The Master, (2004), by Colm Toibin: A Review

    Colm Toibin, the contemporary Irish author of four previous novels and various other writings, has produced a very interesting and enjoyable study of personality, character and Art in The Master. A portrait of the artist – the great American novelist, Henry James - as a middle-aged man, a biographical essay on sensibility and emotional and aesthetic distance, an historical fiction of life informing Art (and vise-versa); it is all of these and more. The 'more' is a wonderful story. For all my doubts going in, I have to say, this seems an unqualified success, and an excellent novel.   My initial hesitation concerned what I take to be a growing trend among novelists to stuff their novels full of actual (i.e. historical) personages as a sign that they are dealing with the real world in their Art. Personally, and generally, I find it aesthetically unconvincing, though the portraits of J. Edgar and Lenny Bruce, for instance, were technical highlights of descriptive fiction in DeLillo’s Underworld. The presence of actual people in fiction is far too often a red flag signaling rather an insecurity, if not an outright capitulation, of imagination.

The Death of Virgil (1945), by Hermann Broch

A Philosophical Novel Of  First Principles 

             “ . . .yet the seconds following hard upon each other enriched
             in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable
             thing called life, and it almost seemed to him as if hope blinked up
             again in those flashes . . . if only in this instant . . .”

       (from Book II: Fire - The Descent, Pg. 96)

   Today (November 1st) is Hermann Broch’s birthday; born this day in 1886 (d. 1951), Broch is best remembered now as a contemporary of Joyce, Mann, Musil, and Freud, and perhaps less well known as the Austrian innovator of the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction. The son of a prominent Jewish family of fin de siecle Vienna, Broch ran (for ten years) and then sold the family’s textile business, in 1928, to pursue studies in Mathematics and Philosophy (much like Musil), before turning away from Logical Positivism in dismay to seek a unifying “totality” of perception in literature.

My Ántonia (1918), by Willa Cather

“Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas”

                          --Virgil, Georgics

    Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American writer of extraordinary emotional intelligence and unsurpassed literary excellence. Her writing is as crisp and clean as river ice, as luxurious as new-spun wool and as richly textured as farmland topsoil. She was an artist of incredible depth of feeling, for her characters, as well as for the land and the past that they grew out of. She was also the greatest admirer and chronicler of the kind of love, luck and endurance of hardship that it takes to be a pioneer. She brought all of these qualities and abilities to bear in My Ántonia.
    It is the story of a love and a life-long reverence held by a man for a woman who was his childhood friend and companion, since the time they both were transplanted - he, an orphan at 10, from Virginia and she an immigrant child of 14, from Bohemia (the modern day Czech Republic) - to the unbroken, unploughed plains of Nebraska in the 1890’s.

A Review of The Assault, by Harry Mulisch

   Harry Mulisch, who died only last year at about this time, was one of the most revered and beloved authors of fiction in post-war Holland. Among many critics (in Holland and abroad) he was considered, even by himself, to be a front-runner for a future Nobel Prize. It was said, he was one of
                               . . . a generation of writers who explored the complex
                               aftermath of a war in which good and evil were not as
                               simple as black and white.

              ---from NYT obituary, October, 2010

His 1982 novel, The Assault, was made into an academy award-winning movie (of the same name) in 1986, which doubtlessly advanced in the States an already burgeoning European reputation.