by JK Rowling. (2007) Published by Scholastic. 759 pages.
28 July 2007
I went out and picked up my reserved copy of this book the day it was released, and I finished it on the evening of the day after. It was an odd feeling, knowing that except for a few people on the other side of the literary curtain, I was among the first to find out all the little secrets of this last chapter in Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some have complained that Harry’s long trek from campsite to campsite with his friends Ron and Hermione got a little boring. I think it is true that JK Rowling had to stretch the plot a little to make it fill out the usual framework of a full academic year. But each time our three fugitive magicians come out of hiding, there’s so much action that I felt I needed the long stretches of tedium to be able to catch my breath, and also to take a step back and appreciate just how far this series has come since its beginning.
I remember in 2000 I picked up the first Potter book. I read through it quickly and felt a little embarrassed to be reading what seemed to me a faddish kids’ book. As Harry took his first shopping trip for a wand and magical tomes, as he visited a deep underground bank run by goblins, as he took the train to Hogwarts and entered the great hall with an enchanted sky for its ceiling, I started to get sucked in by the concept. I thought that in terms of creating a fantastic world, Rowling had written herself an enormous blank check. But I expected the characters to be little more than action figures moving through this fantastic world.
There’s a point in this final book where Harry Potter breaks out into a fit of rage at a father on the verge of abandoning his wife and child. “Parents,” he says, “Shouldn’t leave their kids—unless they’ve got to.” It’s one of the best parts of the book, the whole series, maybe Harry Potter’s truest moment of heroism. One reason the Harry Potter series has worked so well is because of Rowling’s miraculous restraint with her own imagination. Though her world is awash with wonders, none of them could ever fully distract from the sadness at the heart of the story: the orphaning of an infant child. In his first few books of the series, Harry is able to enjoy his childhood, making friends and playing sports and spending a realistically minimal amount of time soul searching. But as his adolescence progresses, old phantoms and longings from his past come to haunt him.
JK Rowling avoided letting her series descend into hollow fantasy, but she also avoided making the novels too precious. True, sometimes Harry’s fireside chats with Dumbledore seemed a little bit like therapy sessions. But though each book contained it’s neat little life lesson served up at the end, it never dominated the plot, never consumed it. Rather, it was always the feelings and emotions that tripped him up as he was looking to concoct a potion or tame a hippogriff. We as readers never had to deal with “Harry Potter and the Journey of Self Discovery” or “Harry Potter and the Battle with Substance Abuse.”
Using the miracle of teleportation, Rowling takes us on a wonderful final tour of her magical world in this last book, whipping up some first class adventure scenes at Gringots Bank, the Ministry of Magic, the home of the wicked Malfoys, and of course Hogwarts Castle. Deftly as ever, Rowling paints the encroaching regime of Harry’s enemy Voldemort with traces of racism, fascism, and the love of torture: her most deliberate touch is the wizard Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, infamous for building the Nurmengard prison, above whose gates stood the slogan “For the Greater Good.” But we also get a realistic look at the dynamics of blacklisting and hate campaigns as we see the Ministry of Magic come under the sway of the dark new regime.
There’s not much else for me to say here that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ll just tell you that this is an excellent conclusion to a wonderful series. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this time period and find many things confusing and confounding, but they will certainly understand the success of JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter.”
Walking the Black Cat
by Charles Simic (1996) Published by Harcourt, Brace & Company. 83 pages.
Reviewed 28 July 2007
What’s great about Charles Simic is you never know when to take him seriously. This is the second book of poetry I’ve read by him; the first was “The World Does Not End,” an earlier book that won a Pulitzer Prize. “Walking the Black Cat” is both funnier and creepier than its predecessor.
If you’ve never read Charles Simic before, the key thing is to prepare for a lot of disjointed images. A lot of people have no patience for this, and who can blame them? Why force yourself through a book of poetry when the job of making sense of everything has been outsourced to you the reader? Why not just shut the book and go look for somebody who’s willing to tell you a story and make sense of what’s going on?
Of course, if you read, say, poetry by Shakespeare or Milton, you’ll encounter plenty of references, terms and phrasings that make it incomprehensible to the modern reader, but most probably you’ll also be presented with an infrastructure of footnotes, glossaries and critical essays that will help you find your way through. Underneath all the obscurity there is usually an orderly, understandable system of poetic symbolism.
One of Simic’s talents is to simulate that sense of confusion, to give us a sense that his poems have been salvaged from some different age, a different world, that with just the right key, it would all make sense. But there never will be a decoding ring for Simic’s puzzles. While Shakespeare’s references to Greek myth and the Chronicles of English history can all be unearthed and dusted off, there will never be anyone to tell us what, exactly, Charles Simic means when he says that Happiness “sat over a dish of vanilla custard without ever touching it!” Even when identifiable figures appear, as they often do, their actions are difficult to interpret. Why is the ghost of Hamlet’s father wandering around a Vegas motel? What does it mean when Adam says the “secret of the musical matchbox” has been stolen from him?
There are frequent references in this book to ghosts, and to hotels, cafés and casinos visited by the dead. There is a sense that these poems are all stories told by a man who has seen the most important figures in his life pass on to another world. He is left alone to tell stories he can’t completely understand. He has precious little real information at his disposal, but a wealth of inklings and dark intuitions.
There are other elements, too. Strange bits of comedy, as when a man demands that his pet canary sing in exchange for the privilege of being able to witness the act of lovemaking. And a few poems that strike a surprisingly candid tone, such as “Slaughterhouse Flies” or “Little Unwritten Book,” which tells the story of a beloved cat who disappeared years ago. The owner still goes out each morning and calls for the cat and leaves a saucer of milk on the porch, to no avail.
Some of the poems are a little weak, such as “The Something.” At his worst, Simic seems like he’s just fiddling around with words, creating little formulaic oddities. But these poems are few; mostly, this book is filled with stylish, enjoyable, spooky morsels of verse.
Reviewed 28 July 2007
What’s great about Charles Simic is you never know when to take him seriously. This is the second book of poetry I’ve read by him; the first was “The World Does Not End,” an earlier book that won a Pulitzer Prize. “Walking the Black Cat” is both funnier and creepier than its predecessor.
If you’ve never read Charles Simic before, the key thing is to prepare for a lot of disjointed images. A lot of people have no patience for this, and who can blame them? Why force yourself through a book of poetry when the job of making sense of everything has been outsourced to you the reader? Why not just shut the book and go look for somebody who’s willing to tell you a story and make sense of what’s going on?
Of course, if you read, say, poetry by Shakespeare or Milton, you’ll encounter plenty of references, terms and phrasings that make it incomprehensible to the modern reader, but most probably you’ll also be presented with an infrastructure of footnotes, glossaries and critical essays that will help you find your way through. Underneath all the obscurity there is usually an orderly, understandable system of poetic symbolism.
One of Simic’s talents is to simulate that sense of confusion, to give us a sense that his poems have been salvaged from some different age, a different world, that with just the right key, it would all make sense. But there never will be a decoding ring for Simic’s puzzles. While Shakespeare’s references to Greek myth and the Chronicles of English history can all be unearthed and dusted off, there will never be anyone to tell us what, exactly, Charles Simic means when he says that Happiness “sat over a dish of vanilla custard without ever touching it!” Even when identifiable figures appear, as they often do, their actions are difficult to interpret. Why is the ghost of Hamlet’s father wandering around a Vegas motel? What does it mean when Adam says the “secret of the musical matchbox” has been stolen from him?
There are frequent references in this book to ghosts, and to hotels, cafés and casinos visited by the dead. There is a sense that these poems are all stories told by a man who has seen the most important figures in his life pass on to another world. He is left alone to tell stories he can’t completely understand. He has precious little real information at his disposal, but a wealth of inklings and dark intuitions.
There are other elements, too. Strange bits of comedy, as when a man demands that his pet canary sing in exchange for the privilege of being able to witness the act of lovemaking. And a few poems that strike a surprisingly candid tone, such as “Slaughterhouse Flies” or “Little Unwritten Book,” which tells the story of a beloved cat who disappeared years ago. The owner still goes out each morning and calls for the cat and leaves a saucer of milk on the porch, to no avail.
Some of the poems are a little weak, such as “The Something.” At his worst, Simic seems like he’s just fiddling around with words, creating little formulaic oddities. But these poems are few; mostly, this book is filled with stylish, enjoyable, spooky morsels of verse.
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