Categories: Books

Richard Howorth recommends All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
By Theodore Rosengarten
1974

Theodore Rosengarten was a young Harvard graduate student, a native of Brooklyn, New York, when he traveled to Alabama in 1969 to conduct research on Southern sharecroppers' unions of the 1930s. There he came across an eighty-four-year-old African-American man, Ned Cobb, who had been a member of a communist-originated union. As he probed Cobb with questions about his union involvement, he realized that this illiterate man had a remarkable capacity to recount the details and events of his life.

In 1971, Rosengarten returned to his subject with equipment to begin recording Cobb's life story. The transcription, edited down from fifteen hundred pages of material, became a six-hundred-page book entitled All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, published by Alfred Knopf in 1974. (Rosengarten changed Cobb's name in the book as a safety precaution.)

All God's Dangers earned immediate praise. The New York Times said that " . . . Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history."

Paul Gray, in Time, called the book "astonishing," and noted that "Miraculously, this man's wrenching tale sings of life's pleasures: honest work, the rhythm of the seasons, the love of relatives and friends, the stubborn persistence of hope when it should have vanished. All God's Dangers is most valuable for its picture of pure courage."

Several reviews noted the "Faulknerian" quality of the narrative of Shaw--who was born twelve years before Faulkner and died ten years after him--and the Baltimore Sun commented that "Nate Shaw spans our history from slavery to Selma, and he can evoke each age with an accuracy and poignancy so pure that we stand amazed." In 1975 All God's Dangers earned the National Book Award.

The book has remained in print over the past thirty years, long a Vintage paperback and presently available from the University of Chicago Press. During that time, roughly the same as my own as a bookseller, I have been asked countless times to answer the same question, which always more or less comes in the form of "What one book would you say best explains the South?"

I have always answered it-usually standing right amidst the canon of Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, and Wolfe, all in their beauteous Library of America editions, and in paperback aplenty, and To Kill a Mockingbird, All the King's Men, Black Boy, or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, not to mention the book of a personal hero, Walker Percy, author of the first great postmodern novel by a Southerner, need I say it, The Moviegoer, or the work of several notable writers who are also friends, Larry Brown, Ellen Douglas, and Barry Hannah among them, and even a few newcomer gems such as Serena by Ron Rash or The Missing by Tim Gautreaux- I have always answered the question with the title whose mere utterance never fails to give a little thrill: All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw.

This question--What one book best explains the South?--usually begs the next: Why? Lots of reasons, many of which I have suggested, but in case not: the strength of the narrative and its epic story, the sheer beauty and honesty in the language, the uncanny detail about agriculture and animal husbandry, about mules, for heaven's sakes, about the economy of farming and of Shaw's time, including the Depression, about labor, class, and race--about race in a way that takes the reader to the heart of America's great, vexing issue--about family, power, and truth, and, perhaps most of all, about human dignity.

Though I do it all the time, I am sometimes annoyed to see "Southern literature" subcategorized, when doing so somehow seems to minimize its importance. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw--let there be no misunderstanding--is a great American work of deep universal relevance and, for its readers, invariably, a source of astonishment and, indeed, reassurance that literature-even from an illiterate-is a thing of unsurpassing satisfaction.

Richard Howorth

Richard Howorth is the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, the bookstore he began in 1979. He served two terms as mayor of Oxford and is a former president of the American Booksellers Association. In 2008 he received the Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.

Scott Simon recommends Additional Dialogue: The Letters of Dalton Trumbo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Additional Dialogue: The Letters of Dalton Trumbo
Edited by Helen Mafull
1970

Dalton Trumbo was an acerbic wit with a bristly moustache who was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood (A Guy Named Joe, Kitty Foyle, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo), and a member of the Communist Party who refused to name names when commanded to the by House Un-American Activities Committee.

I will leave his literary reputation to film scholars (many point out that somehow he wrote his best films--Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave--under the pseudonyms he had to adopt during the blacklist). But this collection of letters establishes Trumbo as the most extraordinary and entertaining correspondent of all time.

He spent most of his best creative years living in a ranch many miles from the film factories of southern California, in exile in Mexico after he was blacklisted, and even in prison, where he spent eleven months for refusing to testify to the HUAC. The kind of creative effort other Hollywood writers might apply to studio meetings, lunches, and, for that matter, scripts they knew from experience would be substantially rewritten by others, Trumbo poured into magnificent letters that only he could send, to family, friends, contractors--even, at one point, to the man repairing his kitchen.

Some highlights: a missive sent to a hotel manager on why Trumbo felt entitled to swipe a room service coffeepot; a travel manual of sorts sent to his daughter, Melissa, about to embark on a trip to Europe, about the romantic dispositions of various European nationalities; and a hilariously detailed epistle to his son, Christopher, about to depart for college, on onanism and other solitary pursuits. There is a little lefty politics among the letters, which can now seem dated or naïve. But they are mostly letters written by a tenderhearted parent, husband, and friend to the people he cherishes most, and who cherish his wit and strength in adversity.

Scott Simon
Host, NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday 

Calvin Trillin recommends The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston

An historical novel about someone most people have never heard of—but recommended by Calvin Trillin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
By Wayne Johnston
1999

I don't think of myself as having much interest in historical novels, but two of my favorite pieces of fiction could be included in that category: The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, by Wayne Johnston, and The Siege of Krishnapur, by J. G. Farrell. (The winner of the Booker Prize in 1973, The Siege of Krishnapur takes place almost entirely within a British fort under siege during the Sepoy Rebellion against the British Raj in 1857. New York Review Books reissued it in a handsome paperback edition in 2004.) The improbable hero of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an actual historical figure, though one most Americans are unaware of--Joey Smallwood, who led Newfoundland into the Canadian federation. The major events Johnston describes in the novel actually happened: as a labor organizer in 1925, Smallwood actually did walk across the entire colony to unionize railroad section-men, for instance, and Newfoundlanders did actually vote to join Canada in 1949. But the most vivid character in the book, the St. John's newspaper columnist Sheilagh Fielding, is fictional. The novel has the sweep of a grand Hollywood movie, complete with seal hunt, and it manages to make a fully rounded character out of a place--the strange and fascinating colony of unrequited dreams. I once described it as "the great American novel, except it happens to be about Newfoundland."

Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, is also The Nation's "deadline poet." His books include the novel Tepper Isn't Going Out, the memoir About Alice, and Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme.

Cathleen McGuigan recommends Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Fashion Week is in full swing. Love, Loss and What I Wore is a lovely and very personal account of the complex emotions, memories, and expressions that ones clothing can inspire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love, Loss, and What I Wore
By Ilene Beckerman
1995

In the crowded bazaar of memoirs, I cherish a little book that came across my desk a dozen years ago called Love, Loss, and What I Wore. A fashion-conscious woman named Ilene Beckerman painted her life growing up in New York City in the 1940s, '50s, and beyond, in swift strokes-with charming color sketches of once-beloved outfits, accompanied by a few concise words about the memories they sparked. She didn't dwell on life's losses-the deaths, the divorces-but hers seemed especially poignant, planted like little bombs among the details of a sharkskin blouse or a favorite navy dress with a detachable cape collar. Like a gourmand remembering long-ago feasts, Beckerman recalled the delicious swishing sound made by a plaid taffeta birthday dress; the eternity it took to hem the yellow-striped circle skirt she sewed with her best friend in high school; and the expensive Chinese brocade dress she wore one New Year's Eve, when she found her first husband kissing the party's hostess at midnight. Maybe I love the book because I still have every party dress I ever owned (after my mother died, I found the childhood ones she packed in a trunk, wrapped carefully in tissue). I've often given this slim volume to friends (women only, of course). Its virtue lies in its understatement-and that, as its stylish author knew, is the key to true chic.

Cathleen McGuigan

Cathleen McGuigan is a contributor to Newsweek, where she writes about architecture, design, books, and other cultural subjects. Besides Newsweek, her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Harper's Bazaar, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. McGuigan was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and is currently an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Note: The play Love, Loss and What I Wore, was written by Nora and Delia Ephron, is based on Ilene Beckerman’s book. It opened in October to rave reviews and will be playing off-Broadway at the Westside Theater until March 28th.

Anne Kreamer recommends The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

If you enjoy mystery novels, author Anne Kreamer recommends The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. It's one of a five book series featuring Tey's Inspector Alan Grant, Scotland Yard's top detective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Daughter of TimeBy Josephine Tey

1951

I can trace my love of reading in a straight line back to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, starting with the maniacally cheerful antics of Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie--The Bobbsey Twins. I was even more excited by Nancy Drew, fantasizing about a life of consequential intrigue with a bit of Ned Nickerson on the side. And after reading Harriet the Spy, I actually went so far as to buy a little journal and start furtively stalking my neighbors, hoping to ferret out some quirk in their habits that would point to a mysterious double life. This was the high Cold War era, and since there were nuclear missile silos in Kansas, why couldn't there be Soviet spies in my Kansas City suburb?

But it was a dozen years later, in 1978, that my future father-in-law introduced me to The Daughter of Time. Those kiddie mysteries that I'd devoured as a girl had, it turned out, whetted my appetite for the real thing, the graceful and lyrical Josephine Tey (a nom de plume of the Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh). The novel begins by introducing Tey's hero, Scotland Yard Superintendent Alan Grant, bored senseless and bed-bound in the hospital as he recovers from a leg broken in the line of duty. He asks his actress friend Marta to relieve his tedium. Believing that a policeman's stock-in-trade is assessing people's faces, Marta brings him photographs of portraits from the National Gallery. Grant becomes obsessed with one image, a picture, he guesses, of a judge. Told that the painting is of the infamous Richard III, he's troubled that his professional eye failed him--that he'd mistaken a beast for a good man.

Tey seamlessly weaves together fifteenth- and twentieth-century England, provocatively probes the nature of truth (the epigraph at the beginning of the book is "Truth is the daughter of time"), and posits a compelling argument vindicating Richard III, conventional history and Shakespeare notwithstanding.

Each book in Tey's entirely too small canon, just six novels in all, is as beautifully crafted as The Daughter of Time and deserves to be savored.

Anne Kreamer

Anne Kreamer, author of Going Gray, is a former executive vice president and worldwide creative director of Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, and was part of the founding team of Spy magazine.

 

Jane Smiley recommends Little America by Henry Bromell

Henry Bromell's 2001 novel, Little America, should have been a best seller -- so thinks Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley -- and provided answers to some of our big questions (like, for instance, "Why do they hate us?").

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little America 

By Henry Bromell

2001

After the World Trade Center attacks, when George W. Bush asked (rhetorically, mind you, not really caring), HneyI thought I knew, having just read a novel by my friend Henry Bromell called Little America.

Published in the spring of 2001, it concerns the attempts of an historian, Terry Hooper, to decipher the events of a particular year-1958-in a particular Middle East nationette-Kurash (imagined by Bromell as a hypothetical representation of other nations in the region). It is the late '90s, and Terry, now fifty, is perturbed in his conscience about what he suspects his father, Mack Hooper, has done, and, in a larger sense, what he suspects his country has done. Bromell weaves together Terry's investigation and the events he discovers in an extremely graceful but suspenseful narrative. I wasn't the only reader impressed by the package-Joan Didion called it "the best and smartest novel I've read in a long time."

The gist of Terry's story is betrayal. In 1958, Mack Hooper is sent out by Allan and John Foster Dulles to control and manipulate the new young king of Kurash, the grandson of the king originally imposed upon the Kurashians by the British, and propped up there for several decades. The British are now on their way out, and the Americans plan to take over, using the king and his country to foil the designs of the Soviets and the Egyptians (Nasser and his pan-Arab League present the principal danger to American designs). Bromell is explicit in his portrayal of American fears. In the late fifties, the Soviets are riding a tide of success, and seem to be expanding their influence all over the world. The Americans fear they are in a losing battle with the ideology of Communism, and are willing to do just about anything to stem that tide.

The young king's fatal flaw, from the point of view of geopolitics, is that he isn't important enough to stand in the way of the Dulles brothers' schemes. Toward the end of the novel, Bromell shows that, when they finally do discuss him, the Dulleses spend only ten minutes on him before moving on to more important matters. But what Bromell does, and what the novel itself is designed to do, is to show that to the Kurashians, to the king himself, to ten-year-old Terry, and to the CIA operatives in the Kurash office, what goes on in Kurash is all important, important enough to shape many lives and much Middle Eastern history. Because the Dulles boys think the way they do, and because the Kurashians think the way they do, profound resentments are inevitable and important. The answer to the question "Why do they hate us?" in my reading of Little America was a nuanced and tragic one. I of course thought Bromell's book should be, could be, and would be a best seller. Silly me.

There were signs that the book was being taken seriously in certain places. Bromell heard through the grapevine that Richard Helms was reading it. A friend of mine with lots of former-spy friends called one of them and said, "I've just been reading about your life." She sent the book to her friend, who subsequently ordered fifty copies. But that was that. Just when the book should have hit the best-seller list and provided answers to some of our big questions, it died.

I've been thinking about Little America for almost eight years, so I went back and reread it. I was not disappointed. Bromell uses the resources of the Novel (character, plot, narrative technique, dialogue) in a beautifully sophisticated way to both inform the reader and move her. But Little America is more than a novel. Bromell's childhood was spent not in Kurash but in Iran. I know this because he told me long ago, when we were friends in our twenties. His sense of what we as a nation did there, and how we screwed up there, is informed and evenhanded. He has a strong empathy with every character and a terrific take on the interlocking relationships they have that cross all sorts of lines and boundaries. Americans are frequently guilty, one generation after another, of not knowing how current events got to be what they are. Were it not so obscure, Little America could correct that flaw with regard to the Middle East.

Jane Smiley
Author

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including A Thousand Acres, Horse Heaven, and Ten Days in the Hills, as well as several works of nonfiction, most notably Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, an anatomy and history of the novel as a form. She lives in California.

Patty Marx recommends The Big Love

Patricia Marx is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a former writer for Saturday Night Live, and a party planner for the C.I.A. Her most recent novel, Him Her Him Again the End of Him, was a Thurber Prize finalist. Her most recent children's book, Dot in Larryland, is the 2009 winner of the Friedrich Medal (an award made up by Marx and named for her air-conditioner). She lives in New York City, and, as far as she knows, has never killed anyone. She once traded a puppy for a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Big Love
Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thomey
1961

"There's one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn." How can you resist a story that begins like that, especially when I tell you that this ludicrously odd, icky, riveting, sweet, hideous, and unintentionally comic account of the amour between the boozy swashbuckler (who'd already been charged with statutory rape of minors) and Beverly Aadland, the so-called baby, is narrated by her mother, an unreliable raconteur if there ever was one? Mrs. Florence Aadland, as she calls herself on the book jacket, proudly tells us that her ingénue daughter, who'd started modeling at six months and taking singing and dancing lessons at age two, was noticed by forty-eight year-old Flynn on the Universal Lot when she was fifteen, and that they did it soon after, because their love was "preordained." As it happened, "He overwhelmed her. He tore her dress, the black one with the bolero ruffles in the back, and he was so eager she cried and she fought him." How does Mrs. Aadland know so much? "When the time came she told me everything she did with Errol Flynn. . . . Everything. And in detail, because she and I love details and get a kick out of sharing things like that." The public did not find out about the liaison, however, until Flynn died of a heart attack shortly after Beverly turned seventeen, and Mrs. Aadland was convicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and denied custody of her daughter. In retrospect, would she have been so supportive of her Beverly's carrying on with this middle-aged reprobate? "Of course I would. And I mean it from my heart. I would let Beverly have those two wonderful years again--even if I knew in advance what the ending would be!" Indeed, in one of the last scenes of the book, mother and daughter, visiting the grave of Errol Flynn, decide that, though his tombstone was graced with more flowers than any other in the cemetery, this extraordinary man deserved more still. And so they steal a larkspur from one dead person, a daisy from another, and a lily from another. What is it that separates this too-candid tale from trash? Is it Mrs. Florence Aadland's voice-somewhere between Anita Loos and Nathanael West? Or is it because the book is out of print and copies are fairly uncommon? Or is it, in fact, trash?

Patty Marx
Writer

James Bone recommends Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

 
As Books came together, it became clear early on that war was on people's minds.

These are some of the titles in the book on the topic of war: Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal; Doing Battle, by Paul Fussel; The Inhuman Land, by Jozef Czapski; The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz; One Woman in the War, by Alaine Polcz; and The White Rose, by Inge Scholl.

James Bone, New York correspondent for the Times (London) and former war correspondent, recommended Kapputt, by  Curzio Malaparte.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaputt: A Novel
Curzio Malaparte
1944

Ever since I first read Kaputt, I have been tormented by Curzio Malaparte's description of meeting Ante Pavelic, the Croatian fascist leader in World War II. The Italian war reporter noticed a wicker basket on Pavelic's desk that seemed to be filled with shelled oysters "as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London." He politely inquired if the oysters came from the Dalmatian coast. "It's a present from my loyal ustashis," Pavelic replied. "Forty pounds of human eyes."

Malaparte (whose nom de plume was a play on "Bonaparte") was, as we might say today, "embedded" with the Nazis. As a correspondent for Italy's Corriere della Sera, he was able to tour the Eastern Front behind Axis lines. From this vantage, he recounts the casual, even flippant, brutality of the German war machine. The book is filled with the horrifying, indeed surreal, images of the war: half-buried bodies with their outstretched arms serving as signposts; German soldiers laughing at their starving Russian prisoners feasting on fellow inmates in order to survive; Jews strung up on trees next to their dogs (their "Jewish dogs").

Published in Naples in 1944, Kaputt was a sensation at the end of World War II. I own a ragged English-language paperback from that time that boasts "over a million copies sold." But the book was carefully subtitled "A Novel," making it a profoundly troublesome work. Malaparte, as we know from his newspaper reports, actually did meet Pavelic. But the anecdote about the eyeballs (still a staple of Serb propaganda) is likely hyperbole. Other key episodes of the book were also invented. He never did, apparently, tour the Warsaw Ghetto in his Italian officer's uniform and console the suffering Jews by telling them in French that "un jour vous serez libres, vous serez heureux et libres" (one day, you will be free, you will be happy and free). You have to wonder about the sort of person who would make that up.

The book, assembled from a smuggled manuscript, is an irreplaceable artifact of World War II. Not only was Malaparte an eyewitness to a morbid culture, he was also a product of it-a mercurial personality with a talent for reinventing himself. An early Italian fascist-later expelled from the party and banished by Mussolini to the island of Lipari-he was a Communist at the end of his life (and is perhaps best remembered today for Casa Malaparte, the house he built on Capri that was featured in Godard's Contempt). There are questions about whether he rewrote parts of Kaputt when it became clear that the Allies would win the war.

For a journalist, the fascination of the book lies in how the blending of fact and fiction yields such a powerful and enduring result. (In this, he is a precursor of that other great war reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski.) For, despite being an unreliable and self-aggrandizing narrator, he captured the perverse imagination and aesthetics of that broken world. In one of his central insights, he writes of the Germans: "Their cruelty is made of fear; they are ill with fear."

James Bone

James Bone, the longtime New York correspondent for the Times (London), is a former war reporter who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, and Panama, as well as the 9/11 attack on New York. His great-grandfather was Britain's first official war artist.

Mark Warren on Nausea

As Books came together, I marveled at the number of contributors who chose to share books that profoundly affected their lives-books that somehow changed them. It's reminder of the unique, subjective joy of reading, and of the ways that we experience the books we come to value. Mark Warren's writes about Nausea, the book he can never forget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
1938

When I told a friend that my subject for this essay was Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel, Nausea, he made a noise of disgust-a quick, sharp exhale through his teeth-and said, "Nausea. The very essence of pretension." Then (get this) he said he'd never even read it, and asked me what it was about.

I told him it was about my hometown.

To be clear, I did not grow up in Bouville, the fictional coastal town where Sartre sets Nausea, nor did I grow up in Le Havre, the town on the English Channel in northwest France where Sartre was teaching when he wrote the novel, and I certainly didn't grow up in Paris, where Sartre lived the rest of the time. I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, in a flyspeck of a redneck town called Highlands. And I went to high school and then a junior college named after Robert E. Lee in the nearby industrial town of Baytown, where Exxon operates one of the largest-capacity oil refineries in the world. Wherever you are in Baytown, you can look up and see a refinery in just about any direction. Discharge torches ten stories high burn off excess chemicals from the refining processes, and storage tanks, like giant hatboxes, are strewn across the land as far as the eye can see. A sign with a giant Exxon tiger counts the days since the last fatal accident. As I grew up, the Plant, as it is simply known, dominated life in that town, and say what you will about particulate pollutants released into the atmosphere, those chemicals do make for dazzling sunsets. The novelist Paul Auster once washed up in Baytown as a merchant marine and would later describe a "sad and crumbling little place."

And mister, you don't know anything about the very essence of pretension until you've sold cable TV door-to-door in a Baytown, Texas, summer.

I guess you could say my heart wasn't really in cable sales. But my schedule was otherwise fairly free at the time, this being the summer of 1980. I was seventeen and had almost no sense of the future and no idea of the outside world, just a gnawing, vague, deep unhappiness.

And then one ordinary day I found this book.

There was this guy in a beat-up white van who would come to pick me up every evening and drop me off with my list of names and addresses in the sad hope of selling folks on cable and earning a meager commission. Name was Ben Webber. He'd leave me in a different neighborhood every day. I hated selling, and to tell the truth, I actually just liked driving around with Ben, who was interesting to talk with, sort of a stranger in a strange land. By Baytown standards, Ben and his brother Will and father Barney made for a truly weird family. That they all seemed to speak a bunch of languages and took in Amir, an Iranian student who somehow found himself studying at Lee College, definitely marked the Webbers as something unusual. We had a small going-away party when Carter deported all those students during the hostage crisis. Fearing he'd be killed if he returned to Iran, Amir was headed to Madrid, and seemed to be relieved to be getting out of Baytown. I remember being envious.

So Ben and I were driving around one day before my shift, past pawn shops and gun shops and ice houses, on a road that took us right through the heart of the Plant, and I absentmindedly popped open the glove box, pulled out a paperback, and started reading:

"Something has happened to me, I can't doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that's all . . . And now it's blossoming . . .

"For instance, there is something new about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or fork. Or else it's the fork which now has a certain way of having itself picked up, I don't know . . ."

From then on I was hooked. I slipped the book into my bag-stole it, actually (sorry, Ben, that's where your book went)-went home that night and read until I had finished the entire saga of Antoine Roquentin, who in diary form was recording the dissolution of his mind. He called it a "sweetish sickness," this nausea that came over him in waves as he became increasingly and acutely aware of his existence, and of the ominous indifference of the physical world, and as the regular things-objects, routines, women-that he had once clung to for meaning began to fail him.

I couldn't sleep that night. I felt hopped up on this new discovery, and was aware that this was something very special, a bulletin from the wide world telling me I was not crazy, I was not alone. Its effect was almost narcotic. A book - a book! - shot me through with a joy so pure. I would read for a while, mispronouncing all the French words, and then stop and just look at the physical book, turning it over in my hands, make a pot of coffee, read some more. This guy Sartre knew what he was talking about. Surely he had been to Baytown.

I did not know what existentialism was; I had never heard the word, and I couldn't even pronounce it. I had no school of thought, nor the vocabulary, to explain why this book mattered to me, why it moved me. It just did. It jangled something that I already had inside, put words to a feeling that comes with discouraging regularity, whether you're in coastal France or coastal Texas. Or, you know, all the places in between.

It is not exaggerating in the slightest to say that this book changed my entire outlook on life and how to live it. I would read Nausea every summer for about fifteen years, the same torn and ragged paperback. The purloined copy is the only copy I have ever owned, and it occupies a special place on my shelf. I still pick it up every now and again, still mispronouncing all of the French. But now when I read it, I visualize Roquentin not at a café or boarding house in Bouville, Le Havre, or Paris. Instead, he lingers at the Waffle House, loiters at the half-empty mall, and in the evenings retreats back to a trailer parked in a cow pasture.

It feels somehow more accurate.

Mark Warren
Executive Editor, Esquire

 

Deborah Eisenberg recommends Cards of Identity

This year's recipiant of the MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, Deborah Eisenberg  recommends Cards of Identitiy as an overlooked and underappreciated novel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cards of Identity
Nigel Dennis
1955

Here's a remarkable novel you might not have come across, possibly because it's so peculiar as to elude categorization. It neither instructs nor consoles nor deeply moves, but the sheer profusion of its surprises and its glittering sentences, along with the tenor of its loopy inquiries into profound matters of "the self," are inebriating, and can send you soaring over all kinds of narrative and intellectual confines. 

I was fortunate enough to have been given the book as a gift and to have known nothing at all about it when I opened it. That might be the best way to encounter it, so I'll provide only one more little clue about the content: the author was apparently a friend of the Viennese psychologist and theorist Alfred Adler, and he translated a certain amount of Adler's work.

It's a very, very funny book, but so witty, too, that instead of laughing, one might find oneself just gaping and pointing at the pages. It's not for everybody-or, goodness knows, for every mood-but perhaps you will join those of us who discovered that we were waiting forlornly to come upon it.

Deborah Eisenberg
Author