If your thoughts are running to decline and fall— though I can’t imagine why on earth they should be—you might want to hunker down with Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell, just published by Yale University Press. One of Goldsworthy’s great virtues is common sense, bracingly put to work. He begins with a superb overview of the “state of the art,” touching not only on currents in scholarship but also on Rome in the popular imagination. A while back, I planned a special section on Rome in Books & Culture (including a couple of then-new books on the fall of Rome), but I could never get it off the ground. Maybe I should try again.
We’ve seen on other occasions how books that have followed very different trajectories to publication seem designed to be read together. A number of the most interesting people I’ve met in the years since 1996 (I think it was), when I first attended a Liberty Fund gathering, have been participants in these meetings, which (with a nod to Michael Oakeshott, but especially to the founder of Liberty Fund, Pierre Goodrich) celebrate conversation for its own sake. (I know, I know. At first I thought there was a trick of some sort, a hidden agenda. Nope.) So it was that I met Paul Rahe several years ago. Yale has just published Rahe’s longawaited book, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, and will issue a companion volume (on Montesquieu) in the fall. This is a project of staggering erudition, driven by great passion. I’ve only begun to plumb it, and to read this book and the second volume properly will require a long time not only with Rahe’s own words but also with his conversation partners. Even on a first pass, though, it’s clear that Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift and How Rome Fell should be in the same stack at your bedside.
What else might find a home in that stack? Oxford’s Bodleian Library has been doing a splendid series of little books collecting postcards on various themes. The two latest volumes (distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press) are Postcards of Political Icons and Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie. The latter collection is particularly rich, bizarre, and haunting. One of the last cards hails the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Decline and fall can be good news. (Warning: these aren’t detachable postcards.)
Mention of Checkpoint Charlie reminds me that Len Deighton celebrated his 80th birthday in February of this year. That happy occasion was accompanied by an announcement from HarperCollins, saying that a number of Deighton’s books (including, of course, The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin) will be reissued in the UK, beginning in June of this year. I have been trying to find out when the books will start showing up over here, without any response so far. I’ve also pitched a Deighton retrospective to a couple of editors, both of whom, alas, said nyet. If you take as your pool novelists who began publishing around 1960—not just those writing spy fiction, such as John le Carré, whose first novel appeared in 1961, the year before Deighton’s debut, but novelists across the board—Deighton is among those I find most consistently re – readable, and the arc of his work is fascinating. “Critical esteem” doesn’t matter all that much in the end, I suppose, but he’s a wonderful writer, and I want to do my bit to get the word out.
Speaking of reissues, two of Peter Handke’s books have just appeared in the handsome NYRB format: Short Letter, Long Farewell, with an introduction by Greil Marcus, and Slow Homecoming, introduced by Benjamin Kunkel (both translated from the German by the late Ralph Manheim). The first of these is among other things a tribute to Raymond Chandler (the title alludes to Chandler’s The Long Goodbye). If you haven’t read Handke, these two would make an excellent introduction. (And if you have—well, these are such lovely little books, you should pick them up anyway.)
Not exactly a reissue is In the First Circle, a new translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, now given the title he intended, and including sections that were cut in order to get the book published in the 1960s. I’m jumping the gun on this—it won’t be out until October— but I want you to have it in the back of your mind or in your PDA or wherever you store such vital information. This has always been my favorite among Solzhenitsyn’s novels. I love the very conception of the book, its setting, the camaraderie of the zeks (that above all), the whole cast of extraordinary characters, the cross-cutting narrative, the pithy proverbs, the savage irony, the astonishing portrait of Stalin.
And on the theme of translation, look for David Skeel’s review (later this year) of Songbook: The Selected Songs of Umberto Saba, a beautifully produced volume from Yale University Press, and Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, from Princeton University Press. Both books are bilingual. (The poet Susan Stewart, who translated the Merini poems, has a very fine review of the Saba volume in the April 6 issue of The Nation.) I don’t know whether these books are the result of benefactions, but however they came about, I’m very grateful.
If you’re like me, you’ll have some crime fiction handy too. Michael Connelly’s latest, The Scarecrow, is due out on May 26, meaning that I haven’t seen it yet as I write. It features newspaperman Jack McEvoy, the protagonist of Connelly’s 1996 novel The Poet. In an interview on his website about the new novel, Connelly is asked why he decided to make McEvoy a central character again:
Being a former newspaper reporter, I’ve watched in recent years as the newspaper economy has crumbled and newspapers have tried to figure out ways to deal with advertising and readers shifting to the Internet. Along the way, many people I worked with have lost their jobs to buyouts or layoffs. I am also a big fan of the television show The Wire. In its last season, the show explored in a secondary plot what was happening to the newspaper business. Watching that show made me want to take a shot at a story that would be a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.
McEvoy’s old beat was in Denver—in The Poet, he was a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. In the new novel, Jack’s job at the Los Angeles Times is about to end. Even so, Connelly explains, it was hard for him to keep up with the pace of real-world events as he completed the novel:
As with any sort of downward spiral, the closer you get to the end, the tighter the circles become. In the writing process and thereafter, I kept hearing of things that were happening and had to try to get them into the story. The Times is meant to represent the entire business—all newspapers. So I might hear of something happening at one paper and I would incorporate it into my story of the Times.
But after the book was finished, the spiral continued. The day after I turned in the manuscript, the Times’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. This necessitated several changes in the manuscript. Three days after the book was supposedly locked and ready to be printed, the Rocky Mountain News closed. This meant we had to unlock the book and make changes. Since then, the Times has announced plans to close more foreign bureaus this summer. Sadly, it goes on and on. In many ways, I wish the book weren’t so timely, because what is making it timely is all of this bad news for newspapers.
Jack McEvoy appeared briefly in Connelly’s previous novel, The Brass Verdict, which brought together lawyer Mickey Haller and his police detective halfbrother, Harry Bosch, Connelly’s signature creation. We can expect Bosch to show up somewhere in The Scarecrow, I think.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
