Legendary Neighborhood

Harlem Shuffle 

by Colson Whitehead

". . . maybe don't play the same number all the time. Play something else, see what happens. Maybe you been playing the wrong thing this whole time."   - Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

I have eagerly anticipated and delighted in reading Colson Whitehead's novels ever since I first read  The Intuitionist.      In his recent novel, Harlem Shuffle, the tension increases with each act as Ray Carney, the main character, delves further and deeper into the world of crime. Social unrest, racism, and classicism are the backdrop against which it is set. As a black man, Carney faces ongoing obstacles in his pursuit of success. He encounters class and racial divides in addition to them.

While racism is pervasive in Harlem Shuffle, to the point where the characters find it difficult to imagine a society in which everyone is treated equally, it plays an equally large role in the evolution of the 1960s New York City and Harlem communities. Even though there are several civil rights demonstrations throughout the book and people are aware of social injustice, characters like Ray have a negative outlook on racism. In addition, a number of unsavory characters are highlighted, including Ray Carney, who the reader found endearing, as part of a skillful depiction of the apparent side of Harlem business.

The book ends with what I consider its best narrative section making it impossible not to recommend it to anyone who enjoys a great read.

The (almost) Complete Truth

Emma 

by Jane Austen

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”   ― Jane Austen, Emma

I most recently read Emma as the April book for my local Great Books reading group. I had previously read it as the introductory novel in a class at the Newberry Library. The class was entitled "Jane Austen's Heirs" and included novels by such "heirs" of hers as Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner. Rereading this delightful novel is something I will undoubtedly do again.

Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." Emma, however, is also rather spoiled; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; and she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives and is often mistaken about the meanings of others' actions.

While Emma differs strikingly from Austen's other heroines in some respects, she resembles Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot, among others, in another way: she is an intelligent young woman with too little to do and no ability to change her location or everyday routine. Though her family is loving and her economic status secure, the quotidian details of Emma's everyday life seem a bit dul; she has few companions her own age when the novel begins. Her determined though inept matchmaking may represent a muted protest against the narrow scope of a wealthy woman's life, especially that of a woman who is single and childless.
And of course there is the classical balance of the novel's structure that, combined with the beauty of Austen's writing style, makes this novel a favorite of readers and writers, particularly those mentioned above, ever since it was published.

What is Life Like?

The Long Form 

by Kate Briggs

"But what is life like, really? The necessary, pressing, open question. And for whom? Questions that the novel, through its descriptions, the sharing out of its attention, both answers and asks." - Kate Briggs, The Long Form







The Long Form, which Briggs refers to as the "essay parts," is partially a reaction to Tom Jones and adopts a similar format that breaks up fictional narrative with expansive nonfiction passages. She also uses all caps with the lavishness of a novel from the eighteenth century; in one passage alone, the word "love" appears numerous times. Thus, it presents the novel form as it has rarely been presented before, with a lengthy series of short chapters, some as brief as a sentence. It is ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant. It does this through its recursive structure, subtle connections and reverberations, attention to physical and social life, and lively conversation with other works of fiction and theory.

The Long Form is technically fiction but often veers toward essay. In this, it resembles a book delivered that morning to Helen’s door, interrupting a coveted moment of calm. In the gaps of time Helen can find to read it, we learn that Fielding’s novel also moves between forms and that it, too, addresses the subject of child-rearing, at least for a few chapters. But, as Helen muses, whereas Fielding’s protagonist arrives as an orphan without history, speeds through infanthood, and becomes a young hero, in reality, babies do come from somewhere, and they exert their own wills before they can walk or speak, even as they depend on a cast of care-giving others. I found the style worked for a time, but it made it difficult to maintain interest in the whole book.

Prudent and Virtuous Governance

Discourses on Livy

Niccolo Machiavelli

“The salvation of a republic or a kingdom is not, therefore, merely to have a prince who governs prudently while he lives, but rather one who organizes the government in such a way that after his death it can be maintained.”   ― Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy






A thought-provoking and perceptive read, Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli that is ideal for those who are passionate about politics, democracy, and the quest for a more just and equitable society. Machiavelli provides a radical vision of a new science of politics that continues to shape the modern ethos, as well as a foundational exploration of modern republicanism.

Discourses on Livy, is a seminal work that laid the foundation for modern republicanism, and it has been definitively translated into English by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. The translation is extremely readable, staying true to the original Italian text while paying appropriate attention to Machiavelli's idiom and subtlety of thought. Machiavelli's radical vision of a new science of politics—a vision of new modes and orders that continue to shape the modern ethos—is revealed in The Discourses, which includes a comprehensive introduction, extensive explanatory notes, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated index.

Livy, whose histories are also a profitable read,  provided Machiavelli with the inspiration scholars needed for five centuries. The discourses contain the germs of contemporary political philosophy, which are frequently concealed and occasionally unintentional by the writers. Reading this book gives you a very different perspective on the author than you may have received from reading his more famous masterpiece, The Prince. Mansfield and Tarcov's translation is careful and idiomatic.

Rural Life

Pig Earth 

by John Berger

“Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. ”   ― John Berger, Pig Earth

Pig Earth, the first of three volumes about the movement from rural to urban life, includes poems and short stories about rural life. Berger adds a historical afterword and interprets these stories as parables. Although the book falls into the novel category, I would consider it more appropriately described as existing in the space between memory and arrangement, or between memoir and imagination. In addition to writing about his personal experiences, Berger also acts as a watcher, an eavesdropper, and a covert sharer in the stories. Berger lives in the isolated Jura.

Berger tackles subjects like the lives of hard labor, the proximity of death, and the bond between farm animals and their owners in her kind and exquisite writing. The book is worth studying as people try to understand a world in transition

Florentine Thinker

Machiavelli in Hell 

by Sebastian De Grazia 

One can take it as a rule, that if there are new things in heaven, there will be new things on earth. A new hierarchy in the first will bring about a new one in the second.   - Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell

This book's wisdom makes me think of Niccolo Machiavelli's advice to the hunter to become a knower of sites by getting to know one well. It demonstrates how much political science can be learned from a single source if it is chosen and studied carefully. Political theorists and political scientists may view their scholarship as derivative and docile, but this would silence their detractors and readily defend their subject and methodology in a competition before unbiased judges to see who can teach the most about politics. Nevertheless, the themes and plots of their novels diverge.

Sebastian de Grazia has done something amazing, whether we admit it or not: he has produced a book for the general reader. His book is a well-reasoned Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual biography of Niccolo Machiavelli

Imaginary Worlds

 

Ficciones 

by Jorge Luis Borges

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.”   ― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

One of the earliest memories of reading that I have is one of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The idea that there is another world beyond or through the mirror in one's parlor is a fabulous way to introduce the flights of fancy that little Alice was prone to engage in as I had learned in Carroll's earlier book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I am reminded of this experience because of the importance of mirrors in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges as he privileges the mirror and his stories as books appear as mirrors for reality. Just as in Carroll the mirror image presents a reflection that is backwards and always seems a bit wrong; however, it is wrong in a way that one only senses and cannot actually identify with any hope of specificity. My own dreams, and perhaps yours, often seem to be similarly twisted, even absurd, reflections of reality.

In Ficciones Borges has included nine short fictions in part one and ten even shorter works called "artifices" in part two. I like every story in the first part but my favorite has to be "The Library of Babel" which, for readers, has to encompass the notions of heaven and hell all in one twisted story.

The first story in this collection, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is an example of the importance of mirrors as it begins with the following sentence: "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."(p 5). Additional stories share favorite places of Borges whether they be a garden in the case of "The Garden of Forking Paths", or the library as in "The Library of Babel". The latter of those two stories would have to be my favorite, and perhaps the favorite of many readers as readers who love libraries. Borges' library is a cheerless and even fearful place. With its incalculably vast size suggesting infinity it can seemingly be a nightmare more than a dream. Yet there is always the possibility of finding hope hidden in the vastness of infinite space. While Borges himself spent several years in a dull library job cataloging books the imaginary library of Babel seems to defy any cataloging. Just like a world reflected in a mirror, "absurdities are the norm" in this library while disorder reigns. Conundrums also abound as with the notion that everything that has already been written, yet there are always new and definitively different books that one may encounter.


The worlds depicted in Borges' stories are filled with blank spaces, the ideas and ideals are abstract rather than personal, yet they yield a personal response. Those unwilling or unable to fill in some of the blank spaces with their own imaginations may find something lacking. No amount of further writing would help though all of the stories are short, even as short stories go with the second part filled with "Artifices" that are typically no more than two or three pages long. Just as the stories beckon with suggestions of ruins, lotteries, libraries, and gardens; so do the artifices with titles that invite you to partake of death, miracles, swords, differing visions of Judas, and the rise of the Phoenix. Infinite libraries suggest stories from an imagination that also may have been infinite.


The world of Borges' fiction expands to encompass more than reality. These short narratives reveal conflicting emotions, motives, and desires shared by all humans and explore what he imagines as a tortured struggle for salvation or perhaps merely redemption.  His genius gives rise to flights of the imagination unique in my experience. My love for these narratives stems from their presences as magical works of a literary master.