A Shower of Summer Days - May Sarton
This is a three person novel. A middle -aged couple (Violet and Charles) come to live in the once-grand house in Ireland where she grew up. Sally, the daughter of Violet’s sister, arrives for a two month stay (and is not at all happy at having been “sent” to Dene’s Court). Charles is mainly a steadfast presence; it’s the emotional life of the two women that gets Sarton’s attention. But, as complications accumulated, I couldn’t relate to the feelings that were being bandied about. I grew more and more detached and wound up abandoning the book at the halfway point. This was my only experience with the highly prolific Sarton. She published fifteen volumes of poetry and twenty-one novels, but she was mainly known as an autobiographical writer – six of her books have the word “journal” in the title. Many people have found sustenance in her accounts of aging and illness, and this is surely due to the fact that in these works she had a subject – herself – who was real and whose feelings had authenticity. For me Violet and Sally lacked those qualities.

The Third Reich - Roberto Bolano (Spanish)
The book takes the form of a diary of a young German on vacation in Spain with his girlfriend. Why he can write like a sophisticated novelist didn’t bother me (until later, when a lot of things bothered me). I liked the freshness of the voice and the situation – mainly its modernity. Udo has a workaday job, but his passion is for a specific kind of gaming, one that involves re-enactments of WWII campaigns. The historical outcome of battles – and the war – can thus be altered if the gamer is skilled in his tactics. Udo is a major figure in this arcane world. But his gaming isn’t initially given a lot of space; mostly we get an account of his vacation-time activities with Ingeborg. They link up with another German couple – Charly and his girlfriend. There’s a lot of late night partying. Charly seems to be a dangerous nut case, especially when he drinks too much, which is often. There are other residents of the resort town thrown into the mix, including a man deformed by burns and the German proprietress of their hotel. But gradually the aimlessness of the plot, along with Udo’s shifting moods (which are perplexing even to him) began to wear thin. If there was some point to the random events I wanted it to emerge. Charly goes out windsurfing and never returns (Is he dead? Is he playing one of his tricks?), but his disappearance soon gets relegated to insignificance. The two girlfriends depart, and the Burn Victim and Frau Else play a prominent role, but Udo’s relationship with them is murky and conflicted. More attention is given to his gaming, which I found silly and boring (Bonano could have introduced a neo-Nazi slant to this, but he never does). By the time I quit reading my interest had faded to nothingness. I had hopes, but Bonano turned out to be just another author who can’t (or chose not to) tell a coherent story. Last note: on the info page I saw that he died in 2003, at the age of fifty, but the book wasn’t copyrighted by his heirs until 2011. Also, despite its considerable length, it was serialized in The Paris Review.

A Young Man in Search of Love – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Singer describes this book, which was published when he was seventy years old, as part of a “spiritual autobiography.” It’s slim in every way except ideas. But the ideas aren’t anything new; the young men in Shosha and The Family Moskat went over the same ground, though their contemplation of life and God and politics was embedded in novels with many characters and events. Nothing much happens to Singer, who comes across as passive and controlled. He’s in a search, but it’s for a meaning to his existence and a place in the world; the book is filled with philosophical musings. He has a strong need for sex, but his relationships with women are marked not by love but by dissension. The most interesting character is Gina, a landlady/mistress more than twice his age, who makes the decision to withdraw not only from Singer but from the battle of life. Only she takes on a dimension that I found touching. Nothing else stirred me, including Singer’s misery; by delving at length into his troubled state of mind he defuses its impact. Singer’s major work came out in the fifties and sixties; this book reflects a compulsion to continue writing, even though he had nothing much to say. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, the same year Young Man was published, and Doubleday gave it the deluxe treatment: over-sized volume, thick paper, and drawings by Raphael Soyer. These spidery, washed out drawings succeed in capturing the characters – and the mood of Warsaw between the world wars – better than the author’s words.

Mrs. Starr Lives Alone - Jon Godden
At last, a writer who’s able to create convincing characters and place them in a plot that’s absorbing from beginning to end. This isn’t a great book, but it provided me with a pleasurable reading experience. Meg Starr, recently widowed, discovers that someone is living in the loft of her house. It turns out to be Chris, a sixteen year old runaway. Meg allows the girl to stay with her. She does it out of compassion, though her loneliness plays a role. She’s also foolishly naive. She remains blind to – or makes excuses for – Chris’s lies and manipulation. She’ll learn, abruptly and forcefully, that she’s made a major mistake: the girl is a dangerous case. Since this is a suspense thriller, I won’t go into the plot. Suffice to say that Meg becomes a captive in her house. As all good suspense thrillers must be, this is a character study of three people (Chris wasn’t alone in the loft; her boyfriend Roy later emerges). Chris is the most compelling of the three – her steely determination is chilling. Godden moves things along nicely – her prose is straightforward and she writes with intelligence. Nothing occurs that’s illogical. Meg uses her only resource – her brain – to try to figure a way out of the trap she’s in. But even there she’s limited; Chris has covered all the bases (or almost all). I never bonded with Meg, though I believed in her. She’s a woman who’s led a sheltered life and who has never learned the value of suspicion. The same can’t be said of Godden. She was sixty when the book was published, and it reflects a fear of disaffected, amoral youth.

The Greyhound in the Leash - Joyce Horner
In the prologue Evelina is at her high school graduation and is listening (though her mind wanders) to the speaker, who gives out that old homily: their lives are still to be lived. “But when the time comes we can be only one of the things we dreamed of being; sometimes we end by not being any of them.” The speaker adds that they have “several possible selves . . . in some places, with some people, you turn into a different person . . . .” The novel is made up of four parts; in each Evelina is thirty-five. In the first three of her incarnations she has married very different men, and is shaped by those choices. In two of her marriages she was not in love, nor does she share an affinity of spirit. The men are good, in their fashion, and she’s not unhappy (though there’s a reappearing Charles Bryce to whom she’s physically attracted). Her marriage to Paul is a different matter altogether; there passion existed, and also an affinity. But that marriage was wracked by problems, mostly due to Paul’s dissatisfaction (not with her, but with how his life had turned out). No seductive Charles Bryce appears because he’s not needed. Evelina and Paul wind up separating. Whereas the loveless marriages survived, and offered security, the love of her life is someone she cannot live with. Part Four is brief: Evelina is unmarried (though in her past she had loved a man named Paul); she has a job as a librarian at an Institute. She has a close friend, Katherine (also a recurring figure throughout the novel, one for whom an independence existence was primary). Though this isn’t the ending Evelina may have wished for, she isn’t a tragic character; she’s open to the world around her and is content in a quiet way. Her life is similar to the one lived by the author (Joyce Horner was forty-six when she wrote the novel). I think she was trying to explore the way things worked out for her, and her approach is thought-provoking. It evoked my own private thought: Evelina remains stable and resilient in all her incarnations because she was brought up by loving parents. She had a solid base from which to embark on whatever life had in store for her.

The Family Moskat - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This teeming, panoramic novel brings to life Poland from the early 1900s to the beginning of WWII. In weight and scope it has elements of greatness. But is there too much weight and scope? There are over 600 dense pages, and it’s prefaced by three family trees. I soon developed a strategy to deal with this deluge of names: concentrate on the people who are important. There’s Asa Heshel and the three women he loves (or can that emotion be attributed to him?); Abram, a capricious and monumentally flawed life force; the nefarious Koppel. All the others, though colorful, I relegated to accessory role players. Once those ground rules were in place, I found the book to be eminently readable. The plot covers too much ground to give any summarization, but some general statements can be made. One is how unhappy most people are. Especially in the relationships between the sexes, strife reigns, and in many cases marriage leads to divorce. Also of importance is the book’s historical aspect, especially in regard to how political upheavals affected the Jewish population in Poland. With the onset of WWI and the threat of Bolshevism, the first evidences of antisemitism appear, and it becomes steadily more virulent. Lastly, there’s the role that Judaism plays. Though the many rituals and religiously-dictated customs seem foolish (as they do to many Jews, who reject the old ways), they give sustenance to a people who are outsiders; through them they connect with all Jews everywhere, including those who are no longer alive. And the rules of conduct set down in the Torah, though rigid, are noble in nature; to break them is to violate the True Way. But there’s aberrant human nature to consider, and life to be lived, so the violations occur. Singer presents characters with all manner of faults, but because they are human I could relate to how they think and feel and act. In the late 1940s the novel was serialized for two years in the Jewish Daily Forward. Singer may have felt an obligation to recreate for this audience a world that was vanishing. He succeeded. *

Emma - Jane Austen
This is the fourth book by Austen that I’ve read – and the last. In the opening a weak-willed young girl accepts Emma as her mentor. Harriet is romantically interested in a farmer. A farmer! For Emma this will certainly not do, so she steers Harriet away from the estimable Robert Martin and toward a more socially acceptable mate (though one lacking in character). To me this was a shameful act of manipulation, and I wondered if Austen was making a statement about values. Could she be critiquing a world in which status, money, manners and dress are all important? No – for Austen status, money, manners and dress were of the utmost importance. Like the rest of her work, her main subject is affairs of the heart among wealthy villagers who have estates with names such as Hartfield and Donwell. The rest of the world, with all its messiness, is totally excluded. This may be one of the reasons for Austen’s appeal; she offers escapist reading, complete with happy endings. I don’t have much interest in her subject matter, nor do I find her parodies of characters like Mrs. Elton amusing. And, if one isn’t interested or amused, the intricacies of her prose, though it has a crystalline stateliness, is a bit difficult to follow. She’s also too wordy; this 539 page book could benefit by a cut of two hundred pages. Still, I kept reading because I rather liked Emma. She has flaws, one of which is an inflated view of her own merit; after a series of blunders, she comes to see herself in a diminished light. So she grows as a person. By the end of the book four marriages have taken place, including that of Emma and Mr. Knightley (in the last line, their union is described as one of “perfect happiness”). Harriet, who had all but disappeared from the novel, is one of those who marry – to Robert Martin. Emma (who had seen the error of her meddling ways) is glad for her, and wishes her the best; but, of course, they can no longer remain on terms of intimacy.

To Know a Woman – Amos Oz (Hebrew)
Everything in this novel, though presented in a clear prose, is shrouded in inexplicability. In the opening chapter Yoel rents a house; it’s a step in his embarking on a new life. After the death of his wife he had retired from his long-time job as an Israeli spy. His strength in that career is purported to be an analytical mind that can penetrate facades. But, in regard to the three people he lives with, he’s pretty much clueless. His teenage daughter is perversely uncommunicative and his mother and his dead wife’s mother (the “grannies”) present problems he can only referee. He’s surrounded by odd types, foremost being his next door neighbors, a brother and sister. Yoel has sex with the sister while the brother watches approvingly; Yoel seems to be sleepwalking through these encounters (on one occasion the brother has to undress him). His former employers keep trying to get him to return to Helsinki, but he’s suspicious of their motives; even his dreams have an elusive quality. Yoel occupies himself by making minor repairs on the house, planting a garden. Then, in the last chapter, his life takes an abrupt turn: he volunteers in a hospital, doing menial jobs and treating the patients with compassion. Is this a solution for his irresolute state? Maybe, maybe not. When I read (and reread several times) the final paragraph, in which we get Yoel’s thoughts, he’s waiting for something: “Hoping for a recurrence of one of those rare, unexpected moments when the blackness is momentarily illuminated, and there comes a flicker, a furtive glimmer . . .” Of what? The entire novel (even the title) was stubbornly obscure. Though I value clarity and usually consider inexplicability to be pretentious, Oz did succeed in keeping me interested in a world of shifting shadows.

The Manor – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
I began my recent review of Shosha with this sentence: “Singer was no novelist.” Well, I was wrong. The Manor is a novel, and it’s very good. It’s a large scale work, heavily populated, and its many narrative strands embrace politics and religion. This makes it difficult to describe the plot, so I’ll crib from the Author’s Note to present a few background facts. The setting is Poland between 1863 and the end of the nineteenth century. The Russians, who are in control of the country, have just put down an insurrection. Poland is fast becoming industrialionalized; railroads and factories are being built, fortunes made. Jews are emerging from the shtetl and have begun to play an important role in this growth; some become wealthy and powerful. New ideas are sprouting: socialism and nationalism, Zionism and assimilation, free love, atheism, the beginnings of Fascism. Though some of Singer’s main characters are not Jewish, his main concern is with Jews. That said, there are Jews who find the religious beliefs that saturate the lives of the devout to be an absurd jumble of medieval superstitions. Yet the devout hold onto something meaningful to them and are the better off for it. But “better” is a relative term. There’s much unhappiness and even misery in the lives of these characters. It’s not imposed by state oppression – flawed people generate their own problems. Though sex plays a large role, no relationship or marriage (often arranged ones) results in contentment; the polar opposite is more common. I was caught up in these dramas. My only quibble has to do with the large cast; there were too many people to keep track of. Still, I suppose that’s what you get in a long, sprawling novel. Singer employs a narrative strategy that’s worth noting: he has a situation reach a crisis, and then he drops it; as we continue to read time passes, maybe years, and eventually we find out, in an offhand way, how that crisis was settled. This has the effect of making one fill in the gaps, to imagine the emotional blow that had been inflicted. For mostly it is a blow. The prose is smooth and engaging. I’ve always wondered how Singer’s original Yiddish was able to survive translation so well. Or did it lose something? I believe that the author, who had a full grasp of English, must have played a role in the process. The Manor is part of a trilogy that includes The Family Moskat and The Estate. More very good novels? We’ll see.

The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Though this novel features a UFO and alien children, it’s too intellectual to fit into the category of science fiction. What Wyndham offers up are ideas, not action. The premise is that a UFO lands in a small English village; during the one day it remains there all women of childbearing age are impregnated (how this is accomplished we never know, for everyone has been put into a deep sleep). The babies that are born are distinguished by glowing golden eyes. As they mature it becomes clear that they have a collective will, and are able to control humans whenever they wish. If they perceive a danger to one of their group, they retaliate. What’s to be done with this threat from Beyond? Are the Children to be granted human consideration? A handful of intellectually-minded characters talk and argue about issues of that ilk. But we don’t experience the events that occur in Midwich from the villager’s perspective. We never get the feelings of a woman who is carrying a child that she knows was not conceived in the normal way. When the villagers raid the Grange, where the Children are housed, we learn what happens through someone’s brief summary. That’s how most events are presented – by means of secondhand accounts. Wydham seldom takes his premise to where the affected humans are to be found. As a result the book lacks emotional immediacy, and this caused me to read it with a sense of detachment.

Shosha – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Singer was no novelist. As a short story writer he excelled, and that’s because he could work within a limited scope. In this novel the incidents are excellent; they just don’t connect up to form a coherent plot. Still, I was involved and often impressed by the flow of ideas from his characters: “. . . eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little shopkeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it had sold chicory, yeast, and beans, and that a customer owed it eighteen groschen.” Or: “I don’t recall who said it, that a corpse is all-powerful, afraid of no one. All the living want and ever hope to achieve the dead already have – complete peace, total independence.” The book is set in Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, and it seems like a recapturing by Singer of the life of Jews in that precarious time. His main character, Arele, is a passive (though sexually active) young man who finds it difficult to make decisions; he’s one of many Jews who could get out of harms way but doesn’t. A decision he does make and sticks to is to marry Shosha, a girl he had known when they were children. He describes her as “infantile – physically and mentally backward.” He seems like a protective father of a vulnerable child; I never believed (despite Singer’s half-hearted efforts to convince me) that their feelings for one another went deeper than that. It’s also clear that Singer reached a point where he wanted a way out of all the personal and political crises that had accumulated. So, on the brink of disaster, he simply abandons the narrative. He closes the book with an Epilogue which takes place thirteen years later. Arele has become a famous author; on a visit to Israel he meets a friend from the past, and we get a brief account of the fate of the characters. Concerning Shosha’s death, there’s not a scintilla of emotional impact. I accepted this ending because to go on was too momentous a task, and both Singer and I had grown weary.

Adam and Evelyn – Ingo Schulze (German)
Schulze writes in a cryptic way. Not the prose – that’s clear enough. But in his narrative the reader is constantly having to connect the dots. Characters will talk about an event that we weren’t privy to, and through their words we have to figure out what happened. Or a chapter will begin with a dialogue between two people, but it will be a while before the identity of one of them is revealed. That type of thing. An added difficulty was that the plot involved political problems in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary (secret police, shootings by border guards, etc.). Though the novel was written in 2008, it seems like a Cold War is still going on; at any rate, I had no idea what the situation was. There’s a lot of traveling by car, a lot of boundaries crossed, and I was lost geographically. However, I stuck with the book because I liked Adam’s third person voice and found his predicament interesting. His wife Evelyn catches him having sex with a woman for whom he’s making a dress (dressmaking is his profession). Evelyn leaves him, he follows. He seems sincere in his remorse and his determination to convince her that they should stay together. Along the way he picks up a young hitchhiker (Katja), and they hit it off (though Adam keeps things platonic). When he occasionally meets up with Evelyn the signals she gives are mostly negative, though she also says that she needs time to make a decision about their marriage. Then, abruptly, Schulze switches to Evelyn’s POV and we find her in bed declaring her love to another guy (Michael). At this halfway point in the novel the complications had risen to an unacceptable level, and I decided that these people would have to work out their futures without me.

Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
I like Max. I like his collection of stories, Seven Men (particularly “Enoch Soames”), and some of his essays are the best I’ve read. I also like him as a person, as portrayed in those essays and in a book about him entitled Portrait of Max by S. N. Behrman. But I didn’t like his only novel, Zuleika Dobson. Others do: the Modern Library selected it as one of the best novels written in the English language in the 20th Century and the Heritage Press deemed it worthy of a deluxe boxed edition, oversized and adorned with art work. The subtitle of Zuleika is “An Oxford Love Story,” and maybe if I went to Oxford (as did Max) and had a rollicking good time there (as did Max), the novel might hold some charm for me. But I doubt it. The plot hinges on a female so alluring that every man who sees her (even a glimpse is enough) immediately falls in love. But Zuleika’s problem (though it doesn’t much bother her; nothing does) is that she can only love someone who doesn’t give a hoot about her. When the self-absorbed Duke initially shows no interest, she becomes enamored; but when he ‘s suddenly stricken by her beauty, and he too becomes a devotee, she loses all interest. So he decides to commit suicide. Soon every young man at Oxford makes the same decision: they will die for love of Zuleika (something she blithely accepts). What follows from this fantastical premise is decidedly earthbound; besides some silly antics, we get a lot of tiresome talk from people I found unlikable and uninteresting. An artist by the name of George Him has crammed the pages with ninety-six drawings, both in monochrome and color; they’re atrociously garish cartoons. His depiction of the bewitching Zuleika shows her as a vapid painted doll (which may, actually, be fitting). I don’t know whether all the Oxford young men commit suicide because I didn’t read far enough to find out.

Vanish in an Instant – Margaret Millar
In this superior mystery the mystery element takes second place to a psychological study of a varied group of individuals. The third person narrator, an attorney by the name of Meecham, has the problem of loneliness; others are much worse off, and some are emotionally crippled. Lives are entangled, and the untangling makes up the plot. Meecham has an inkling that the motivation for a murder lies in the past, and that it hinges on the identity of a shadowy woman by the name of Birdie. But he’s no sleuth able to perceive what the reader cannot see. Nor does he dispense justice. At the end he lets the person who committed the murder go unpunished. Punishment would serve no purpose, and the guilty party has often treated those in need with kindness. As for Meecham, he finds love. Millar doesn’t establish much of a reason for the love to emerge, she just grants it. I didn’t object; in this grim melange some hope of happiness was welcome. Margaret Millar was married for over forty years to the crime novelist Ross MacDonald. Vanish is similar to his Lew Archer books in the psychological probing, the sharp characterizations, the dark vision of life. I can imagine the two of them typing away, working out the fates of lost souls, and the picture that emerges is somewhat unsettling. I’ve read all the Archer novels – I was, at one period in my life, addicted to them – and now I plan to read more of Millar.

The Dalkey Archive – Flann O’Brien
In the opening chapters the highly fantastical almost bridges into science fiction. We get a stoppage of time; an interview with Saint Augustine; a concoction, which, when released, will exterminate all life on the planet. This weirdness is presented with a rollicking verbal inventiveness. But gradually a change settles in – the prose becomes straightforward and the plot has Mick logically working out a plan to save humanity. We aren’t done with eccentrics – Sergeant Fottrell is addicted to adjectives: “I know the dates and times protuberantly because it was my good self who carried out the punctures with my penknife.” Fottrell has disabled a bicycle tire because, according to his “moly-cule theory,” a man can turn into a bicycle or anything else that he has a long and intimate acquaintance with. (Since the molecules switch places, a bicycle will begin acting like a man.) Mick also has an encounter with James Joyce, who’s living in anonymity in a nearby town (but is he the JJ?). The picture of Mick that emerges is a sad one: he’s a bachelor in his thirties who lives with his mother; his job is so insignificant (and underpaid) that it’s never identified; he has a girlfriend, but their relationship is celibate. And he drinks too much. He decides that, after he’s solved pressing problems (such as saving humanity), he’ll enter one of the more rigorous religious sects. But he solves nothing; instead, in the closing ten spoken words Mick gets a jolt that unravels all his plans. Though the book never becomes dark or heavy, the fading of the initial exuberance is obvious. Near the end O’Brien has Mick think “As an intending Trappist, he would have to turn his back on pleasure but that would not be so easy because he knew of practically nothing which could be called pleasure.” Is the author describing his own frame of mind? Archive was written by a sick man; it was published two years before O’Brien’s death at age fifty-five. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, is his most famous work; I find it to be a boring bit of juvenile indulgence. But in The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth, and in Archive too, O’Brien gave me pleasure.

The Works of Love – Wright Morris
I never could get a handle on what made Will Brady tick. His only act of initiative – this is something he does as a young man – is to propose to a prostitute he visits regularly. She laughs him out of the room. When he leaves the house he finds a group of women sitting on the steps; he asks, “Is there one of you girls who would like to get married?” They too find his proposal to be funny. But after this Will shows no conviction; his jobs and his subsequent marriages are initiated by others. He even has an infant he didn’t father foisted on him. He accepts all that comes his way without resentment or involvement. His life roles are summarized in this way: “A father, one who didn’t know what being a father was like, and a lover, one who didn’t know much about love. More or less hopeless.” Perhaps it was Will’s uniqueness – was there ever such a rudderless person in fiction? – that made reading about him rather fascinating. But what counts in a novel that challenges your credibility is your final opinion about where the author is taking you. As Morris skips years (in unsubstantiated giant strides) Will winds up an old man who, in a faux childish fashion, deals with the Great Questions of Life. A Voice from out of the sky says to him, “There’s no need for great lovers in heaven. Pity is the great lover, and the great lovers are all on earth.” With this turn to profundity I began to plod along inattentively (which may be why I couldn’t understand the ending). Morris violated his own credo about what fiction should deal with; regarding a book about men who visit the moon, he writes, “What the world needed, it seemed, was a traveler who would stay right there in the bedroom, or open a door and walk slowly about his own house.” I agree – there’s value in addressing the ordinary human condition. But in The Works of Love Morris is closer to that condition when he’s describing a man who hasn’t a clue about how to be human.

Scenes from Village Life – Amos Oz (Hebrew)
What these eight stories share is a mysterious, sometimes creepy sense of dislocation, as if something terrible is lurking in the shadows. Everybody in the Israeli village is unhappy in one way or another – lonely, angry, lost – and relationships (when they exist) are troubled. In the final story, “In a Faraway Place at Another Time,” the place Oz takes us to is one where degeneration and degradation reign. Though this is a solid collection, too many stories seem truncated; if a point is being made, it never comes to light. In “Digging” is everyone imagining the digging under a house or is it or is meant to be symbolic? Oz is good at creating atmospherics, but that’s not enough. Only in one story – “Waiting” – do all the elements work. The mayor of the village receives a note from his wife; it reads “Don’t worry about me.” Benny waits for her to come home, then he begins searching for her. What emerges is how empty Benny’s relationship with his wife is, and how flawed he is. He’s all surface, glad-handing his way through life. His search, deep into the night, may be his only act of commitment. He winds up sitting on the bench where his wife had been when she gave someone the note that was delivered to him. “So he settled in the middle of the bench, his bleeding hand wrapped in the scarf, buttoned up his coat because of the light rain that had started to fall, and sat waiting for his wife.”

Scum – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This novel was published the same year Singer died (at age eighty-seven), so one can’t help but wonder about that blunt title. Who or what does “scum” refer to? To Max Barabander or the world in general? In the opening page Max is at a café in Poland, looking at a Yiddish newspaper. Alongside stories of a world careening toward WWI he reads of three hundred brides being shipped off to prospective grooms in Australia; they have been selected solely on the basis of photographs. Max thinks, “Three hundred girls! Damn their wicked little navels. That’s what I’d like, a ship with live merchandise. Between a yes and a no, I’d make a million rubles.” So he sees this as a business opportunity – sex trafficking. Later in the novel he’s drawn into that exact endeavor. But he doesn’t instigate the plan; he initially goes along with it at another’s urging, then later decides to back out. On the surface this forty-seven-year-old man is forceful and smooth and persuasive, but he’s unable to discriminate in his actions. He’s constantly getting caught up in a tangle of lies, all of them involving women. That’s the book, basically. Singer holds one’s attention, but the abrupt ending suggests that he got tired of dealing with his conflicted character and brought a halt to the proceedings by sticking him in prison. Though Max is despicable in many ways, it’s hard to condemn him. We’re in his mind, so we’re privy to his regrets and confusion and desire to lead a life in which he hurts no one: “to make amends for every sin – with money, with words, with presents. An aversion arose in him against all those who take nothing in account except their own desires.” Despite his good intentions, Max follows his inchoate desires and goes stumbling on the downward path.

Behind the Lines – Jaroslav Hasek (Czech)
These episodes take place in a country that has long been exposed to the conflicts of its more powerful neighbors. Perhaps the Czechs are so well-acquainted with war that they can appreciate an author who makes a cynical joke of it. This book’s “hero,” Gasek (close to Hasek, isn’t it?), is a survivor, resourceful and wily and able to land on his feet in the face of any threat that comes his way. When he’s in charge he never resorts to brutality; he’s deflects it if he can. And when he can’t – when people die – it’s only mentioned as happening. Hasek populates these stories with grotesques and madmen, which lends an element of slapstick to the proceedings. His take on calamity and chaos was probably bracing to a people caught up in the Great War and the communist revolution in Russia. Bitter laughter is better than no laughter at all.

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Over 600 pages of them, and not one of those pages is boring. Though the locale of some stories is pre-Hitler Europe, to read them is to enter a Grimm-like forest where supernatural beings lurk. Did Singer believe in the malignant powers he writes about? All that can be said with certainty is that they fascinated him. Not only do demons and Satan exist, they sometimes narrate a story. These forces intervene in human lives; men and women struggle in their grasp or submit willingly to their bidding. Working from this premise, Singer’s characters confront good and evil, question the existence of god, try to fathom the meaning of life. No beliefs are respected and no answers are provided (least of all by a Jewish religion that’s depicted as a morass of superstition). The pieces that take place in the present (in which Singer plays a role, either an active one or as a listener to a tale told to him by someone else) are less exotic, though they too have an element of other-worldliness. Satan may not appear in New York, but peculiar people and odd occurrences abound. Not all stories fit the mold I’ve described; some stay grounded in reality. Nor was every story to my liking. But always evident is Singer’s intense absorption in human nature and behavior. Because so many of his characters are ruled by aberrant passions, this book gives off a sense of wildness. As an author Singer possessed a unique power, perhaps given to him by one of his demons: the power to compel the reader to enter the dark and tangled forest. *

The Women at the Pump - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
“People from the big city have no conception of the scale of things in a small town. They think they can come and take their stand in the marketplace and smile their superior smile; they think they can laugh at the houses and the paving – how often they feel that way!” Thus this book begins. Though the omniscient narrator’s familiar, jaunty tone is sustained throughout, the residents of a fishing village get a thorough examination, and few come out unscathed. This is a comic novel only in the sense that human failings are treated in a bantering way. Of the doctor made resentful by his lack of success: “Nor did he ever attain anything respectable in the line of malice, he had started too late; as an elderly castaway he attained only to a sour dissatisfaction, to bitterness, rancor, petty vindictiveness, slander.” Hamsun uses the village as a microcosm; his universal subject is life. He perceives it to be hard; only the rare individual isn’t twisted or damaged in some way. He respects a man who’s brave, resilient and simple, who confronts life as it is and doesn’t examine it nor whine about it. I use the word “man” because this is a masculine novel; women matter, but the minds Hamsun enters are those of males. As for a plot, many years roll by, things happen in the village, small and momentous, to people of both high and low station; these events are topics of gossip for the women who meet at the pump. In the closing chapters Hamsun seems at a loss as to how to wind things up, and the book loses its momentum. Still, this is another considerable accomplishment from the Norwegian master.

Love - Elizabeth von Arnim
The title, in its simplicity, is misleading; this is a novel filled with conflict. A young man (Christopher, twenty-five) becomes infatuated with an older woman (Catherine). Though flattered and enlivened by his intensity, she makes determined efforts to discourage him. But even when she reveals to him that she’s forty-seven and has a nineteen-year-old daughter, his ardor is not dampened; he continues to insist on marriage; Catherine weakens. Complicating matters is the husband of her daughter. He’s a reverend in his fifties, and though he’s much older than his wife, he and his priggish mother consider Catherine’s relationship with a mere boy to be repugnant. Since he has the power to separate Catherine from her daughter, his uncompromising attitude carries weight. In the midst of these pressures, Catherine marries Christopher. But love doesn’t conquer all; instead it leads her into a desperate struggle. She’s in the last stage before old age sets in, and to combat that dissolution she has elaborate (and expensive) “treatments” to make her appear young; they help, but they also make her look cheap. Catherine loses something precious to her: her dignity. Her formerly quiet life is in emotional turmoil, and though her daughter sticks by her, their harmonious relationship is altered. Love turns out to be a mixed bag. Are the ecstasies (which, on Christopher’s side, become less and less ecstatic) worth the grief? For me the answer is no; reading this book was a painful experience. The author creates a rose-colored aura, not unlike what would be found in a romance novel, yet the roses have thorns.

Wayfarers - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
This long novel begins when Edevart is in his mid-teens, ready to strike out on his own. He’s not regarded highly in his village, mainly because he hadn’t done well in school. But there are varieties of intelligence, and Edevart is quite capable. He’s strong and good-looking, virtuous and honest. We follow his journey to manhood. A major influence is August, a wayfarer by nature (homeless, never settled, never content); August creates change wherever he goes with his restless inventiveness. But it’s Edevart’s first love, Lovise, who alters the course of his life. The idyllic weeks they spend together prove indelible, even though, as time passes, he becomes disenchanted with her. She’s basically a good, caring person, but she’s not the simple and pure soul he thought her to be. She, like August, becomes restless – another wayfarer. By the end of the book Edevart’s character has hardened considerably; the naive boy is gone. Back in his home village, idle and restless (that word again), he receives a letter from Lovise; she has moved to America. The book ends with Edevart disappearing, but we know that he’s gone to join her. I was left with the conviction that happiness does not await him. Happiness (or at least contentment) lies in being satisfied with where you’ve been set down in the world and accepting traditional values. Hamsun was in his late sixties when he wrote this book; these are an old man’s conclusions. What’s so impressive is the freshness and vigor with which he depicts the feelings of a young man. *

Joe the Engineer - Chuck Wachtel
After starting (and quickly discarding) a string of literary novels that were done in carefully-wrought prose, full of deep thoughts and feelings, Wachtel’s fast-moving novel was a welcome change. Joe is a strong character, as are the secondary ones (particularly his wife and his co-worker, Joe Flushing Avenue); the authenticity of the gritty Queens locale is an added plus. Joe is a dissatisfied soul, unhappy with his marriage and job; his negative outlook on life is bolstered by a deeply-ingrained cynicism. I found this story of a flawed man on the wrong track to be interesting, though I was put off by the novel’s vulgarity, which sometimes descends to the level of bathroom humor. In the closing pages Wachtel seems to give up on his material. A fight at a funeral parlor comes across as Keystone Cops foolishness. And at the end the reader is left with no idea what the future holds for Joe; the author simply abandons him.

Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly - John Franklin Bardin
I liked the premise (woman released from mental hospital after two years; reason for her hospitalization unstated) and the precision of the writing. But then the prose took on an overheated tone and elements that had been initially intriguing – the whereabouts of the harpsichord key, the question of Basil’s involvement with another woman – were fixated on but not developed. The person’s mind we’re in was murky with mysteries. I’m sure that if I had read further (and I would have, twenty years ago), her dark problem would have been revealed. But now, when annoyance sets in, I stop reading.

Gimpel the Fool - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
A mixed bag. Sometimes you pull out a pearl (“Gimpel the Fool”) and sometimes a slimy maggot (“The Mirror”). The problem with the latter story – and others like it – is its extreme cruelty. When Singer delves into the supernatural his imagination conjures up elaborate horrors. Still, even these repugnant stories have a perverse power. Singer was a complex man; he could convincingly show a gentle and compassionate side, as in “The Little Shoemakers,” “By the Light of the Memorial Candles” and “Joy.” He explored basic questions, and he mostly concluded that life is an inexplicable mystery. He ends “Joy” with a character saying “One should be joyous.” Considering the darkness of so many stories, one has to wonder how successful Singer was in finding simple joy. *

The Three-Cornered Hat - Antonio de Alarcon (Spanish)

A short folk tale, told with liveliness and simplicity. The characters are one-dimensional representations of some aspect of human nature. What mattered for me was the portrayal of true love – one grounded on trust and affection. I also liked the donkeys braying to each other.

A Crown of Feathers - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)

For many years Singer made his living by selling his work to Yiddish newspapers. He had to entertain, and he did. I wonder who his audience was – men? Women are frequently portrayed as threatening, both physically and personality-wise; many have facial hair (one has a full beard). The relationship between the sexes is fraught with discord; it can even turn murderous. Thankfully – since a little strife and hysteria can go a long way – this isn’t a major element in most stories. The quality level Singer maintains is very high (only two of the twenty-four stories don’t succeed). But it’s when viewed cumulatively that this collection takes on a unique power. What makes it unique is that Singer often approaches the big questions of life from a supernatural perspective. In “A Crown of Feathers” the conflict between good and evil is played out in the mind and heart of Akhsa. At one point she decides that the universe is ruled not by God but by the “black powers.” She swallows a potion to call the Devil to her; that night he comes. His attitude is both fawning and contemptuous. She has questions for him, ones that he finds amusing in their naivety. When she asks, “Where is the truth?” he replies, “The truth is that there is no truth.” *

The Big Money - John Dos Passos

This is the last of the USA trilogy; in all it makes up over 1200 pages. Dos Passos wrote, in a preface to the series, that America was “mostly people speaking.” He gives them a voice; the bulk of this book, and the other two, follows lives. People think, feel, act, talk; the narrative drive and authenticity is amazing. The time span covered by the trilogy – three decades – and the diversity of the characters give it enormous scope; this is as close as we’ll come to the Great American Novel. It has a strong element of protest – there was much injustice in the USA – but this isn’t a limiting factor; each book teems with human beings we can relate to. The Big Money succeeds as fully as the other two did. Dos Passos set out on a path he believed in; it was exactly the right path. *

In My Father’s Court - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This autobiographical novel takes place in the Jewish section of Warsaw in the early 1900s. People come to the “court” of the rabbi (Singer’s father) to have all manner of problems settled; through this framework we get a look at a world teeming with the whole range of human emotions. Though the rabbi has to be immersed in this world (often a distasteful task), his desire is to move to a higher religious plane, and he wants his son to take this path. Isaac is initially a listener/observer, but as he grows from boy to young man he becomes an individual with strong ideas of his own. The religious life or the worldly one, with its pitfalls? It’s no contest; the young man doesn’t believe in religion, and the world of sex has too great an allure for him. Along with some of his stories, this is Singer’s best work. *

Empire Falls - Richard Russo
A long novel that moves with the glacial slowness we had prior to global warming; even the attempts at wit are strung out, wordy, tedious (the funniest thing about the book is that it won the Pulitzer Prize). At the center is dull, good Miles, so Russo surrounds him with an assortment of oddballs, constructing a complex interplay between them that gets increasingly unwieldy and unbelievable. The novel is clunky and plodding. I don’t mind clunky, plodding novels, not if the author presents people and situations that are interesting and true to life. Russo does neither.

The Rock Pool - Cyril Connolly
Connolly made no concessions to the reader. Often the writing is obscure, the ideas complex, the language French. I read for stretches without comprehension, no longer in the story, annoyed. Yet at other times it seemed brilliant. The characters (expatriates in a French Riviera town) can’t live in conventional society (or are barred from returning to it – some are predatory rotters). The main character is Naylor; his moral and monetary descent is believable and frightening. The sense of disgust – self-disgust, disgust for one’s fellow humans and for life – is portrayed with force. Yet, strangely, a sense of life’s beauty is also evoked, though it’s a beauty lost forever. *