Tag Archives: Walter Benjamin

Bryce Sears’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on by under Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, his second for the blog, is by Bryce Sears (@BryceSears5). Bryce, one of the nicest people on Book Twitter (which is saying something), is an avid reader and writer who lives in Oakland.

Alex Katz, Ada Ada (1959)

It looks like I read about a book a week in 2022. Notable also that about four books in every five or so I read last year were by women. I favored women writers by about the same margin the year before last, too. I’m not sure why I’ve been reading mostly women. I haven’t planned to do so – not as a habit. Like anyone else, I’m just following my own interests in reading. Years ago, I spent a lot more time reading men, perhaps favoring them by as lopsided a ratio. Months of reading Nabokov, Bellow, Naipaul, Coetzee. So, maybe I’m bringing things back into balance? I wonder too, as I think about reading Fosse and Knausgaard in 2023, if I might be going back to reading more men. We’ll see. It has been exciting reading more women. I think that, not being the primary beneficiaries of a patriarchy, the women I’ve been reading have tended to see the world as more dangerous than did the men I used to read more of.

The Book of Goose, and some other works by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li and Shirley Jackson top the list of writers I read the most of last year. I had previously read only a little of both. With Li, I had read her second story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Then, last year, I read the first collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. [Ed. – I feel like those early collections don’t get enough love these days.] With that, I had a feeling something had clicked for me with her writing. I read her third novel, Where Reasons End, as well as her collection of memoir essays, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. These are both pretty somber books. Li has spoken in interviews about her own attempts to commit suicide and she wrote, in Dear Friend, about these attempts. In 2017 her son, at 16, took his own life. She writes, in Where Reasons End, a work of fiction, about a mother’s grieving following the suicide of her son. Toward the end of last year, I read The Book of Goose, Li’s most recent novel and my favorite of hers. More recently, finishing in January of 2023 (I’d like to call this part of a “long 2022”), I read The Vagrants, her first novel, which is very good and very bleak.   

I realize this may all make Li sound like a writer of mostly bleak stories. And her work is often quite somber, at least in these books I’ve read. But it isn’t always. The Vagrants, which deals, among other things, with the oppression of free speech in China, struck me as bleak mostly for political reasons. Dear Friend has chapters about suicide, as mentioned, but is mostly about reading (Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas McGahern, William Trevor, Marianne Moore, among others). The stories are terrific and varied. The Book of Goose is dark and delightful.  

I like how Li describes the human predicament. She doesn’t go in much for metaphor. She uses short sentences and short paragraphs. She has written about reading Tolstoy, and her writing can remind me of his in moments when humanity seems to shine out of her paragraphs. I had that sense while reading The Vagrants, especially, but also while reading The Book of Goose. The latter has the feel of a fable. I wouldn’t describe it as a funny book. But it did, like The Vagrants, strike me as having deep wells of humor. Consider its narrator, 13-year-old Agnès, thinking here about her friend Fabienne, and questioning her own belief in god:

Fabienne loved making nonsense about god. She claimed she believed in god, though what she meant, I thought, was that she believed in a god that was always available for her to mock. I did not know if I believed in god – my father was an atheist and my mother was the opposite of an atheist. If I had been closer to one or the other, it would be easier for me to choose. But I was close only to Fabienne. Perturbatrice of god, she called herself, and said I was one, too, because I was always on her side. In that sense we were not atheists. You had to believe that god existed so you could make mischief and upend his plans.

What I love here, especially, is that “If I had…” bit. Yes, it is a little bleak how casually Li has her narrator put her religious belief up for grabs. It is as if Li is saying, Yes, that is how we build our identities. But isn’t that mostly true? And isn’t it funny that we are like that?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and some other works by Shirley Jackson

I can’t believe I waited so long to read Shirley Jackson. [Ed. – You’re ahead of me! I know, it’s a scandal.] But here, at last, I’ve made a start. My summer last year was the summer of Shirley Jackson. It wasn’t planned, not (again) as a habit. On a whim, I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson’s last novel. I had always assumed it was a kind of haunted house story, like The Haunting of Hill House. Somehow – very likely from the Backlisted podcast, as Castle is the subject of their 52nd episode – I wised up. A house figures prominently in Castle, as in much of Jackson’s work. But Castle is about siblinghood and mass hysteria, not to mention the anxieties of adolescence. It has Gothic elements. It resembles a haunted house story. But it isn’t supernatural. Not in the least. Just a tale about the remnants of your average family getting by after one of them has murdered the others with some arsenic in the fruit salad.

If you haven’t read Castle, don’t wait. I wish I hadn’t. I followed it with a binge. I reread The Lottery, which I hadn’t read in decades. It’s still a knockout. I read The Haunting of Hill House, then The Road Through the Wall, then Hangsaman. Haunting struck me as a little dull, perhaps because its approach has been used so often elsewhere since its publication. I should have read it when I was younger. I liked Road a lot, but Hangsaman came closest for me to the thrill of Castle, which is still my favorite Jackson. I read Dark Tales, another story collection (“The Summer People” is a stunner in that one). I read The Sundial, too, in which Jackson turns her knack for foreboding tension into comedic gold. (Pitch-black comedic gold, if that makes sense.) Another Do as I Say Not as I Did? Don’t sleep on The Sundial.

Somewhere along the way, I read A Rather Haunted Life, the Ruth Franklin biography. It is a sad thing about our time with Jackson, who died in 1965 at age 49, only a few years after Castle was published. Her most popular book in her lifetime – her biggest seller by some margin – wasn’t Castle, or any of the world-famous books mentioned above. It was a book called Life Among the Savages, the best, I gather, of the comical chronicles of everyday family life Jackson wrote for the women’s magazines of her day (another collection of these chronicles is called Raising Demons). I’m not here to speak ill of comical family chronicles. I have copies of both of these books and look forward to reading them. Still, new to her work as I am, aware I’m only the latest of many to have this thought, I can’t help but wish we’d gotten more time with Jackson. I can’t help but wish she had seen her reputation rise based on the books we celebrate her for now, or other books she might have written. Had she lived even into her 80s, she would have been alive and presumably writing in the 1990s. Crazy-making, thinking of what she might have come up with in those years.

The Dominant Animal and Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan

I read two books by Kathryn Scanlan last year. Earlier in the year, after loving a story of hers (called “As the Dick Would Have It”) in Southwest Review [Ed. – Ok that is a a good title], I picked up The Dominant Animal, a collection of very short stories. I read it quickly and liked it a lot. I’d recommend it anyone who doesn’t need a story to convey a meaning of some sort that is especially clear. Some of the stories in this collection were published, I believe, in Noon, the journal Diane Williams founded. Probably everyone knows this, but Williams is famous for writing very short stories. People write of her stories that they skirt meaning in interesting ways. I find her stories interesting. Her narrators often strike me as shocking, even horrifying. Most of them I find comical. I experience the people in her stories speaking and behaving in ways I think, at first, people never speak or behave in real life. Then, sometimes, I start to think people do sometimes talk and act like that. In any case, even as I think now that Scanlan is portraying characters in a somewhat more realistic way than I read Williams as doing, or intending to do, my read of The Dominant Animal at the time (a somewhat shallow read, I hope I’m making clear, though I hope it may help readers new to her work) was along these lines – that Scanlan was doing a similar sort of thing to what Williams is doing.

Kick the Latch, which I read in September, is a quite different sort of book from The Dominant Animal. It is a kind of novel. A single, first person narrative of the life of a horse trainer named Sonia, a woman Scanlan interviewed whose voice (I’m quoting here from the afterward and the French flaps) she transcribed and amplified and “used to write the book, which is a work of fiction.” In some ways, the book reads like a memoir written by Sonia. It would feel very much like a memoir, I think, if it had included more details that identify her, like her last name. As it is, Sonia can feel at times like an everywoman. That isn’t a bad thing, to my thinking. The book is terrific. Moving, at times harrowing, odd, above all interesting. Scanlan has a wonderfully taught prose style. Producing a book in this way raises ethical questions. I can imagine someone trying this technique – producing a novel based on interviews with a working-class person who doesn’t want credit as a cowriter – in a way I’d consider exploitative. The hosts of the Literary Friction podcast interviewed Scanlan and wondered, as a kind of thought experiment, how our reaction to the book might change if Sonia were suing Scanlan over some kind of misrepresentation. That would change things for me, certainly. So, I count myself lucky nothing of the sort seems to be happening. The book is so good. Just thinking of it again now, I want to reread it. All the while I was reading it, I wished my grandparents – my grandparents! – were alive so that I might convince them to read it. If you knew them you’d get the emphasis. They were open-minded about literature, but weren’t great readers. My grandmother was a big Danielle Steel fan. But they were Texans who retired to a horse-racing life in New Mexico. They could sound at times like Sonia does in Kick the Latch. And the storytelling in the book is so naturally done. My grandparents would have loved it. I bet you would too. [Ed. – Been hearing a lot about this, but this has sold me! Thanks, Bryce.]

In Memory of Memory, by Maria Stepanova (tr. Sasha Dugdale)

I’m a sucker for the “meditation on” label in book marketing. Give me Fernando Pessoa journaling for five hundred pages about nostalgia, and his daily life at the office. Give me Claudio Magris, traveling the Danube, letting its scenery take his thinking where it will. Give me Nathalie Léger, on a three-book quest to understand herself through the lives of other artists. If the feeling of a mind letting itself wander a bit aimlessly thrills you too, you may love In Memory of Memory as I did. The book is a kind of tribute Stepanova is writing to her family. The digressive nature of this tribute may make it difficult to track what exactly is happening to her family. I could find myself losing threads. Still, I didn’t mind. The digressions are wonderful. They’re most of the book. The family history, in some sense, is a frame to support them. Stepanova writes about Sebald and Joseph Cornell, Tsvetaeva, Walter Benjamin, Francesca Woodman, among other writers and artists. She writes about history. Her family had better luck than many other Jewish families did in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. [Ed. – Low bar…] In Memory of Memory isn’t about the worst human suffering of those years. It’s about some people who escaped it. This is a source of some tension for Stepanova. She writes with some regret that she had no heroes in her family, that they all “appeared to live utterly apart from grinding mills of the era.” In this sense, the book strikes me a tribute to ordinary people, too, as well as to art and literature.

AlexKatz, Jean Standing (1976)

How can I only have read a book a week last year and I’m still running out of space for this piece? (Because I’m longwinded, that’s how.) [Ed. – Haha I’ll see you and raise you…]

I don’t want to miss saying that I read and loved J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine last year, too – a somber book of perfect sentences. You won’t read it without planning to reread it. It is that good.  

I loved Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, one of the funniest books I read last year. Did you know she was friends with Jodorowsky? I didn’t until a few months ago, when someone said so on Twitter (so it must be true). I want to read everything by her now. I want to learn all about her life, too.

I loved Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. Another book that had me laughing. It was one a very few non-fiction books I read last year. I loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (tr. Susan Bernofsky), and Magda Szabó’s The Door (tr. Len Rix). I hope to read a lot more of both writers. I read, spread out over most of the year, the seasonal quartet of Ali Smith. I want to read more of her work. And Sleepless Nights – I can’t not mention Sleepless Nights! My first Elizabeth Hardwick. I see a lot more of her work in my future. [Ed. – Thanks, Bryce. So many writers, right???]

Two Books on Resistance (II)

Posted on by under book review, Holocaust, judaism, review, Uncategorized

I recently read two books about resistance to fascism:

Norman Ohler, The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (2020) Trans. Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarborough (2020)

Justus Rosenberg, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (2020)

I learned from both, but I didn’t learn what I most wanted to, namely, why do some people resist when most do not? Both books privilege historical detail over theoretical analysis. Still, the experiences recounted in these texts are interesting; setting them down, I found I had a lot to say, so I have divided this post into two parts. Notes on Justus Rosenberg’s The Art of Resistance are below; those on Norman Ohler’s The Bohemians are here.

Justus Rosenberg began setting down his memoirs at age ninety-eight. (I do love a late bloomer.) Published on the eve of his centenary, The Art of Resistance emphasizes Rosenberg’s wartime activities—its subtitle is “My Four Years in the French Underground”—but its most interesting sections concern the author’s childhood in the Free City of Danzig. This political anomaly was a compromise reached after WWI that balanced Allied intentions to grant Poland independence with the reality that 75% of the port city’s inhabitants were German. Danzig (today Gdańsk) and surrounding areas were made into a semi-autonomous city state; oversight was provided a high commissioner appointed by the League of Nations who sought to ensure that the rights of Poles (20% of the population) and Jews (5%) were respected in this new parliamentary democracy. In the early 1920s, almost 100,000 Jews from Russia and Poland passed through Danzig on their way to America. Others, though, especially those cultural affinities were with Germany, stayed on.

Among these were Rosenberg’s parents. Bluma Solarski and Jacob Rosenberg grew up in a shtetl only a few miles from the East Prussian border. Danzig was their haven—they eloped there to avoid familial disapproval (the Rosenbergs were rich; the Solarskis were not), and Justus was born soon after, in January 1921. The young couple rejected Zionism, attended a highly reform synagogue (and that irregularly), and hired a German nanny for their only son. (He barely mentions his sister, it is curious, even a little disquieting.) Like most of the rest of the Jews in the Free City, the Rosenbergs prospered. Not that the place was entirely idyllic; it wasn’t immune to developments beyond its borders. The local Nazi party won the most seats in the elections of 1932, yet the city’s international nature (its economy depended on the port) made them much more circumspect than their sister parties in Germany.

But by 1937 the gloves were off. Rosenberg witnessed a frightening attack on Jewish-owned businesses and homes to which the authorities turned a blind eye. After this, Rosenberg’s parents looked for a way to send him abroad, eventually arranging for him to study in Paris. Before leaving Danzig for good, he spent three weeks with his grandfather’s family in Poland, getting a crash course in Jewishness (Rosenberg was amazed to learn that not all Orthodox Jews were Chassidic). Still the sixteen-year-old was more interested in losing his virginity to a friend of his mother’s and reading French novels, which experience, admittedly, served him in good stead in Paris.

His trip to France was broken up by a stay with his paternal uncle in Berlin, a socialist, laryngologist, and composer (who had studied for a time with Schoenberg). Wandering the streets, sixteen-year-old Rosenberg saw posters advertising a rally where Hitler would be addressing the nation. Curious to know what sort of man could elicit such hatred in so many, Rosenberg ignored the signs blaring NO JEWS PERMITTED. His blond hair and blue eyes made him inconspicuous; before he knew it, he was in the middle of a fourteen-thousand strong crowd, watching with queasy fascination as the little man whipped up his audience.

This was the first of many times in his life when Rosenberg found himself in the presence of famous figures of the era. He had a knack for ending up at the centre of things. That Zelig-like quality manifested in full after three unremarkable, if satisfying, years in Paris. In the spring of 1940, his studies at the Sorbonne were interrupted by the invasion of France. By this time, Rosenberg was following events keenly. Already in 1938 most of the Jews of Danzig had left the city, most for Poland, but some, like Rosenberg’s parents, for Palestine. They wrote to say they had made it to Bratislava, and were embarking down the Danube to Romania in the hopes of reaching a ship. Rosenberg would not hear from them again until after the war.

When Paris fell, Rosenberg decided he need to do something. Like so many others, he left the city on foot; his destination, the barracks of the Polish army in exile, in Brittany. But he ended up south of the city instead, and when he finally, weeks later, made his way to Bayonne, near the Spanish border, where the British navy had agreed to take any remaining Poles to England, he found he had missed them by hours. By chance, he ended up in Marseille where, through friends of friends, he was taken on as a courier by an American who had recently arrived in the city with pockets full of money and orders to secure exit visas for prominent refugees. This was Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee; through him, Rosenberg met luminaries like Victor Serge, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst. He procured blank identity cards for forging, delivered sealed messages, laundered money through the Marseilles mafia, and even accompanied Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler, and Heinrich and Golo Mann on a nighttime trek over the Pyrenees. He played Exquisite Cadaver with Breton, took a message to Marc Chagall, and was given $500 by Peggy Guggenheim, “for an emergency.” See what I mean? Crazy stuff.

After Fry was expelled from Vichy France, Rosenberg tried to escape to Spain himself, but was arrested by the authorities. After a number of close shaves, he joined the French Resistance, who sent him to Grenoble to live undercover, but he was arrested again, in the summer of 1942, and interned in a camp near Lyons from which, a sympathetic guard told him, he and the others would be deported to Poland. (The map in this New York Times piece is excellent.) Chance intervened again—“Sometimes chance itself occasions good fortune,” the book’s epigraph explains—in the shape of the sister of a friend from his student days in Paris. Before being arrested she had been a medical student in Lyon, and she counselled Rosenberg on how to fake the symptoms of peritonitis. Before long, the “violently ill” Rosenberg was sent from the camp to hospital in Lyon where he was operated on. (Rosenberg speculates with pleasure about the surprise the surgeons must have felt when they found nothing wrong with his abdomen.)

In recovery from what was a dangerous operation, even if it was fake, Rosenberg befriended a nurse who, it turned out, had studied with the medical student and, putting two and two together, put him in contact with the Resistance. A friendly priest hid a change of clothes in the hospital bathroom and a bicycle near the exit; clutching his stitches, the woozy Rosenberg wobbled his way to a safe house from which, after recovering for good, he was sent into the countryside, where he monitored Swiss radio. Later, he joined a cadre of resistance fighters and laid mines for German truck convoys. In the summer of 1944 he was swept up by an American battalion and became their interpreter. On leave in liberated Paris in late 1944 he learned of a new organization, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up to respond to what the Allies knew would be an unprecedented refugee situation after the war. Rosenberg, who as a child had wanted to be a diplomat and spoke several languages, was a natural fit. When mediating between the victorious Americans and the vanquished Germans paled, Rosenberg jumped at the chance to take a US military ship to America, where he began a new life that led him eventually to become a professor of literature at Bard. (He’s been emeritus for almost 20 years but still teaches, or did until recently anyway.)

Rosenberg in Marseilles, 1941

The Art of Resistance is as odd a book as its subject’s life has been eventful. Its tone is strangely cheery, which certainly fits the story of a man who seemed always to have landed on his feet, but which to me only highlights the grief that routinely goes unmentioned. In an epilogue detailing what happened to the various people referenced in the book, Rosenberg offhandedly notes that sixty-four of the sixty-eight members of his extended family alive at the start of the war were murdered in the Holocaust. Rosenberg, it is likely, did not know many of these people well (of the few that he did, his grandfather’s family died, as best he can tell, in the Warsaw Ghetto and the uncle in Berlin was killed at Auschwitz, but not before he organized a clandestine choir in the camp at Sachsenhausen where he was first interned). It is also true that, miraculously enough, his entire immediate family survived. His parents and sister made it to Haifa; his sister, now 92, still lives in Israel. All of which might explain why this is not a book about loss. And why should it be, I suppose? My sense, however, is that despite the fluency of the narrative, there is something blocked about it. I was regularly surprised that Rosenberg was not more forthcoming about his feelings, or reflective about his situation. How does he feel about his survival? He says only:

Time and time again, there was what I call a ‘confluence of circumstances’ that presented me with a window of opportunity, or a moment to be seized. At each juncture, a combination of factors enabled me to seize that moment or slip through the window. That’s my best explanation for how I survived.

He names some of those circumstances—he didn’t look stereotypically Jewish; he appeared younger than he was (people often took him for a 14-year-old), which inclined them to look kindly on him; he knew five languages and had had parents who arranged for a wonderful education—but the awkward, passive syntax of the passage tells a truth. Survival wasn’t only—wasn’t even primarily—a function of ability, but of chance. Rosenberg was plenty clever and resourceful, don’t get me wrong. But The Art of Resistance shows more clearly than many memoirs of Jewish WWII experience that the Bildungsroman imperative of the memoir as a genre sits uneasily with the realities of the period.

It’s fascinating to read an excerpt from a letter Rosenberg received, decades after the war, from a woman who had also worked with Varian Fry, a woman who “shrieked with joy” to learn of his survival. Rosenberg, she writes, was “just another kid, a Jew, a ‘nice boy, but there’s nothing we can do’ (as Fry said to me when I pressed him to help you).” (Fry is someone I need to learn more about; Rosenberg’s portrayal is ambivalent at best.) The woman says she and Rosenberg and the others who worked on the team are “a people apart,” but Rosenberg doesn’t seem to think of himself that way. He is a competent writer, but not an especially good one (he explains in plodding detail what it means to be a flaneur; gives a capsule definition of the Folies Bergère; writes of his student days, “I came to be of the opinion that eating is culture on a plate!”). He even gets a little sententious when, describing the sad fate of Walter Benjamin, who died attempting to cross the Pyrenees, on one of those missions of the sort Rosenberg himself helped lead (though not that one), he notes that gifted people have their weaknesses too, like anyone, before lauding his own habit of “thinking seriously about what was happening along the way,” as if others who died didn’t think seriously, too. And he can be a little boring: the last part of the book reads like a series of testimonials—he quotes from various commanders who extolled his work with them.

But the man’s had a hell of a life, and who cares if he’s a little complaisant. You won’t learn what the art of resistance is from this book, or even if it has an art—Rosenberg’s claim about chance seems to suggest no—but you’ll hear an amazing story. That might be enough to compensate for book’s inability to be clear about what it means to have such a story.

Maybe the lesson of books like The Art of Resistance and The Bohemians is that if we’re looking for a lesson, something like a manual for resistance we won’t find one. We just have to do it.