Unexpected Pleasures

Editor’s Note: As Book Review prepared to turn the page on the year 2000, we invited a number of writers to participate in an end-of-the-year symposium that would give readers an opportunity to learn what books--newly published, out of print or reissued, it mattered not--had afforded them the most unexpected pleasure in the last year. A backward glance, if you will, before stepping forward.

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GISH JEN

Somehow, inexplicably, I managed to miss E.M. Forster’s “Where Angels Fear to Tread” in my youth--what luck! For to come fresh to this triumph was the pleasure of my year. Should moral education be fun? But why not? Rarely have I been so entertainingly edified. This is a water slide for the imagination: One swerves and plummets and hurtles, crashing to the surprisingly inevitable with regret the ride’s ended.

Gish Jen is the author of “Who’s Irish?: Stories” and “Mona in the Promised Land.”

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LISA JARDINE

This spring, Britain was buzzing with talk of a novel by a brilliant newcomer: Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth.” I resisted for some months, then finally bought and read it. I was entranced. It was hard to believe this was a novice writer, her prose so bubbled and fizzed with life, the reach of the plot was so epic.

Finishing it late one night, I phoned my mother, Rita Bronowski, in La Jolla for a chat (one of the few bonuses of living so far from her is that my midnight hour is her early afternoon). Before I could get beyond pleasantries she broke in, excitedly: “I’m just reading the most marvelous novel--I can hardly put it down, it so totally captures the England of my childhood. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, it’s called ‘White Teeth,’ by Zadie Smith.”

A novel by a twentysomething black author, which a fiftysomething Jewish professor and her eightysomething artist mother, on opposite sides of the world, can both tap into with delight and recognition--that’s surely a work of real creative genius!

Lisa Jardine is coauthor of “Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West” and author of “Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance.” She is a professor at the University of London and an honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

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STEPHEN VIZINCZEY

Most books become less on second reading; masterpieces become more. I read Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” for the fifth time this year, and it is still a new experience. When I first read it I enjoyed it as a funny, moving, romantic tale about a can-do Yankee’s adventures in the Dark Ages--and to literal-minded readers who cannot recognize their fellow men in the garb of another age or the real in the fantastic, it may never be more. But on rereading you find that the Dark Ages were so dark because most people couldn’t make connections, couldn’t see how apparently disparate things related to each other--and they still don’t, which is why there is still so much darkness around. To my mind Twain is the most American writer not only because his works are infused by a revolutionary spirit, by the love of individual liberty and a loathing of privilege (a spirit embodied in his Yankee, from whom FDR took the phrase “New Deal”) but also because he is the most savage critic of all the noble illusions about “the People” which prevail in America. No one ever wrote so profoundly about the People’s slavishness and credulity, the ease with which they can be brainwashed and exploited, and how these human flaws go into the making of any society. If what Twain wrote was outdated, political parties wouldn’t spend hundreds of millions on TV ads. “A Connecticut Yankee” is the best primer about how society works, about how relevant laws and the conduct of the powerful are to everybody’s lives. No work of political science could possibly compete with it. I admire Twain’s immortal boys, but their predominance on reading lists may be due to the fact that they’re the least disturbing of Twain’s creations, less likely to make readers into troublesome citizens than his stories and this book. To my mind it is one of the masterpieces of world literature, right up there with Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” except that Twain experienced happiness and love, which made him a gentler soul: He delivers the most damning truths with compassion and healing humor.

Stephen Vizinczey is the author of “In Praise of Older Women,” “An Innocent Millionaire” and “Truth and Lies In Literature.” His new novel, “Wishes,” will be published next year.

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MICHAEL TOLKIN

Harry Munns’ “Cruising Fundamentals” led to Jonathan Raban’s “Passage to Juneau,” which led to his earlier book “Coasting.” When the Messiah comes (by a 1939 gaff-rigged Alden schooner), all history books and all works of philosophy will also be travelogues and autobiographies, with Raban’s work the model.

With my eye tuned for books about sailing, I found Kevin Patterson’s “The Water In Between,” which belongs on the shelf beside Raban.

I finished the fourth in Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” series. After the first three, I was an adamant Sophie, but it’s already becoming happy about itself and therefore less interesting, Ian Fleming with a thesaurus.

But it was Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” that was the newest of books for me this year, and not because the Royal Navy makes an appearance. She reminded me, and I’m reading Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” right now, which teaches the same lesson, that the greatest authors are generous and loving to their characters and that in this mercy is humor. She used to annoy me; I wanted vulgarity, I wanted George Eliot’s anger about the times, but Austen devastates with a wit that miniaturizes a decadent aristocracy she knows is already doomed. I missed this when I was younger.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t like Ian Fleming. I do.

Michael Tolkin is the author of “The Player” and “Among the Dead.”

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SHIRLEY HAZZARD

Much pleasure, this year, in books of the prolific Irish writer John Banville, and particularly in his novel “The Untouchable”--extraordinary, I thought, for mastery of language and penetration of character. The work I have kept by me--as a lifeline, so to speak--has been the short story “Lighea” (in English, “The Professor and the Siren”) in the brief collection, “Two Stories and a Memory,” of posthumously published writings by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The story amazes and reassures, and leaves a sense of happiness, as if restoring its readers--as Edward Mendelson wrote of certain lines by Auden--to a “secret, unexplicit defense of a part of themselves that almost everything else written in their century [has been] teaching them to discredit or deny.” Ravishing.

Shirley Hazzard is the author of several novels, including “The Transit of Venus.” Her latest book is a memoir of Graham Greene entitled “Greene on Capri.”

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DONALD HALL

Michael Longley’s new collection of poems, “The Weather in Japan,” is the best book I have read this year and, although I have admired him for some time, I did not expect him to surpass himself. His last single volumes, “Gorse Fires” and “The Ghost Orchid,” followed by a “Selected Poems” in 1999, ought to have prepared me. A poet of Belfast, of Seamus Heaney’s generation, he is well known in Ireland and England. Although he publishes frequently in The New Yorker, I find Americans largely ignorant of him. He writes short poems, master of a line that is soft, gentle, sensuous, grave--and suddenly explodes with an immensity of emotional power. Here he writes, in his deceptively quiet line, of Auschwitz and Belfast’s violence. Here are striking poems out of the Great War. “The Weather in Japan,” brilliant and taking me back to earlier brilliance, shocked me into understanding that the poet I had admired had quietly become--along with Seamus Heaney, say, and Geoffrey Hill--a contemporary who should endure over the life of our language.

Donald Hall is the author of many books, including “Winter Poems from Eagle Pond” and “Without: Poems.”

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JEAN STROUSE

About every five years I pick up Josephine Tey’s historical mystery novel, “The Daughter of Time” (1951), and it seduces me all over again. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, confined to a hospital bed with a broken leg and terminal boredom, has a professional gift for “reading” faces. When a friend brings a collection of pictures to entertain him, he is drawn to a face that seems marked by intelligence and suffering. It turns out to belong to Richard III, the notorious usurper who murdered his nephews in the Tower. Baffled and intrigued, Grant starts digging around in historical sources and slowly--from his hospital room--peels back layer after layer of received wisdom. Tey is an enormously entertaining writer whose wry 1950s sleuth makes the 15th-century mystery come alive--Yorks, Lancasters, Nevilles, Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses, the “sainted” Sir Thomas More. Just about everything history has handed down about Richard, including Shakespeare’s version, appears to be wrong, although it’s probably impossible after more than 500 years to establish what’s definitively right. And anyway, “Daughter of Time” is a novel (the full quote: “truth is the daughter of time”) as well as a sparkling meditation on history and biography.

Jean Strouse is the author of “Morgan: American Financier” and “Alice James: A Biography.”

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LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pnin” is the heartfelt tale of a Russian emigre never quite coming to grips with the realities of human vice, nor the humdrum demands of material living. As his beautiful Russian wife and an American arts college exploit him to the full, he remains loving and Christ-like. Nabokov, under cover of writing about that same provincial 1940s America that formed the backdrop to “Lolita,” creates in his redundant Russian literature professor a superb character in the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. Readers who have both Russian and English should home in on his always amusing observations about language. Watch out too for the superbly moving symbolism of the scene in which Pnin does the washing-up after his farewell party. The mystery, and one every morally driven writer of fiction would surely want to penetrate, is how Nabokov manages to avoid being sentimental.

Lesley Chamberlain is the author of, among other works, “Nietzsche in Turin.”

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RUSSELL BANKS

I can’t in any way claim to have “discovered” the works of Sherwin B. Nuland--his books are well-known and one of them, “How We Die,” is a National Book Award winner. But I came to him by way of an earlier, lesser-known book, “Doctors,” which is a brilliant history of the evolution of Western medicine told by means of a sequence of mini-biographies of the men and women whose work, philosophies and historical contexts shaped it, from Hippocrates to the Yale-New Haven Heart Transplant Team. This is not so much a “great man” chronicle as it is a fascinating, coherently unfolding, suspenseful story whose central mystery is the mysterious nature of the human body. Nuland is a scientist with a philosophical turn of mind, a historian’s love of context and a good novelist’s affection for human nature. Beyond that, he writes with exceptional elegance and precision and is a pure pleasure to read, hour after hour. Having completed “Doctors,” I immediately moved on to “How We Live” and “How We Die,” increasingly convinced with each book that there is no more enjoyable or useful way to cross the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities than in the company of this extraordinary physician-writer.

Russell Banks is the author of the recent collection of stories, “The Angel on the Roof,” and the novels “Cloudsplitter” and “Rule of the Bone.”

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LES MURRAY

The title of Lady Hong’s “Memoirs of a Korean Queen” may be slightly misleading; the lady was wife to the crown prince of Korea in the mid-18th century and mother to the next king, but her unfortunate husband never reigned as king. Instead, in that most formal of Confucian societies, he was driven insane by the relentless carping disapproval of his father, King Yongjo, and took out his baffled rage in impulsive unapproved trips to the fast pleasure city of Pyongyang (how things do change!) and in exercising his royal privilege of murdering and raping the servants with impunity. At the fated end of this tragedy, the king exercised the same privilege on his unloved son, having him locked up in a stout timber grain box till he died, presumably of thirst. Remarkably, the king did not destroy the prince’s whole family, as he might have done. He always treated his daughter-in-law with affection and even reinstated her father in high office after furiously dismissing him for speaking in the crown prince’s defense. Time after time, it was fault in costume and ceremony that reignited the king’s ire and caused more and worse faults. On the last day of his life, Prince Sado’s desperate promises to behave better were negated in the king’s eyes by his appearing at court in cotton rather than silk; “Do you intend to kill me?” raged his father. Written in the next reign in order to counter various distortions, Lady Hong’s haunting story is limpid and economical and less stylized than what might have come from the brush of a Confucian gentleman writing in classical Chinese. As women and children did in the Korea of her day, she wrote in the beautiful native Hang’gul syllabary, with no straining after quotations and flourishes, and her book has been translated into clear, readable English by another Korean woman, Yang-hi Choe-Wall of the Australian National University in Canberra, who also provides an introduction and necessary if slightly skimpy notes. Like certain other nonfiction books, for example Germaine Greer’s moving “Daddy We Hardly Knew You,” Lady Hong’s book makes a first-rate novel.

Les Murray is the author of numerous books, including “Subhuman Redneck Poems,” “Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse” and, most recently, “Learning Human: Selected Poems.”

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THOM GUNN

One of the first cruising areas I heard about in New York, or in the world, was the movie theater neighborhood on 42nd Street, especially inside the Victoria and the Amsterdam. It was sleazy and fun and always interesting, though not always satisfactory. Once a little guy in a leather jacket settled down beside me with “Just gave a handkerchief job to a sailor downstairs,” surely the only time I ever heard the phrase. Samuel R. Delany gives a wonderfully circumstantial memoir of these and other theaters in the first half of “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” (New York University Press, 1999), describing what they were like before the big gentrification. They were meeting places where people got together to chat, to have sex on the spot, to watch sex, to go off together, even occasionally to form friendships, to make up a casual, good-humored alternative society.

The second part of the book consists of an essay of which the primary thesis is “that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of goodwill.” Delany develops his thesis with great complexity: It is a profoundly humane and intelligent book and a “discovery” even if you know his novels already.

Thom Gunn is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including “Boss Cupid.”

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MICHAEL HENRY HEIM

People tend to be surprised when they learn I am reading Anglo-American literature rather than the Central and East European literature I translate. Of course I must keep up with writers in the languages I translate from, but I am equally if differently indebted to the writers in the language I translate into: They give me the tools to render the wealth of styles I am called upon to reproduce. During the last few years I have been on an Irish jag because, as everybody knows, the Irish make such rich use of the language. And the Swift, Sterne and Wilde tradition does not end with Yeats and Joyce or even Sean O’Faolain or Edna O’Brien. I have been taken with a spate of exciting younger writers and was happy to discover yet another during my first trip to Ireland. He is Niall Williams, and the novel recommended to me--and one I highly recommend to you--is his “Four Letters of Love.” It has all the stylistic exuberance we expect from the Irish and is a stunning love story to boot. Williams pulls off a magnificent structural feat: Fairly early he makes it clear who is going to--or, at least, should--fall in love with whom, but how they will come together is a mystery for much of the work and whether they will come together for good is, in the end, up to your own romantic inclinations. Along the way he creates some wonderfully wild, eccentric characters and contrasts the west coast--Galway and the rugged Aran Islands--with an increasingly effete Dublin. A masterful work.

Michael Henry Heim is a translator of Central European and Russian fiction and drama. He teaches in the department of Slavic languages and literature at UCLA.

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JOHN BAYLEY

I have had two unexpected literary pleasures this year, small perhaps but eminently satisfying. The first was the discovery of a volume of verse by the Victorian poet T.E. Brown, forgotten now except for the notorious and excruciating “A Garden is a Lonesome Thing: God not. . . .” To my great surprise I discovered a number of poems that were bizarre, full of black humor and distinctly good, notably one about a codfish and what it might think and feel.

The second was a brilliant little novella by Brigid Brophy, published in 1954 and long out of print. Title: “Hackenfeller’s Ape.” This rare ape is being used for scientific experimentation, and the story is as gripping and humorous in its own disturbing way as is T.E. Brown’s cod poem.

John Bayley is the author of numerous works, including “Leo Tolstoy,” “The Red Hat: A Novel” and “Elegy for Iris.”

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VIVIAN GORNICK

W. G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” had an extraordinary effect on me when I came on it last summer. I was at the tail end of a long piece of work on the persona in nonfiction writing, and this so-called account of a solitary walking tour along a remote English coast--I’d not read Sebald at all until then--had the power of bringing my thought of two years into unexpected, and much appreciated, focus. Beginning as I had with Victorian certitude (in both essay and memoir) and concluding with late-20th century anomie, Sebald’s voice came as a comfort and an illumination. The solitariness in it was familiar, but the calm of it came as revelation. The calm and the silence. Together, in this narration, they are a benign presence. The narrator is neither repelled by the silence around him nor does he embrace it. He simply rests in it: without shock, resentment or sedation. Like a Trappist monk. Or like Samuel Beckett, who also had the power to move into and then beyond anomie. The effect is moving and instructive. Somewhere in “Rings” the narrator tells a story about a prince whose magical powers allowed him to light a fire with icicles, and he, the narrator, wonders now “whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one’s own wretched heart is still aglow.” And there you have it. The allure of the book. Its strange beauty. An account of human bleakness is being given us now, at this moment in our spirituality depleted history, by a narrator who needs to believe that his wretched heart is still aglow.

It is a measure of the bankruptcy of fiction that “The Rings of Saturn” is repeatedly called a novel. The critics cannot believe that the power to make us feel this, our one and only life, as very few novels do these days is coming from a memoirist--a nonfiction truth-speaker--who has entered our common situation and is telling the story we now want told. But it is.

Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including “The End of the Novel of Love,” “Approaching Eye Level” and the memoir, “Fierce Attachments.”

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CYNTHIA OZICK

Pleasure? Three books have lately preoccupied me, all historical, all saturated in varieties of human venom. “Man is a wolf to man” might be their common motto. They are Mihail Sebastian’s “Journal: 1935-1944,” in which the descent of Romania’s literary intellectuals into fascism and anti-Semitism is meticulously and personally documented; Eugene L. Pogany’s “In My Brother’s Image,” a pained account of his father and his uncle, identical twin brothers in Nazi-era Hungary, one protected as a Catholic, the other tormented as a Jew; and James Carroll’s courageous “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews,” an honest chronicle of 16 centuries of theological contempt and persecution.

There is no pleasure in these disquieting histories--but they led me back to an elucidating tale, so many decades left unread that coming on it again was tantamount to dizzying revelation: Jonathan Swift’s “A Voyage to Lilliput.” Here, through Gulliver’s innocently inquiring anthropological prose, is the encapsulated meanness of puffed-up power run by absolutism; the rupture of identicals (Lilliputians and Blefuscudians); immemorial hatred, religiously inspired (Big-Endians and Little-Endians). A close reading of Lilliputian society will uncover Mircea Eliade, the Iron Guard zealot (later celebrated at the University of Chicago as a philosopher of myth), and even the Emperor Constantine himself, publisher of lethal edicts. Satire is perhaps the one literary form that can, undyingly, extract bitter amusement from deadly malice. Pleasure? Of a kind.

Cynthia Ozick is the author of, most recently, “Quarrel & Quandary: Essays” and “The Puttermesser Papers.”

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ROBERT CONQUEST

Unexpected by me was to find myself more taken with Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason” than with any other prose work that has come my way for a long time. I thought I would feel like that about any “History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Yes, I read philosophy at Oxford but, yes, like most people, I’ve kept up poorly and usually made heavy going about keeping up. Not with this elegant, readable, well-argued, well-written volume.

Gottlieb enjoys full academic status but has long been out in what I suppose we mustn’t call the real world, where the public for journalism demands clarity and comprehensibility. Gottlieb’s forte, or one of his fortes, is common sense, together with the best sort of shamelessly inquiring mind. The result is fresh, vivid, provocative. No nonsense about the post-Heidegger stuff (found, to be fair, in the pseudo-philosophers of the English departments rather than among philosophers proper). Nor any of the superficial readability of those who’ve sold out to pop correctness. Gottlieb is as enjoyable as he is intellectually stimulating.

Robert Conquest is the author of many books, including “Reflections on a Ravaged Century.”

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ROY PORTER

My literary discovery of the year came when reading Simon Schama’s “A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000 B.C.-1603 A.D.”--the book which accompanies his new BBC television series. I’d always known him as an expert on the Dutch Republic in the golden age and as a historian of the French Revolution, but here he holds forth about his native shores from earliest times (the Neolithic in the Scottish Islands) up to the death of Queen Elizabeth I.

It is fun to have British history made so playful and seen through the eyes of today: The Vikings came “with a bad attitude”; Cnut’s rule was “a hostile take-over”; Domesday Book made William the Conqueror the “first data-base king.” The author of “Rembrandt’s Eyes” has seen British history through a fresh pair of eyes.

Roy Porter is the author of, most recently, “The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment.”

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CHARLES WRIGHT

Actually, my most pleasurable “discovery” was a “rediscovery” and not of a book but an author. W.G. Sebald’s “Vertigo,” which I did read this year with great pleasure and a kind of amazement, made me remember the real discovery I made several years ago when I read his novel “The Emigrants” for the first time. Now that was a brilliant book. “Vertigo,” similarly structured around four narratives, was the first novel Sebald wrote but the last translated into English. “The Emigrants” was the second written but the first into English. A third novel, “The Rings of Saturn,” was the last of the three but the second in English. All are extraordinary books, and one (“The Emigrants”) is a masterpiece. What is more pleasurable than that? One last thing. The translation of all three books was done by Michael Hulse (beato lui), a labor of love and genius.

Charles Wright is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, “Appalachia.” His collection “Black Zodiac” was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1998 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry in 1997.