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.
Katzenkopfpflaster
by Sarah Kirsch. (1979) Published by dtv. 119 pages.
8 July 2007
This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.
8 July 2007
This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.
The Comedians
by Graham Greene. (1965) Published by Penguin Books. 287 pages.
Reviewed 5 July 2007
As a writer, I’ve always been a little shy of the subjects of adultery, affairs and jealousy the way that you might be shy of opening that great big present someone gave you for your birthday, the one in the enormous box with the massive bow. Mystery writers can rely on sexual jealousy as a surefire motive guaranteed to contain more spice than simple monetary greed. Serious writers seem obliged to dwell on the complications of extramarital affairs the way that traditional haiku poets were obliged to dwell on the blossoms of cherry trees. Affairs, custody battles, divorce, feelings of loneliness, these are all cliché subjects, but they’re clichés that many of us have to visit because these are the subjects that get under the skin of the safest, most stable, most “mature” people, the apparent pillars of our society. If you want, you can write about mob lords, private detectives, wizards, soldiers, whalers, firefighters, people who throw themselves into conflict and adventure. Heroism and villainy are legitimate subjects for serious literature. But in order to gain maturity you also have to recognize the forces in life that make mature adults act like selfish children; you have to recognize the fact that even when people seek to avoid conflict, even when they try to settle down, conflict comes and finds them right where they live.
Graham Greene is thinking about these issues and many more when he brings together Brown and Jones, two men who have spent much of their lives as itinerant con artists. After a particularly successful scam involving forged paintings, Brown retreats to Haiti and decides to settle down into the role of the owner of a hotel he inherited from a mother he barely knew. He manages to turn the Hotel Trianon into a favorite spot for poets, artists and thinkers, and also starts up a romance with the wife of an ambassador from an unnamed South American state. Brown scoffs at the way the ambassador is obsessed with his own sense of ownership, the way he treats his wife as a possession and always emphasizes the word “my” in the phrase, “my wife.”
But Brown finds that he too is susceptible to jealousy and pettiness when he encounters Jones, a laid-back smooth-talker who boasts of his spurious military achievements in Burma during WWII. As a fellow con-artist, Brown can’t look down at Jones for playing fast and loose with the truth, but he feels threatened by the fact that Jones is capable of something that’s always eluded Brown: the ability to make people laugh.
What’s great about this book is the fact that the narrative is so prosaiac and matter of fact that I kept getting caught off guard by Graham’s great talent. Over the course of the book, Graham takes the carefree sense of humor that Brown so dreads and uses it as an anchoring for a series of literary fancy knots, reflections about the dark comedy of the increasingly corrupt Haitian Government under President “Papa Doc” Duvalier; about the tragically absurd comedy of guerilla forces who think they have a chance to overthrow a despotic government able to rely on CIA support; about the comedy of the American utopians who come to Haiti in hopes of building a vegetarian center that will bring peace to the country by removing acidity from the Haitian diet; and most of all, about the farcical and pitiful comedy of misunderstanding that arises when Brown fails to heed the wisdom of his own mistress’s words: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination . . . then we fail.”
Reviewed 5 July 2007
As a writer, I’ve always been a little shy of the subjects of adultery, affairs and jealousy the way that you might be shy of opening that great big present someone gave you for your birthday, the one in the enormous box with the massive bow. Mystery writers can rely on sexual jealousy as a surefire motive guaranteed to contain more spice than simple monetary greed. Serious writers seem obliged to dwell on the complications of extramarital affairs the way that traditional haiku poets were obliged to dwell on the blossoms of cherry trees. Affairs, custody battles, divorce, feelings of loneliness, these are all cliché subjects, but they’re clichés that many of us have to visit because these are the subjects that get under the skin of the safest, most stable, most “mature” people, the apparent pillars of our society. If you want, you can write about mob lords, private detectives, wizards, soldiers, whalers, firefighters, people who throw themselves into conflict and adventure. Heroism and villainy are legitimate subjects for serious literature. But in order to gain maturity you also have to recognize the forces in life that make mature adults act like selfish children; you have to recognize the fact that even when people seek to avoid conflict, even when they try to settle down, conflict comes and finds them right where they live.
Graham Greene is thinking about these issues and many more when he brings together Brown and Jones, two men who have spent much of their lives as itinerant con artists. After a particularly successful scam involving forged paintings, Brown retreats to Haiti and decides to settle down into the role of the owner of a hotel he inherited from a mother he barely knew. He manages to turn the Hotel Trianon into a favorite spot for poets, artists and thinkers, and also starts up a romance with the wife of an ambassador from an unnamed South American state. Brown scoffs at the way the ambassador is obsessed with his own sense of ownership, the way he treats his wife as a possession and always emphasizes the word “my” in the phrase, “my wife.”
But Brown finds that he too is susceptible to jealousy and pettiness when he encounters Jones, a laid-back smooth-talker who boasts of his spurious military achievements in Burma during WWII. As a fellow con-artist, Brown can’t look down at Jones for playing fast and loose with the truth, but he feels threatened by the fact that Jones is capable of something that’s always eluded Brown: the ability to make people laugh.
What’s great about this book is the fact that the narrative is so prosaiac and matter of fact that I kept getting caught off guard by Graham’s great talent. Over the course of the book, Graham takes the carefree sense of humor that Brown so dreads and uses it as an anchoring for a series of literary fancy knots, reflections about the dark comedy of the increasingly corrupt Haitian Government under President “Papa Doc” Duvalier; about the tragically absurd comedy of guerilla forces who think they have a chance to overthrow a despotic government able to rely on CIA support; about the comedy of the American utopians who come to Haiti in hopes of building a vegetarian center that will bring peace to the country by removing acidity from the Haitian diet; and most of all, about the farcical and pitiful comedy of misunderstanding that arises when Brown fails to heed the wisdom of his own mistress’s words: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination . . . then we fail.”
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