conclusions in his popular atheistic tract, God is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything.
Mangalwadi’s book is the culmination of his own personal journey to test the biblical assertion (prophecy, promise) that God would bless all nations through Abraham. He specifically wanted to determine whether God had indeed blessed India through his revelation in the Bible. In the process he unmasks myth after secular myth concerning the origins and foundations of the greatness of western civilization, from the basic concept of the dignity of human beings to the development of technology to the ideas that made freedom possible (lanugage, literature, education, science) to morality and compassion and wealth.
By uncovering the deception of the secular myths (that we were all taught in school) he shows the real hope that we have – the only hope that we have – in the face of the impending disasters that secularism offers us.
So yes, I recommend you read it.
In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi (whose name I love to say out loud) sites an attempt by some Danes to demonstrate that human beings are just like all the other primates. The results turned out to be a delightful case of unintended consequences:
The Copenhagen Zoo vividly expressed the secular view of humanity when it exhibited a caged pair of Homo sapiens in 1996. Zookeeper information of?cial Peter Vestergaard explained that the exhibit sought to force visitors to confront their origins and accept that “we are all primates.” The visitors saw the other hairy primates staring at the ceiling, swinging from bars, and picking lice from each others’ pelts. However, the caged Homo sapiens (Henrik Lehmann and Malene Botoft) worked on a motorcycle, checked their e-mail, sent and received faxes, read books, and adjusted their air conditioner.
The zoo had a problem. Existing laws, shaped by the “outdated” biblical worldview, demanded that it recognize the fundamental rights of Homo sapiens, including their right to freedom. It had to give them the freedom to leave their cage to satisfy “urges” for a night at the opera or a candlelight dinner. The zoo also had to pay them to stay in a cage. These humans refused to heed the call of nature in public and objected to displaying “intimate behavior,” claiming “that’s not interesting.” After a few weeks, both Homo sapiens departed the monkey house. The experiment violated their dignity as human beings.
In chapter 24 of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has some subtle and not-so-subtle satire of some Southern church ladies gathered to discuss missions. This passage struck me pretty sharply:
Today Aunt Alexandra and her missionary circle were fighting the good fight all over the house. From the kitchen, I heard Mrs. Grace Merriweather giving a report in the livingroom on the squalid lives of the Mrunas, it sounded like to me. They put the women out in huts when their time came, whatever that was; they had no sense of family–I knew that’d distress Aunty–they subjected children to terrible ordeals when they were thirteen; they were crawling with yaws and earworms, they chewed up and spat out the bark of a tree into a communal pot and men got drunk on it.
Immediately thereafter, the ladies adjourned for refreshments.
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I suspect very few of you have never read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t read it in my first 53 years. I have no excuse, no defense, except that of Esqueleto in the film Nacho Libre, when asked by Nacho why he had never been baptized: “Because I never got around to it ok?” Anyway, I’ve read it now. And I have a few thoughts and questions that may or may not be worth thinking and asking, which I’ll publish in a few separate posts.
First: Atticus is clearly an idealized man and a great hero in the book. He’s a man of principles and courage. He passes on wisdom to his children. He treats all men fairly, as they ought to be treated. He lives by a simple code, that in order to understand someone else you have to try to stand in his shoes. I suppose that’s akin to the Golden Rule, and Atticus sticks to it, even when he is pressed to unreasonable limits. (more…)