It will help, I think, to remember Daniel Quinn’s mantra: “If they give you lined paper, write sideways.”
J.M. COETZEE
1940–
Disgrace
Elizabeth Costello
John Marvell Coetzee, born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, was educated in schools there and at the University of Cape Town, from which he graduated with degrees in English and Mathematics. He then went to the University of Texas, from which he graduated with degrees in English, Linguistics, Computer Science, and German. In 1972 he applied for U.S. citizenship but was denied. Do you suppose it was because he was too well educated?
He began writing in 1969 and quickly published a number of novels, including Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980; Life and Times of Michael K. in 1983; and Age of Iron in 1990. Disgrace was published in 1999.
It is a dreadful story that you hope could not be true—but it surely is, in more ways than one. The protagonist—hardly the hero in any sense of the word—is a professor in an unnamed university, either American or Canadian. He is introduced in the first sentence thus: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, in his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” The object of his affections, if that’s the word, is one of his students, a tall, lissome young woman whose parents are not as pleased by his sexual arrangement as he and perhaps she are. One thing quickly leads to another, and he soon finds himself without a teaching job anywhere in the country. With no prospects of any other kind of work paying enough to keep him alive, he returns to South Africa, where his daughter lives on a ranch, and offers to help her out in any way he can in return for a bed and three meals a day.
At first this arrangement is satisfactory, until a shocking event occurs that I will not describe because you must discover it yourself when you read this remarkable, perhaps great, book. The event seems to him to require a response that his daughter does not think is correct. He realizes that this difference between them is symbolic of the change that in one way or another is going on in the world almost everywhere, and certainly in Africa. The change is inevitable. From one point of view it is very unpleasant, but from another very appropriate and good. I know I am being vague, because I don’t want to unravel all these mysteries before you have read the book. Of course, you can put your head in the sand, but that is hardly ever a good idea because it leaves you open to a kick in … well, you know.
Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, is a very strange book. It isn’t easy to say what happens in it. On the surface, the book is a report of several long, controversial lectures given by the protagonist about the way we treat animals and including the suggestion that we ought to change places with animals and let them treat us the way we treat them. One critic said that she could be thought of as one of those large cats that eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open body, give you a cold yellow stare. Quite so. Be brave and read this book, too.
ROBERTO CALASSO
1941–
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Roberto Calasso was born in Florence, Italy, in 1941. He studied English literature at the University of Rome and graduated with a thesis on Sir Thomas Browne, a fascinating and little-known—especially in Italy—English doctor and antiquarian who wrote two astonishing books in the seventeenth century. Calasso began to work for Adelphi Edizioni when it was founded in 1982 (he was twenty-one) and since 1999 has been its chairman. It has published several of his books, which have been translated into most of the European languages.
The Ruin of Kasch (l983, translated 1984) is an absolutely crazy book. The first half of it is a brilliant biography of Metternich, the political genius who reshaped Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (and created a new world that made inevitable the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 and the First World War of 1914-18). The second half of the book is about a lost Central African Empire—Kasch—that was swallowed up by the jungle five hundred years ago. I read it all the way through, but I really don’t know why.
Yes, of course I do. It is because I had previously read The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988, translated by Tim Parks into English in 1993), which in my opinion and that of many others is the finest book ever written about the Greek myths. It is a subject I love because I have written about it, too, but when I read Calasso’s book I was flabbergasted. It is one of the books I wish I had written.
It begins wonderfully, telling and retelling the Myth of Europa, who was raped by Zeus, the Bull that rose from the sea, and gave birth, in a manner of speaking, not only to the Greece we know but also to Europe. “How did it all begin?” is the recurring theme, and there are many answers, all of which Calasso describes with stunning scholarship and beauty. In the remainder of the book he shows how each of these various beginnings ends up in one great, heart-breaking event, when Cadmus, an old man, defeated and torn and his children torn too, but united with his bride, herself an old woman now, gives to the Greeks his last gift, the alphabet, with which they will begin to create—leaving the gods behind because they are no longer needed—the new world that we know because we still live in it today.
MARK HELPRIN
1947––
Winter’s Tale
A Soldier of the Great War
Mark Helprin was born in New York in 1947 and grew up there and in the British West Indies. He holds degrees from Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and he did post graduate work at Oxford University. He has served in the British merchant navy, the Israeli Infantry, and the Israeli Air Force.
He began to write stories as a student and published several in the New Yorker before he was twenty. Winter’s Tale was published in 1988; it had been written before he was thirty. It is a fantastic story of early twentieth-century life in New York City. One of my favorite scenes describes a trip on the New York Central Railroad south from Saratoga. In a tremendous five-day blizzard, the train is practically covered by snow and cannot move. It is terribly cold. Fires are built in the cars using the floorboards and the now-useless luggage for fuel, but the passengers soon run out of food and water. Several people die of exposure and starvation.
Unknown to them, a search party from a neighboring village has set out with twenty-five sleighs loaded with food and warm clothing, snow shoes, and skis. It takes days before the train is found and the farmers from the village with all their equipment finally arrive. The two hundred desperate passengers can hardly believe their good fortune as they quickly don the warm clothing. Those who know how to ski put the skies on their feet; those who do not are told they must learn, because this is an emergency, and that’s what happens. And because this book is a ceaselessly interesting fantasy they all survive and return to their lives, but much changed in their understanding of what life is. There are other mysterious goings and comings, and a battle between good and evil that is very exciting. The book was highly praised when it appeared and is still described as Helprin’s best book.