Goethe, James, Evenings, Writing, Hitler, Elites, Serotonin, Piranesi, Breath, Elmet, Angel, Gilead

Some reviews of my recent reading

The next Western Canon salon is about Emma by Jane Austen on Thursday, September 12th. Tickets here.

Don’t forget to vote for the best British novelist. I’ll be updating you later this week on the first round results.

Brandon Taylor is reading Second Act, so maybe you should too!

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Goethe: His Faustian Life

I know shamefully little about Goethe and learned a good deal from this book. Highly readable, as you would expect from

A.N. Wilson

; it is full of good information. After attending a course about Goethe, Wilson was struck with the importance of science to his work, and this book treats both the science and literary sides of Goethe as equally important. I often slowed down and lingered. Recommended if, like me, you ought to know more about this major writer. I am still struggling to read Faust as the translations just don’t really work. The new Princeton edition is good though and I’m getting there. Out late September (December in the US). Here’s my interview about this book (and many others) with Wilson.

p.s. Wilson is one of my favourite living biographers and you must read his Prince Albert book if you haven’t. (It’s interesting from a Progress Studies perspective if royal history isn’t your bag.) I also greatly enjoyed his memoir Confessions, which is full of the sort of plangent, anecdotal self-analysis I like in English memoir writing. Like all of the best biographical writers, Wilson is so honest. It reminded me of Another Self by James Lees-Milne, among others.

James

Sort-of Huckleberry Finn but where the narrator is Jim the slave. Very clever, very entertaining, very well paced. Wonderful ending. James draws on Twain, obviously, but also on a wealth of slave literature, and has both a very lively argot and compelling plot points for dealing with how people “pass”, how they adjust their speech to their superiors, how people are controlled by language as well as force, how that can be turned around… Percival Everett got a lot more famous recently after American Fiction, the movie based on his novel Erasure. That novel is much less likely to appeal to a large audience, containing, as it does, a large section of impenetrable literary theory. James is every bit as smart, but in the mode of a classic story-driven novel. Were it not for the fact that I was travelling, I would have read it in one sitting. I can’t say more without giving things away, but you should really just experience it fresh. It ought to be shortlisted for the Booker, though prizes go to longer books, not better ones. (On that note, I told you that Rita Bullwinkle’s novel Headshot would be praised because of its content despite being mediocre and it is now on the Booker long list. A.K. Blakemore was honest that it is a dull book but I think she has deleted the tweet.)

Gilead

Mesmerising novel that takes the form of a letter from a dying minister to his young son. Subtle but compelling; meditative but dramatic. A major work of our time. At the end I wanted to turn back and start again. John Bullock pointed out the King Lear reference at the end to me. I didn’t, and don’t, have anything to say about the recent New York Times list of the best books of the century so far, other than that I like lists and that I am glad it prompted me to finally read this book. Why did I wait so long? As my wife said when she read it, I am glad Marilynne Robinson wrote Gilead.