[{"title":"Laying Blame for \u0026lsquo;The Year Without Summer\u0026rsquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-30-year-without-a-summer-1816/","date":"August 30, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Laying Blame for 'The Year Without Summer' The largest known volcanic eruption in the last two millennia had massive climatological, agricultural, economic, and sociological impacts on Planet Earth, but perhaps the most lasting aftershocks have been bibliographic. Volumes about the Indonesian eruption continue to engulf nearly every section of the world’s bookstores like molten lava. In the history section, climate historian Wolfgang Behringer\u0026rsquo;s Tambora and the Year without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis is a recent release. On the science shelf, Gillen D’Arcy Wood\u0026rsquo;s Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World has won numerous awards. Historical fiction, too, has erupted with offerings like Guinevere Glasfurd\u0026rsquo;s The Year Without Summer: 1816. With that kind of topic glut, any new publication requires a clear and compelling raison d\u0026rsquo;être.\nThe strongest existential rationale for the discursively titled The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History is its intersection of history and climate science. The authors, a history professor and his meteorologist son, spend 300 pages prospecting for the sweet spot between those two disciplines. In the process, they careen wildly between micro and macro, yanking the zoom slider back and forth from a \u0026ldquo;People\u0026rsquo;s History\u0026rdquo; vantage to \u0026ldquo;Great Man\u0026rdquo; specificity with all the mastery of George Jetson on his treadmill: “Jane, stop this crazy thing!” Ultimately, however, history and science synthesize into a narrative so ineluctably fascinating that the scale problems can\u0026rsquo;t spoil a solid nonfiction read.\nYou Put Your History in My Science! Historian William K. Klingaman’s success as a storyteller is directly proportional to the relevance of the events described. When he zeroes in on the impact of the volcanic eruption that clouded the atmosphere and chilled the globe, he scores. When he digresses, he does not. For example, U.S. President James Madison’s 1816 address to Congress is pertinent because it directly addressed the altered climate. “The president comforted Congress … with an assurance that the frigid summer and prolonged drought had not created a national crisis.” Okay, excellent detail. But Klingaman cannot resist evaluating the broader state of America’s union: “The United States was at peace with every other nation; American exports continued to expand; … and the frontier remained free of clashes with Indians.” And\u0026ndash;?\n“Great frost—we must learn to be humble.” Similarly, it makes perfect sense to relay a horror fiction contest between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley because that competition, which prompted the novel Frankenstein, was a way to escape the cold. But what does the suicide of Mary’s half-sister Fanny have to do with anything? Klingaman’s insistence on reporting every mildly interesting nugget of research, from painter J.M.W Turner’s salary to Jane Austen’s disinterest in “historical romances,\u0026quot; suggests the historian is not entirely clear on the assignment. The book often reads so much like an 1816 yearbook that I almost expected to find the margins inscribed with well wishes for life after graduation. (“Never forget that summer we cross-country skied to class! Lord Byron is low-key hot!”)\nYou Put Your Science in My History! The contributions of meteorology PhD Nicholas P. Klingaman also lack focus. His expertise is especially evident in crucial passages detailing the devastating impact of the volcano on agriculture around the world. These descriptions—of soggy, rotten crops and failed harvests—underscore the reality that “the year without summer” had economic consequences far more serious than a few spoiled weekends at the beach. Too often, however, the book devotes pages to numbing town-by-town weather reports:\nWhen morning temperatures in Maine dipped into the 30s at the end of the first week of August, farmers wrapped old shawls or rags around the seedlings for protection. Throughout the month, winds remained unusually steady from the north and west, keeping the air drier than normal. The first hint of disaster occurred on August 13, as a cold wave passing through northern New England brought frost that damaged corn in the fields north of Concord, New Hampshire. Temperatures dipped below freezing again the following evening, causing frost damage in western Massachusetts, then rose and remained warm for nearly a week.\nWith this level of detail, I half expected Al Roker to hand things over to my local station for conditions in my neck of the woods.\nBlame Canada The Klingamans are at their best when discussing the reputed causes of the aberrant weather. They excel at reconciling the superstition and pseudoscience of the 19th century with modern scientific knowledge. Observers in 1816 did not have the technology needed to identify Mount Tambora as a “person of interest,” let alone finger it as the culprit. The top hypotheses of the day blamed astronomical phenomena such as tidal variation and sunspots—not explanations that are still on the scholarly table. The era\u0026rsquo;s weather forecasts were based on measurements of fruit and vegetable growth, so those are of little value as well. It’s no wonder most observers attributed the changes to divine intervention.\nAmericans saw God’s hand especially in unexpected events that affected an entire community, such as hurricanes, epidemics, earthquakes (“peculiar Tokens” of God’s anger), and famine. Destructive frosts and snowfalls in June came from God as well. One Vermont newspaper could even cite scripture from the Old Testament to explain the recent cold wave: “Perhaps we can assign no other cause than that the fiat of the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,” the editors wrote, “and the wisest philosophers will be ready to exclaim with Elihu, the friend of Jub, ‘By the breath of God frost is given, and the breadth of the waters is restrained.’” Or as a Connecticut farmer confided to his diary, “Great frost—we must learn to be humble.”\nAs I read, I felt grateful to live in era when peer-reviewed studies dictate my understanding of seasonal disturbances even if I put forth little to no effort to comprehend those studies. I also reflected with bewilderment that so many of my contemporaries renounce the advantages of superior scientific knowledge in favor of the spurious claims of darker times. At least the denizens of 1816 had an excuse; we have only ourselves to blame. “I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes,\u0026quot; said Pat Robertson in 1998 in an Old Testamenty threat to prideful gays. \u0026ldquo;I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you.” The 2024 version of this was an effort by extremists to claim Hurricanes Helene and Milton were geoengineered to flatten it opponents\u0026rsquo; states. In this respect, not much has changed since 1816:\nA more fanciful explanation for the frigid summer came from a resident of Albany, New York, who noticed a correlation between the advent of colder weather in the Northern United States and the Madison administration’s failed attempt to invade Canada during the early stages of the recent war against Britain. “It seems very strange to me,” he informed the editor of the Columbian, “that ever since our late ‘just and necessary war,’ these Canadian winds have all blown so cold upon us! Others have noticed this as well as myself and say, that our N. winds have, of late, been much colder than formerly. At this rate,” he concluded, “it is very clear that Canada must be ours, or we must all migrate to the southward in a very few years.”\nThe passages on the causes of the year without summer were satisfying for another reason as well. I had the sense that father and son were writing in tandem, with history informing science and science clarifying history. Here was that elusive sweet spot that gives this particular book a place in the vast, accumulating body of knowledge regarding the volcanic eruption of 1815.\n"},{"title":"\u0026ldquo;Okay, Boomer, but should ‘Genocide’ be one of ‘The Things We Never Say’?\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-23-the-things-we-never-say/","date":"August 23, 2026","tags":null,"text":"\"Okay, Boomer, but should ‘Genocide’ be one of ‘The Things We Never Say’?\"  To [Lytton] Strachey, as well as to other intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, [Victorian novelist George] Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone. The falling-off of regard was precipitous. Almost immediately after Eliot’s death critics vied with each other to demonstrate their own vitality by thinking up new ways to characterize her deadliness. “It is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels,” one critic wrote of her works. \u0026hellip; In 1895 George Saintsbury was able to note that while her novels might still be read, they were not admired by anyone whose opinion counted for anything. (Saintsbury was a well-known literary critic, whom no one now reads.) Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch\nYouth often regards the wisdom of the saints with distrust, even outright scorn. Matriculants to Generation Z\u0026#9670;The minumum birth year for Gen Z inclusion (born ‘97-2012) wield a hypersensitive bullshit detector tuned to wary tintinnabulation any time sainthood is bestowed upon a straight white male. That tendency doesn’t prompt author Elizabeth Strout to temper her earnest canonization of high school history teacher Artie Dam, the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say:\nEvie spoke afterward of Artie always in terms of his being a saint. He was a saint, she said this again and again as she lived the rest of her life, never marrying again. An absolute saint, she said. Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say\nThe hagiographic tone is not just widow’s warmth. Substack’s Ron Charles attributes a compatible statement to Strout herself: \u0026ldquo;This Artie, I love him.\u0026rdquo; I wonder if Strout is deliberately echoing George Eliot, whose favorable comparison of her Middlemarch heroine Dorothea Brooke to Saint Theresa was the thematic spine of the novel.\nThe effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. George Eliot, Middlemarch\nThe sainthood of both protagonists emanates not from extravagantly pious deeds but from self-effacing acceptance of their flawed fellow travelers. Dorothea saves the day because she sees Tertius Lydgate’s scientific dedication instead of his gambling addiction, Rosamund Vincy’s vulnerability instead of her henpecking manipulativeness, Will Ladislaw’s tenacious decency instead of his prickly egotism.\nArtie has the same moral x-ray vision. Evie initially thinks he is \u0026ldquo;soft\u0026rdquo; for telling an awkward student that the world can be changed by personal authenticity. But she comes to see toughness in Artie’s saintly ability to turn a bully into a Shakespeare scholar. Or a Trump supporter into his most trusted confidant. By the novel’s conclusion, Artie — hang on, his confidant was what now??\nIf that last example instinctively feels like a bridge too far into MAGA apologia, you may have the same difficulty swallowing Strout that Gen Z BookTokkers have been voicing as The Things We Never Say laps the track toward the September 22\u0026#9670;Booker Prize shortlist for 2026 announced. announcement of the 2026 Booker shortlist. Mind you, I am a Gen X\u0026#9670;The minimum birth year for Gen X inclusion liberal (born ‘65-‘80) who still feels sadness over Charlie Rose’s absence from late night television, who can’t help finding George W. Bush a wee bit adorable when he pals around with Michelle Obama, who maintains a reservoir of affection for Woody Allen’s films despite decades of red-flag marriage to his own stepdaughter and damning allegations of worse. But even I took a good long look at Strout’s empathetic bridge across Trumpism before I reluctantly followed Artie across it.\nSome observers, especially those who paused homework assignments to watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the George Floyd protests, find Strout’s call for empathy less palatable because she uses the 2024 US presidential election\u0026#9670;Donald Trump re-elected US President as a thematic backdrop. I ultimately appreciated the radical willingness of The Things We Never Say to extend the traditionally humanizing power of fiction over \u0026ldquo;big, beautiful\u0026rdquo; barriers.\nWho’s Afraid of George Eliot? In her own time\u0026#9670;George Eliot dies , Eliot was adulated for her penetrating moral wisdom. No less an embodiment of the Victorian Era than Queen Victoria herself actively sought Eliot’s autograph. Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, read Middlemarch 15 times in 15 years. One (unnamed) critic quoted in an 1883 issue of The Atlantic went so far as to suggest that Eliot’s fiction regulated the moral register of daily life, claiming her novels prevented \u0026ldquo;our highest moments from making our every-day experience seem vulgar and incoherent, and \u0026hellip; our every-day experience from making our highest moments seem spectral and unreal.\u0026rdquo; Even the novelist known as The Master, Henry James, who condescendingly denigrated Eliot’s storytelling capabilities, conceded of her fiction that \u0026ldquo;much should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its elevated morality.\u0026rdquo;\nHowever, what passed for lofty moral insight during the 1870s seemed insufferably credulous by the turn of the century. \u0026ldquo;She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at,\u0026rdquo; wrote Virginia Woolf, \u0026ldquo;the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn.\u0026rdquo; Obsessively judgy Victorian moralism was a strangulating corset to Woolf’s generation, and perhaps her contemporaries like the progressive Bloomsbury Group (those in Woolf’s vaunted literary clique) suspected Eliot, for all her agnostic humanism, of secretly wanting to bind it inextricably to their hips. Woolf herself pushed back on that cynicism, giving Eliot credit for a rare willingness to target Middlemarch at \u0026ldquo;grown-up people,\u0026rdquo; but even Woolf confessed \u0026ldquo;bursting into laughter\u0026rdquo; at one of Eliot’s earnest dictums.\nTalking ’Bout My Generation Ironically, the path-blazing modernists applied the same withering hindsight to Middlemarch’s meliorism that Strout’s generation, the Baby Boomers\u0026#9670;The minimum birth year for Baby Boomer inclusion (born ‘46-‘64) applied to Jim Crow, the Vietnam War, and married couples with matching twin beds. As anyone knows who has logged into a social media platform since Facebook conquered the pre-Millennial generations, the Gen Z consensus on their Baby Boomer ancestors is that the one-time hippies long ago sold the Woodstock farm in exchange for bourgeois comforts. That is not sheer imagination, but Gen X bears more responsibility for the outcome of the election than do the Boomers. Cornell’s Roper Center reports that Americans aged 45 to 64 favored Trump in 2024 by a double-digit margin, 54% to 44%. I am sorry for so many reasons to say that that demographic includes me. (I was 51 on election day.) Gen X screwed the pooch in this election cycle; there\u0026rsquo;s no evading that. Strout, who turned 65 the day MAGA stormed the Capitol\u0026#9670;The Capitol stormed by MAGA; Elizabeth Strout turns 65. , is in a less compromised bracket. Trump won 65-and-up by only one point.\nThe heartbeat of Dorothea’s characterization betrays an unplanned arrhythmia that leaps off the page. I never got that feeling from Artie Dam. That brings us back to The Things We Never Say, a title almost lifted right off a Woolf character’s manuscript in her debut The Voyage Out. Woolf’s youthful Terence Hewet writes Silence, or the Things People Don’t Say to convey the legacy in his generation of Victorian spiritual amputation. Strout invokes it to imply that the same paralyzing inhibitions lurk behind the mindless extroversion of Trump’s America.\nSaintly Artie Dam, every student’s favorite history teacher, is roughly halfway in between my age and Strout’s. He is 57 when our myopic peers send the Charlottesville President, the \u0026ldquo;Enemy of the People\u0026rdquo; President, the Bleach Injection President, the \u0026ldquo;Cats and Dogs\u0026rdquo; President back to the People’s House. That day takes place roughly halfway through the 201-page novel. The election does not drive the plot, but it looms over it with nearly the same menace that Philip Roth conjured in his Lindbergh-beats-FDR alternative history The Plot Against America. It is the invisible white hood in the midst of a brawl over antisemitic comments at a school soccer game. It seeps into the loneliness that makes Artie indulge suicidal and kleptomaniac impulses. It is the context that darkens Artie’s discovery that his beloved son Rob was conceived by a jackass math teacher with a Trump-sized ego. Put differently, it is not the story of the novel but it is the novel’s subject. Late in the book, Strout highlights the connection in crimson:\nArtie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. \u0026hellip; He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it. Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide. Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say\nThe metaphor of self-evisceration feels both imprecise, particularly in resistant Blue America (the novel is set in Massachusetts), and inartfully direct. But the line it draws between Artie’s sense of loss and today’s cable news scroll could not be more stark.\nNot surprisingly, The Things We Never Say, steeped as it is in page one politics, has divided our nation’s book communities, with older readers split between those who loved the book and those who disliked the overt politics. Charles, a Boomer close to Strout’s age, suggested The Things We Never Say deserved longevity equal to that of Stoner by John Williams, which is as popular on BookTok as The Great Gatsby is in American Literature courses. The Boston Globe’s Priscilla Gilman, a Gen X-er born three years before me, argued that the political content diminished a usually reliable author. \u0026ldquo;The fiction seems to lose its bearings on the way to becoming parable or allegory,\u0026rdquo; Gilman claimed.\nI have not studied all of the 8,741 reviews that have already been posted on Goodreads as I write this, but the generational divide appears as soon as you probe for it. Search for \u0026ldquo;too political,\u0026rdquo; and 1,733 reviewers turn up, most my age or older. Mary Lins, a 69-year-old Strout diehard from Jefferson City, Missouri, \u0026ldquo;kept reading, hoping that once she’d ’had her say’ the book would concentrate more on the characters and plot (which is riveting), but the political doom and gloom continue throughout.\u0026rdquo;\nOkay, Boomer. Younger Goodreads and BookTok reviewers did not share my generation’s queasy unreadiness for political fisticuffs. When I had read 10 pages that I dismissively and naively described to an email correspondent as \u0026ldquo;realism without being entirely real\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;wry without being funny,\u0026rdquo; I received an eye-opening TikTok by Alfie Tindall, known on TikTok as Alfread. He is a 24-year-old parasitologist in training from Glasgow who summed up the view I later encountered again and again from Gen Z critics. \u0026ldquo;I think reading is one of the most political things that we can do,\u0026rdquo; he began, \u0026ldquo;and I commend authors who are bold enough to dive into conversations about current affairs.\u0026rdquo; To Alfread, Strout had written \u0026ldquo;about 200 pages of centrism and fence-sitting.\u0026rdquo; Her engagement amounted to appeasement for mainstream audiences, and she refused to allow her characters to \u0026ldquo;commit to any kind of political take.\u0026rdquo; Her references to Gaza could have been designed to \u0026ldquo;educate\u0026rdquo; her readers, but instead dodged an obligation to call a spade a spade. Alfread is methodically precise; a United Nations commission has investigated Gaza and has determined it fits four of five criteria for genocide. Why then can’t Strout use that word? He also called her out for a \u0026ldquo;both-sidesy\u0026rdquo; tendency to equate Israel and Gaza while clearly attributing responsibility for the Ukraine conflict to Russian aggression. Alfread’s controlled fury cleanly articulated his generation’s impatience with moral prevarication. His critique of Strout echoed the words of Jesus in Revelation: \u0026ldquo;So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.\u0026rdquo;\nWatch Alfread’s video here!\nHot Take — So Please Don’t Spit Me Out! I find the readily discernible generational fault lines over The Things We Never Say fascinating, but I have trouble seeing my own view in almost any of the reviews I encountered. Like Alfread, I regard Strout’s willingness to take on a divisive political conversation as a strength rather than a liability. I am far more persuaded by Alfread’s bold political standards than Gilman’s aversion to allegory.\nI am also aligned with Alfread in that I am not as enthusiastic about Strout’s character work and prose as Ron Charles. In fact, without Strout’s ominous invocation of the current creeping, tendril-clutch spread of Fascism, I would have found Strout’s depiction of an everyday saint quietly making a difference in the lives of his students tepid and clichéd. Artie is a pleasure to meet, and I enjoyed his unabashed awkwardness. I like that he is more principled than clever, and I admire the way Strout juxtaposes his teacherly wisdom with silent, self-probing doubt. But for all that, there is a patness and perfection and thinness to the characterization that was never one of George Eliot’s shortcomings. If we are to pit Strout’s saint against Eliot’s, I will choose Dorothea’s brash naïveté and pained romantic timidity every time. The heartbeat of her characterization betrays an unplanned arrhythmia that leaps off the page. I never got that feeling from Artie Dam.\nWhere I part ways with Alfread is in his principled rejection of Strout’s genuine political audacity. His diagnosis of \u0026ldquo;both-sidesism\u0026rdquo; is a clear misreading of the text. He argues that Artie becomes suicidal because \u0026ldquo;divisive political times\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;overwhelm\u0026rdquo; his \u0026ldquo;mental health.\u0026rdquo; But the word \u0026ldquo;divisive\u0026rdquo; (and its variations) do not appear in the book at all, and Strout never draws a causal relationship between cultural friction and Artie’s depression. Rather, suicide is employed as a metaphor for the nation’s capitulation to Trump: \u0026ldquo;His country was committing suicide.\u0026rdquo; I do not understand how such an intelligent reader construes that verdict as \u0026ldquo;fence-sitting.\u0026rdquo; As for the charge of \u0026ldquo;appeasement,\u0026rdquo; Strout’s political punch is restrained not by a desire to please Mary Lins or me or Alfread (after all, she clearly hasn’t) but by the same force that hushes her matter-of-fact prose. She isn’t a showy or performative writer, and honestly she is sometimes more direct than she needs to be. For purely aesthetic reasons, Strout could stand to lean harder on metaphor and abstraction and even less on political manifesto. Alfread demands that Strout reflect his own moral certainty. But the characters in her custody are not as well-informed as he is. This approach has a legitimate authorial defense: Steely resolution is not as dramatically compelling as doubt.\nAlfread is right to demand ideological authenticity, to have horror called by its own horrific name. The reason to demand that \u0026ldquo;genocide\u0026rdquo; be named as such is that its legalistic accuracy stamps out the obfuscating power of euphemism. Politicians use language as a roadblock, to evade reality in craven subservience to the criminal Netanyahu regime. But Strout has already indicted the United States for letting Gazans starve. She has acknowledged that Netanyahu bombs children to prolong his hold on power, and to obstruct corruption charges in the Israeli courts. She has let true suffering breathe inside her make-believe. In that context, Alfread’s demand for a password strikes me as borderline unliterary. \u0026ldquo;Genocide\u0026rdquo; has an undeniable currency in politics, but fiction can employ a broader vocabulary. It should not be shackled to literal rigidity. Alfread is correct to point out that the key voices in the international community have ratified the accuracy of the term, but in a novel there are other ways to accurately describe suffering.\nI would also defend Strout’s use of Elon Musk. Her characters are not as firm in their rejection of him as Alfread would like (\u0026ldquo;Why did we need to bring That Man into it?\u0026rdquo;, he asks). And I will agree that if we can’t call out Musk for his callous endangerment of African children who depended on USAID programs he canceled, we lack moral understanding. But Eliot would say that the ability of a writer and reader to put themselves in the shoes of a reckless manslaughterer is fundamental to the moral power of fiction. When Strout invokes Musk’s trans daughter and abusive father, she isn’t letting Musk off the hook or asking us to let our hearts bleed for him. She is dramatizing the debate between Artie and Evie.\nOf course, this is all my hot take, the perspective of a Gen X\u0026rsquo;er who has already described himself as a \u0026ldquo;liberal.\u0026rdquo; That label already cost me the trust of some in Gen Z, who tend not to hear the same meaning in that word that my peers do. I give Alfread a lot of credit for his openness to this debate. I sent an email across the Atlantic last weekend, and he wrote back within ten minutes: \u0026ldquo;Differences in opinion are what make book discussion so interesting and I’m sure there is a generational aspect behind it that I’d love to see you explore.\u0026rdquo; I would simply submit that \u0026ldquo;too political\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;not political enough\u0026rdquo; can themselves be euphemisms for \u0026ldquo;not fully aligned with my politics.\u0026rdquo; We should recognize that Strout is out on a limb regardless of where we are in the tree.\nEpilogue In May 2026, The Guardian put an exclamation point on Eliot’s recovery from Edwardian ignominy by naming Middlemarch the single greatest novel in the history of the form. In other words, Strout could dunk on all 12 of the other longlisted novels and still fail to lay an accidental pinkie finger on Eliot. But the important thing is not the fatuous artistic competition, and make no mistake, all artistic competitions are fatuous.\nEliot may be too earnest for Woolf’s generation and Alfread’s as well, but I hope there is a timelessness to her priorities. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings,\u0026quot; wrote George Eliot, \u0026ldquo;is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from them in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.” If we cannot recognize the humanity of the inhumane, even in imagination, our own humanity is called on the carpet. My point is not that fictional empathy pulls rank on real-world reckoning. Real-world anything outranks fictional anything. In the real world. But fiction has to be distinct, a space where imagination issues temporary pardons at the expense of real-world rage.\nEliot’s best defense may have been scripted by her contemporary Oscar Wilde, the last line of his own magnum opus. Wilde was just beginning to find himself in fiction when real-world cruelty stripped him of dignity and broke his extravagant heart. Is Eliot an outmoded purveyor of sentimental sap, Oscar?\n\u0026ldquo;On the contrary, \u0026hellip; I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being earnest.\u0026rdquo;\nMy thanks to Alfie Tindall.\n"},{"title":"A Tale Told by an \u0026ldquo;Idiot\u0026rdquo;, Full of \u0026ldquo;Theory \u0026amp; Practice\u0026rdquo;—What Does it Signify?","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-14-de-kretser-batuman/","date":"August 15, 2026","tags":null,"text":"A Tale Told by an \"Idiot\", Full of \"Theory \u0026 Practice\"—What Does it Signify?  \u0026ldquo;An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.\u0026rdquo; Michelle de Kretser, Theory \u0026amp; Practice\nThirty years ago, I resolved to submit a play for a college competition a few days before the deadline. \u0026ldquo;Write what you know\u0026rdquo; is always dubious advice for writers who don’t yet know anything, so I opted for the common beginner’s gambit of writing about not having anything to write about. In The Tragic Fall of Rufus the Great, a Greek Chorus heralds the birth of a boy destined for artistic greatness, but the world has finally run out of unique combinations of words. The boy comes of age and pours heart and soul into a dramatic masterpiece that turns out to be a word-for-word replica of Death of a Salesman. \u0026ldquo;There is nothing new under the sun,\u0026rdquo; I concluded, borrowing a 2,500-year-old Biblical cliché that was probably already a cliché when the Preacher patted himself on the back for writing it in Ecclesiastes.\nThe next spring, I saw Mighty Aphrodite in a second-run movie theater and realized Woody Allen had been working on the same idea, right down to the vaunted newborn and the satirical Greek Chorus. My eagerness to have my play workshopped dissipated permanently as I realized the world would assume I’d heisted it wholesale from Woody. \u0026ldquo;Nothing new,\u0026rdquo; indeed.\nThe buyer should always beware claims of new forms. Is there any possible form of fiction that fiction hasn’t already taken? \u0026ldquo;The novel was triumphant at the middle of the [19th] century,\u0026rdquo; says critic James Wood in his book The Broken Estate, \u0026ldquo;and there is a sense in which Melville, Flaubert, and Gogol, all of them writing roughly contemporaneously, were poets who wanted to make the novel a genre that could consume all others and then perform all their functions at once—a stomach of genres, digesting satire, poetry, epic, the historical novel, realism, and fable.\u0026rdquo; Since then, we have had the shifting interiority of Virginia Woolf, the arcane allusivity of James Joyce, the maximalist floridity of Marcel Proust, the self-referential disclosure of John Barth, the duplicitous gamesmanship of Vladimir Nabokov. So what could possibly be left for the novel to do that is new?\nStill, when I first read the promotional blurb for Theory \u0026amp; Practice, winner of Australia’s 2025 Stella Prize, I was so intrigued by its concept that I paid Evil Billionaire Jeff Bezos more than I would have paid my beloved ThriftBooks just so the book would arrive on my doorstep the next day. This is a doorstep that receives so many books that my mailman incredulously asked if I had a nine-to-five. (True story.) The hook that helped de Kretser jump the line of my teetering TBR* was its promised fusion of novel, memoir, and critical analysis of Virginia Woolf. That struck me as a genuine formal innovation.\nBut as I worked my way through the slender but compelling narrative, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had encountered its innovations somewhere before. Finally, it struck me like a pronouncement from a sagacious Greek Chorus: Elif Batuman. The chunked confessional episodes, the coming-of-age romance, the higher ed nostalgia, even the genre-defying insights into classical literature, all bore a distinct resemblance to Harvard Russian Lit alum Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot (a Pulitzer finalist) and its sequel Either/Or. Both authors aspire to reinvent the novel. Is either successful, or do they both fall victim to the timeless intonations of Ecclesiastes and my undergraduate stab at a one-act comedy?\n* TBR = To Be Read\nThe Fiction-Memoir Hybrid Both Batuman and de Kretser seek to invigorate the novel by blending memoir seamlessly into a fictional context. On a broad level, their stories follow a recognizable pattern, that of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. In such a work, states the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, \u0026ldquo;the plot unfolds through the narrative of a young person’s development and formation that ideally results in ’maturity’—a rather contested concept, which is traditionally understood as the harmonious integration of personal aspirations and the demands of the social.\u0026rdquo; Both books feature protagonists seeking maturation through epiphanic romance but for whom no stake is higher than writerly ambition.\nHaving characters discuss literature is not a new form. Selin knows that; she\u0026rsquo;s read Proust. The novels are strikingly similar in plot and structure, but wildly divergent in scale. De Kretser’s Sri Lankan heroine, innominate but scornful of her name’s ubiquity (could it be Michelle?), learns the ropes of 1986\u0026#9670;Michelle de Kretser starts a doctoral program at the University of Melbourne Melbourne postgrad life in 175 pages. Batuman’s Turkish American ingenue Selin Karadağ, a 1995\u0026#9670;Elif Batuman starts her freshman year at Harvard University matriculant to Harvard’s literature program, takes two novels, two scholastic years, and 770 pages to achieve maturation. But both characters flit from day to day in chapterless episodes, single paragraphs to several pages in length, narratively aimless but for each character’s burgeoning attraction to an unavailable cad with a serious girlfriend and an incongruous readiness to flirt.\nThe Idiot, named after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1868 panegyric to naïveté, reads like an embarrassingly earnest freshman diary. Selin is bright, but every insight is raw and untested, dimly apprehended through the opaque scrim of inexperience. She soaks in education from every avenue, dormmates and Dostoevsky, fellowship and Fellini. Selin lacks confidence in every area but one: she has been an accomplished personal essayist since high school.\nBy Either/Or, which is also the title of Søren Kierkegaard’s contemplation of ethics and aesthetics, she has become bold to the point of reckless, hellbent on dispensing with her inconvenient virginity. Her intellectual takeaway runs along these lines:\n\u0026ldquo;The aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? \u0026hellip; What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men.\u0026rdquo; Elif Batuman, Either/Or\nThe protagonist of Theory \u0026amp; Practice hits page one at the Either/Or end of the intellectual and sexual precocity spectrum. At school, she reveres Virginia Woolf’s message of gender equality while condemning her perceived antisemitism and colonial snobbery. In her dating life, she is defiantly invested in a man who claims to be in a \u0026ldquo;deconstructed relationship.\u0026rdquo; Her takeaway echoes Selin’s:\n[I was struck] by the tremendous silencing power of shame. To whom could we confess our treacherous, rivalrous, trite, uncool, unfeminist feelings without shame? Shame could transform female solidarity into a scold’s bridle. It could ensure that a philosophy designed to free us set a weight on our tongues. Michelle de Kretser, Theory \u0026amp; Practice\nBoth authors are expert personal essayists, and they’re not afraid to apply their skill to a novel. De Kretser’s expertise in this form informs her work as a university professor. Batuman’s is expressed in New Yorker articles and essay compilations. But is this a formal innovation, as promised in de Kretser’s pledge to \u0026ldquo;tell the truth\u0026rdquo;?\nNot really. Both books are apparently heavily autobiographical, but the reader only recognizes them as memoir if they are exposed to outside information. In a hermetic reading, the claim to fiction/non-fiction hybridity is essentially bravado. The anecdotes may borrow the authentic ring of truth, but the books rely on the same narrative artifices that all novels employ. \u0026ldquo;Fiction is of course a form of lying,\u0026rdquo; wrote James Wood in his book The Broken Estate. \u0026ldquo;Fiction requests belief from us, but we can choose not to believe at any moment. \u0026hellip; Our belief is itself metaphorical—it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly belief.\u0026rdquo; Even with certainty that an undisclosed portion of a novel actually took place in the life of its author, fiction’s essential contract remains unchanged.\nThe Critic as Novelist The weightier claim to innovation is that of a novel that weaves academic literary analysis into its story. The extent to which Batuman attempts this is one of the greatest pleasures of her novels. But while the books teem with critical interpretations, her voice is one of sophomoric cogitation rather than genuine academic rigor. In one passage, Selin discusses Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the boy she is crushing on:\nHe invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them—like, it’s hell, it’s intolerable humiliation, it’s the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can’t get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired. … It’s like he does this shoddy, depressing thing, killing an old lady—and instead of shoddy and depressing, it’s supposed to be an earthshaking philosophical crisis.” Elif Batuman, The Idiot\nIn another, she reflects on a childhood memory from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust:\nThe episode itself, about baby Proust’s anguish on nights when his parents had dinner guests, was harrowing. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was pretty sure that I had felt the same despair when my parents went to dinner parties. Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work; what was, for you, a cause of desperation, was for them an occasion for dress-up and celebration. But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else? Elif Batuman, Either/Or\nThe goal of these passages is to illuminate characterization. Batuman is not attempting to get an A on a term paper.\nWhat makes de Kretser’s book thrilling is that her ideas about Virginia Woolf are part of the novel’s larger argument. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual framework and lived experience: theory and practice. Her examination of Woolf’s casual antisemitism despite her marriage to a Jewish man reveals that the feminist icon\u0026rsquo;s theoretical heroism does not always convert to practical morality. The narrator is not just idly speculating about Woolf’s shortcomings. She is incorporating her thoughts into a verdict on her own behavior. De Kretser also draws parallels between the narrator’s experience of sexual callousness and the horrors of colonialism, expressed in a homework-inspired passage about Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1986.\nAt times, de Kretser’s critical insights are entertainingly well developed. Forty pages from the book’s conclusion, she treats us to a delightfully sophisticated paper titled \u0026ldquo;Virginia Woolf’s Tea\u0026rdquo; that explores Woolf’s own attempt\u0026#9670;Virginia Woolf starts writing The Years, blending essays and fiction at formal innovation in The Years. We are told that Woolf intended that book to be a critical and narrative hybrid, but the project was abandoned in despair. De Kretser’s fictional student suggests the failure of The Years resulted directly from Woolf’s moral failings:\nI contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea pluckers. The former was made possible by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. I told my audience that Woolf had set out to find a fresh form in The Years, but had later abandoned the attempt. A fresh form represents a desire to see the world differently, but Woolf hadn’t managed to do so. The Years remained enclosed in the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Under The Story in The Years. Michelle de Kretser, Theory \u0026amp; Practice\nThe narrator’s criticism here is not just character work, as are Selin’s hot takes. De Kretser is introducing authentic textual insight, backed by historical research. The trouble is, in this most pivotal instance at least, that the critical text is not actually integrated. De Kretser narrates her paper rather than excerpting it. That was disappointing.\nThe climax of Either/Or ends up modeling a more seamless integration of the two modes of writing. That book starts with Selin’s confession that skill as an essayist has never translated to imagination. She is inept at inventing stories. But in the book’s conclusion, she turns a fascinating critique of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Gustave Flaubert\u0026rsquo;s Madame Bovary into compelling narrative:\nNear the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself. Elif Batuman, Either/Or\nBatuman doesn’t present this passage as criticism cum fiction. The literary analysis is fully employed as a storytelling device. The criticism catalyzes character growth. The Idiot and Either/Or are sometimes frustrating in their capacious drift through Selin’s undergraduate experience, but I have no notes on Batuman’s propulsive, criticism-fueled conclusion.\nNew Forms? Selin’s epiphany about The Portrait of a Lady turns into a manifesto for her own experience based fiction. She reads James’s preface to that book, which uses the image of a \u0026ldquo;wind-blown germ\u0026rdquo; to explain how ideas for stories drift into his life. She decides that she can turn this insight into a new form of fiction:\nNowhere in the preface did Henry James say why he hadn’t found his own life interesting enough to write about. I tried to remember what I knew about Henry James’s life. I was pretty sure I had read that he was gay. Probably being gay had been illegal, and he had been ashamed. So his problem, like Isabel’s, was that he had been born too soon. That was sad, but it didn’t really change anything. Like, for whatever reason, Henry James had had to do stuff like find a “wind-blown germ” and then forget how he had found it, so he wouldn’t feel like he was stealing. But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why. Elif Batuman, Either/Or\nThe reader of Either/Or understands that Selin’s new form is the book in their hands, just as audiences of The Tragic Fall of Rufus the Great understood that they were watching Rufus’s failed attempt at a dramatic masterpiece. This returns us to our initial inquiry: Has Batuman earned the claim to a new form? Has de Kretser?\nI don’t think either author has cleared that bar. Batuman’s use of James and Flaubert in her climactic revelation is riveting narrative with real analytical heft, but the voice is consistent with the narration throughout the two novels. Selin is becoming a more insightful critic, but her form of discussing literature remains that of a storyteller, not an academic. She has not actually changed her mode of writing.\nDe Kretser’s decision to present a summary of her paper rather than excerpts of it undermines her claim to hybrid prose. I would have preferred it if she had interwoven her critical voice with her narrative voice, similar to the way that A.S. Byatt weaves Victorian poetry into 20th-century narrative in Possession. It is not necessary for the essayistic content to be indistinguishable from the story, the way that Benjamín Labatut\u0026rsquo;s non-fiction melts invisibly into his fiction. But it seems to me a more original use of critical writing would be for the two forms to be rendered adjacently in their native idioms, not in a character’s voice. Having characters discuss literature is not a new form. Selin knows that; she\u0026rsquo;s read Proust.\nNeither author has created a novel that doesn’t read like a novel or reinvented a centuries-old art form. But the willingness of both authors to merge their own stories with literary insight and narrative imagination makes for three exceptional reading experiences. Their dramatic masterpieces may not be wholly original, but they do not turn out to be just another edition of Death of a Salesman.\nSadie Seroxcat, editor of Medium’s Counter Arts publication, generously selected this essay for publication in its Literature section starting Sunday August 21, 2026. She has my thanks.\n"},{"title":"Stacking \u0026ldquo;Killing Commendatore\u0026rdquo; Against An \u0026ldquo;Artist of the Floating World\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-08-ishikami-muraguro-showdown-note/","date":"August 8, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Stacking \"Killing Commendatore\" Against An \"Artist of the Floating World\" When I think about ranking Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore against Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, it hardly seems a fair fight.\nIshiguro’s novel has been a fundamental link in his Nobel Prize-winning chain for exactly four decades this April. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was made into a Ken Watanabe movie. It was the Japanese John the Baptist to the English Jesus Christ of The Remains of the Day, the book that made Ishiguro the most instantly recognizable Japanese British novelist of all time. Ono the Painter set the template for Stevens the Butler, from their ingratiating civility to their trust-canceling habit of disowning the account they have just reported. It has been compressed to perfection, hardly a word feels excessive or uninvolved in the book’s purposeful momentum.\nMurakami’s novel is so Not That, it almost seems the opposite. It has been on shelves for less than a decade, and it already feels dated in its Updikean bad boy sexual energy. The most coveted trophy it has acquired is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. (No, I’m not kidding.) Critics tend to regard it as a turgid, uneven late-career mediocrity that fails to live up to its promise. It is not John the Baptist to anything. Rather than feeling meticulously compressed, its 733 pages come across as inflated to the precipice of a needle pop.\nReading the book, however, I began to suspect that a lot of that is unfair. It was more inventive than I\u0026rsquo;d given it credit for. The 733 pages mostly fly by pleasantly if not obsessively. It isn\u0026rsquo;t the kind of prestige read that Floating World is, but it has ambition, charm, and thematic heft.\nStill, I tended to think of Killing Commendatore as disqualified from serious contention with Ishiguro’s mini-masterpiece based on two persistently nagging impressions:\nIt is a shameless retread of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Its word selection is unusually vapid even for Murakami. Shameless Retread Is it? Is it, though?\nYes, both Wind-up and Commendatore are about a Murakami Man who refuses to accept his wife’s demand for a divorce.\nYes, both books juxtapose Murakami Man’s divorce angst with World War II tragedy.\nYes, both books explore latent male anger.\nBut the core idea of Commendatore, the Art-through-Process theme described in the canonical essay, is completely absent from Wind-Up and represents authentic insight on Murakami’s part.\nMoreover, An Artist of the Floating World also deliberately revisits story elements from a prior work. I haven\u0026rsquo;t read A Pale View of Hills, but I understand that Ono and his story are a conscious reworking of its teacher subplot. Perhaps Killing Commendatore is less lazy retread than an attempt to return to a story he was still processing.\nVapid Word Choice Murakami has never been known for sparkling verse. But in Killing Commendatore, his penchant for inexpressive prose seems to bottom to an insipid new low. Take the following passages as an example:\n\u0026ldquo;Mariye’s aunt had a very tranquil, calm way of speaking. She had lovely features. Not the kind of beautiful woman that would turn heads, but neat, regular features. A natural, subdued smile graced her lips, like the pale moon at dawn.\u0026rdquo;\nThis narrator is supposed to be a portrait artist with a knack for capturing his subject\u0026rsquo;s authentic, singular soul using a probing eye for detail. But his description of Mariye\u0026rsquo;s aunt is not a Rembrandt; it is a Dick and Jane cartoon. Also, I wonder if anyone has ever written that closing simile before. \u0026ldquo;Pale moon at dawn\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip; Oh, wait, yes they have.\n\u0026ldquo;I enjoyed listening to the music of Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, and Beethoven. Not forgetting Mozart, of course. Their music was deep, amazing, and gorgeous.\u0026rdquo;\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t say! Was it also good, awesome, and cool?\nI wondered at first if Philip Gabriel was a weak new translator. After all, regular Murakami collaborator Jay Rubin could write the following translation from After Dark, so would he have been constitutionally capable of such bathetic language?\n\u0026ldquo;To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.\u0026rdquo;\nBut, no, Gabriel was the translator of my favorite Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, and he was responsible for this:\n“If you play Schubert’s sonatas, especially this one straight through, it’s not art. Like Schumann pointed out, it’s too long and too pastoral, and technically too simplistic. Play it through the way it is and it’s flat and tasteless, some dusty antique. Which is why every pianist who attempts it adds something of his own, something extra. Like this—hear how he articulates it there? Adding rubato. Adjusting the pace, modulation, whatever.”\nBut the strange thing is that Ishiguro, a native English speaker, has been saddled with the same diagnosis of \u0026ldquo;flat prose.\u0026rdquo; This is from James Wood in The New Yorker:\n\u0026ldquo;Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium—sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal. \u0026hellip; He does need the pressure of form, a narrative shape that forces his bland fictional representations to muster their significance. \u0026hellip; [In these forms,] blandness emerges as a traumatized truce, a colorless pact that holds the personal and historical present together at the cost of a sinful amnesia. \u0026hellip; “The Buried Giant” has far too much dialogue like this, more Monty Python than William Golding: “Your news overwhelms us, Sir Gawain. . . . But first tell us of this beast you speak of. What is its nature and does it threaten us even as we stand here?”\nI wondered if Ishiguro, who grew up listening to his parents speak Japanese as a first language, bore similarities to Murakami because of some distinctly Japanese cultural trait with which I was simply unfamiliar. I asked Dwight Egan Sora, a high school friend who makes a living translating Japanese to English (he is also an actor). This is what he said:\n\u0026ldquo;Having never read Murakami in Japanese, I can\u0026rsquo;t really comment on the accuracy of the translations. Interestingly, I never thought about the flatness of Ishiguro\u0026rsquo;s prose, but I always felt that there was an underlying Japanese sensibility to his stories and his character\u0026rsquo;s inner lives (Including the very-English Remains of the Day). A lot of Japanese art is focused on compression and brevity (such as in haiku), and the general tendency of those practicing those arts is to get even more compressed and spare over the years. There are a lot of factors behind this. The Buddhist-derived concept of “emptiness,” that negative space (whether emptiness in a painting or text) has its own significance and meaning equal to content. There’s also a fatalistic streak and sense of scarcity in the Japanese psyche (I always remind folks that despite being a major techno-economic power, it’s still a tiny nation of small islands with limited natural resources, little arable land, and located in a natural disaster zone prone to typhoons, earthquakes and tsunami) that emphasizes finding the most out of the least. I would say a lot of Japanese art and literature (both classic and modern) also often focuses on the banal and mundane in terms of subjects and observations, and sometimes opts for rather childish modes of expression. Exactly what this means is hard to say. However, there is a tendency in Japanese society to really force order, behavior and expectations upon children starting in elementary school, after a very carefree early childhood period. This rigidity and demand for seriousness pretty much continues through your entire adult working life. However, once you are entering your advanced years, you’re allowed to slip into rather childish behavior. Almost as if you are given a chance to reclaim opportunities to play denied earlier in life. I don’t know if any of that is helpful, but those are my notes.\u0026rdquo;\nDwight’s answer lent substance to a stab-in-the-dark question. His compression instinct rings true to my uninformed mind. I recognize that minimalist aesthetic from Japanese cuisine, with its tendency to value the innate flavor of the ingredients rather than shovel on seasoning, as Americans do. Compression is, of course, Ishiguro’s hallmark as a novelist, and Murakami directly discusses “negative space” as a concept in visual art in Killing Commendatore. Furthermore, the \u0026ldquo;childish behavior\u0026rdquo; diagnosis may explain Murakami’s banal choice of adjectives in his seventies, although I still find it mind boggling that his translator and editors would let him get away with \u0026ldquo;deep, amazing, and gorgeous.\u0026rdquo;\nAs for Ishiguro’s Japanese sensibility, I assumed the relentless politeness of his dialogue was a Japanese trait when I read Floating World, but it shows up in other settings, too. I always thought it odd that Stevens uses “Father” in place of pronouns when addressing his dad: “Father is tired tonight, I expect.” The daughter in Floating World does the same thing. \u0026ldquo;Japanese sensibility\u0026rdquo; may be the most logical explanation, unless using a parental title in place of pronouns is a British custom I don\u0026rsquo;t recognize.\nConclusion In the end, comparative literature is about identifying shared characteristics. It is not about ranking books. If you have to do that, yes, Ishiguro is the clear victor. But Murakami’s ambition and originality score him serious points. It is not a tie, but Haruki holds his own.\n"},{"title":"Ishiguro \u0026amp; Murakami Float Ideas on the River of Metaphor","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-07-floating-commendatore/","date":"August 7, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Ishiguro \u0026 Murakami Float Ideas on the River of Metaphor  “What most impresses me about [Kazuo Ishiguro] is how he changes his style with each work. That’s completely different from the way I work. I’m the type to gradually develop and evolve my style . . . But we are similar in that we both place a great importance on style.” Haruki Murakami in a 2018 interview for David Karashimas book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami\nAt first glance, Japanese author Haruki Murakami\u0026#9670;Haruki Murakami born ’s statement about Japanese British author Kazuo Ishiguro\u0026#9670;Nagasaki, where the Ishiguro family resides, hit with atomic bomb seems like spot-on insight about both of their generation’s most internationally recognized authors of Japanese descent.\nCertainly, Ishiguro reinvents himself with every outing, bounding from chronicler of post-war Japan (An Artist of the Floating World) to voice of the British servant class\u0026#9670;The Ishiguros emigrate to the United Kingdom (The Remains of the Day) to lyrical mimic of Arthurian legend (The Buried Giant) to cautionary tale-teller on the hazards of cloning (Never Let Me Go) to early adopter of AI-era angst (Klara and the Sun). But his style, which I’ll define as the formal expression of the author’s central themes, is actually more consistent than a surface inspection would imply. With the exception of 1995’s sprawling nightmare The Unconsoled, which The New Yorker’s James Wood blasted for having “invented its own category of badness,” Ishiguro is a master of compression, collapsing complex history and psychology into 250-page explosives.\nEven Murakami’s self-evaluation is an oversimplification. Unquestionably, Murakami has evolved in his narrative capacities from the playful semi-superficiality of his first English-language offering, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to the sophisticated fusion of magical realism, whimsy, and desolating portraiture that marks his signature works, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. But Murakami has also showed that his form can be adapted to suit a contrasting context, as with the realistic hippie memoir Norwegian Wood and the restrained jazzy impressionism of After Dark.\nKilling Commendatore finds Murakami coming as close as he ever has to a direct dialogue with Ishiguro’s work. Like An Artist of the Floating World, the novel contends with the atrocities Imperial Japan committed during the war. Both books depict painters confronted with the state’s demand that they subjugate art to politics. Because of that shared starting point, the two books provide a fascinating case study for comparison. The temptation is to evaluate Murakami on Ishiguro’s terms: What does he have to say about his generation’s relationship to their parents’ embrace of Fascist values? But it turns out that the more interesting question is how both authors hold up on Murakami’s terms, as laid out in Killing Commendatore: How does an artist arrive at an Idea, and what approach best realizes that Idea?\nIshiguro’s Inquiry:\nMaking a Better Go of Things To see how our city has been rebuilt, how things have recovered so rapidly over these years, fills me with genuine gladness. Our nation, it seems, whatever mistakes it may have made in the past, has now another chance to make a better go of things. One can only wish these young people well. Narrator Masuji Ono in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World\nIshiguro’s novel voices the rage felt by his own generation ( he was born in 1954\u0026#9670;Kazuo Ishiguro born in Nagasaki, Japan ) at his parents’ generation for cooperating with the expansionist Hirohito regime\u0026#9670;Emperor Hirohito decides to expand into Empire . The book is a cathedral where the tombstones of wartime regret resound with echoing whispers of grief. The protagonist, painter Masuji Ono, has lost his wife and son. Ono is no innocent victim, however. He let expansionist colleagues push him from meaningful art to polished propaganda. His daughter’s suitor, Jiro Miyake, channels righteous fury into polite intimations that his would-be father-in-law should simply commit suicide: “Sometimes I think there are many who should be giving their lives in apology who are too cowardly to face up to their responsibilities,” he remarks with pointed imprecision. “Some of them are no better than war criminals.”\nBy delegating the storytelling to the war criminal himself, Ishiguro points a silent finger of blame at the wartime generation, but this reads less as a withering indictment than as a sad statement of fact. He lets Ono mount his own defense and earns a conviction through Ono’s self-implication. In a key scene, Ono tries to teach his young grandson the right way to think about an Imperialist songwriter who killed himself after the war\u0026#9670;Emperor Hirohito surrenders to President Truman . He describes the decision as “brave and honourable” before immediately retracting the implied confession. “Your Oji never meant anything by saying he was like Mr Naguchi,” I said. “‘It was a sort of joke he was making, that’s all.”\nUltimately, generational guilt is not Ishiguro’s true subject; he is more concerned with exploring what guilt does to memory and identity. “I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there,” said Ishiguro in a 2000 interview. “In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened than in what actually happened.”\nTo that end, Floating World is full of narratorial prevarications like this: “Did Miyake really say all this to me that afternoon? Perhaps I am getting his words confused with the sort of thing Suichi [his son-in-law] will come out and say. This is quite possible.” Wood has called Ishiguro’s narrators “reliably unreliable.” The truth comes through our own interpretive lens and in moments of unintended honesty. This allows Ishiguro to be brutal in his ethical verdict and compassionate in his narrative sentencing. The quotation about “making a better go of things” in future generations ends the novel on a note of intergenerational grace.\nMurakami on Ishiguro’s Terms:\nHistorical Headfake As close as Killing Commendatore comes to relitigating the generational conflict of Floating World, Murakami sidesteps the question by acquitting his war-era artist of Ono-esque wrongdoing. Tomohiko Amada is this book’s Ono generationally speaking, but he takes the principled political stand that Ono can’t muster. From 1939 to 1947, we are told, Amada “stayed as far removed as possible from what we might call ‘artistic circles.’ He couldn’t stand that crowd anyway, and their ‘nationalist art’ glorifying the war effort made him like them even less.” Far from grappling with whether those nationalist artists should have killed themselves after the war, Murakami portrays a different sort of principled suicide. Amada’s brother slits his wrists to evade culpability when ordered to execute Chinese prisoners.\nMy cynical side wonders (get ready for a digression of Murakamian proportions) if Murakami made a hero of his Ono just to avoid implicating himself in a generational conflict of his own. Murakami’s literary star has been rising in America in recent years, but enthusiasm for his originality and captivating storytelling are increasingly tempered by post-Gen X objections to his constant indulgence in graphic het male sex and gender Othering. These objections have been standard for 30 years, yet Murakami STILL draws ire from younger readers for his sexual preoccupations.\nIn 2018’s Killing Commendatore, Murakami makes 13-year-old Miyake’s dissatisfaction with her breast size a jaw-droppingly oft-invoked running gag. For once, Murakami’s adult protagonist does not openly flirt with his tween admirer, but he does offer helpful insights about the size of his penis. Female Gen Z\u0026rsquo;ers like Fable’s Lys seldom review Murakami without expressing disgust with this aspect of his oeuvre. Lys “really enjoyed” Killing Commendatore but withholds a positive rating because of the Miyake boob gags: “I mean, to be expected really but come on man how many times do we have to tell you to STOP.” If Murakami has heard these cease-and-desist orders, he isn’t letting on. In Novelist as a Vocation, his 2021 writer’s guide, Murakami offers this stunningly oblivious anecdote:\nOnce when I was talking with a young woman reader, she asked me, “Mr. Murakami, how is it that though you’re a man in your sixties, you understand young women’s feelings so well?” (Naturally, there are lots of people who don’t share this opinion; I’m just giving this as the opinion one reader had.) Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation\nAs a man in my fifties, I have never shared Murakami’s apparent perception that women like Miyake and 1Q84’s Aomame spend copious time on bosom-based ennui. Perhaps he is too impressed by what surely must be outlier comments like the one he cites to worry about the disgust he invokes in young Americans. Still, I can’t help wondering: Does Murakami intuit that any attempt to censure his parents’ generation for their war-era shortcomings would result in generational censure of his aging-hippie Free Love value system?\nAn Artist of the Floating World is the meticulous historical analysis of a writer doubling as both prosecuting attorney and absolving confessor. Killing Commendatore is a gloppy lasagna piled high by an Iron Chef. Whatever the reason, Murakami, like Ishiguro, uses postwar trauma as a backdrop for an entirely different thematic exploration. His has nothing to do with guilty narrators. Rather than tell the story from Amada’s wartime perspective or his own generation’s postwar vantage, Murakami entrusts the book to another earnest young Murakami Man. Not familiar with that alliterative designation? Google it and you’ll find countless references without attribution to its originator. Nearly every Murakami novel is narrated by a generic tricenarian, modest, often divorced, LP-collecting, pasta-and-sushi-cooking male.\nThis one, a talented portrait artist curious about dabbling with other forms, doubts his own reliability at the outset: “`Something’s wrong with me,’ I thought as I stared at myself in the mirror. … Better not get near anyone.” This feeling is driven by guilt and grief over a surprising marital breakup and a sexual encounter that got uncomfortably rough. But after each of the book’s three supporting M’s—Miyake, neighbor Menshiki, and friend Masahiko—endows him with unwavering trust, this Murakami Man comes to see himself as a normal guy haunted by normal angry feelings.\nBecause the setup feels real, and because most men bear a capacity for latent violence, the trust does not feel cheap, and the hero even begins to seem less generic than most of his predecessors. But if Ishiguro explores World War II reverberations in order to explore narratorial unreliability, Murakami’s choice of a reliably reliable narrator is a hard pass at repeating Ishiguro’s approach. Murakami is signaling that his core inquiry lies elsewhere.\nMurakami’s Message:\nThe Idea Made Visible Haruki Murakami and his signature, from Society for Culture, Art and International Cooperation\nThe core idea of Killing Commendatore is that, rather than forming an Idea for a work of art and then meticulously perfecting it, the artist often begins creation in search of an Idea. In the novel, Murakami Man starts a portrait of Menshiki without knowing what he is trying to capture:\nMy sketches had accurately captured what was distinctive about his face, yet there was nothing about them beyond the sense that they were well-done drawings. They were all oddly shallow and superficial, devoid of depth. They were no different from caricatures drawn by some street artist. Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore\nOver time, the portraitist finds something in Menshiki that is worth painting. For Murakami, this usually means finding a metaphor. For instance, Amada’s finest work converts a scene from the Mozart opera Don Giovanni into scene from a forgotten period of Japanese history. This brings his Idea, the Mozartean creation Commendatore, to life in Amada’s house, just as he came to life from a statue in Mozart’s opera. This is a fascinating meta representation of the Murakami vision of the artist’s journey.\nI have long felt that Murakami’s work fossilizes his own early probing for a point. This doesn’t always work. In 1Q84, he found an interesting central juxtaposition (religious fundamentalism and domestic abuse) that served as an Idea, but he never but never settled on a metaphor that would give purpose to its dramatization. Instead, he blew up the novel’s dark side with a horrifically exculpatory plot twist (the rapist isn’t really a rapist; he’s forced to rape by jolly dwarves). But sometimes Murakami finds the perfect analogy. John Updike’s New Yorker review of Murakami’s high-water mark, Kafka on the Shore, explained how the author’s quest for meaning through metaphor in that novel thrillingly illuminated postwar reckoning:\nThis novel quotes Goethe as decreeing, “Everything’s a metaphor.” But a Western reader expects the metaphors, or symbolic realities, to be … organized by certain polarities, in a magnetic field shaped by a central supernatural authority. No such authority controls the spooky carnival of “Kafka on the Shore.” To quote Colonel Sanders once more: “Listen—God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan, God’s always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.” John Updike, “Subconscious Tunnels,” The New Yorker\nIn Killing Commendatore, Murakami’s central metaphor is equally illuminating: Commendatore’s transubstantiation symbolizes art’s power to create a tactile link between artist and subject. The metaphor is fragile, but it works best when Murakami goes all in, as in a climactic hero’s journey through a perilous underworld with its own River Styx that one character, a renegade figure incarnated from canvas, declares “is a metaphorical river, but the water is very real.”\nIshiguro on Murakami’s Terms:\nCompeting Metaphors By Martin Kraft - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.\nIshiguro’s fiction doesn’t swing through such polarities. He once told an interviewer that he “tries to avoid anything that is overtly melodramatic or plotty, that tries basically to remain within the realms of everyday experience.” Such a grounded methodology means whittling his central conceit into 206 tightly coiled pages, not expanding it, like Commendatore, into 733 pages of sloppy intellectual thrill-ride.\nInterestingly, though, Ishiguro, too, explores in his writing rather than writing a preformulated outline. He begins with a story, an Idea, and starts writing in search of a setting. He knows the events, but he is like a film director scouting for a time period and locale.\n“You can think of me like an early aviator before airplanes were properly invented. I’m building some sort of flying machine in my back garden. I just need it to fly. And you know how odd some of those early flying machines looked? Well my novels are a bit like that. I put them together out of anything I can think of according to my thinking to make the thing fly.” Kazuo Ishiguro, “I’ll Take as Long as I Need,” The Talks\nTheir methods may be similar, but their mediums are a world apart. An Artist of the Floating World is the meticulous historical analysis of a writer doubling as both prosecuting attorney and absolving confessor. Killing Commendatore is a gloppy lasagna piled high by an Iron Chef. In other words, it is a daredevil reach for greatness at tremendous risk of failure. Playwright Tony Kushner explains why lasagna is the perfect metaphor for ambitious writing in a classic essay:\nBaking lasagna has long been my own personal paradigm for writing a play. A good play I think should always feel as though it’s only barely been rescued from the brink of chaos, as though all the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A good play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been; just as each slice of lasagna should stand tall, while at the same time betray its entropic desire toward collapse, just as the lasagna should seem to want to dissolve into the eat and cheese stew, so you can marvel all the more a the culinary engineering magic that holds such entropy at bay, that keeps the unstackable firmly, but not too firmly, stacked. A good play, like a good lasagna should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity, and an overreach…. It is pretentious food. Tony Kushner, “On Pretentiousness”\nAt the risk of presenting one metaphor too many, it’s worth noting in conclusion that both writers were musical professionals before they started writing novels. Ishiguro was a singer/songwriter in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and he is still carefully compressing his themes into tight three-minute lyrical structures. Murakami was a jazz club owner, and he is still giving his characters a place to improvise wild discursive solos.\nFor both Ishiguro and Murakami, a writer does not need to construct a seven-mast schooner before dipping a toe in the river of metaphor. Once adrift on the consequential reality of its waves, these authors are capable of assembling the boat midstream, billowing sail by billowing sail. Postscript\nI have written an addendum to this essay called Stacking \u0026ldquo;Killing Commendatore\u0026rdquo; Against An \u0026ldquo;Artist of the Floating World\u0026rdquo;. It tackles probing questions such as:\nWhich of the two books is the superior work of literature?\nIs Killing Commendatore just a shameful retread of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle?\nIs An Artist of the Floating World just a shameless retread of A Pale View of Hills?\nWhy are both authors often criticized for their flat prose?\nAnd does translator Dwight Egan Sora consider flat prose a Japanese cultural characteristic? Also, please note that Sadie Seroxcat, editor of Medium’s Counter Arts publication, generously selected this essay for publication in its Literature section starting Thursday August 13, 2026. She has my thanks.\nAn Artist of the Floating World was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1986.\u0026quot;\n"},{"title":"The Poisonwood Ambassadors","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-27-poisonwood-ambassadors/","date":"July 27, 2026","tags":null,"text":"The Poisonwood Ambassadors “Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages simply convert you.”\n“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.” Henry James, The Ambassadors “ If [my father’s] decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.” Leah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible\nAs a kid, I was perpetually a diminutive apostle-in-training. Dad was a mainline protestant minister and mom was a graduate of the so-called \u0026ldquo;Harvard of the Evangelicals.\u0026rdquo; Consequently, many of my birthday and Christmas presents fell into one of two categories. There were James Dobson-esque devotional books jammed with advice on how to talk to unbelievers. And there were catchy Christian LPs that modeled Christlike humility and divinely sanctioned self-aggrandizement in the same unironic breath:\nPeople smile at me and ask me what it is\nThat makes them want to be just like I am\nSo I just point to you and tell them, yes it's true\nI'm no special one, I'm just one man\nKeith Green, “Because of You” Sometimes I would role play a witness opportunity in my head, but there was no one to witness to. I went to a suffocatingly small Lutheran grade school where belief in Jesus was as obligatory as German classes. By the time ninth grade unlocked that cage, I couldn’t wait to disappear into the secular anonymity of a 4,000-student high school. There, I finally started meeting kids who lacked the doctrinaire confidence of Martin Luther. My best friends were a Jew and a gay lapsed Catholic. The relief was palpable. Still, my training nagged at the back of my mind. Wasn’t I supposed to be finding a quiet moment to explain that Jesus was the reason they wanted to be just like me?\nEven then the notion of persuading others to adopt my most intimate beliefs was completely alien to me. I simply did not have that kind of confidence.\nFor much of American history, confidence has been this nation’s chief domestic export. That is the mutual subject of The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Written from bookend vantage points on the 20th century’s experiment with American Imperialism (1903 and 1998), the two novels are so different in style and focus that the comparison seemed superficial to me until I noticed that they tell essentially the same story.\nTrue, imperialism is the explicit subject of Kingsolver’s book and merely a hastily mentioned metaphor in James. Her novel is a historical epic covering the shifting power structure of Africa from colonial subservience to violent independence from the perspectives of five distinctly voiced first-person narrators. His is an intensely internalized navigation of individual choice told mostly through dinner party chitchat and obsessively reiterative third-person narration.\nBut each begins with Americans attempting to impose their confidently held values on older societies that already have fully formed ethical traditions. In both cases, the missionaries are converted by the natives, shattering the evangelical premise. In the end, however, Kingsolver’s heroines redeem epiphany for constructive change while James’s hero achieves the epiphany without actualizing its transformative potential.\nExporting Confidence Although The Ambassadors is a resolutely apolitical book, it is set at a moment\u0026#9670;Henry James publishes The Ambassadors when America’s cultural chauvinism was snowballing toward its first colonial occupations. The period is documented by Empire, the 1987 entry in Gore Vidal’s seven-volume “Narratives of American Empire” historical fiction series. At the outset of that book, President William McKinley is winning the Spanish American War and reluctantly weighing whether to adopt the loser’s Caribbean colonies. Always one to challenge America’s overweening self-image, Vidal casts Henry James himself as the nation’s sesquipedalian conscience. Told in one scene that the world will be worse off if America lets Russia or Germany take over Spain’s colonies, James replies with modest sagacity:\n“What then are WE given to, that is so immeasurably superior? … How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?” Henry James in Gore Vidal’s Empire: A Novel\nVidal’s use of James is not tangential to The Ambassadors. Rather, it illuminates the unspoken historical backdrop of its diplomatic mission.\nWhat James explores through metaphor, Kingsolver dramatizes explicitly. The Poisonwood Bible started life as a memoir, with the author looking back on a family trip\u0026#9670;8-year-old Barbara Kingsolver travels to Africa to Africa. Kingsolver’s father was a doctor, and his mission was medical rather than religious. While living in Africa, the youthful Kingsolver wrote a striking entry in her diary:\n“Even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard-pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That\u0026rsquo;s how it works.”\nBarbara Kingsolver, “Writing the D.A.B.,” a postscript to The Poisonwood Bible\nThe CIA plot\u0026#9670;President Eisenhower authorizes Lumumba assassination to poison duly elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though eventually abandoned, is settled history to the extent that it is documented online by the State Department. Somewhat surprisingly, the incident has never tainted Eisenhower’s positive historical reputation. Eisenhower’s Democratic successor John F. Kennedy encountered political turbulence for the Bay of Pigs not so much because the president had contemplated assassinating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but because the attempt was sloppy. Many Americans shrugged; that’s what heads of state did at wartime, and this was during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s decidedly undemocratic efforts to promote global democracy opened a new interventionist era in American Imperialism, a label that was applied with ever less frequency.\nE.M. Forster argued that, in \u0026ldquo;The Ambassadors,\u0026rdquo; “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk. By contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. That promotional mission is the setup of Kingsolver’s novel. She assigns that mission to Nathan Price, an abusively dogmatic Southern Baptist minister who relocates his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to spread Jesus’s love to natives by butchering their native tongue and belittling their traditions. Price is more than a religious emissary, however. Saving the savages from darkness means exposing them to American religious, political, and cultural superiority, for that is Price’s path from primitive confusion to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.\nThe mission in The Ambassadors is narrower, but no less founded on cultural hubris. The offstage villain of The Ambassadors is the puritanical industrialist Mrs. Newsome, who sends Lambert Strether to Paris to preach good old fashioned American judgmentalism to her expat son Chad in the hope that he will take over the family business. Chad’s offense is his rapid assimilation to Old World values. He has been cavorting with an older French woman, and it is bad for business. James never identifies Mrs. Newsome’s exported commodity (American confidence?), but the company’s real estate is described as “a little industrial colony.”\n“Savage” Conversions Pair that colonial language with the quotation that opened this essay, about the French tendency to convert American missionaries to their permissive value system, and you have the controlling metaphor of The Ambassadors. The more Strether sees of Old World life, the more he embraces it.\nThe novel supports Vidal’s portrayal of James, who moved to Europe early in adulthood, as openly cynical about his birth country’s virtues. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fictionalized biography of James (The Master), argues in his introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of The Ambassadors that James wrote the book in part to distance himself from the imperious boosterism of its American characters.\nThe idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction. Colm Tóibín, introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors\nSimilarly, the Price women soon learn the cost of their cultural chauvinism. The Price women share narrator duties, but the book’s moral heroine is middle daughter Leah Price, who starts as her racist father’s biggest fan but ends up marrying an African.\nLeah declares familial independence after Rev. Price’s native congregation casts literal votes to reject Jesus’s authority in their community. “White men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” argues the village chief. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.” Price throws a temper tantrum, citing separation of church and state to invalidate the election in the same breath that he invokes divine authority. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”\nBut though most of the Price women join Leah in her rebellion, Kingsolver provides one notable holdout. If Mrs. Newsome is the calculating presence of capitalism in James’s book, Kingsolver’s Rachel Price, the minister’s eldest daughter, represents the bourgeois consumer who swallows her pitch like Mikey does Life cereal. (“Mikey will like it!”)\nDroll but politically and intellectually apathetic, Rachel, who thinks Karl Marx heads the Kremlin, spends the early chapters wringing laughs from memorized American TV commercials. By the end, she sells out body and soul for creature comforts. She becomes the mistress of a murderous ambassador determined to profit from classified knowledge of Eisenhower’s Lumumba plot. When the family moves from Africa to Atlanta, one of the Price girls describes American life as “dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.”\nDictating Form The lexicology of each novel reflects its thematic takes on American certainty. Kingsolver’s deftly constructed, melodious prose reflects her confident rejection of American confidence. Each of her five narrators has her own distinct syntactic rhythm, and each seems as accomplished a writer as Kingsolver herself. The careful craft of the prose expresses the author’s thematic and political clarity.\nTake this passage, about a flood that disrupts the family garden, narrated by Nathan’s verbally proficient elective mute daughter Adah:\nOur Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire. Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. … Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds. Adah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible\nIf Nathan is “revising the earth,” changing the story to fit his agenda, Adah is already coming to terms with his belligerent good intentions. She rejects Nathan’s certainty but is unwilling to replace it with a hubristic narrative of her own.\nWhereas Kingsolver’s craftsmanship shows that she knows what she believes, James’s proliferating prose embodies his constant caveats. He can’t write a clause without reconsidering it in the clause that follows. In Empire, Vidal lampoons James’s famously snaking, cannibalistic sentences:\n“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; … “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”\n“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.\nGore Vidal, Empire: A Novel Tóibín’s introduction to The Ambassadors argues that it is no coincidence that James’s sentence structure is at its most baroque in this late novel. Although partially a result of the author’s method—he verbally dictated his meandering prose to a secretary—the internal interrogations reflect his predilection for moral ambivalence at a time of American confidence:\nIn [James’s] own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply. Colm Tóibín, introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors\nAnother way that the two authors’ form is driven by their content is the arena of storytelling. The novelist E.M. Forster (Howards End) was less than charmed by James’s deferral of narrative excitement to thematic exploration. He argued that, in The Ambassadors, “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk.\nBy contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. Her story includes floods, covert intelligence on a global scale, and free-roaming lions. Sometimes, the plotting is so eventful as to strain the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, as when not one but two Price daughters are privy to classified information about Eisenhower’s assassination plan. The book’s histrionic emotional climax is the death of Ruth May, the youngest daughter. The emotional weight of her fatal snakebite is undercut by her near proximity to death’s door over numerous preceding chapters, but Kingsolver’s elegiac prose drives home the awful price of Nathan’s original sin. The family should never have come to the Congo.\n“But you are here,” Leah’s African groom-to-be had allowed in a prior chapter, “So yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”\nMistakes Become the Story In his preface to the novel, James declares The Ambassadors “the best, ‘all round,’ of all my productions” on the grounds that it is the purest expression of its thematic concept. That theme, he says, is expressed when his middle-aged hero rejects caviling puritanism in favor of passionate living: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”\nForster was frustrated by the microscopic scale of this conceit. He claimed James’s characters are “incapable of fun, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income.” If Strether and Gostry had a flesh-and-blood humanity to equal “Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon,” Forster says, James’s book would “burn to ashes” because they would substitute endless cogitation with action.\nColm Tóibín’s novel The Master offers an alternative take. Tóibín’s Henry James is paralyzed by his sensual feelings for men. He spends a night\u0026#9670;Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes sleep over in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s bed but remains chaste. He follows Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trial\u0026#9670;Oscar Wilde convicted of sodomy in strategic silence. He pines after painter Pavel Zhukovksy\u0026#9670;Henry James meets Pavel Zhukovsky . In other words, he steadfastly declines to “Live!”\nWhether or not James’s sexuality sheds any light on Strether’s narrative arc, the Master ultimately declines to give him a happy ending. In the climactic scene, Strether refuses to pursue a romance with the woman he loves because to do so would be to profit from his ambassadorial project. He decides it is better to be right than to live.\n“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”\n“Oh yes—I know.”\n“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”\n“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”\n“To be right?”\nShe had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her. “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.” … Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”\nHenry James, The Ambassadors The short clipped sentences, after 400 pages of meandering discourse, are striking. So is James’s evident admiration for his hero’s principled refusal. But isn’t Strether repeating the very mistake he lamented so fervently in the passage James identified as the book’s core? At the precipice of manifest destiny’s great expansion, Strether paces a tragically self-imposed cage. This feels like a retreat. His choice is principled, but wrong. Confidence is missteering Strether one last time.\nWith the historical consequences of confident zeal laid out behind\u0026#9670;Barbara Kingsolver publishes The Poisonwood Bible her, Kingsolver can be more generous with her characters’ imperialist “mistakes.” In the penultimate chapter, Adah Price remembers her father’s ministerial declaration that “Tata Jesus is bängala!” The Reverend’s intended meaning is “Jesus is precious,” but his mispronunciation translates to “Jesus is poisonwood.” Adah concludes: “The mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”\nThe pastor dies in isolation, but the women in his life build familial community around Leah’s burgeoning Black family. Their scars are real, but they will live.\nThe Bleached Bones of a Christian America’s plot has experienced an unexpected twist in recent years.\nThe 44th American president was Jamesian in his capacity for nuanced self-appraisal. Barack Obama was mocked by his opponents for turning foreign visits into “apology tours” that weighed sympathy for American Exceptionalism against the nation’s repeated moral failures. Obama was temperamentally akin to Lambert Strether: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”\nWith Donald Trump, American confidence is back. The 47th American president openly threatens to tear open the sutures that were applied during the era covered by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. The nation’s chief executive officer, a self-declared “genius,” asserts his nation’s claim on some sovereign nations while enacting Eisenhowerian regime change in others. Strether has been succeeded by Nathan Price.\nThroughout high school, I lacked both the confident Faith of my Fathers and the confident doubt of my friends. I told myself that it had been the size of my high school and not its cultural diversity that had made such a positive difference in my life. When the time came to choose a post-collegiate path, I opted for a school as densely populated as my secondary institution and almost as theologically small as my Lutheran grade school. By orientation\u0026#9670;I start college , I had outgrown my own decision. Dorm devotion culture—with some of my Lutheran school classmates—confirmed that sinking feeling. It took months to find friends who shared my distrust of “Dogs and Devos” (hot dog-fueled Bible study before bed). Sometimes a lesson is so important it bears repetition before we finally learn to live.\nThe Poisonwood Bible was a 1999 Pulitzer finalist.\u0026quot;\n"},{"title":"Singing Brahms His Own Lullaby","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-21-brahms/","date":"July 21, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Singing Brahms His Own Lullaby If you ask my nonagenarian father what he knows about Johannes Brahms, he can name the lullaby and the three B’s (“Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”) and nothing else. Probe further and an indistinct association emerges between the fourth grade and the title “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” although Dad seems a bit surprised when I point out that the title belongs to the lullaby guy. And yet, if you flip through my parents’ old LPs, you will encounter numerous Brahms recordings, including a box set of the complete orchestral works that no one knew we had.\nI could easily ascribe this to old age, but that doesn’t help me explain my own inability to encode neural connections pertaining to Brahms. I find his music harder to identify and retain than any other classical composer. My ear is untrained, and my youth was devoted to weird pop music jumblings—Russ Taff, Richard Thompson, and Radiohead—but I can hold my own in a game of Name That Composer if the composer is Mozart, Chopin, Sibelius, or Telemann. Not so Brahms. His style never announced itself vigorously enough to grasp my attention, and while I might stay pleasantly adrift in its sonority, any attempt to focus on craft always dissipated with the first available distraction.\nSo why did I buy Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography? Why did I devote 80 days of my crowded reading life to a book about a composer whose music I neither knew nor enjoyed? Why wasn’t I deterred from my commitment to read it when the publisher’s apparent calculation that an audiobook wouldn’t return their investment consigned the book to weekends-only spurts? Why did I repeatedly decline to skim or scan or chunk or DNF* The Brahms Lullaby, as my brother pointedly nicknamed it the thousandth time he saw the 1.55-pound paperback tumble from my slumbering hands?\nYeah, it\u0026rsquo;s got girth.|Provided by the author\n* DNF = Did Not Finish\nApril 6 to May 1\nPromise Made, Order Placed I keep correcting my brother’s perception that the only reason I kept reading the 636-page compendium was to honor a pledge to a Reddit user who was thinking through one of Swafford’s most intriguing contentions:\nThe mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.\nThe Redditor invited fellow lit fans to evaluate that claim, offering a remarkable one of his own in the process: “I find Brahms and Bach endlessly interesting, engaging, and delightful, and Wagner and Bruckner bore me to tears.” I stared at those words for a beat, my brow furrowed in confounded self-implication.\nBrahms? Endlessly delightful? What was I missing?\nEven after I’d spun those family recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, even after I’d clocked it as the piece that clinched Brahms’s reputation atop the Romantic hierarchy virtually overnight, even after I’d read Swafford’s page xxi\u0026#9670;Teenaged Jan Swafford falls in love with Brahms First Symphony account of a high school First Symphony performance that permanently transformed him from an aspiring football player into one of classical music’s foremost chroniclers, even then, I still couldn’t pick the climactic fourth movement out of a police lineup.\nOn Reddit, I pled guilty to Swafford’s indictment but fronted on Brahms: “I enjoy both the Brahms and Wagner ends of the spectrum, but my ear is untrained, and my mind too wanders through the sonority.” When my interlocutor replied with a chipper, less-than-overwhelming endorsement (“I just did a bunch of complaining about the epilogue to the book above, but I do really recommend it in general!”), I unthinkingly jotted the fateful pledge: “I’m looking the Swafford up on ThriftBooks!”\nMy brother was wrong, of course: yes, I’d promised to check out the biography, but I’m not so scrupulous about keeping internet promises that I’d sacrifice twelve consecutive reading weekends just to keep one. I considered it because I needed to earn another freebie from ThriftBooks’ diabolical rewards program. I ordered it because Swafford came highly recommended as a propulsive music biographer and because his Brahms is a fraction of the length of his Mozart and Beethoven. I cracked it open to get a stronger grasp of Brahms’s place in the larger context of a fascinating era in music history.\nIf I’m honest, I read it as a frustrated inward dare. If I could read 636 pages on a composer who steadfastly refused to stick in my head and come out the other end just as oblivious to his delights, then I’d have absolute, inarguable confirmation that there was something seriously wrong with me.\nMay 2 to June 6\nPages i to 74\n1833 to 1853\nBrahms Ohne Bart or The Brahms Lullaby? Swafford’s introduction strengthened my resolve to go through with the dubious project. It bubbled with intellectual intrigue. He describes the challenge of researching a recalcitrant subject who deliberately burned his papers to confound would-be biographers. He promises a lively translation of the primary materials that employs anachronistic use of idioms and contractions. He sets up the essential tension in Brahms’s music between respect for the structured formalism of Classical forerunners like Mozart and Haydn and affinity for the emotive Sturm und Drang of Beethoven. He pits traditionalists like Brahms, his mentor Robert Schumann, and his mentee Antonin Dvořák against the envelope-pushing experimentalism of “New Germans” like Johannes’s reviled rival Franz Liszt and the divisive, puts-the-cult-in-culture godhead Richard Wagner. He promises to uncover the authentic soul Brahms hid behind his famously sprouting whiskers, providing his book an alternative title that produced a flattered chuckle from this lapsed German student: Brahms Ohne Bart. “Brahms Without the Beard.”\nBut having roped me in with a scintillating sales pitch, Swafford’s opening chapters failed to render a captivating portrait of the youthful Brahms. When later chapters referenced the childhood Johannes as “Kreisler,” Brahms’s nickname for his immature self, I didn’t have a clear picture of what that term connoted. Subsequent told-not-shown Swaffordian depictions of Kreisler as strident and irritable made me want to flip back to earlier pages. Maybe Brahms had burned all the evidence of his early character, or maybe I’d nodded off too often, but I felt blindsided: when did you show me that kid?\nFor the most part, Swafford relates the bildungsroman years like a diarist more interested in jogging his own memory about events than in describing or wrestling with his emotional life. I plodded through these pages, frequently procrastinating with more entertaining diversions like Alexander Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin, James Wood’s The Broken Estate, and\u0026hellip; Wordle. Spotify’s New Order Hits \u0026amp; Classics. Studying for the office’s state-mandated sexual harassment training.\nBrahms Ohne Bart was a cute moniker, but my brother’s seemed more apt.\nJune 6 to July 17\nPages 74 to 270\n1853 to 1862\nBizarre Love Triangle The moment Robert and Clara Schumann make their entrance\u0026#9670;Brahms meets Robert and Clara Schumann , Swafford’s narrative suddenly acquires a pull as inescapable as that of the Sun upon the planets. Around this time, I see a TikTok video in which musicologist Sarah Fritz asks, “Can we all just agree that the most interesting thing about Brahms is Clara Schumann?”\n@sarahfritzwritr Follow for ALL Clara Schumann content! #musicianlife #schumann #brahms #classicalmusic ♬ original sound - Sarah Fritz To me, her wry observation has the weight of unvarnished truth. It’s such a wrenchingly bizarre love triangle that I can’t help relaying it in bald, unanalyzed plot summary.\nThe 20-year-old Brahms plays his “Hungarian Dances” on the Schumann family piano, and Robert immediately wants to found a fan club. He takes to the press to declare that Brahms is music’s “ John the Baptist\u0026#9670;Robert Schumann declares Brahms John the Baptist in a music journal ”—or maybe Schumann is John the Baptist and Brahms is Christ, it’s not entirely clear. It also reads as possibly sexually fueled overpraise to those who’ve heard Robert make the same claim about a parade of promising nobodies. Wagner and his allies laugh it up, ironically dubbing Brahms “heiligen Johannes (Saint John).\u0026quot;\nSchumann’s thin tether to reality snaps and he plummets into the Rhine\u0026#9670;Robert Schumann attempts suicide by jumping into the Rhine River . Brahms becomes caretaker to Clara, a talented musician in her own right. Usually too cool for school, Brahms falls so hard he can’t stop declaring hopeless adulation\u0026#9670;Brahms declares his love for Clara in a letter for the spouse of his ailing benefactor, who is enduring agonizing hallucinations in a nearby hospital.\nOnce, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips. In early June\u0026#9670;I see a Royal Opera concert with Sting as Robert Schumann , my family watched a DVD of a Covent Garden concert that featured Sting reading Schumann\u0026rsquo;s letters to Clara. That concert ends with Schumann\u0026rsquo;s death in the psychiatric hospital, officially of pneumonia\u0026#9670;Robert Schumann dies of pneumonia in a psychiatric hospital , and suggests that Clara spent the rest of her life perpetually pushing the ardent Brahms away because she was worn out emotionally and resolvedly devoted to Robert.\nI saw that and my momentum with Swafford slackened. If that was how the story resolved itself, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t sure I wanted to spend another 500 pages on a book of which that was the most interesting component.\nSwafford, his prose expanding in ambition to meet the unfolding drama, ends up contradicting the Sting depiction. Clara eventually wants to marry Brahms, but his feet turn suddenly frigid\u0026#9670;Vacationing in Switzerland, Brahms and Clara decide not to marry . Like most men of his era, Brahms is an amorously doting misogynist. How could he be artistically productive in the same house as a talented woman? He starts sending her distanced remonstrations by post. She has moments of righteous indignation but more often expresses besotted devotion to both his compositions and his penetrating eyes.\nBrahms’s ongoing feelings for her as the decades pass are a hot mess of densely knotted contradictions. Clara should be a better mother; he would kill to have a son like Felix\u0026#9670;Brahms chastises Clara for undervaluing her son . Oh, but by the way he’s openly infatuated with her 16-year-old daughter\u0026#9670;Brahms falls in love with Clara\u0026#39;s 16-year-old daughter Julie and won’t let it go until Julie marries\u0026#9670;Julie Schumann is married. Brahms is jealous. years later. At the same time, Clara’s tenacious devotion to Brahms’s art fuels his finest work. When he\u0026rsquo;s not lecturing her about being too effusive:\n\u0026ldquo;Art is a republic. … Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.\u0026rdquo; Johannes Brahms to Clara Schumann in Jan Swafford\u0026rsquo;s Johannes Brahms: A Biography\nBrahms’s admonition\u0026#9670;Brahms tells Clara \u0026#39;art is a republic.\u0026#39; that Clara shouldn\u0026rsquo;t try too hard to sway the \u0026ldquo;voters\u0026rdquo; in favor of his sonatas has implications beyond their emotional tug-of-war. Emerging alongside his earnest, unintended torture of his faithful best friend is a sense of Brahms as an equal opportunity showman capable of inhabiting a variety of musical forms. Wagner, a lifelong critic of Brahms, grudgingly acknowledges this quality after their sole meeting: “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”\n\u0026ldquo;Art is a republic.\u0026rdquo; Whereas Wagner was dogmatic about his own artistic supremacy, Brahms was an irascible chameleon goading the public: “Who do you want me to be next?”\n[Brahms] spent a fair amount of his time writing commercial dances and a patriotic extravaganza, and piles of the sorts of vocal duets, quartets, and such that were staples of social music-making, Hausmusik, in the nineteenth century. None of this is hackwork, but it was largely written to move off the shelves, and did. Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography\nI ask myself: Does this shapeshifting quality explain my inability to identify his music?\nBut just as I start to feel vindicated, I notice an objectively appreciable upgrade in the quality of his compositions. Brahms goes from “The Hungarian Dances,” lively and toe-tappable but simple, to the First Piano Concerto, with a thunderous Beethovenian opening inspired by Robert Schumann’s suicidal plunge into the Rhine and a soft Chopin-esque declaration of undying love for Schumann\u0026rsquo;s wife.\nI find it so compelling, I shell out $25 to buy a used copy of the concerto in the edition most respected by audiophiles.\nJuly 18 to July 19\nPages 270 to 636\n1862 to 1897\nFalling for Brahms Like Brahms for Clara If Brahms is a chameleon, he is a progressively more proficient one, and Swafford’s lively writing is matching him note for note. Brahms may have tried to destroy the trail left to biographers, but he clearly overlooked some bangers. Swafford’s pages are increasingly dense with quotations from Brahms that reveal his abrasive humblebrag charm. “The melodies fly so thick here that you have to be careful not to step on one,” he says of his own marries\u0026#9670;Brahms First Symphony debuts, securing his reputation for good . When told that its last movement bears a strong resemblance to Beethoven\u0026rsquo;s Ninth, Brahms snaps, “Any jackass can see that!”\nMeanwhile, my enjoyment of the book expands in ironic lockstep with my impatience with it. In mid-July, I make a determined resolution that this will be my last weekend babysitting Brahms. It’s not even a plausible conviction; I’m only halfway through Swafford’s tome, and I squander Saturday on personal business. Sunday is here, and there are 304 pages left.\nSpeaking of bangers, Brahms is now churning out the masterpieces that launched him into triune immortality with Bach and Beethoven. Brahms’s fevered output seems motivated by his oft-stated fear that he will end up the Romantic era’s enduringly obscure equivalent of Luigi Cherubini (Medea). There is Ein deutsches Requiem\u0026#9670;The six movement version of Brahms\u0026#39;s A German Requiem debuts , as secular a requiem as the era could offer, one that the agnostic Brahms defended by saying he not only intentionally left Christ’s name out of it but wanted to replace the word “German” in “A German Requiem” with “human.” There is the Violin Concerto, of which one violinist groused, “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” There is the inventive classical riffing of “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56.” There are the four resplendent symphonies.\nThese compositions put Brahms in Wagner’s orbit; the two are now the undisputed godheads of the Romantic world. Wagner is going to win, his emotive defiance of structural rules pushing classical music as a whole inexorably toward Modernism. Not even Brahms and Clara can deny the appeal of Wagner’s operas. She grudgingly admits that Lohengrin “is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music.” He admires The Ring Cycle while still condemning Tristan und Isolde (“If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for the rest of the day”). But even as he rises to Wagner’s strata, Brahms is not bold enough to challenge Bayreuth’s maestro on his own playing field. He gives up his lifelong ambition to write his own Fidelio (Beethoven’s sole opera). Once upon a time, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev\u0026#9670;Brahms and Turgenev vacation in Baden-Baden . Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips.\nThe complex friendship of Brahms and Clara continues to provide Swafford’s emotional core, but as 5am Sunday turns into 8am Sunday, the music itself becomes the surprising star of the second half. I listen to it as I read Swafford’s mellifluous and cerebral analysis of the latter works. My untrained eyes race with surprising comprehension past pasted chunks of sheet music and fluent technical explications (“The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major”), nestling into the writerly effusions that finally shed light on beautiful melodies that were previously unattainable to me:\nThe piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate. … It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. \u0026hellip; This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler. Fate! Fate!\nAs the pages fly by, my resolve strengthens to avoid spending another 80 days on the second half of the book. That would take me to Halloween weekend, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performing Ein deutsches Requiem, individual tickets not yet on sale. But if my determination keeps me glued to my chair into the afternoon, what keeps my blurry eyes affixed to the pages is Swafford\u0026rsquo;s fluid prose, and the sudden legibility of Brahms\u0026rsquo;s musical themes. I don’t claim to have fallen for Brahms like Brahms for Clara. The tally of skipped bars was higher than the tally of skimmed paragraphs. But when 1pm arrives, I breathe a sigh of relief. 304 pages turned today. I have finally sung Brahms his own lullaby.\nJuly 20\nAftermath The more I listen to Brahms, the more legible his compositions are. My brain’s former unwillingness to recognize patterns amid his impassioned drama and eminently accessible melodies, particularly in the gloriously fertile period between ages 35 and 52\u0026#9670;Brahms Fourth Symphony debuts , has melted entirely away. But in retrospect, it’s not entirely mysterious. I think it had to do with his impeccable craftsmanship. In 1876, Brahms wrote about the importance of meticulous perfectionism: “Keep going back to it and working it over and over again, until … there is not a note too many or too little, not a bar you could improve on,” he told a conductor. “Whether it’s beautiful too, is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be.” I think that prioritization of gloss over warmth caused me to tune him out at times while he hopped from optimized form to optimized form.\nA couple weeks after finishing Swafford, I decided to whether to delay a lakeside vacation in order to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play an outdoor rendition of Brahms’s First Symphony fused with excerpts from Radiohead’s landmark alternative rock album OK Computer, an album I rank among the best of all time. At the timpani-rolling crescendo Wagner smirkingly called “Beethoven’s Tenth,” I hear the familiar words of “Electioneering.” They conjure the shapeshifting Brahms, who finally secured my vote in his republic of art.\nI will stop, I will stop at nothin’\nSay the right things when electioneering\nI trust I can rely on your vote\n"},{"title":"Frumsplaining to George Eliot","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-12-romola/","date":"July 12, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Frumsplaining to George Eliot David Frum is not an expert in English Literature, but like Septimus Carr, he plays one on his blog. A longtime Atlantic contributor, former George W. Bush speechwriter, and, to his everlasting credit, a fierce interrogator of his own party and of the Trump administration, Frum writes culturally fluent, rational content that is never more entertaining than when he applies his unique perspective to classic novels. Consider me a fan.\nNevertheless, my hackles made a rapid, indignant ascent when I came across an undated account of Frum’s attempt to read Romola, George Eliot’s 1862\u0026#9670;Romola is published, originally in serial editions historical fiction novel about 1492 Florence. After claiming inaccurately that “almost nobody” likes the book, Frum offers this blithe thesis:\nI got a little more than half way through the book before I finally had to quit, beaten into submission to the majority view: \u0026ldquo;Romola\u0026rdquo; is boring and silly — Eliot’s one grand debacle as a writer. David Frum, davidfrum.com\nHe DNF’d it? And then panned it in print?\nWhat follows is a not-entirely-unaltered reproduction of a message I pasted into the Contact form of Frum’s website on February 9, 2026. That Frum never responded to my message is unsurprising considering his perpetually crowded dance card. After all, Frum has serious White House credentials, secured in an era when such plaudits were not predicated on professional inadequacy, contempt for the office’s very purpose, and generally demonstrable rank incompetence. Frum is also a sought-after political commentator in outlets as ideologically disparate as The National Review, MS Now, The Times of Israel, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.\nAlso, he’s an abject candy-ass too craven to defend his wholly indefensible literary views.\nI’m just kidding, of course.\nI don’t actually know what the ideological perspective of Süddeutsche Zeitung is.\nOPEN LETTER TO DAVID FRUM Hi, David.\nI greatly enjoyed your now-aging post about George Eliot’s delightful prototypical campaign drama and topsy-turvy melodrama Felix Holt, The Radical a couple of years ago, around the time I read the book myself.\nSo fun to get a contemporary political commentator\u0026rsquo;s analysis of a fairly obscure Eliot work. I agree with your assessment that Felix is a satisfying early effort at a Victorian political novel. Certainly, Eliot deserves credit for implicitly asking whether it was \u0026ldquo;radical\u0026rdquo; to make \u0026ldquo;rotten boroughs\u0026rdquo; (overrepresented voting districts) a little less rotten, or to call out the soft corruption of buying votes with beer. I would argue that any conversation about Victorian novelists who \u0026ldquo;show the system in action\u0026rdquo; should cite Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote more than a dozen politically sophisticated novels from an insider\u0026rsquo;s perspective laced with withering wit and compassionate conservatism. (Your old boss might approve.) But that\u0026rsquo;s a quibble. Your appreciation of Felix’s institutionally isolated matriarch Mrs. Transome was spot-on. I only wish you\u0026rsquo;d elaborated on your oblique reference to \u0026ldquo;the problems of feminism.\u0026rdquo;\nAll that said, you blew a wide-open layup in your evaluation of Romola. I get your frustration with the early chapters, in which the book’s semi-monastic titular heroine does echo Felix’s Esther Lyon in succumbing to a love you so aptly framed as \u0026ldquo;dangerously self-abnegating.\u0026rdquo; But you fail to acknowledge Romola’s eventual cleareyed emergence on the other side of that love and her efforts to take up arms against it. Tsk tsk. Someone didn’t complete the assignment.\nYour declaration that “almost nobody has a good word to say for Romola” is either ignorant or insulting. That “almost” is a black hole of a caveat; it swallows 3,000+ Goodreads users who gave the book a 4 or 5 star rating, this one included. It also envelops no less an authority than Henry James, who called it Eliot’s “most important” work (“the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped”) in an 1866-10\u0026#9670;Henry James declares Romola the most important Eliot novel. edition of Atlantic Monthly—yes, David, the publication that punches your meal ticket. James praised Romola’s “elevated morality” and suggested that its artistic merit was commensurate with its success “as a moral argument.” To be fair, it was a mixed review, but James later\u0026#9670;Henry James says Romola and Middlemarch were both Rare Masterpieces. offered similarly bracketed praise for Middlemarch (”[it] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole”), which was recently declared the single greatest offering in the history of the novel by The Guardian. In that piece, James called both books \u0026ldquo;rare masterpieces.\u0026rdquo;\nYou argue that Romola reads “like a worshipful guidebook.” Okay, so early on Eliot crams her exhaustive historical research into every sentence like Hermione Granger writing an admissions essay for the House of Medici. Okay, so most of her chatty Florentine characters speak a homogenous Renaissance dialect that she likely invented for this project. Okay, so the opening chapters tend to slog along like a Medicean galley through an oil spill in the Arno.\nForget all that. Before long, Eliot’s narrative pot starts boiling. She deftly begins to unfurl one of the most original love triangles in English literature. Eventually, she boldly assigns a leading role to a controversial historical figure, the fascinating friar-cum-politician Girolamo Savonarola. By the time she pits the merits and hazards of Christlike devotion and servitude against the cumulative wisdom of classical antiquity, this supposedly “boring and silly” three-volume adventure holds its own against the bulk of the Victorian canon.\nEliot’s literary calling card is her fine-tuned psychological characterizations, and `Romola has them in spades. That Romola’s two-timing husband Tito Melema, from whose perspective much of the book is told, is an antihero does not make him unique in 19th century literature. But only the progenitor of Middlemarch’s remarkably multidimensional semi-antagonist Edward Casaubon could have rendered Tito with such subtle layers. The book details his gradual decline from an earnest, goodhearted youth to a craven-but-smooth-as-silk Machiavellian sociopolitical overachiever. Eliot forecasts this fall from grace before\u0026#9670;Piero (The Unfortunate) de Medici beomes ruler of Florence Tito has even committed a sinful action, reporting that he has \u0026ldquo;sold his soul to evil\u0026rdquo; after he merely thinks about his reluctance to rescue his adoptive father from Muslim slavery. (It must be acknowledged here that Eliot\u0026rsquo;s depiction of so-called “Moslem conquerors” is regrettably far less nuanced than her depiction of nearly every white character in her oeuvre.) But if her early judgment of Tito seems harsh, she is less interested in condemning an evildoer than in sowing the subtle seeds of his undoing. Throughout the book, even as he contemplates murder, plots political assassinations, cheats on his wife, and seduces a childlike girl, Eliot compassionately stresses Tito\u0026rsquo;s genial nature, kind instincts, and sincere uxorious devotion. There but for grace go all of us, she suggests. She isn’t interested in mustache-twirling villains; she wants to contrast the difficult choices made by Romola with her husband’s persistent unwillingness to depart from the path of least resistance.\nAs remarkable in Romola as ever is Eliot’s clear-eyed moral wisdom. I’ll admit I was puzzled through much of the novel by the heroine’s, and by extension Eliot’s, obvious admiration for the severe religious zealot Savonarola. The youthful Eliot was willing to sacrifice her father’s love and subject herself to vicious gossip by openly and honestly rejecting foundational Christian doctrine. Moreover, she could not have achieved what she did as an author without the impressive breadth and depth of her reading and education—even in an era when a solid foundation of learning was a requisite of the comfortable classes. So how could Eliot be so generous in her treatment of a politically ambitious monk who willfully destroyed secular art and improbably claimed to have received prophetic visions from God Himself? The answer is that Eliot prioritized Christian compassion for society’s most vulnerable over lavish indulgence in erudition and wealth. She appreciated the way that Savonarola steered\u0026#9670;Friar Girolamo Savanarola takes over Florence Florence away from the depravity of the Medici toward a humanism that she still considered holy even though she had personally shed the trappings of religious belief. By the conclusion, however, Eliot distances herself (and Romola) from Savonarola\u0026rsquo;s extremism.\nYou might be tempted, Mr. Frum, to claim vindication when I confess that the last few chapters lack the page-turning adventure of Felix Holt’s climactic electoral riot and trial. Or that Romola offers nothing resembling the beautifully intertwined emotional climaxes of the three major romantic plots in Middlemarch. I’ll admit that I struggled a bit to get through the repetitive final pages of Romola. But a slight reduction in narrative oomph at the finish line hardly negates Eliot’s confident, artful wisdom throughout the race.\nYou would do well to consider studious silence as a preferable alternative to staining your corner of the eternally accessible world wide web with an underinformed mansplanation directed at one of the most revered fictionists ever to take pen to paper.\nBy the way, thanks for being a good sport about the preceding playful dressing down. I hope you\u0026rsquo;ll accept it in the spirit I intend: strongly but jestingly worded trash talk from a minor online literary blogger to a major one whose work he admires.\n“Mansplaining” is admittedly a cheap shot. I’m sure you’d be just as patronizing if you were critiquing a male author whose book you hadn’t read.\nIn all seriousness, thanks for continually fighting the good fight; yours is an important political voice in dark times.\nSincerely,\n"},{"title":"Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Marital Therapy of Memoir","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-06-dylan-thompson/","date":"July 8, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Marital Therapy of Memoir In the days when “vinyl collections” were the only kind, I’d flip through my mother’s classical LPs hoping for showtune jackpots. She had two sore-thumb pop inclusions: Meet the Beatles and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “There was a time when I used to host parties,” she explained dismissively when pressed.\nOn the cover of Dylan’s debut\u0026#9670;The Freewheelin\u0026#39; Bob Dylan drops , a girlish youth and a youthful girl huddled down a wintry city street. That babyface didn’t seem a remotely plausible match to the hoarse wisdom within. But the promo copy on the back cover claimed authenticity:\nAs Harry Jackson, a cowboy singer and a painter has exclaimed: “He’s so goddamned real, it’s unbelievable.” The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear. Nat Hentoff, Back cover of The Freewheelin\u0026rsquo; Bob Dylan\nI got to know Richard Thompson through mix tapes. In high school, we’d jumble 45 RPM favorites and compact disc discoveries onto 90-minute cassette tapes sequenced with auteur pretensions.\nThe friend responsible for circulating Thompson’s husky-voiced elliptical wit throughout our clique recently apologized for putting his strange masturbator-on-a-train song “Psycho Street” on so many of our tapes. “I think laughter was the intended response,” she explained in an SMS thread about our 2019 excursion to see Thompson at a tiny Evanston\u0026#9670;Richard Thompson live at Evanston SPACE venue. “And maybe a bit of fear that I was not a sweetly milquetoast softie as advertised.”\nThe Rumor and Sigh-era pop songs\u0026#9670;Richard Thompson releases Rumor and Sigh she disseminated had convinced me that Thompson was an arrogant, cuttingly funny alpha male with impeccable trad/rock taste. The Evanston concert upgraded that assessment to “confident, effacingly witty folk-rock legend.” But tonight I looked through every one of my excavated mix tapes from that friend. The only Thompson song I could find was a soundtrack deep cut, the hushed confessional “False or True”:\n“I tell you secrets that don’t even matter / I give you keepsakes but only to flatter / I don’t believe in myself, I don’t believe in myself / So why should anyone else”\nI read Thompson’s 2021 memoir Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967–1975 to square his contrasting songwriting and performing personas. I read Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One expecting to find an ice cool social justice warrior: Pete Seeger meets James Dean.\nThis is what I learned.\nPopular music is a blind date. The singer flatters you with practiced intimate “secrets that don’t matter.” Cautiously bares polished vulnerabilities. Every album is a come-on, every concert a consummation in fancy underwear. If they’ve done their job, you go home believing you alone have glimpsed their immortal spark and stare expectantly at the phone for the next release.\nReading a memoir is marital therapy. The singer relitigates old transgressions. Sometimes shouts, sometimes strives to charm his way out of the doghouse. I was utterly surprised by the distinct ways Dylan and Thompson recast their public façades to preserve their relationships with their fans.\nTHOMPSON:\n“It’ll Be Me” Richard Thompson has always had a knack for rendering entrenched defiance and regret in the sparsely worded lightning flashes that three-minute pop song structure affords.\n“I’ll find the door, take your bullies off me / A sweeter age it was that loved me well”\nHis characters tend to be loners baring glimpses of their fiercely guarded souls.\n“As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay / And you wouldn’t want me any other way”\nSelf-revelation in a Thompson song often comes laced with a rabid bite.\n“I feel so good, I’m gonna make somebody pay tonight / I’m old enough to sin but I’m too young to vote / Society been dragging on the tail of my coat”\nKnowing the songs, I expected Thompson to report his early adventures with an acidic, take-no-prisoners wit. But that voice appears\u0026#9670;Beeswing by Richard Thomspson drops so fleetingly amid the book’s blandly detailed reminiscences that I finished it with less sense of his personality than I’d had coming in.\nDYLAN:\n“Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” Unlike Thompson, Bob Dylan has never been given to portraiture. His early folk songs, the ones that catapulted him from Midwestern obscurity to become the premiere singer of his generation, seemed to have a single narrator who was old-soul wise, righteously indignant, socially compassionate.\n“Your sons and your daughters / are beyond your command / Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand”\nChronicles Volume One, a nondescript title of as-yet-unrealized ambition (we’re still waiting for Volume 2), documents\u0026#9670;Bob Dylan\u0026#39;s memoir Chronicles Volume One drops the way that lyrical persona shifted into cagily diffuse verse in his later work.\n“All the people we used to know / They’re an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenter’s wives / Don’t know how it all got started / I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives”\nWhat strikes me about the memoir is that its narrator bears little resemblance to either of those personas but is nonetheless grudgingly candid, as if some unidentified force was pulling his teeth into pained self-revelation.\nTHOMPSON:\n“Drifting Through the Days” To say that Beeswing is stylistically cautious is not to say that it is dull. The book is a breezily enjoyable and informative first try at authorship. Thompson shares recollections like a favorite uncle reflecting on the good old days: charming, well-spoken, chockfull of insights into his era and vocation.\nThese are the years in which Thompson co-founded the legendary British folk-rock group Fairport Convention\u0026#9670;Fairport Convention plays its first concert , married and divorced his famous gigging partner Linda Thompson, logged session time and awkward Tube rides with reclusive peer Nick Drake, and snuck a “reprehensible” (his word) peek inside Joni Mitchell’s songwriting notebook.\nA traditional chronological structure ushers Thompson from a “very shy” suburban kid who found the guitar enabled self-expression to a “socially inept” solo artist writing songs “for pleasure, but also to understand [myself] and decode life.” His thoughts are more coherently articulated then Dylan’s, but the latter’s rough musings contain more diamonds.\nDYLAN:\n“You Wanna Ramble” To say that Chronicles Volume One is astonishingly revealing is not to say that it is always fascinating. The prose is plainspoken, sometimes prickly. He almost apologizes for his intelligence. This is not the kind of writing you would expect from a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.\nA large percentage of the book consists of rambling lists of cultural influences. The Russian and French classics he studied while squatting on the couches of intellectual Greenwich Village friends. His vinyl folk heroes, his impressions of meeting them for the first time. Off-Broadway theater experiences. Dragnet and Fibber McGee and Molly.\nJust when you are nodding into nostalgia-induced slumber, he drops a stunning disclosure. “If I had been a voting man, I would have voted for Kennedy.” “My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of [western star] Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody.”\nNot a voting man? Goldwater? These are jarring self-descriptions from the writer of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the frontman of the 1960s hippie protest movement.\nTHOMPSON:\n“Saving the Good Stuff for You” By my count, Beeswing contains only three passages of varying length that feel like risky self-exposure. The first is a heartfelt description of a 1969 touring accident\u0026#9670;Fairport Convention suffers tragic bus accident that ended the lives of a bandmate and a girlfriend for whom his feelings were uncomfortably casual. “Her death froze our romance in midstream, so for a while it seemed more important than it really was.”\nThe second is an account of his 1970s conversion to Islam. Thompson had been drinking “solitarily and secretly,” he confesses. “When I started praying, I gave up drinking immediately — stopped on a sixpence.”\nThe third is a throwaway anecdote in which he declines an invitation to Paul McCartney’s 26th birthday party. It is 1968, the Beatles are at their artistic zenith, and dissolution is fast approaching. “It shows how much of a musical snob I was at the time that I decided not to go — to me the Beatles were a ‘pop’ band and not to be taken seriously,” he discloses.\nThis is the only glimpse we get of this side of the youthful Thompson: judgmental and arrogant yet stonily principled. When the author expresses a desire to give his younger incarnation “a good shake” and an admonition to “get down there and enjoy himself,” it feels moving but pat. What happened to the snarl that young man drafted into his songs?\nDYLAN:\n“What Good Am I?” You have to wade through pages of banality to accumulate a meaningful self-portrait of Dylan, and even then the brushwork is prevaricating and elusive. But the questions I was asking about him as I read his testimony bowled me over.\nMy prior impression of Dylan was of a more talented Holden Caulfield, recalcitrant mainly because he detested the phonies he found in the music world and the world at large. Now I found myself asking, is he the biggest phony of all? It was not just the aforementioned voter apathy and conservatism. It was the bald-faced hucksterism.\nIn his account of his Greenwich Village folk-scene origin story, Dylan confesses to having had a hustler’s instinct for self-mythologizing as a marketing strategy. He admits to feeding a record label PR executive a biography that was “pure hokum — hophead talk. I hadn’t come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan.”\nIn the same paragraph, Dylan embodies Caulfield values and embraces his own phoniness. “It wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up,” Dylan writes with his Holden hat on. “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick.”\nBut one sentence later, Mr. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” denies that song’s entire premise like Peter before the rooster crows:\nI didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, that was all well and good. Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One\nMuch of the book describes Dylan’s struggle to escape the political shadow he’d cast. “Joan Baez recorded a protest song about me that was getting big play,” he reports in chapter three. “[She was] challenging me to get with it — come out and take charge, lead the masses — be an advocate, lead the crusade.” He tries to tell The New York Times that he had never been a spokesman for any cause. The paper runs the interview with the headline, “Spokesman Denies That He’s a Spokesman.”\nDylan treats these pressures as external, presenting himself as a humble, misunderstood musician. This feels like a small copout to me. He’d adopted Woody Guthrie’s agenda. He’d sung protests songs with Baez. He’d opened for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.\u0026#9670;Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech Was that too “pure hokum”?\nTHOMPSON:\n“Keep Your Distance” Even after his most vulnerable passages, Thompson the memoirist keeps poking his head back into its tortoise shell. The wrenching dissolution\u0026#9670;Richard and Linda Thompson break up of his relationship with wife and folk partner Linda Thompson is reduced to a tepid disclosure: “We emerged as substantially different people, and I am guilty of falling out of love.”\nTwo paragraphs down, Richard races through a confession that he neglected his firstborn:\nLinda and I had three kids — Kamila was born in 1982 — and we felt overwhelmed at the time, but I should never have neglected Jesse; it was immature and irresponsible. We get on well now — as I do with all five of my talented children and six grandchildren. Richard Thompson, Beeswing\nTrim a few words and it reads like a family Christmas letter. It’s not that Thompson owes his audience “salt for the memory, black for the years, black as forever, mascara tears,” but the emotional breech between the Christmas letter and the lyrics I just quoted could swallow the British Isles.\nDYLAN:\n“Things Have Changed” Chronicles skips over the peak of Dylan’s fame, focusing instead on its sepia-toned Gaslight Café prelude and its agonizing paparazzi aftermath. The book’s ellipsis is bridged in my Gen X imagination by “The Lamenting of the 12-Bar Blues,” an old Dylan-inspired folk bootleg performed by Luka Bloom, a favorite Irish folkie of mine. The song depicts a trad troubadour who refuses to accede to constant requests for covers of “the most famous singer in the world:”\n“No, no a thousand times no / I’d rather see my life’s blood spillin’ / I’ll sing anything / Even God Save the King / But I won’t sing any Bob Dylan”\nFinally, after a girlfriend threatens to withhold sex, the singer gives in:\n“I tore off my coat / and ruptured my throat / and I sang just like Bob Dylan.”\nThat iconic unpolished raspy twang. For many, it was the only thing they knew about Dylan. The strangulated strangeness of that voice was like a guarantee of authenticity that lent it Woody Guthrie authority. Is it possible that it was a put-on?\nIn chapter four, Dylan is touring with Tom Petty. The man who’d opened for MLK is now shilling for Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Dylan is so sick of his own songs, they hardly escape his throat. But when Dylan picks up a new “vocal technique” from an aging jazz singer, his prose suddenly takes on a vivid immediacy.\nAt first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain…. Now I knew I could perform any of these songs without having to be restricted to the world of words.\nAt some point in Dylan’s recorded catalog, his voice acquires a different rasp than one that made him famous. Is that the moment he adopted this “vocal technique”? The inauthentic voice he could no longer perform — was that his famous rasp? Was the voice that inspired Woodstock and the Vietnam protests a phony character voice? A bit of hustler hokum?\nDYLAN AND THOMPSON:\n“I Contain Multitudes” When I finally scratched “Dylan concert” off my bucket list on November 17 2021\u0026#9670;Bob Dylan at Auditorium Theatre , he did not make an effort to convince me of his authenticity. The octogenarian plowed indefatigably through his new record, Rough and Rowdy Ways, mustering only one grudging pleasantry, as if we were pulling teeth. Instead, he let sharp new compositions like “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” do the talking.\n“You won’t amount too much, the people all said / ’Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head / Never pandered, never acted proud / Never took off my shoes, throw ’em in the crowd”\nCoincidentally, I’d seen Richard Thompson two weeks earlier\u0026#9670;Richard Thompson at Old Town School of Folk Music , witty and gracious as ever. But he seemed more invested in reading excerpts from the memoir than in logging another fleet, fretboard-traversing “Valerie” solo. We applauded the latter, but he waved us off peremptorily. “Please don’t. It’s too easy.”\nJudging from Chronicles Volume One, none of it comes easy to Dylan. Those anguished paragraphs about the songs that refused to escape his larynx because they no longer felt true: Most people just sing. Despite the huckster instinct, Dylan’s commitment to truth bleeds from his lyrics.\n“I’ll keep the path open — the path in my mind / I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind / I play Beethoven sonatas Chopin’s preludes . . . I contain multitudes”\nMaybe the singing voice was real; maybe it wasn’t. His mind is unimpeachable. When I juxtapose his autobiography with the plain honesty of his songs, I realize that the book never casts him in grandiose inflation. It merely reports his hustler tendencies openly, unapologetically, and without the whiff of settled platitude that dominates Beeswing.\n“Persuasion” So, did these books save the marriage or catalyze a split-up?\nWe’re working through it.\nBeeswing was inconclusive on whether Thompson’s fractured songwriting and concert personas were “False or True.” He’s a gentleman, but I can’t quite shake my disappointment that he recast himself as the very milquetoast softie that my friend turned to “Psycho Street” to reject.\nDylan’s braver self-reckoning in Chronicles shattered my image of Seeger by way of Dean. I suspect he is a puffed-up suburbanite with little consistent core. But as long as he keeps writing homespun verse with gutting moral clarity, I won’t kick him out of bed.\n"},{"title":"Commemorating the Commemoration of Sir Tom Stoppard","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-01-stoppard/","date":"July 1, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Commemorating the Commemoration of Sir Tom Stoppard  Today\u0026#9670;The Tom Stoppard Theatre is named on London’s West End, the Duke of York’s Theatre officially became the Tom Stoppard Theatre. The name change is timed to coincide with the opening of a new revival of Arcadia, by consensus the most ambitious and moving play by the man who was the world’s finest living playwright until his passing at 88 last\u0026#9670;Tom Stoppard Dies Thanksgiving week.\nIt’s funny how appreciation of an individual artist, particularly in youth, can leak into self-definition. Seeing the news about the Tom Stoppard Theatre pop up unbidden on my phone this afternoon triggered unearned pride tempered with a trace of ennui: I’ve never set foot in the venue that now bears the name that cloaks mine. My nom de plume as a literary essayist is derived from two of Sir Tom’s leading men: Septimus Hodge from Arcadia and Henry Carr from Travesties. This is a nod to his outsized influence in my development. His inventive wit and voracious intellect inhabit my brain cells, surfacing with embarrassing frequency in my writing. The detritus of his boundless reading life, one that frapped literature, politics, philosophy, and science into springboards for humbly stated moral wisdom, ripple within my own. The man turned me on to literature, and now he’ll never know.\nWHEN I WAS A CHILD, I SPAKE AS A CHILD Last week, I watched a surprisingly delightful 2009 promotional documentary for Rufus Wainwright’s opera Prima Donna. In it, Rufus’s mother, folk music legend Kate McGarrigle, states that pubescent boys (yes, she specified boys) tend to latch fiercely onto a life-shaping enthusiasm. For Rufus, who was born two weeks after I was, that passion was opera. Stoppard’s interests at that age were more diffuse. Cricket, Greek, and Evelyn Waugh. The latter was beginning to nudge his pen in comical directions, but Hermione Lee reports in Tom Stoppard: A Life that he was bored by the theater and that his school headmaster lamented his “lack of ‘single-mindedness.’” My own story ratifies McGarrigle’s observation. Early in my teens, I was becoming passionate about pretending to be other people onstage.\nACTING Stoppard accompanied me on that journey, too. My first role in college was Moon in Stoppard’s comedy The Real Inspector Hound. My last was Henry Carr in Travesties, an ostentatious Stanley Cup for any actor that entailed multipage monologues as a doddering old man and pages of declamatory dialogue as a repurposed Algernon Moncrieff. When\u0026#9670;Travesties at Court Theatre we learned that Travesties was being staged at Chicago’s Court Theatre, the cast bundled into road-tripping sedans. The Chicago Carr was Larry Yando, to this day a regional legend with famously protean range. He generously met our effusive cast in the lobby after the show. When he asked which of us had played his role, I fought simultaneous urges to hide and to curtsy in pride. The inveterate pro looked at me conspiratorially. “You know how you never accept compliments for memorization? For this role, you accept.” I knew what he meant. After one performance, a peer said to me, “In that play we did this summer, you were still calling for lines in tech. How did you manage to learn this part?” The reality was that it had been easy. Carr’s thoughts are meandering and senile, but Stoppard’s exquisitely phrased digressions flow with inexorable logic. A year or two after graduation, I was cast as Algernon at a community theater. Stoppard had lifted so much from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest that I felt like I’d already memorized the part. But as I performed those glittering lines, I found my voice did not respond to my thoughts the way it used to. I’d done those voluminous monologues in a throat-constricting old man voice. Yando had kept his voice lithe and let his body do the aging. My directing class professor, a twinkle-eyed gent who always seemed to know more about his students’ inner lives than he had any right to, sat in for one of the rehearsals. “He’ll be wonderful in this show,” he told a friend. “If he doesn’t lose his voice.” When one reviewer described my Algy as “a crashing bore,” I couldn’t help but blame the damage my Travesties choices had inflicted.\nWHEN I BECAME A MAN, I PUT AWAY CHILDISH THINGS McGarrigle’s insight about tween enthusiasm only tells part of a story that tends to twist in early adulthood. In Wainwright’s early twenties, he fused his operatic passion with melodious contemporary songcraft. Now he is primarily known as a pop star. Stoppard’s early aimlessness crystallized into purpose when he became a journalist and drama critic instead of attending university. He once told Theatre Quarterly that he began thinking about writing plays at 21. It was a common enthusiasm for his generation, he said. “Everybody of my age who wanted to write, wanted to write plays.” As for me, the thrill of acting was beginning to pale, overtaken by fascination with the things that Stoppard could do with words and ideas. The more Stoppard plays I read, the more I wanted to follow his bibliographic breadcrumbs to new authors who referenced new authors who referenced new authors. Packing wildly disparate topics into two brisk acts, as Stoppard did, began to seem nobler and grander in my estimation than enacting intention and obstacle onstage in assorted accents.\nWRITING Literary analysis was emerging as a personal strength by the time Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass took up residence in the wings of the newly minted Tom Stoppard Theatre, then still called the Duke of York’s, on February 24, 1995\u0026#9670;Broken Glass opens at Duke of York\u0026#39;s . This bit of trivia is memorable to me because it was a month to the day after I concluded\u0026#9670;Depart Heathrow my sole London escapade. Broken Glass, then at the National Theatre, was the first performance I saw in a monthlong theatre course more chaperoned than taught by the directing class professor, who preferred to let our own fledgling perceptions do the teaching. At intermission, I was headed for concessions when he caught my eye and gestured toward the plush purple seat beside him. “What do you make of all this melodrama?” he asked grumpily. “What is Miller trying to do?” I rattled off a quick summary. The Brooklyn wife’s paralysis is brought on by personal horror over the overseas emergence of Nazism, and the self-hating Jewish husband doesn’t get it. The psychosomatic illness is the personal thread that binds personal and public morality, Miller’s signature theme. The professor looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, almost persuaded. Then he turned back toward the stage. “Maybe it is interesting intellectually. But it’s boring.”\nI identified a paradigm across all his plays in which his characters’ epistemological certainty is shattered by postmodern doubt, only to be renewed in a more complex form that affirms absolute truth. I think the professor, who had read my prompt book essays about Stoppard’s The Real Thing for his directing course the prior year, had enough sense of my affinity for Stoppard that he deliberately assigned me the task of reviewing Arcadia. He undoubtedly had enough sense of that affinity to know the absurdly outsized weight I would feel when he singled me out in the aisles of the Haymarket Theatre, the time-suspended shimmer of the climactic double waltz still wafting through our partially formed prefrontal cortexes like matutinal mist, and sternly told me, “I think you could write like that. But it will take work.” I spent multiple subsequent hours wandering down Tottenham Court Road with my girlfriend, dissecting the play and getting foolishly rutted on a fallacious insinuation I’d seen in a gopher post that Gus’s presence in both periods, coupled with an insipid misinterpretation of chaos theory, somehow pointed to the real-world possibility of time travel. By the time I settled into work on the review assignment, there were few hours left in the morning. After I’d read it to the class, the professor said, “That’s good writing, but is there more that needs to be said? What were your favorite lines?” And the ensuing stream of cherished Stoppardian bon mots brought back vivid memories of a forgotten childhood tradition in which my brothers and I would meet on the living room trampoline the morning after a musical theater outing and quote the funniest constructions by Hammerstein or Gilbert or Loewe or whomever wrote the book for them. Some critic once wrote that audiences walk out of Stoppard plays “humming the puns.” I guess that’s what my class was doing that morning in the pub adjacent to the St. Giles Hotel. He also said, “Laughter is the sound of the audience patting itself on the back.” Guilty as charged.\nNEVER MEET YOUR HEROES The following day\u0026#9670;Tom Stoppard at UPenn , I got a call from my London-era ex. “He’s going to be speaking in Philadelphia,” she said. “I think we should go.” Seven hundred and fifty miles later, I lowered myself into an auditorium seat at the University of Pennsylvania. He was there for a Q\u0026amp;A, which was glorious. I loved the way he rolled his Rs. I loved his grounded humility. An audience member praised his use of science and called Arcadia his best play. Stoppard replied that he didn’t deserve points for his thin understanding of chaos theory or the second law of thermodynamics. “If Arcadia is my best play, and you may be right,” he said (of course I’m paraphrasing). “It’s not because I made allusions to scientific theories. It’s because the story bears the most emotional weight.” Spot on. But he also said, or maybe I read this somewhere, that the praise for his realistic dramas was frustrating because writing his early, funny ones (he once called it his “hummingbird phase”) took so much more work.\nLOSS I tried to formulate a question from a paper I’d written for my theater history class (though it was really comparative lit), “Gravely Underestimating God: Loss and Renewal of Faith in the Plays of Tom Stoppard.” The paper identified a paradigm across all his plays in which his characters’ epistemological certainty is shattered by postmodern doubt, only to be renewed in a more complex form that affirms absolute truth. The academics in Arcadia lament the futility of comprehending the past but ultimately cherish the opportunities afforded by historical ignorance. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern know nothing about their purpose in Hamlet, but their existential despair is part of a larger context in which Shakespeare is an all-knowing deity. Hapgood explores quantum uncertainty in the duplicitous world of espionage but suggests Einstein should have had more faith in a “God who throws dice.” You get the idea. The concept was largely inspired by Stoppard’s only overtly theistic play, Jumpers, but now I wish I could have added some of the later plays, like Rock ’N’ Roll and The Hard Problem, both of which exhibit human frailty but conclude that materialism is too reductive. The title was from a 1973 interview with the Rev. Joseph McCulloch that focused on Stoppard’s religious perspective. “I rather think that science and theology will always find a way to dance together to the music,” Stoppard said in a remarkable two-decade premonition of Arcadia’s closing waltz. “The higher we penetrate into space and the deeper we penetrate into the atom, all it shows to a theologian is that God has been gravely underestimated.”\nI tried to find a question there, but decided my juvenile insights required too much explanation for a forum like that, and what was I going to ask? “Is this pattern really in your plays?” I flattered myself that he might have said, as he once did in The New Yorker:\n“Whenever I talk to intelligent students about my work, I feel nervous, as if I were going through customs. ‘Let’s have a look in your suitcase, if you don’t mind, sir.’ And, sure enough, under the first layer of shirts there’s a pound of hash and fifty watches and all kinds of exotic contraband. ‘How do you explain this, sir?’ ‘I’m sorry, Officer, I admit it’s there, but I honestly can’t remember packing it.’”\nBut I stayed silent. And after the Q\u0026amp;A, I silently handed him the copy of Indian Ink my elder brother had given me for Christmas (“I guess I forgot to autograph it myself,” my brother said that week, seeming genuinely remorseful). Stoppard jotted his rather plain non-cursive signature as he bantered with someone behind him. I don’t think he even looked up. My other brother remembers Stoppard declaring, “I’m a rrrrromantic” to his rearward interlocutor as he signed our books and swears — or imagines — that Sir Tom gazed into his eyes as he said it. I just meekly accepted his scrawl and walked offstage to join a friend. “I would have thought you would have said something,” she said.\nRENEWAL This should probably be an ache, the way my memory of the professor’s admonition is an ache. But what would I have said? He meant so much to so many. What would my fanboy appreciation mean to him? There’s that exchange in Arcadia where Thomasina laments the incineration of the Alexandria library: “How can we sleep for grief?”\nSeptimus tells her, “By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old.”\nI have his plays. That’s enough for me.\nRest in peace, Sir Tom, and long live the Tom Stoppard Theatre.\n"},{"title":"Bella Vita, Brutta Morte—A Pandemic-Haunted Opera","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-06-19-bella-vita-brutta-morte-a-pandemic-haunted-opera/","date":"June 19, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Bella Vita, Brutta Morte—A Pandemic-Haunted Opera  \u0026ldquo;But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son.\u0026rdquo; Mark 13:32\nMarch 3, 2020.\u0026#9670;Arrive in Manhattan Tuesday at 9 AM.\nWhat strikes me about this photo now is how little we all knew of what was to come. The uncomprehending splendor of lower Manhattan. The imbecilic cheer of the Spirit logo. The Statue of Liberty looking on in Lilliputian futility as death comes galloping. This is what the beautiful life looked like just before the global pandemic wiped the smile off its stupid face.\nThat Tuesday morning, I was a high rolling investor in the fragile Bella Vita. A theater major who made his living primarily in unartistic venues, I had come to tether self-definition and fulfillment snugly to artistic consumption. At an age when my friends sacrificed every freedom to their expanding families, my sacrifices were to arthouse cinemas, regional theaters, and intimate concert venues. As for death, the curtain drop that preempted every show, we were mostly acquainted through plays. “Alas, poor Yorick,” was my jam. “Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?” If you’d asked for my most painful bereavement, I might have cited Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally.\nMcNally’s jam was opera. When he wasn’t writing plays about it, he was listening to it on LP, or regaling encore anecdotes on radio’s Texaco Opera Quiz. His play Golden Age, staged in 2012 at the New York City Center, memorializes the bel canto era of the early 19th century. The setting is 1835, coinciding with the slow fade of the era’s increasingly idle idol, Gioachino Rossini. The Barber of Seville composer stopped writing operas in his thirties and dedicated himself to a full-time, debauched Brutta Vita.\nAlso featured in Golden Age is bel canto’s shooting star, Vincenzo Bellini. The “Casta Diva” composer was cut down at 33 by amoebic dysentery. McNally declined to memorialize the demeaning truth of Bellini’s passing, preferring to cast it as a consumptive Bella Morte. McNally’s instinct to cave to a clichéd, respectable expiration may reflect his affinity for opera, a genre in which everyone dies and every death culminates in soaring crescendo.\nIronically, McNally’s own demise was an agonizing Brutta Morte. He was among the first celebrity victims of the pandemic that was perched on Manhattan’s doorstep as I touched down at LGA on March 3, 2020. McNally was probably at his Greenwich Village home that morning, deciding whether to outrun the swiftly spreading novel coronavirus. He had survived the AIDS crisis, two lung cancer surgeries, and three decades of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, only to succumb to an illness that most immune systems shrug off in a few days of mild discomfort.\nOf that day and that hour knoweth no man. For someone as dependent on consuming art as I was in early 2020, the pandemic was itself a sort of temporary death. During lockdown, I became an opera fan and read McNally’s Golden Age. This essay is a quartet between the four of us about the lesson I learned that year:\nThe beautiful life should be cherished while it lasts, and there is no such thing as a beautiful death.\nACT ONE: BELLA VITA (quartet) ME\nMy 89-year-old father is still recovering from our 5 AM flight, but I’m barreling through LaGuardia like the Budget Rental Car office is about to close up. It’s not a business trip, but it certainly is not leisure. A friend needs help moving out of downtown Manhattan. We have one day to help, and no lodging booked for the night. I have two part-time jobs, so I am not being paid for the time off, and there is no remote work option. I am inwardly calculating the temporal cost of a Chinatown lunch.\nMy brother has other ideas. That night, Agrippina will be the fifth production of a Georg Frideric Handel opera in the 137-year history of the Metropolitan Opera, but I don’t know much about opera yet.\nTo me, the bigger draw is the first preview performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Laurie Metcalf and Rupert Everett as the bilious couple playing drinking games for keeps in the 1962\u0026#9670;Edward Albee’s Who\u0026#39;s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens drama that Edward Albee based partly on his relationship with Terrence McNally. It will be performed only nine times before it is swallowed by history.\nAcross the East River at St. Anne’s Warehouse, Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga is reprising her cunning, boyish turn in the incense-soaked Hamlet I saw alone at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2018\u0026#9670;I see Ruth Negga in Hamlet in Dublin . The opening image of Negga’s grieving prince identifying his plastic-shrouded father in the morgue will come to feel like a summary of the year, and the realization that I’ll never have the chance to share it will fester smartingly long after The New York Times declares it the best play of the abbreviated year.\nBut on March 3, I am only dimly aware of the looming specter that awaits the world. Today, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will announce confirmation of the state’s first recorded case of person-to-person spread of the “novel coronavirus.” In a matter of days, Bellevue\u0026#9670;Bellevue morgue established Hospital, where I briefly parked our Jeep Compass, will be the site of a makeshift morgue.\nThe notoriously compressed city will confirm nearly 18,000 cases before the end of the month, making New York the epicenter of a global pandemic. Chinatown will combat the entrenched misperception that the spread started here.\nThat is the real reason to rush my elderly father out of Manhattan and sacrifice precious indulgences in a beautiful cultural life that will soon cease to exist anywhere on the globe. But on March 3, I’m just impatient. Forget the Chinatown lunch; it’s faster to eat at a halal cart.\nMortality is an operatic melodrama only to a precious few. The rest of the universe glances at our impassioned histrionics and yawns. BELLINI\nVincenzo Bellini was a poster boy for the bel canto era (the Italian phrase translates to “beautiful singing”). During that period, early in the 19th century, opera blossomed into a gloriously showy caricature of itself. The bel canto composers succeeded the elegant 18th-century craftsmanship of Mozart and Glück with daredevil coloratura runs of trilling high notes that seem to flow from a ceaselessly renewing fount.\nExcess was the defining characteristic of Bellini’s life and music. He was the flamboyant middle child in the so-called “Bel Canto Trinity.” This threesome consisted of Bellini, his mentor Rossini, and his hated rival Gaetano Donizetti. “The only thing humble about … Bellini is his origins,” testifies one character in McNally’s Golden Age. “He’s become more French dandy than any Parisian.”\nIn the 1887 joint biography Great Musical Composers German, French, and Italian, George T. Ferris claims Bellini once chastised a singer for exhibiting insufficient passion. “You put no life into your music. Show some feeling. Don’t you know what love is?” The historical jury is still out on Bellini’s sexual orientation, but McNally, America’s famously out queer dramatist, leans into the rumors that his subject was a sensual omnivore.\nTAMBURINI. Bellini likes men.\nGRISI. Bellini likes women.\nLABLACHE. Bellini likes everyone.\nTerrence McNally, Golden Age McNALLY\nMcNally\u0026rsquo;s portrait of Bellini is to some degree autobiographical. McNally never asked anyone to guess about his feelings for men. \u0026ldquo;He was writing about gay people when Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee were writing about straight people,\u0026rdquo; points out actor Michael Urie in a 2019 New York Times video tribute. Actually, Williams admitted the existence of closeted queers in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Streetcar Named Desire. By contrast, McNally\u0026rsquo;s 1965 Broadway debut\u0026#9670;Bump in the Night, McNally\u0026#39;s Broadway debut, opens was the first to feature a sexually active homosexual.\nStill, he resisted pat pigeonholing. Christopher Byrne\u0026rsquo;s biography A Man of Much Importance: The Art and Life of Terrence McNally documents the playwright\u0026rsquo;s complex 1980s relationship with his most celebrated female peer, Wendy Wasserstein\u0026#9670;Terrence McNally begins seeing Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles). \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s a bad time to be gay,\u0026rdquo; groused one friend in Byrne\u0026rsquo;s book, \u0026ldquo;so good for you, you can switch.\u0026rdquo;\nBut McNally shrugged off the gossip, stating simply that he was \u0026ldquo;a gay man in a relationship with a woman.\u0026rdquo; Today, McNally\u0026rsquo;s honest fluidity seems ahead of its time.\nThe youthful McNally apparently resembled Bellini physically. Consider Ferris\u0026rsquo;s description of Bellini:\nNature gave him a beautiful and ingenuous face, noble features, large, clear blue eyes, and abundant light hair.\nCompare that Albee\u0026rsquo;s account in Mel Gussow\u0026rsquo;s Edward Albee: A Singular Journey of his first encounter\u0026#9670;Terrence McNally meets Edward Albee with McNally:\nI noticed this nineteen-year-old, a ravishing-looking blond kid lurking around the place. I found out he was a college student named Terrence McNally who wanted to be a playwright. Well, Terrence and I started talking and the next thing I knew, so to speak, we were living together.\nAt the time, McNally was on a sort of pilgrimage to New York City from his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, where there were few out gay men and few opera fans with voluminous vinyl collections. He had discovered opera in a rowdy grade school classroom. A teacher played Madame Butterfly, and the 11-year-old McNally was transfixed in glory while his classmates brawled around him\u0026#9670;Terrence McNally hears Madame Butterfly in a classroom at 11 .\nROSSINI\nGioachino Rossini was opera\u0026rsquo;s most prolific composer. He generated an astounding 39 vocal dramas between the ages of 14 and 37. That\u0026rsquo;s 11 more operas than even Giuseppe Verdi, the maestro who succeeded the bel canto era, managed in a 60-year career that spanned the latter portion of the 19th century.\nIf Bellini manifested his beauty addiction as a voracious romantic appetite, Rossini binged on conspicuous consumption. Ferris confirms this. \u0026ldquo;Rossini could write best when he was under the influence of Italian wine and sparkling champagne.\u0026rdquo;\nRossini was endlessly gifted but lazy. He would party as long as possible, and then fall back on his effortless genius. \u0026ldquo;Rossini\u0026rsquo;s idleness and love of good cheer always made him procrastinate his labours till the last moment,\u0026rdquo; explains Ferris, \u0026ldquo;and placed him in dilemmas from which only his fluency of composition extricated him.\u0026rdquo;\nACT TWO: BRUTTA VITA (quartet) ME\nBy mid-March 2020, the beautiful life was officially sheltering in place. Days of lockdown turned into weeks turned into months turned into a full year before vaccinations unlocked our mutually solitary cages. Some of those days, it was possible to get a sidewalk seat at a local eatery, but the cost of those visits was unremitting disease anxiety and internal moral conflict. Theaters of every description decided that dilemma on our behalf. They simply extinguished their ghost lights.\nIn the earliest days, I agonized over whether to risk showing up for a long-anticipated production of Henrik Ibsen\u0026rsquo;s Lady from the Sea. After the March 12\u0026#9670;Lady from the Sea canceled at Chicago’s Court Theatre cancellation, I agonized over whether to donate the tickets or request a refund from an economically crushed institution.\nAnd don\u0026rsquo;t think I don\u0026rsquo;t hear your patronizing \u0026ldquo;aww.\u0026rdquo; The World Health Organization says the global body count was at 4,291 that day, and I was rending my garments over the loss of pricey tickets to a play I actually saw two years later. I don\u0026rsquo;t share Rossini\u0026rsquo;s taste for fancy wines or Bellini\u0026rsquo;s weakness for sex, but I can\u0026rsquo;t pretend I haven\u0026rsquo;t felt the beautiful life mount into gluttonous surfeit. I was diagnosed with type two diabetes during the pandemic, and I tried not to picture rampant sugar systematically breaking down my organs.\nOh, the plays I couldn\u0026rsquo;t see. Art can nourish the spirit, but when consumed to excess, it can glut the whole system. I get it, but the loss still aches.\nMcNALLY\nMcNally\u0026rsquo;s volatile five-year partnership with Albee grew ugly in a starkly different way. The beautiful life for Albee, already smashingly successful thanks to The Zoo Story, consisted of bottomless gin and bourbon binges. The couple\u0026rsquo;s friend Robert Heide claims their intense drinking bouts served as the template for George and Martha\u0026rsquo;s drunken death matches (\u0026ldquo;Hump the Hostess,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Get the Guests,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Bringing Up Baby\u0026rdquo;).\nTerrence McNally, just out of Columbia University, also attended those late night affairs and later we realized that the model in Virginia Woolf? for Honey who ends up drunk on the floor, puking, was a combination of both of us\u0026hellip;. I told him that one night … while sprawled on the floor, I had heard Albee, Rorem and others who were standing above me jokingly but cynically saying \u0026ldquo;Well, if he wants to kill himself, let him.\u0026rdquo; ROBERT HEIDE, \u0026ldquo;CAROUSING IN THE VILLAGE WITH TERRENCE AND EDWARD,\u0026rdquo; WESTVIEW NEWS, MAY 3, 2020\nEven a beautiful life can become ugly when lived to excess.\nBELLINI\nHe hasn\u0026rsquo;t written anything in twenty years. All he does is bask in his past triumphs and eat dishes named for him. Have you tasted a Tournedos Rossini? No wonder he has the gout. Bellini discussing Rossini in Terrence McNally\u0026rsquo;s Golden Age\nROSSINI\nIn stark contrast to Bellini, who never reached his mid-30s, fate granted Rossini four decades\u0026#9670;Gioachino Rossini, dead at 73 of sybaritic comfort after he voluntarily extinguished his own incandescent artistic flame. Corpulent and lazy but ever the life of the resplendent dinner party, Rossini recedes from creation as if disgusted by the limits of his facile genius. In his book, Ferris enumerates Rossini\u0026rsquo;s flaws:\nThat he gave too little attention to musical science; that he often neglected to infuse into his work the depth and passion of which it was easily capable; that he placed too high a value on merely brilliant effects.\nIf Rossini evaded his divine calling because he was ashamed of these flaws, that is an enduring tragedy. Nobody cares about such minutiae when they hear the solemn beauty of the 11 O\u0026rsquo;clock quartet in Mose in Egito.\nIn Golden Age, McNally gives Rossini a chance to explain himself, but the answer feels disappointingly pat. \u0026ldquo;I got tired,\u0026rdquo; he says. \u0026ldquo;I ran out of things to say.\u0026rdquo;\nACT THREE: BELLA MORTE (quartet) ME\nSince Ibsen would not come to the mountain, the mountain came to Ibsen. My brother and I, egregiously fortunate to share a COVID bubble, curated an Ibsen video festival in our basement. The BBC\u0026rsquo;s Hedda Gabler posed a grimly timely question: was there a meaningful distinction between a bullet piercing your temple and a bullet piercing your bowels?\nMcNALLY\nWhen he wrote Golden Age, McNally clearly shared that operatic belief in the beautiful death. He gives his Bellini the same fate as Verdi\u0026rsquo;s Violetta: a noble, slow-motion, coughing surrender to tuberculosis. The cultured McNally was seemingly repulsed by Bellini\u0026rsquo;s actual cause of death: diarrhea.\nConsidering that McNally had been facing down death ever since a disease then called GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) halted gains toward a beautiful queer life in the 1980s, his dialogue about mortality in Golden Age is surprisingly pedestrian. It\u0026rsquo;s as if McNally, clinging to opera\u0026rsquo;s myth of enduring beauty, was incapable of grasping the solitary horror of mortality.\nYou know what I shall miss the most? The seasons. The first flowers of spring. The earth tells us that the cycle has begun again. Bellini in Terrence McNally\u0026rsquo;s Golden Age\nThe usually masterful dialogist provides a far more poignant conclusion in the stage directions: \u0026ldquo;The Page comes into the empty room. He looks around for what is left of the pizza…. Still eating, he sees Bellini\u0026rsquo;s bloodied handkerchief on the floor. He looks at it but continues to eat.\u0026rdquo;\nMortality is an operatic melodrama only to a precious few. The rest of the universe glances at our impassioned histrionics and yawns.\nBELLINI\nVincenzo Bellini died\u0026#9670;Vincenzo Bellini, dead at 33 at 33, also the final age of Jesus Christ. The same age of demise as John Belushi and Chris Farley and Sam Cooke, a change is gonna come. Folk singer David Wilcox is no Bellini, but he did write these memorable lyrics in his 1997 folk song \u0026ldquo;Glory\u0026rdquo;:\nIn the big boring middle of our long book of life\nAfter the twist has been told\nIf you don\u0026rsquo;t die in glory at the age of Christ\nThen your story is just getting old\nDavid Wilcox, \u0026ldquo;Glory\u0026rdquo;\nROSSINI\nRossini was 43 when Bellini died. He would live for exactly 33 more years. I\u0026rsquo;m not making this up. No one knoweth the hour, but bel canto was already dead, the incandescent torch passed to the more restrained, more psychologically sophisticated Giuseppe Verdi. In Golden Age, the 22-year-old Verdi attends I Puritani\u0026#9670;Opening night of Bellini’s I Puritani to pay homage to a dying legend. \u0026ldquo;He\u0026rsquo;ll need another name for the theatre,\u0026rdquo; grouses Rossini, aging into obscurity. \u0026ldquo;Giuseppe Verdi, it sounds like a farmer.\u0026rdquo;\nACT FOUR: BRUTTA MORTE (aria) McNALLY\nIn March 2020, the 81-year-old Terrence McNally struggled with every gasp to inflate the damaged air sacs in his one remaining lung. He occupied precisely the high-risk group that was repeatedly defined by the media throughout the pandemic.\nTerrence and his husband Tom decide to make a break for it. They board a JetBlue flight for Florida, determined to outrun the novel coronavirus. Terrence tries to sanitize the airport bathrooms, but no one knows how this thing spreads. No one knows how to breathe contaminated air with just one lung. I can only imagine the isolation he endured and what it must have done to his slowly eviscerating mind.\nThe spiky protein exponentially multiplies, no one can join him in the hospital, he can\u0026rsquo;t infect Tom, Andrea Chénier alone at the guillotine, Aida alone in the tomb, the 11-year-old blond boy is thunderstruck by Butterfly\u0026rsquo;s aria \u0026ldquo;Un bel di, vedremo\u0026rdquo; in a classroom where nobody cares, where nobody is gay, where only Callas understands, un bel di vedremo, \u0026ldquo;one fine day we\u0026rsquo;ll see,\u0026rdquo; Callas singing softly in Sarasota sterility, and there at last is Tom.\nThat hour knoweth no man, but it is March 24,\u0026#9670;Terrence McNally dies and it is 10:45 AM in Sarasota.\nCODA BELLINI\nGaetano Donizetti is everything I detest in this business: banal melodies, orchestrations that would embarrass a student, toadying up to the impresarios, brown-nosing the press. The only reason he\u0026rsquo;s here tonight is to see me fail…. And yet, he\u0026rsquo;s a fellow composer. He knows how hard and long the distance is from this (He points to his heart.) to this (He points to his head.) to there. (He points to the stage.) We are brothers that way. This is the most beautiful tenor aria ever written. I would give the entire score of The Pirate to have written it. (He begins to play and sing \u0026ldquo;Una furtiva lagrima (A furtive tear).\u0026rdquo; It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter how badly he sings.) Vincenzo Bellini in Terrence McNally\u0026rsquo;s Golden Age\nME\nSeptember 26, 2021.\u0026#9670;Elixir of Love at Lyric Opera, Chicago Sunday at 2 pm.\nThe usher reviewing our dog-eared vaccination cards at the Civic Opera House in Chicago is masked to the nines, but there is an unusual pep to her salutation that hints at giddy relief. \u0026ldquo;Howdy,\u0026rdquo; I wish she had blithely chirped. That would be a fitting end to a quadruple decker story in which everything rhymes. As I am handed a letter-sized program brimming with the kind of operatic minutiae Terrence used to declaim in the Texaco Opera Quiz, I cheerfully rhyme the story to myself in a Chef Boyardee accent.\nBellllla. Bruuutta. Rossiiiiini. Belliiiiini. McNaaalllly.\nChastened for my indulgent distraction by a near collision with the exponentially multiplying walkers, canes, and N95s, I lead my 90-year-old father to the claustrophobic elevator. On the sixth floor, the first live opera I have ever seen is a well-constructed bel canto romantic comedy dressed in Fellini hoop skirts. But it is tenor Charles Castronovo\u0026rsquo;s heartfelt \u0026ldquo;Una furtiva lagrima\u0026rdquo; and the subsequent bellowing cheers that will stay with me until death comes galloping.\nTomorrow, Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune will write that \u0026ldquo;the building was listening to his voice along with his audience, and he was repaying its favor in rapturous kind…. It exemplified what so many people have missed during the pandemic about hearing their favorite music sung live.\u0026rdquo;\nBeauty is back. Belllla.\nNOTE: This essay first appeared as \u0026ldquo;Bella Vita, Brutte Morte\u0026rdquo; on June 19, 2026. It was subsequently revised into the current form with the guidance of Music for Thought on Medium, specifically their editor, Hannah’s Café. They have my thanks.\n"},{"title":"Shallow Lads and Narcissistic Dons","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-06-09-hornby-frayn/","date":"June 9, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Shallow Lads and Narcissistic Dons  Maybe there were other people who were just as prolific, although I doubt it, especially since Prince did a lot more than just record, and Dickens did a lot more than simply write novels. But I yoked them together in my mind at that moment because they are two of what I shall have to describe, for want of a more exact term, as My People—the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work…. Anyone who has spent a lifetime consuming culture in all its forms at a possibly unhealthy rate has a similar list. Nick Hornby, Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius\nCall it paranoia, but the last sentence of that quotation from Nick Hornby’s extended juxtaposition Dickens and Prince feels like a gauntlet drop aimed at me personally. For one thing, Hornby has clearly intuited that he himself once occupied a prominent spot among My People. For another, my inner narcissist can’t conceive of another reason to write a 159-page Venn diagram whose concentric circles overlap so narrowly that the exercise initially seems pointless. In one circle sits Charles Dickens, master of Industrial Revolution page-turners and character name inventor extraordinaire. (Has any writer been so unfailingly gifted at nomenclature? From Canon Crisparkle to Mister Sweedlepipe, Mrs. Kidgerbury to Master Bates—okay, perhaps not “unfailing.”) In the other circle sits Prince, the master funk-pop innovator who told the global media, “my name is now a symbol I made up,” to which the global media obsequiously replied, “As you wish, Mr. Symbol.” That anachronistic pairing converges precariously on a few superficial similarities and two that really count: their shared membership in Nick’s Hall of Influences and their pathological productivity. Hornby suggests that the raw tonnage of artistic output produced by the Oliver Twist author and the Purple One may be weightier than that of any other pair in cultural history. “Maybe you are reading this and shouting, Wagner! Picasso!” he writes. “If so, you’ll have to write your own book.” Holy shit, he did it again. Did you hear him? Did you hear him? Oh, the monster overbearing. He is unmistakably triple dog daring me to draw an arbitrary pairing from My People that is more rhetorically fertile for a personal essay than his. Alright, Hornby, you’re on.\nThis is a joint appreciation of Nick Hornby, master of novels about shallow lads who fetishize pop culture, and Michael Frayn, master of novels about narcissistic academics who fetishize high culture. At the heart of the comparison is their shared interest in the vast gap between artistic appreciation and artistic labor.\nHIGH FIDELITY AND COPENHAGEN When I was in my twenties, that gap sometimes felt like an unbreachable chasm. If you asked me then how I wanted my personal bildungsroman to play out, I would emphasize my aspirations to secure artistic labor. But like many theater kids at that age, I was unable to confidently identify my artistic niche. Promising enough as a liberal arts graduate to have the pick of the theatrical internship litter, I turned down the Ostentatiously Expanding Enterprise most likely to hire me and signed on with the Struggling Cultural Institution that let me try my hand in the most departments. Dramaturgy was the real lure of that internship, but at the time there were only a handful of paid dramaturgs in the country.\nMichael Frayn’s Copenhagen, the first Tony winner I ever saw live, was a dramaturg’s dream. Nestled at the nexus of history, science, and epistemology, the play ricocheted with intellectual energy. I had encountered Frayn as a master of meticulously plotted farces (Noises Off, Chinamen), but he didn’t become one of My People until I read Copenhagen. Quantum physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr look back from the vantage of posterity, racking their brains as to why Heisenberg visited Bohr during the German occupation of Denmark. The ghosts reenact their brief and explosive encounter again and again, but the closer they look the more history is contaminated by bias, dogma, longing. This is an anthropomorphic dramatization of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which asserts that, within the atom, observation alters outcome. Quantum physics fiction isn’t unique to Frayn, before or after. Tom Stoppard’s 1988 spy sendup Hapgood uses wave-particle duality to illustrate the human capacity for multiplicity. Benjamín Labatut’s 2021 novel When We Cease to Understand the World plumbs subatomic uncertainty not so much for metaphor as for ghastly post-nuclear atmospherics. Still, Frayn’s treatment blew me away then and took root in the corner of my brain that scrutinizes motivation and intention. It was the kind of play that made me want to be a dramaturg. No, director. No, playwright.\nThe rudderless drift of my artistic career did not deter my proficiency as a consumer of art. In that respect, I resembled the now-iconic OG shallow lad Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s 1995 breakout bestseller High Fidelity, which I read around the same time. Rob and I both enjoyed ranking things. He through endless Top Five lists (best subtitled films, most memorable split-ups, etc.) and I through obsessively researched Oscar Party competitions. He opened his own record shop. I was hired to write album reviews. We both had an overdeveloped capacity for informed artistic appreciation. His artistic ego was wounded when he started dating a singer/songwriter. Mine was wounded with nearly every social encounter. I wasn’t as crass as Rob in my dating life, but I was at least as incompetent at it. I was or I was not ready for commitment, and I did or did not love, and I could or could not envision myself pursuing any other course of action than the one on my plate any given day. My twenties are ongoing in my dreams. I wake up and rack my contaminated memory to pinpoint my past self\u0026rsquo;s motivations and intentions, but my observations yield only endlessly shifting Heisenbergian uncertainty.\nMy impulse is to crack wise, but it is a genuinely poignant resolution, and it is always easy to be glib. THE HORNBY YEARS AND HEADLONG By my mid-thirties and forties, I’d settled on a career outside the arts with research duties that led to reading fatigue. That caused me to sacrifice serious reading in exchange for binge watching and never-ending screen time. During that decade, I occasionally opened a book, but I always lazily defaulted to authors I already knew. It was an exceedingly exclusive club of authors, and Hornby ranked at the top. At that point in my life, his familiar Shallow Lad Deepens narrative was intellectual comfort food. Book after book told the same story of superficial people redeemed through human connection. The snarky journalist in How to Be Good is so enamored with the Woke Girl that he eventually becomes good himself. An awkward tween in About a Boy teaches a coasting one-hit wonder how to care again. A mismatched suicidal foursome in Long Way Down restores their desire to live via shared community. A skateboarder in Slam time travels his way to becoming a responsible father. The shallow lads are usually accomplished appreciators of pop culture, but art is supplanted in importance once they achieve the Well Lived Life. In all of that Hornby, I think only Sophie Straw, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel-esque sixties comedienne in Funny Girl, succeeds as an artistic creator. But by the time I heard that audiobook on a solo road trip to Fort Wayne, Shallow Lad Deepens felt less surprising than the exponentially replicating mile markers on I-69. Hornby’s work is clever and engaging, and each book succeeds on its own terms. But it was time to read somebody else.\nMy literary exile finally ended during an annual visit to a favorite bookstore, a tradition that somehow survived the reading recession. A copy of Hornby’s State of the Union: A Marriage in Ten Parts was languishing on my nightstand, but I’d seen that couple resort to therapy in the television version, and it had failed to light a spark. Instead, I picked up a Frayn novel that took a troubled marriage narrative in an entirely different direction. The narrator of Headlong is a narcissistic don as bored with teaching the philosophy of Nominalism (the belief that there are no universals) as I was with my repetitive reading life. He is existentially rejuvenated by his delusion (or is it?) that his country neighbor unknowingly possesses a long-missing masterpiece by Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who quietly resisted the religious tyranny of Spain’s brutal 16th-century despot King Philip II. I began reading the book with enthusiasm. And put it down in intellectual exhaustion 20 minutes later. In better times before and after, I would have devoured Frayn’s frisky 344 pages like an airy apéritif. Instead, my atrophied attention span alternated between pathetically brief spurts of momentum and weeks of doomscrolling relapse. Yet curiosity about Professor Martin Clay’s snowballing descent into art-fueled madness kept inspiring a few more reps, a few more reps, a few more reps. Ten months later, Headlong was still on my nightstand. But the last 20 percent was so propulsive that I stayed up all night until I reached the conclusion.\nTHE TRICK OF IT AND JULIET, NAKED Three weeks ago, I wrote a review of Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child entitled “In Defense of Latter Morrison.” One critic in particular triggered my defense mechanism. Ron Charles, for 20 years the esteemed literary voice of the Washington Post, employed his prodigious linguistic powers to dispatch the book as “flat” and “clunky.” I didn’t recognize Morrison’s novel in his arch encapsulation, so on my Substack I characterized Charles as “breathtakingly disrespectful” to a “national treasure.” The next day, I spotted a singularly witty post on my Substack feed. It was a rejection of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land penned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Snorting gleefully as I seared a salmon filet, I noticed the writer’s name. Ron Charles. Attempting to bookmark the post with my unspatchulaed hand, I accidentally hit “Subscribe.” I am now an (unironically) enthusiastic member of Charles’s 34,000 + subscriber base. Turns out I’d levied a snarky grammar joke at an incisive wordsmith who is a national treasure in his own right. Worse, I did it on his new platform 100 days after he was laid off from his position as one of the nation’s few remaining newspaper book critics. That is an institution that has long been important to me as an appreciator of art.\nFrayn’s 1989 novella The Trick of It lampoons literary appraisers so impressed with their own pedantically intoned insights that they become blind to merit. Its narrator, Richard Dunnett, is a verbally precious English lit professor who meets, beds, and marries the novelist he specializes in. The constant conjugal interaction destroys the relationship between critic and writer. No longer the resident expert on his wife’s work, Richard becomes insecure, defensive, and controlling.\nA refusal even to consider sympathetic and constructive criticism, it seems to me, is a terrible vote of no confidence in oneself…. I have to give her the confidence to go forward. And I have to do it by shaking her confidence in where she is standing now. That’s the paradox which … is inherent in every teacher’s task, every critic’s role. Michael Frayn, The Trick of It\nRichard’s admiration for his wife’s craft devolves into a sulky rejection of fiction itself: “That\u0026rsquo;s what they do, these people,” he says of novelists. “They embroider, they improve on the truth \u0026ndash; they tell lies.” He tries to write his own novel (“any bloody fool can do it”) but eventually must concede that her gifts dwarf his own. For all his rambunctious wordplay, Richard’s erudition masks an underlying banality of artistic thought. He is the prototype of the Fraynian shallow don fetishizing high culture without genuine substance. Frayn’s depiction of Richard punching up at his wife, who is clearly the better writer, feels eerily relevant to my experience punching up at Charles for punching up at Morrison.\nHornby’s 2009 novel Juliet, Naked treads much of the same territory in a pop culture context. The Trick of It is about a professor who meets the author he teaches. Juliet, Naked is about a professor who meets the reclusive rock star he teaches. Unlike Frayn’s, Hornby’s pompous academic doesn’t become romantically entangled with the object of his fanboy obsession. Instead, his live-in girlfriend does. Both works mock the swollen pride obsessive fans and experts often feel in their own artistic interpretations. Both books win laughs by puncturing that pride. My impulse is to crack wise about the redemption that the rock star finds in his relationship with the professor’s ex, but it is a genuinely poignant resolution, and it is always easy to be glib.\nLoving art, high or low, is not the same thing as crafting one’s thoughts about art, and analyzing art is not the same thing as creating it. In the last two years alone, I’ve consumed 100 books. Artistic consumption does fuel one’s creative appetite, and now I try to write these essays to ensure I am intellectually engaged with the books. Hell, I write them to make sure I am intellectually engaged with life at all. For a chronic consumer and one-time wannabe creator, that is almost but not quite a Shallow Lad Deepens narrative.\nTouché, Hornby.\nThis essay is in the Booker category because Michael Frayn’s Headlong was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, and Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001.\n"},{"title":"Queen of the Risotto Night at Verdi’s","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-05-29-risotto-night/","date":"May 29, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Queen of the Risotto Night at Verdi’s I picked up Alexander Chee’s exhilaratingly over-the-top historical fiction melodrama The Queen of the Night to revel in 19th-century opera lore. I know I’m late to the party, but when the book dropped in 2016\u0026#9670;The Queen of the Night is released by Alexander Chee , I didn’t know a mezzosoprano from a heldentenor. It wasn’t until the pandemic years that the subject held much interest for me. My brother was once as opera-ignorant as I was but he’d become so fluent in bel canto and opera buffa that those sheltering in place with him were soon infected with a rapidly metastasizing cultural virus. Before 2020, I had never sat through a full-length opera. Six years later, I’ve seen almost all of the established canon via 24 live performances at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, three at the Met in New York, 19 at other regional theaters or concert halls, 34 in movie theaters, and at least 20 through streaming services and physical media. So let’s just say I came to Chee all in for thematic and narrative intersections with sung-through dramas from Aida to Zelmira. On the other hand, I did not come expecting the nuance of psychology, thought, and expression that is the hallmark of great literature. For the most part, The Queen of the Night aligns with my expectations. It is as self-indulgent as my reasons for reading it and as grand and silly as most 19th-century libretti. Still, there is a certain gravity to the book, derived from the way the broadly shifting fortunes of its heroine—from frontier orphan to kept woman to pampered superstar—reflect the broader condition of women in the historical period it explores.\nNot Just Opera This, I think, is the reason Chee exercises more restraint in his celebration of the operatic artform than I’d anticipated. For most of the novel, he plays hard-to-get with his target audience, teasingly doling out the operatic allusions here and there for roughly the first 400 of 549 pages. Only then does the heroine and narrator, soprano Lilliet Berne, land a breakthrough role in Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula that permits the author to rev up his operatic engines at last. Prior to that, his mode is that of a more traditional purveyor of historical fiction. Chee opens with a mouthwatering fanfic morsel: risotto night at the home of maestro Giuseppe Verdi. But Chee soon flashes back to her origins as a dutifully churched orphan girl raised on Iroquois land in Civil War-era Minnesota\u0026#9670;The Homestead Act is passed to provide land to American families like Lilliet\u0026#39;s . From there, she runs away and joins le cirque in Paris, voluntarily signs up for grisette duty, is purchased as a courtesan by a patriarchal villain known only as “the Tenor,” scores a gig as a servant to Empress Eugénie de Montijo during France’s Second Empire, and shacks up with a Chopin-esque composer of piano nocturnes during the ensuing Siege of Paris\u0026#9670;The end of the Siege of Paris . Not too long after that, she ascends at last to the pinnacle of the diva hierarchy.\nA Personal Venn Diagram The long opera-less swaths surprised me, but not as much as the way The Queen of the Night intersected with so many other books I’ve read or plan to read this year. This took me back to junior high, my brief but intense comic book period, when the most thrilling of all literary concepts was the Marvel/DC crossover: Superman meets Spider-Man! The X-Men tussle with the Teen Titans! The Queen of the Night has that kind of cross-pollinated energy. The depiction of Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire echoed an Émile Zola novel I’d just read (The Fortune of the Rougons) and another on my To Be Read list (Mysteries of the Court of Louis Napoleon). Additionally, Lilliet vacations in Baden-Baden, where she studies under Pauline Viardot-Garcia\u0026#9670;Pauline Viardot-Garcia trains opera singers in Baden-Baden and flirts with the likes of Brahms meets Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose Fathers and Sons sits on my TBR shelf, and German composer Johannes Brahms, the subject of a Jan Swafford biography I’m working my way through. At one point, I got confused about which book detailed an opera-writing brainstorming session between Brahms and Turgenev. (It was Swafford.) I also started to feel relief that opera characters die in such perfunctory abundance. The comic book characters died a lot too (Superman, Jean Grey, the Flash\u0026#9670;The Flash dies in Crisis on Infinite Earths issue 8. Yeah, yeah. ), but it always turned out to be a marketing gambit. At least opera corpses don’t pop back up after the stretta is over.\nFollowing the E19 Model Chee’s plot is sprawling and digressive, but it loosely follows the narrative structure that critic Conrad L. Osborne claimed was common to all but two operas in the “Extended Nineteenth Century” (that is, extended to include Mozart and Strauss). That structure, explained in Osborne’s massive critical tome Opera as Opera, is essentially this: a protagonist (usually male, but reversed here) who lacks the social standing she desires (a courtesan and royal servant rather than an opera star) falls obsessively in love with a reciprocating lover (the aforementioned composer) who occupies the social position (professional musician) she aspires to.\nOperas do not draw their artistic seriousness from their words but from their glorious music. Their union is opposed by high-ranking antagonists (the Empress and the Tenor) with romantic designs on the lovers, generating a love triangle (more of a quadrangle in this case). There is a clash, and one or both lovers die.\nFach as Destiny For obvious reasons, I won’t reveal how closely the novel maps to the E19 on this last point but suffice to say that Lilliet is haunted from the opening chapters by an oppressive sense of encroaching Fate. Chee is at his most clumsily melodramatic when he identifies this destiny as Lilliet’s “curse” and at his most arcanely clever when he associates it with her indelibly fixed type as a singer. This type is known in German opera lingo as a fach, a term that pinpoints a singer’s vocal characteristics at a more granular level than terms like “contralto” or “mezzo.” Lilliet defines fach as follows.\nIt is a singer’s fate, for it describes the singer’s range and the type of roles the singer will sing. Some soprano tones are associated with virtue, others with seduction, others with grief. If your voice is a collection of the highest notes, you are to play the good girl. If your voice reaches only to the near heights, you are the spurned one or the dishonored. A bit lower and you are the rival or the seductress, and still lower, the maid or matron…. Mine was a voice that sounded at first as if it did not have the capacity for high notes, until they emerged, surprising, with great force. A voice for expressing sorrow, fear, and despair. The tragic soprano is what I was called, also known as a Falcon.\nLilliet’s fate is determined as inescapably by society, class, and gender as by her fach. She spends the whole novel trying to free herself from constraints imposed by authority figures. As a tyke, Lilliet is prevented from realizing her staggering potential when her devout mother tries to curb her emerging pride by gagging her singing voice. In Europe, she voluntarily signs a sex worker registry to help a prostitute friend. On most pages, she is desperately plotting an escape from the contract that ties her to the doting but abusive Tenor. She escapes him and finds love with the composer, but her aristocratic mistress steps in and ships her back to servitude. Lilliet’s laundry list of socially degraded roles gives her an implausibly Zelig-like ubiquity in the salient events of the era, like the demise of the Second Empire\u0026#9670;The Third French Republic begins . But realism is not Chee’s priority, and he quietly employs her breadth of experience to establish her as a 19th century Everywoman. Lilliet is addressing more than just opera convention when she asks, “Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?” The question bears thematic weight when applied to women in general.\nCan’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Live Without \u0026lsquo;Em As a genre, opera alternates between gynolatry and misogyny. From the bel canto era on, sopranos have always been the unquestioned stars of the show. Early 19th century composers like Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti deployed coloratura sopranos like Fourth of July firework displays; the feminine arias were the dazzlingly virtuosic main event of the evening. Men could only win arias of equal power by literally emasculating themselves, as did the castrati to preserve their girlish youthful voices. Rossini was denigrated by critics just for assigning arias to bass voices at all. Yet for all that upper register idolatry, the female characters in operas were consistently and brutally victimized. “Dead women,” wrote Catherine Clément in her 1989 book Opera, or the Undoing of Women, “But no matter how hard I laugh there is always this constant: death by a man.” She proceeds to catalog opera’s female casualties: Nine knifings, three incinerations, two fatal jumpers, two consumptives, and so on. It is a crushing compilation, one that Lilliet knows well, and she consciously strives to stay off the list.\nL’Amour la Mort Death, and its equally momentous abstract partner, love, are the foundation upon which opera is built. Wagner united the two in the immortal compound word, Liebestod. In the novel, Chee points out that the juxtaposition is not unique to German opera: “L’amour, la mort,\u0026quot; Carmen\u0026#9670;Georges Bizet is devastated by the failure of Carmen, now perhaps the most popular opera sings \u0026ldquo;In the Habenera,\u0026rdquo; by turns gaily and seductively. Love, death. Love. Only in French do they rhyme.” This is what gives so many opera libretti their visceral emotional power and also what makes them sometimes feel overweening and gaudy. Operas do not draw their artistic seriousness from their words but from their glorious music. The music elevates the maudlin earnestness of operatic scripts to an intangible poetry of universal power. In emulating the overreach of opera, Chee harnesses some of that raw artistic heft, but he cannot reproduce it. His prose is skilled and sometimes ambitious, but it is not a substitute for the kinetic polyphony of a Rossini quartet or the blustery innovation of a Wagner interlude. To those untutored on opera’s finer points by their brothers, or any surrogate thereof, The Queen of the Night may read as pseudohistorical schlock. But to those ripe for the indulgence, it is a sustained high C.\n"},{"title":"In Defense of Latter Morrison","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-05-20-god-help-the-child/","date":"May 20, 2026","tags":null,"text":"In Defense of Latter Morrison  Henry: I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.\nDebbie: Death?\nHenry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.\nTom Stoppard, The Real Thing Toni Morrison’s “early stuff” occupies a stratum in world literature that is difficult for any writer to live up to. This week, The Guardian’s panel of 172 literary luminaries declared Morrison’s Beloved the second greatest novel in the artform’s history, placing her work above that of every fictionist who ever lived apart from George Eliot. Hardly surprising, then, that Morrison received fewer adulatory notices at 84 years of age than she did at her zenith. Still, I can’t help feeling almost personally affronted by the myopic ingratitude of some of the elite critics tasked with assessing God Help the Child, the eleventh and final novel (she was working on a twelfth when she died) by this generation’s literary doyenne. Kara Walker of The New York Times compared it to reality TV and dismissed it as a “curt fable” aimed at provoking “outrage.” The Independent complained Morrison’s characters were “prototypes for an idea rather than real people.” In The Washington Post, Ron Charles was by turns tone-deaf (“the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma, throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling”) and snarky (“If thoughts like that strike you as both fresh and somehow eternal, you’re in luck: There are a lot of them here”), at one point helpfully pointing out that “You not the woman I want” was “a jarring bit of Ebonics” in the mouth of a character with academic bona fides, as though America’s most celebrated poet of everyday speech had accidentally misplaced a helping verb. Charles managed one salient insight in dispensing his breathtakingly disrespectful review: “Because her latest work offers curious reflections of where she began in The Bluest Eye, it’s tempting to read God Help the Child as a capstone of her jeweled career.” In context, this observation was merely another opportunity to insult a national treasure, but he was right about the shared genetic tissue tying Morrison’s 1970 debut, about a Black child who longs to look whiter, to her 2015 swansong, about a dark-skinned woman who outlives the consensus that Black is ugly.\nThe relationship between the two novels has frequently been noted, but a 2015 Essence interview with Morrison confirms my suspicion that it runs deeper than a shared interest in colorism within the Black community. “[Racism today] is certainly not like The Bluest Eye,” Morrison said. “God Help the Child is set in 2007 or 2008, so it’s quite different. I felt I could hang on to that; I could write about those changes.” Functionally speaking, God Help the Child is an unofficial sequel to The Bluest Eye. It consciously revisits the racial trauma Morrison symbolized in the paternal sexual abuse of young Pecola Breedlove in 1940s Lorain, Ohio and examines the continued legacy of that trauma in the adult lives of twenty-first-century Black New Yorkers. God Help the Child may not always exhibit the formal inventiveness, heightened lyrical expressiveness, and raw power of the slim volume that catapulted Morrison from a publishing career to the pinnacle of world literature. But to understate the latter novel’s commentary on its seminal predecessor is to miss the source of its own substantial emotional clout.\nPHYSICAL BEAUTY The masterstroke of The Bluest Eye was the identification of societal conceptions of beauty as a subtle enforcement mechanism employed by racist white America. Yes, more conventional applications of racial violence are invoked in that book: white men forcing Pecola’s parents to perform for their own sexual gratification, a white gynecologist comparing Black mothers to horses, a candystore clerk shrinking from Pecola’s inadvertent touch during a financial transaction. But the greatest violence in Morrison’s debut is perpetrated by the impossible standard of white beauty. Pecola’s mother trying to emulate Jean Harlow’s movie star hair. A “mulatto girl” in a Claudette Colbert movie hating her mother for her blackness. The insidious consensus that “a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” This depiction of the weaponization of physical beauty by white America had personal magnitude for Morrison. The book is set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio, the precise time and place the author occupied as a ten year old.\nMorrison modeled beauty in action by crafting radiant prose of searing insight through shifting vernacular registers. God Help the Child demonstrates the legacy of that trauma in 2007 New York City. The characters are adults now. They are successful in ways that Pecola could only dream of: protagonist Bride is a cosmetics executive and her lover Booker (a name with as much explicit significance as “Breedlove”) is an intellectual with a graduate education. Yet God Help the Child is not an unmitigated Huxtable-esque success story. Every character in it struggles to overcome some form of childhood abuse. The unflinching focus on the permanent wounds of child abuse is reflected in Morrison’s preferred title, rejected by Alfred Knopf: The Wrath of Children.\nIn this context of trauma-haunted racial progress, Morrison asserts that the contemporary fetishization of Black beauty can be almost as unhealthy as the denial of it. The opening chapters retread the Pecola issues: its rotating first-person narration begins with Bride’s mother, Sweetness, confessing that she resisted physical contact with her infant daughter out of revulsion for her skin color. But when Bride comes of age, the world showers her with praise for her physical appearance. An especially effective moment in the novel is the way a white boyfriend attempts to act out Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a 1967 film about a white daughter who teaches her parents to tolerate her boyfriend Sidney Poitier, for reasons that have nothing to do with racial justice:\nI remember one date in particular, a medical student who persuaded me to join him on a visit to his parents’ house up north. As soon as he introduced me it was clear I was there to terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept repeating. “Look at her, Mother? Dad?” His eyes were gleaming with malice. But they outclassed him with their warmth—however faked—and charm. His disappointment was obvious, his anger thinly repressed. His parents even drove me to the train stop, probably so I wouldn’t have to put up with his failed racist joke on them. I was relieved, even knowing what the mother did with my used teacup.\nThe boyfriend wants to weaponize societal antiracist frown power just to make his parents feel uncomfortable. Morrison doesn’t trust that sort of performative adulation of Blackness any more than she trusts Bride’s dependence on it: “That’s all she’s invested in,” Morrison explained to Essence. “She’s not complete. Either one of those things is destructive: Using it as a boost or being destroyed by it.” Of course, beauty has been the tool of the oppressor against women in general, and not just Black Americans, for centuries. Morrison is writing about the keen blade’s underside hidden in every introduction of “my accomplished son and beautiful daughters” or “the lovely Miss So-and-So.”\nROMANTIC LOVE In both The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child, Morrison couples the idolatrous worship of physical beauty with that of romantic love. In one scene, little Pecola reflects on the men who are always loving and leaving women in popular music. “How do you do that?” she asks. “I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” Her mother, Pauline, the one exposing Pecola to old love songs, has long associated beauty and love in an unhealthy way: “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”\nFor its part, God Help the Child portrays the way that an obsessive romantic love based on attraction crumbles into tragedy when the beloved leaves. Bride is so devastated by Booker’s sudden exit that her body literally begins to change: “Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.” She becomes the battered victim who accused an innocent woman of child abuse in order to win her colorist mother’s love. Put another way, the proud, grown-up Bride regresses back into Pecola’s degraded form. In his review, Ron Charles saw the narrative risk Morrison was taking with this sole departure into Magical Realism and pounced, brutishly:\nIn the semi-magical worlds Morrison has created before, such surreal touches seem both evocative and weirdly natural, but in the flat language of this novel, they\u0026rsquo;re clunky symbols, needlessly explained.\nIn my view, though, that’s a lazy reading. It’s easy to dismiss such a sore-thumb stylistic move, but Morrison’s boldness pays off precisely because it is isolated. It gives her otherwise grounded prose permission to sing.\nSELF-LOVE Morrison’s antidote to these societal afflictions lies in expanded notions of beauty and love. In her introduction to a 2007 edition of The Bluest Eye, Morrison recalled an elementary school classmate who longed for blue eyes, the inspiration for that novel.\nUntil that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it… In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.\nThis radical notion of beauty as action as opposed to inherited appearance is played out in Bride’s heroic response to her own pain. Instead of crumbling like Pecola, she takes arms against her sea of troubles, embarking on a quest to find Booker and force him to account for his decision to abandon her. The nuance in this goal is crucial. Bride insists on a respectful separation, not reconciliation at any cost. Revisiting The Bluest Eye in a contemporary context gives Morrison permission to begin writing a healing process that eluded those characters in the first novel. Pecola never moves from self-contempt to self-acceptance. She bears her father’s stillborn child and never recovers. But the news in God Help the Child that Bride and Booker will bear a child of their own signals that that self-love is finally branching into shared love. Bride has learned the lesson Sethe struggles to learn in Beloved: “you your own best thing.”\nBEAUTY IS SOMETHING ONE CAN DO Throughout her glorious canon, Morrison never settled for merely depicting beauty as action. She modeled it in the act of crafting radiant prose of searing insight through shifting vernacular registers. The consistently generous moral wisdom of Morrison’s writing recalls that of her partner at the top of the Guardian’s list: Mary Ann Evans, who defied a world that thought her ugly by becoming George Eliot. In a sense, the Guardian’s selection of Middlemarch and Beloved as English-language literary exemplars is a logical pairing. Eliot’s novel championed a woman of conventional beauty but exceptional moral clarity. Morrison’s championed a woman seen as ugly who fought ferociously for love. Bride earns a place in that tradition.\nMorrison never names the year God Help the Child takes place, but she told Essence that it is 2007-2008. In other words, the year that Barack Obama’s message of change temporarily filled the Black community with hope for healing and self-acceptance on a national scale. Today, progress from Pecola’s 1941 to Bride’s 2008 is under assault on the pretense that national racial healing has already been accomplished. The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child provide reminders that abuse leaves wounds that can only be healed by beauty in action.\n"},{"title":"Pushkin Versus Tchaikovsky","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-05-13-onegin/","date":"May 13, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Pushkin Versus Tchaikovsky In March 2026, a grizzled, toothless artform somewhere in a dank corner of cultural oblivion gazed on with resentment. Opera was enjoying its best month since Maria Callas hung up her faltering legato. Heartthrob Timothée Chalamet’s rudely phrased statement of the obvious–that opera (and its sometime stage partner, ballet) were fighting for their lives—proved marketing gold for opera houses the world over. Talk-show hosts seemed more interested in guests’ thoughts on opera than on their blockbuster films. Oscar host Conan O’Brien even opened Hollywood’s Super Bowl by treating 17.9 million viewers to a joke about the ferocity of the opera community. And, oh yeah, the Metropolitan Opera’s new Tristan und Isolde sold nearly every ticket. But as opera and ballet basked in the resplendent glory of public insult, the toothless artform shook its head in futile disgust. “You think opera is dated?” it sneered. “Has Timothée even heard of the verse novel?”\nTo the extent that Americans have heard of Eugene Onegin, we are more likely to have direct experience with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1879 opera than Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 novel, a Russian-language compilation of 389 rhyming fourteen-line stanzas. To make a very sketchy comparison: about 74,000 literature enthusiasts have rated the book on Goodreads each year since that site was founded in 2007. (That’s about 8% of Anna Karenina’s following there.) Contrast that with the estimated 112,000 butts that sat through Tchaikovsky’s version at the world’s largest opera house, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, during the same period, and you have some conception of the disparity here. Of course, that comparison must scale quite differently in Russia, where Onegin is often mandatory for high schoolers. I’ve heard that Pushkin outranks Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov as Russia’s most revered 19th century author, but I never gave any consideration to reading his masterpiece until the Met’s latest Eugene Onegin simulcast hit my favorite multiplex two months after opera won the Chalamet lottery. The moment seemed right to pit Pushkin against Tchaikovsky in a highbrow fight club with my highly unqualified self acting as sole judge, jury, umpire, and referee. Onegin versus Onegin, and may the best obsolete artform win. I’d save my verdict for the end, but this is where I usually put the thesis, so here it is: Tchaikovsky’s austere, wrenching orchestral meditation on the terrifying winner-takes-all stakes of romantic disclosure is affecting and melodious, but it is a pale reflection of Pushkin’s profound and dizzyingly clever romantic satire.\nWhat the Opera Gets Right While the overall outcome of the competition was not particularly close, composer/librettist Tchaikovsky scores high marks for distilling the most opera-friendly components of Pushkin’s verbally dexterous novel into the most celebrated Russian vocal drama of all time. The core storyline lends itself comfortably to the synopsis page of an opera program. A sheltered country lass falls head over heels for the new landlord, a handsome newcomer fluent in showy urban erudition. She earnestly pledges her soul to him in a letter tailor-made for a killer first act aria, one that earned soprano Asmik Grigorian an ovation I timed at 46 seconds of the Met’s 2026 broadcast. When the solo branches into a duet, Onegin is impressed enough by Tatyana’s ardent missive to hold her at arm’s length (“I love you like a loving brother”) rather than notch another easy conquest. But he is not impressed enough to resist flirting casually with her sister in a showstopping ball scene that engages the chorus and affords the composer an irresistible mazurka moment. Act two darkens the tone with a duel to the death between Onegin and the sister’s fiancé, which alters the protagonist’s cavalier relationship with life. Tatyana marries a powerful politician; he drifts aimlessly in a balletic montage. Soon he is writing her a hopeless love letter. Just like Tristan—and every other grand opera—this masterwork thrives on Liebestod, love and death. These existential forces are as predictable in opera as they are in life, and nearly as powerful. In fact, the composer is at his best when the poet is at his most banal. Exhibit A is “Song of the Girls,” which wastes a page of Pushkin on bathetic balladry but soaks Tchaikovsky’s stage in bucolic beauty. As in the rest of the 150-minute musical drama, the maestro isn’t so much energized by Pushkin’s originality as inspired by his universality.\nTchaikovsky was temperamentally unsuited to the task of musically conveying Pushkin’s lighthearted verbal fireworks. (Though, to be fair, we all know what that man could do with an orchestra and some fireworks.) FORM DICTATES CONTENT Just as Tchaikovsky extracts from the lovers’ tale that which best suits his chosen form, Pushkin uses it to elevate the verse novel to new heights. He takes the form that Lord Byron had popularized in the preceding decades—the digressive and colorful narrator, the use of meter and rhyme to underscore ironic wit—and makes it his own. According to those who’ve read it in Russian, Onegin is no mere feat of mimicry. Pushkin consciously strove to out-Byron Byron with an eye-popping discipline of form that would have felt like a size six corset to his flamboyant forerunner. Pushkin tied one metaphorical hand behind his back by inventing a supersonnet with fewer syllables (iambic tetrameter not pentameter) and stricter rhymes.\nFINDING THE RIGHT TOUR GUIDE Or so says the introduction to Yevgeny Onegin, the 2016 translation by Pushkin expert Anthony Briggs I chose for its plain-to-the-point-of-anachronism words and playful 21st-century wit. The Russian original has often been called untranslatable due to the reputed difficulty of applying Pushkin’s restraints to English. Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Spalding was the first to try in 1881, and his pseudo-Shakespearean style is impressively lithe but dated in the way that any Gutenberg.org edition inevitably must be. Legendary novelist Vladimir Nabokov employed the opposite strategy. He waved the white flag to Pushkin’s brilliance and discarded rhyme altogether in favor of literal translation. It was a controversial call, one that so galled American critic Edmund Wilson that the two writers (and former friends) became embroiled in the analog equivalent of a social media flame war. But Nabokov could afford his deference to Pushkin; he could read Russian. I wanted a Pushkin proxy with language as fresh to me as Pushkin’s was to the Russians who started reading his serial entries in 1825. Briggs can be a bit Anglophilic for my Yank ear. Where Spalding described Onegin as “Pedantic although scholar like,” Briggs calls him “an enlightened clever dick.” To a Brit, that means “clever in a way that is annoying” (Merriam-Webster). It comes across more harshly to an American, but “dick” is not an inappropriate word here for a seducer who conjures tears on cue. Briggs’s breezy slanginess worked for me throughout because it was also authentically witty. My favorite example comes in Pushkin’s condemnation of the barbaric tradition of dueling with pistols. Nabokov ends the concluding couplet thus: “but to dispatch him to his fathers will hardly pleasant be for you.” Spalding is characteristically pretty: “But home his body to dispatch / Can scarce in sweetness be a match.” But, to my ear, Briggs wins: “But sending him to kingdom come / Surely you won’t find that much fun.”\nWHY SO SERIOUS? That should give an operagoer unfamiliar with Pushkin an idea of what Tchaikovsky conceals with hushed solemnity. The Russian symphonist had a tragic sensibility; he was temperamentally unsuited to the task of musically conveying Pushkin’s lighthearted verbal fireworks. (Though, to be fair, we all know what that man could do with an orchestra and some fireworks.) It’s sad that the 37-year-old Gioachino Rossini retired in 1829, just four years before Pushkin finished *Yevgeny Onegin. His coloratua sopranos could have married Pushkin’s complex internal rhymes to ornamental showboating, and his librettists knew comic potential when they saw it. Think of what Lorenzo Da Ponte did with the comic architecture of Beaumarchais. By contrast, Tchaikovsky was too staid even to depict Onegin’s famous pedantry. Pushkin’s Yevgeny “knew by heart—or sort of did—the odd line from the Aeneid.” Tchaikovsky’s Eugene is more of a generically ill-behaved frat boy who doesn’t know how to process his own feelings.\nIT’S A SHAME TO WASTE A GOOD NARRATOR The greatest casualty in Tchaikovsky’s version is the ironic wisdom of Pushkin’s narrator. The libretto holds fast to the writerly “show don’t tell” dictum, and that pays some dividends. Tchaikovsky is unwilling to risk losing the audience’s sympathies by adapting Pushkin’s pedantic thematic dissertations. But in the hands of a wit like Pushkin, great risk reaps greater rewards. His narrator isn’t merely omniscient; he is a fully realized character. He feels, he bristles, he defends. And then he brings the whole narrative to a screeching halt just to process the horrifying realization that he has turned thirty! In Chapter 4 Stanza 22, the narrator’s lessons should remind us of self-help gurus like Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley. Instead, Pushkin delivers burnished verse that converts cliché to lived-in sagacity:\nWho shall be loved? Who can be trusted?\nWith whom do we risk no betrayal? Who weighs our words and deeds, adjusted\nObligingly, to our own scale? …\nWho sees our sins as “not too bad”? Who will not bore us, drive us mad? Stop your vain search for lost illusions; You’re wasting all your strength and health. The one to love is you yourself. For me, this brought back tactile memories of my twenties, when everything on God’s green earth could be distilled to Finding a Mate. “Who will not bore us, drive us mad?” What drove me mad were the Stakes. They made me reprehensibly clingy and paralyzed. Onegin, for all his seductive swagger, proves just as terrified of being alone as I was. When he discovers that Tatyana’s obsessive crush has contracted into powerful self-love, his emotional dissolution reminds me of a line from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing: “You don’t really think that if Henry caught me out with a lover, he’d sit around being witty…? Like hell he would. He’d come apart like a pick-a-sticks. His sentence structure would go to pot, closely followed by his sphincter.” Tchaikovsky’s story is emotionally resonant, but it could have had that kind of nuanced insight.\nYOU DO YOU, PYOTR ILYICH. Reading Pushkin convinced me that his verse novel was superior to Tchaikovsky’s reflection on botched human connection, securing a triumphant chortle from the long-forgotten verse novel. Still, as I prepared this essay, that conviction began to shift into gratitude for both works. Yes, a different operatic creator could have captured more of Pushkin’s essence. He could have brought flesh to the imaginative bones that all novels inevitably are and profited from Pushkin’s defiant need to tell and show. The narrator could have been a character integrated into the narrative like those we find in musical theater (Hamilton’s Aaron Burr, Into the Woods’s fourth-wall violator, (The Drowsy Chaperone’s nostalgic Man in Chair). But then we wouldn’t have Tchaikovsky’s aching elegance. We’d lose the brooding sonority of Kasper Holten’s 2013 Covent Garden production, in which a middle-aged Tatyana bared her soul to a diffident middle-aged Onegin while her youthful self hovered above them, silently cradling unending hurt. Tchaikovsky could have tried to be a better Pushkin, but he would have come tumbling from the highwire. In retrospect, I’m glad we have both Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, not Pushkin plus Tchaikovsky in clown shoes.\n"},{"title":"Émile Zola Survives the Allure of the DNF Sirens","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-04-27-rougons/","date":"April 27, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Émile Zola Survives the Allure of the DNF Sirens DNF Sirens About halfway into The Fortune of the Rougons, I started to hear the enticing honeyed song of the DNF sirens.\n“Come, steadfast reader, weary from rowing through enervating waves of exposition. Come and frolic in our melodious meadows!”\nMost read this novel because they wish to cast off on Émile Zola’s epic Rougon-Macquart series from its entry point. Not me. I had no intention of reading all twenty volumes. I just thought the period of French history covered by the book was too eminently dramatizable not to yield thundering historical fiction. In 1851, Napoleon Bonaparte’s intransigently ambitious nephew, the duly elected President of France, sought to circumvent the Second Republic’s term limits with his third coup d’etat. How could a writer of Zola’s reputation write a tedious book about France’s “Great Ogre”? If I could just paddle through a few more weedy generations of Rougons, the narrative was bound to gain momentum.\n“Life is short! Your TBR is long!”\nBut passage through Rougon family history only led to a confluence with Macquart family history. I had only myself to blame. I’d known from the outset that Rougons was reputed to be less dramatically satisfying than later Zola, but experience had trained me to distrust such warnings. I’d braved Honore de Balzac’s overlooked panegyric to governmental budget cuts, The Bureaucrats. I’d forded Henrik Ibsen’s 10-act Roman drama Emperor and Galilean. I’d traversed George Eliot’s oft maligned historical novel Romola. Lesser efforts by master authors are usually rewarding, particularly if the topic is interesting. But in chapter five, Zola’s teenaged lovers kept flirting and swimming and swimming and flirting, and that song was so seductive.\n“Abandon ship and dock here amid the rotting piles of unread pages!”\nApparently, Zola’s emulation of Balzac’s 91-volume Comédie Humaine series mimicked his hero’s mind-numbing backstories and Parisian geographical digressions but not his penetrating psychological nuance. For a momentary escape, I clicked the “BuyBack” button on ThriftBooks. They were willing to pay me 81 cents for my copy of Zola’s Germinal. A click of the mouse and I could DNF Émile’s supposed masterpiece without ever having to read a word of it.\nRiveting fiction doesn’t dwell in meticulously outlined family trees rationed from a distance into summary sentences. Yet as I scanned line after line of Zola’s stultifying prose, a glinting sentence caught my bleary eye. “Leaning back in the mayor’s armchair, steeped in the atmosphere of officialdom that pervaded the room, Pierre Rougon bowed to right and left, like a pretender to throne whom a coup d’etat is about to transform into an emperor.” Hold up, that was, wait, was that – funny? Gradually, the slack pace was intensifying. The bird’s-eye overview of history was swooping down into real-time specificity. The sketchily outlined characters were sharpening, if not into Balzacian humanity, at least into layered archetypes. The final pages did not succeed in “solving the dual problem of temperament and environment,” as Zola promised in his self-aggrandizing preface. But they evolved into genuinely engaging, “ripped-from-the-headlines” political satire that swaggered with biting, lived-in authority.\nNATURALISM The preface that precedes The Fortune of the Rougons teeters with the near-manic energy of a 28-year-old dreamer with far more ambition than discipline. “I shall attempt to discover and trace the thread that leads mathematically from one person to another,” Zola vows with an earnest solemnity that makes me want to proudly affix his doodling to my Frigidaire. He thought of himself as a scientist dissecting the hereditary and environmental factors that prefigured an individual’s behavior from birth. He was less invested in crafting a coherent and absorbing work of fiction than he was in founding a literary movement, which he called Naturalism to distinguish it from Realism in the Balzacian tradition. Balzac, the so-called Master Realist, wrote about the sociopolitical machinations of everyday people during the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, and Second Republic eras that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Zola, too, wished to focus on ordinary people, but he believed behavior was generated by larger forces than mere individual personality. Fortune was supposed to examine the way class and biology influenced the self-serving political positioning of Pierre and Félicité Rougon and their immediate and extended family.\nEXPLOITING HISTORY But if the overweening preface stipulates biological determinism as the novel’s raison d’être, the novel itself is sidetracked by the impulse to comment on unfolding historical events. The preface construes those disparate aims as compatible and interrelated. Louis Napoleon’s 1851 power grab was meant to be a perfect illustration of Zola’s Darwinian hypothesis. But looking back at the preface, I was struck by his giddy response to the regime’s eventual dissolution in 1870:\nFor three years I had been collecting the documents I needed for this great project, and I had even completed the present volume when the fall of the Bonapartes, which I needed artistically and always saw as the logical conclusion to my story, without daring to hope that it would happen so quickly, suddenly gave me the terrible but necessary denouement for my work. My scheme is now complete. Émile Zola, Preface to The Fortune of the Rougons\nThe fall of the Bonapartes is beyond the scope of the novel that Zola was introducing, but his description of it in the preface reveals that breaking news was by this point inextricable in his mind from his burgeoning literary project. A fierce supporter of the Republic, Zola had good reason to exult in the Great Ogre’s demise. But The Fortune of the Rougons exhibits a similar relish in the dramatic possibilities of the 1851 coup. Zola reads the headlines and can’t believe his luck. France is falling apart at the seams; this is a superb development for his novel! He is like a comedian cashing in on the comic insipidity of his nation’s leaders. In this way, Zola is just like Pierre and Félicité: he is exploiting national instability for professional gain.\nIDEAS IN DRAMA I am in no position to criticize Zola’s opportunism: his gain as a storyteller is my gain as a reader. The more Zola tries to explore his pet theories about behavioral tendencies visited from father unto son, the thicker his narrative molasses becomes. Riveting fiction doesn’t dwell in meticulously outlined family trees rationed from a distance into summary sentences. It feeds off the pulsating progressions of the here and now, the ceaselessly fascinating interplay of intention and obstacle. Grand-scale causes grow dull without attention to microscale effects. Imagine Leo Tolstoy cramming War and Peace into Fortune’s 293 pages. Rookie blunder. Zola gets away with it only because his small-town reflection of national tragedy blasts through his intellectual interests like dynamite.\nZola also illustrates this principle when he expiates his own grief at the loss of the Republic by patiently rendering a doomed incipient romance. In the first chapter, Silvère (17-year-old son of Macquarts) and Miette (13-year-old daughter of Rougons) both participate in and symbolize the fight for the Republic. Just three years before the novel opens, the French voter rolls had ballooned from 200,000 to nine million. Zola personifies the heady optimism of that period as a tentative puppy love, eschewing political oration for nostalgic depictions of first kisses stolen in public squares. His tender patience in the opening sequence lends emotional power to the mutual demise of lovers and Republic as the novel draws to a close. Here, because they are genuinely interrelated, big ideas augment individual drama and vice versa.\nSATIRE WINS However, the big ideas that drive The Fortune of the Rougons are not the notions of family determinism that Zola initially wanted to put under the microscope. Zola wanted to be a Francis Galton, Darwin’s eugenicist cousin, expounding the dominance of nature over nurture. But Galton’s theories have not aged well. In contrast, Zola’s portrayal of justice sacrificed on the altar of bourgeois success is more relevant than ever. What finally silenced my DNF sirens was not Zola’s notion that character is passed through the bloodline but his visceral portrait of weak character reaping bloodshed.\n"},{"title":"Henrik Ibsen and the Two Christianities","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-04-21-emperor-galilean/","date":"April 21, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Henrik Ibsen and the Two Christianities GALILEAN When I read multiple books at once, I usually try to keep them firmly segregated by genre and topic. I like to minimize the likelihood that the audio book I’m listening to at breakfast bleeds into the mental space occupied by the novel I page through at night. But even with the most disparate pairings, there are transcendent moments of mutual illumination. In my evening read, Henrik Ibsen’s rarely produced 1873 historical drama Emperor and Galilean, the spiritually tormented heir to the Roman throne, Julian, was wrestling with contradictions in the message of his kingdom’s reigning deity:\nEverything I’ve ever done, Christ has been there, all the time, judging, commanding, the poisoned hypocrisy of the words themselves. Thou shalt not. Words that crush life…. When my spirit, starved of beauty, dreamt of the ancient world, Christ told me to look only at His one hard truth. Thou shalt not. When I felt the natural sweet yearnings of the flesh, Christ, the lord of self-denial, terrified me into chastity. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not! Everything human, everything beautiful, forbidden. With Him, to live fully is to die. To love as we can and to hate as we must, both are sinful. And why? Julian in Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean\nThe next morning, essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan\u0026rsquo;s collection Pulphead jumped its boundaries to directly reply to Julian’s Christ-haunted tirade.\n[Jesus] was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said…. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile, and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him. Why should he vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species? Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays\u0026gt;\nHow could the omnipotent judge vexing Julian be the same man as Sullivan’s power-averse humanitarian? Ibsen and Sullivan were both grappling with the inherent tension between the two Christianities, one focused on the tolerant humility of the “Carpenter’s son,” as Julian calls him, and the other fixated on his elevation to the strata of ultimate power. The historical Emperor Julian (331- 363) tried to halt the growth of this second Christianity by restoring the polytheistic paganism of his forefathers. In Ibsen’s telling, however, Julian’s only alternative to the oxymoronic concept of a “Christian Empire” is to place his own conflicted, vacillating self at the head of another bullying theocracy.\nEMPEROR Ibsen said in an 1873 letter that Emperor and Galilean, which contained “more of my own spiritual experience than I care to acknowledge to the public,” portrayed “a struggle between two irreconcilable powers.” The letter does not define these powers, but a line from William Archer’s 1907 English translation of the play clarifies Ibsen’s meaning by repeating his terminology. In the scene containing the “Thou Shalt Not” monologue quoted above, Julian’s pagan spiritual advisor Maximus confronts the aspiring leader with a stark choice between submitting to oppressive Christian purity and employing political power in the pursuit of happiness. “Emperor or Galilean;—that is the alternative. Be a thrall under the terror, or monarch in the land of sunshine and gladness!” declares Maximus. “You cannot will contradictions; and yet that is what you would fain do. You try to unite what cannot be united,—to reconcile two irreconcilables.” (The emphasis is mine.) The edition I read, a streamlined 2011 National Theatre adaptation by Ben Power that distills Ibsen’s pedantic monologues into brisk action-oriented dialogue, states this line more directly: “Live … under Christ’s terror and judgement or rule a world of light! Emperor, or Galilean, that’s your choice.” Either way, Maximus is telling Julian, why wallow in spiritual resentment when you are uniquely positioned to be the change you wish to see in the world?\nPAGANISM Elsewhere in the play, Maximus frames this choice as trifold, suggesting that Julian offer an alternative not only to the austerity of Christianity but also to the emptiness of hedonism, which Ibsen associates with the pagan beliefs embraced by the historical Julian. Ibsen betrays his cultural biases by persistently couching his discussion of Hellenistic paganism in Biblical terms. For example, take this exchange between the young Julian and Gregory of Naziansus, a classmate who later became Bishop of Constantinople:\nGREGORY. Beautiful things were written about pagan sin, but it was not beautiful.\nJULIAN. Wasn’t Socrates beautiful in the Symposium? What about Achilles? Heracles? Odysseus!\nGREGORY. Poetry! You mistake poetry for reality.\nJULIAN. Then look at our Scriptures. There was beauty in Eden and we called it sin. There was beauty in Sodom and Gomorrah and we said it was so ugly that God was forced to destroy it. That’s our truth. Our truth is the enemy of beauty.\nHenrik Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean After a few perfunctory allusions to antiquity, Ibsen retreats to more comfortable terrain for a Norwegian raised in the Lutheran church.\nIn the end, Julian’s ambitions of establishing a utopian third kingdom prove to be just as impracticable as those of the second Christianity. Despite Ibsen’s misgivings about that tradition, which he explored in his 1886 play about the apostate pastor Rosmersholm, the dramatist can’t bring himself to endorse its replacement by paganism. William Archer suggests as much in his introduction to the play:\nThe secret of Julian’s failure lay in the hopeless inferiority of the religion he championed to the religion he attacked. That religion, with all its corruptions, came to seem a necessary stage in the evolution of humanity; and the poet asked himself, perhaps, whether he, any more than Julian, had even now a more practical substitute to offer in its place. William Archer, Emperor and Galilean\nTHIRD WAY So, Ibsen has the pagan prophet Maximus advocate for the development of a third kingdom. “The first is the kingdom born of sin, in the garden, on the tree of knowledge,” explains Maximus. “The second is the kingdom born of death, on the hill, on the tree of the cross.” Julian is visited by mystical representatives of these kingdoms, who turn out to be Cain, the murderous brother from the Old Testament, and Judas, the traitorous apostle from the New Testament. Maximus wants Julian to use his power to provide a third way.\nThis vision was an expression of Ibsen’s Hegelian optimism (it reflects Hegel’s idea that history is refined by synthesizing thesis and antithesis), but it was opaque enough to result in chilling misinterpretations. Historian Stephen F. Sage argues that Ibsen’s vision for Julian’s third kingdom, which translates to “Third Reich” in German, inspired another disturbing vision of Christian conquest: that of Adolf Hitler. “What Christianity wrote against Julian is the same drivel as the stuff the Jews pour forth about us,” said Hitler in a dinnertime chat reported in Sage’s Ibsen and Hitler. “While the writings of Julian are the pure truth.” Hitler’s theological thinking is unsurprisingly muddled, but his approval of Julian’s vision remains a caution for those who would impose Christ’s bottom-up ethic from the top down.\nIn any case, Ibsen’s Julian is too weak and insecure to realize his lofty vision. In the first section of Power’s condensed four-part structure (Ibsen’s epic was originally divided into two five-act plays), Julian is a devout Christian tortured by paralyzing doubts. He longs to escape to Athens, where he would defend Christ in the “lion’s den” of secular academia. He gets his wish in the second part, but Julian the scholar is reportedly more interested in Dionysian revelry than his studies. The last two parts detail his gradual political ascension from soldier to Caesar to Emperor.\nIn the end, Julian’s ambitions of establishing a utopian third kingdom prove to be just as impracticable as those of the second Christianity. Julian initially promises to institute liberal reforms to the religious state (“Under my rule, there will be freedom of worship for all citizens of the Empire”). But he grows jealous of the citizenry’s continued devotion to Christ, persecutes believers mercilessly, and is consequently assassinated. Julian wants to transcend the judgmental “Thou Shalt Not” of Christianity, but having acquired the power to do so, Christ’s demand that “anyone with power renounce it”—as quoted by Sullivan from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas—becomes a threat. In one scene, Julian describes a recurring dream:\nWhat is victory? When Christ still reigns as the king in human hearts. I’ve been dreaming about Him, the same vision over and over. In my dream, I conquer the whole world, erase all memory of the Galilean… But then a procession passes me on this other world. At its head are soldiers and priests, weeping women following. And in the middle of the crowd walks the Galilean, fully alive, a cross on His back. I shout to Him, ask Him where He’s going. He turned to me, smiles, and says, ‘To the place of the skull.’ Maximus, what if His death on this planet was just one amongst many? Defeating Him on Earth is meaningless if He keeps on suffering, dying and conquering again and again from one world to the next? Then He rules the whole universe and my efforts count for nothing. Emperor Julian in Emperor and Galilean\nEmpires must be built, defended, and maintained at sword-point. Religions are unenforceable. As soon as they are enforced, they lose their moral authority and become monstrous.\n"},{"title":"Defying the Caveman Brain \u0026ldquo;After Dark\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-04-15-after-dark/","date":"April 15, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Defying the Caveman Brain \"After Dark\" “When it’s dark, it really makes you tired, doesn’t it?”\n“That’s when everybody’s supposed to be asleep,” Takahashi says. “Historically speaking, it’s quite a recent development that human beings have felt easy about going out after dark. It used to be after the sun set, people would just crawl into their caves and protect themselves. Our internal clocks are still set for us to sleep after the sun goes down.”\nHaruki Murakami, After Dark Like a lot of sheltered post-adolescents, I first trespassed on those forbidden hours during my college years. This was a function of the stark, light-switch change in my mother’s parenting philosophy the instant I matriculated to a tertiary institution. “If you were away at school, I wouldn’t know what you were up to after I go to bed,” shrugged the permissive alien who had possessed my mother’s body. Overnight, she’d transformed from the most protective, curfew-wielding parent in my high school social circle to the most nonchalantly hands-off. Her insistence on providing a prompt parental escort from every high school party at 10:30 spoiled my first evening of drinking games shortly after it commenced. “I feel like I let you down,” apologized my magnanimous host as I simultaneously searched for my shoes and checked my breath for traces of tequila. “This clearly isn’t what you wanted to do.” My memories of the wee small hours immediately after she unlocked their gates are vivid. The contrast between the boisterous urban nightclubs and the silent suburban streets. The illusory IQ escalation that enlivens 3AM philosophical discourse. The heavy morning-after fatigue that tints the memory of last night’s energy with disproportionate nostalgia. “I was so cool then,” muttered a friend at dawn when reminded of something she’d said the evening before.\nHITTING STRIDE IN MIDDLE AGE After Dark is Haruki Murakami’s Horatian ode to the hours between midnight and dawn. It commemorates humanity’s courageous defiance of our atavistic aversion to that time of day. A short novel, almost a novella, it takes place over the course of one night, with chapter titles progressing from “11:56pm” to “6:52am.” This unity of time and focus prompts uncharacteristic discipline in Murakami’s famously audacious style. In his 2023 introduction to the Vintage International edition, Murakami says his intended subject was the “things that can only happen in the world in the middle of the night, a world wrapped in darkness, where image transcends logic.” He casts the book as a briskly written, cinematic attempt to “deconstruct the novelistic world I’d built (or that seemed to be built) in my previous novel, Kafka on the Shore.” Although he reports that Japanese critics and readers were “confused and put off” by After Dark, I find its experimental restraint complements the sprawling, playful ambition of its predecessor. This period from 2002 to 2004, when he was in his mid-fifties, seems to have been the magical “middle of the night” of Murakami’s career, when he wrote with a confidence missing from his earlier works and a freshness lacking in the books that followed.\nA GENTLE AND SWEET ROMANCE Given my postadolescent affinity for the wee small hours of the morning, it is perfectly logical to me that Murakami’s narrative focuses on a pair of 19-year-olds. Mari Asai and Tetsuya Takahashi are university students who meet cute in a Denny’s. They are each braving after-hours Tokyo for different reasons. He is a jazz trombonist playing late-night gigs. She suffers from insomnia because her older sister has made a bewildering, supernatural decision to sleep around the clock. These might be Murakami’s best realized protagonists, with distinctive personalities and uncharacteristically poignant back stories. Certainly, Mari is the author’s most convincing female creation. She is bright, introverted, and empathetic, but also slightly aloof. Thankfully, he gives her none of the sexual preoccupations that made 1Q84’s Aomame fall short as a successful feminist heroine. In fact, despite its multiple prostitute characters and late-night setting, After Dark steers shockingly clear of explicit sexual descriptions. Instead, Mari and Takahashi connect verbally, slowly developing a gentle and sweet romance.\nBEFORE SUNRISE As Murakami points out in his 2023 preface, “the story depends mainly on dialogue,” eschewing his usual adventurous plotting in favor of the kind of reflective conversation that all-nighters encourage. The book’s confessional profundity is a quiet echo of filmmaker Richard Linklater’s “Before Trilogy” (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight), exhibiting a similar reverence for the enveloping rush of extended conversation. Linklater’s transatlantic couple obliviously pace touristy European streets, more attuned to the interplay of idea and memory than the classical beauty that surrounds them. When Mari connects with a middle-aged employee at a “love hotel” for couples, their exchange seems tailor made for Before stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.\n“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction—they’re all just fuel.” Korogi in After Dark by Haruki Murakami\nLIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION The author admits that he’d love to see his intentionally cinematic novel adapted for the screen. “Though to date, no one has asked to do so,” he writes in the introduction, defensively adding “Not that that particularly bothers me.” In places, Murakami’s cinematic aspirations are quite explicit. Rather than describing the scene directly, he writes as if he and the reader are watching a film together: “Our viewpoint takes the form of a midair camera that can move freely about the room. At the moment, the camera is situated directly above the bed and is focused on her sleeping face. Our angle changes at intervals as regular as the blinking of an eye.” This narrative approach is original and daring if also somewhat labored and gimmicky. But the camera perspective narration is used with restraint, limited only to the chapters devoted to Mari’s sleeping sister.\nIn places, Murakami\u0026rsquo;s descriptive prose soars closer to poetry than anywhere in his canon. Murakami also evokes film when he conjures a song score by simply invoking titles and artists. Although the prose is consistently jazzy, the musical allusions don’t end with Duke Ellington and Sonny Rollins—they also include Percy Faith and His Orchestra, the Pet Shop Boys, and a Scarlatti cantata. One’s tastes have to be pretty wide-ranging to fully appreciate Murakami’s scene setting talents.\nFEELING IN THE DARK However, the book’s greatest asset is not its ability to emulate film; it is the novelistic way Murakami captures numerous overnight settings. He perfectly renders the atmosphere of a 24-hour Denny’s, with silent coffee-sipping punctured by occasional teen-group rowdiness. A former jazz club owner himself, he skillfully recreates the vibe of an improvising band. He evokes the sleepy stillness of a suburban home just before the family wakes up and the slightly dangerous ambience of an all-night convenience store. In places, his descriptive prose soars closer to poetry than anywhere in his canon.\nMidnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.\nAh, yes. The throbbing low notes of the city after dark. I read those words and I’m twisting down Toronto’s Queens Quay with one hand on the manual gearshift of a friend’s Sentra. We’ll soon arrive at a late-night improv show, and then we plan to spend the night driving back to Zeeland, Michigan. My primitive brain is starting to long for the cave, but I’m 21 and I’m not afraid of the dark. I can sleep when I’m middle-aged and running on high-octane memories.\n"},{"title":"Sleeping Through the Alarm","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-04-14-pulphead/","date":"April 14, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Sleeping Through the Alarm Deep in the latter pages of his personal essay master class Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan describes a minor historical figure whose most impressive attribute had only recently become a mark of obsolescence. Constantine Rafinesque, a self-proclaimed “Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, [and] Philanthropist,” was a self-taught polymath in an era when a specialized education was becoming essential.\nThe years when Rafinesque should have been getting properly taught and trained, right around 1800, are when academic specialization as we know it was codifying itself. The million philosophical projects launched by the Enlightenment had generated the West’s first overwhelming wave of data sets, especially in natural history. In order to know something thoroughly now you had to know much less. Rafinesque slept through the alarm on this shift in the matrix. He showed up still wanting to know it all, to be a synthesizer. He didn’t see it was a time instead for clean, precise, empiricist gathering. John Jeriemiah Sullivan, Pulphead\nReading this, I wondered whether Sullivan’s 2011 essay compilation had also crossed an threshold in the Zeitgeist that made it subtly out of step with the present moral climate. Sullivan’s superpower is his fusion of opinionated skepticism and magnanimous empathy. The latter quality tends to get people into trouble in the social media and cable news-induced slow boil of the Donald Trump, #MeToo, and post-George Floyd eras. I myself frequently resist—or worse, fail to resist—the temptation to brandish my keyboard online in defense of compassion, or at least nuance, toward those adjacent to offending public figures (their colleagues, exes, and employers). These ill-advised overtures mostly bewilder the invisible majority, one of whom expressed optimism that I was “a dumb bot and not a real law guy.” The last decade has borne witness to outrages and cruelties that were unimaginable in my formative years, and in response our tribes have fractured into subtribes. I wanted to know: is Sullivan’s refined moral compass too refined for post-2017 America?\nOPINIONATED SKEPTICISM I didn’t see that query coming in the early pages of Pulphead’s opening essay, a seemingly dismissive take on Christian Contemporary Music and its fans. If anything, I was prepared to take gentle umbrage at his incredulous curiosity about “people who claim to love this music.” After all, my ears still ring with the mocking laughs my peers emitted when I disclosed that my first LP and pop concert were both performed by Amy Grant. (And this was at a Christian school.) Let’s just say Sullivan’s magnanimity was not discernible when he brushed aside my childhood guilty pleasure as a “genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.” True, “Christian rock” is an inherently derivative enterprise, at least musically. But while I don’t claim to know what the Christian rock kids are up to these days, I maintain that Keith Green, Randy Stonehill, and Steve Taylor used to exhibit lyrical substance that put “Smooth Like Butter,” “MmmBop,” and “Michelle My Belle” to shame. Not that I would argue with Sullivan’s characterization of the genre as “message music for listeners who know the message cold.” A Christian singer who visited one of my classes reported being rejected by CCM labels for her low “J-count”—an industry metric for worldview that quantified Messianic namedropping. Christian popular music has always been more driven by a weird hybrid of commerce, spiritual chauvinism, and authentic reverence than by any artistic consideration.\nMAGNANIMOUS EMPATHY In the end, however, Sullivan’s scornful assessment of Christian music is a Trojan horse for a confessional appreciation of a tribe he once belonged to. He has kind words for Christians (“smarter than any bunch I’d been exposed to”), CCM fans (“they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that”), and Jesus himself (“the most beautiful dude”). His straight-faced admission that he embarrassed his Episcopalian parents by taking evangelism (and even ‘80s Jesus rockers Petra) seriously costs him most of the cool points he earns elsewhere in the book with laudatory essays on Bob Marley’s Wailers, Axl Rose of Guns n Roses, and trailblazers in Black country blues. Still, it is his profound refutation of Christianity’s worst tenet that clinched my irreversible respect.\nThe hell stuff: I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared to God, so what was His trouble again?\nSUBTLY OUT OF STEP Throughout the rest of Pulphead’s 365 pages, Sullivan consistently demonstrates that human capacity for forgiveness, and it is in this respect that the book begins to feel anachronistic. I doubt if my social media sparring partners would be impressed by Sullivan’s declaration of platonic love for a nonagenarian writing mentor from his college days who championed the Confederacy and fondled Sullivan in his sleep. There are some in both parties who would object to the essay’s defense of socialism—he cites the Biblical chapter and verse that inspired Karl Marx’s “credo of communism”—and others who would be offended by his ability to investigate the Tea Party (MAGA’s Obama-era ancestor) and conclude that “some good could come from the sheer event of so many Americans educating themselves about policy decisions.” Worse, his take on Michael Jackson’s history with children is so nuanced that I am reluctant to repeat it here for fear of incurring guilt by association.\nSullivan’s sonorous prose exudes personality and honesty, his deft fluency with the arts, politics, science, and history providing a Rafinesque (-esque?) polymathic breadth. TOO REFINED FOR 2026? So what is the verdict on the hive mind’s response to Sullivan’s moral compass? Research confirms my suspicion that I am not the only observer to find Pulphead’s openheartedness out of step with the bitter times. In a blurb declaring the book the 81st best of the nascent century, the New York Times wrote, “If this book feels as if it’s from a different time, perhaps that’s because of its generous receptivity to other ways of being.” Some critics noted that magazine essayists in the Pulphead vein (the title is itself a dated moniker for zine scribes) don’t really exist anymore. The National review said, “To argue on behalf of Sullivan is also to throw your weight behind a kind of journalism that seems perennially perched on the precipice of obsolescence.” An admirably sculpted 2018 Goodreads review by Oriana concluded that the book “already feels like a sweet lovely relic of a more innocent but less enlightened time” and opined, “I hope he’s a little more enlightened now, has been able to adjust with the times, because he’s a crushingly stunning tale-teller.”\nREGRESSIVE ENLIGHTENMENT That, he certainly is. Sullivan’s sonorous prose exudes personality and honesty, his deft fluency with the arts, politics, science, and history providing a Rafinesque (-esque?) polymathic breadth. And perhaps he does look back at some of these essays with a recalibrated ethical framework. Maybe his current work is better informed by the numerous intense moral reckonings we’ve all been through. But I hope it’s not regressive to suggest that the 2020s could hardly produce a more “enlightened” outlook—in the meditative, higher mind sense—than Sullivan starts with here. Pulphead’s deference to “other ways of being” may make it a nostalgic artifact, but it is one worth elevating to breaking news.\n"},{"title":"Not About Newton","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-04-02-clockwork/","date":"April 2, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Not About Newton  “There’s a tendency in publishing today to affix grandiose subtitles to every nonfiction book that exists. The formula goes a little something like this: ‘Cool Phrase [colon] Promise that book will A.) Change Your Life, B.) Show How America Changed, or C.) Explain Everything.’ Subtitle grandiosity is a relatively new thing, meant to make books obvious so they can be easily pitched and marketed. There’s a logic to it. Theoretically, subtitles should make it easier for readers to select books. Instead of having to skim an article or book jacket flap, all we have to do is read the subtitle. Supposedly, then, we’ll know what the book is about. However, these subtitles are ridiculously misleading.” - Alex Kalamaroff, “Death By Subtitle: How Extravagantly Fallacious Subtitles Are Ruining Books” (2012)\nKalamaroff did not mention The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society \u0026amp; the Birth of the Modern World in his riff on the formulaic imprecision of nonfiction titles. But Edward Dolnick’s widely read popular science account of the origin of the Enlightenment, released the year before Kalamaroff’s internet essay was published, has got to be the most staggeringly mislabele8d book I’ve encountered. This may seem like a superficial complaint (never judge a book by the convoluted title sprawled across its cover), but the nomenclature promises a structural unity that Dolnick’s accessible scientific history never delivers.\nFor chapters and chapters, the title character, Isaac Newton, virtually vanishes. The Clockwork Universe is essentially three distinct volumes bound into an awkward unit: a zippy pop history, an accessible science textbook, and a lopsided double biography. The three parts are ambiguously labeled “Part One: Chaos,” “Part Two: Hope and Monsters,” and “Part Three: Into the Light.” These opaque headings reveal little about the book’s contents, so a strong title would have helped.\nNEWTON WOULD HAVE BRISTLED Instead, we get a main title that is loaded with historical significance Dolnick does not actually invoke. According to Stephen D. Snobelen’s essay “The Myth of the Clockwork Universe,” Newton would have bristled at the application of the term “clockwork universe” to his own work. The “clockwork” analogy for the whole of God’s creation dates back to the 13th century, but it is most closely associated with Deism. This Enlightenment-era theology saw the world as a ticking mechanism set in motion by God and subsequently left to its own devices. When applied to Newton, it often erroneously implies that Newton shared the Deists’ vision of hands-off divinity. To his credit, Dolnick clearly establishes Newton’s sincere religious commitment, pointing out that he “devoted thousands of hours—as much time as he spent on the secrets of gravity or light—in looking for concealed messages in the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon and trying to match the prophecies in Revelation with the battles and revolutions of later days.”\nSUBTITLE GRANDIOSITY The subtitle “Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, \u0026amp; the Birth of the Modern World” is even less helpful in informing prospective readers about Dolnick’s subject. First, Newton does eventually emerge as the decisive leading man of Dolnick’s third and final section, but he is just one of many early thinkers discussed in the preceding pages. Second, whatever the oddly structured book is about, the Royal Society ain’t it. That organization, a London-based institution for experimenting savants that boasted Sir Isaac as one of its members, is “dispatched in the first third of the book,” as New York Times critic Ann Finkbeiner put it. Finally, while it is not an egregious misnomer to refer to the Enlightenment as “the Birth of the Modern World,” that designation is more of a nod to the publishing trend identified by Kalamaroff than an actual summary of Dolnick’s agglomerated trilogy.\nZIPPY POP HISTORY The opening segment of that triptych, “Part One: Chaos,” confidently charts a road map of the gloomy medieval context from which the age of discovery emerged. Without modern medicine, Dolnick explains, life expectancy languished at a miserable thirty years of age. With characteristic wit, he suggests that the rich were even less likely to survive the murky swamp of disease that defined those times because they had the disadvantage of access to doctors. Survivors of the rampant Black Death had the devastating 1666 Great Fire of London to look forward to. In this section, Dolnick also initiates a major theme of the book: the tyranny of the period’s universally accepted belief in a cruel and manipulative God. In “Chaos,” he constructs a towering prosecution of the medieval concepts of hell (“religion focused far more on damnation than on consolation”) and predestination (“whether a person led a good life or a depraved one would do nothing to alter God’s verdict”). Anachronistically quoting Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and, in a later chapter, James Joyce’s vivid 1916 depiction of hell from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dolnick spends the whole book hammering home the Enlightenment thinkers’ slow escape from the bonds of their profoundly limiting faith.\nAN ACCESSIBLE TEXTBOOK In the second section, “Hope and Monsters,” Dolnick morphs into a talented remedial physics instructor. Throughout 100 pages adorned with lively charts and graphs, the author gamely explains how Johannes Kepler attempted to decipher God’s cosmological laws with obsessive geometric doodling. He describes the curse that Zeno’s Paradox, which supposedly demonstrated the infinite division of distance, posed to almost all of the Enlightenment savants. He teaches the reader how Galileo used abstraction to shift the epochal conversation from “why” to “how.” For chapters and chapters, the title character, Isaac Newton, virtually vanishes. The lively voice of the author of “Chaos” is recognizable throughout the second section, but it’s hard to shake the sense that one is reading an entirely different work.\nLOPSIDED DUAL BIOGRAPHY With very little transition, Dolnick abruptly pivots into dual biography in the concluding section, “Into the Light.” By shifting his attention to the conflict between Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over credit for the invention of calculus, Dolnick once again demonstrates his estimable gifts at a wholly distinct nonfiction genre. Leibniz mostly disappears in the final chapters, as Dolnick devotes his full attention to Newton’s development of the law of gravitation.\nWHAT IS THIS ABOUT ANYWAY? Each section succeeds on its own terms, although I personally enjoyed the historian and biographer more than the science class lecturer. That may say more about me than it does about Dolnick: he is a former Boston Globe science writer and one-time aspiring theoretical mathematician while I learned more about science from Tom Stoppard than I did from the 101 courses I yawned through. Still, I was left with the feeling that The Clockwork Universe is confusingly titled because the author and his marketers were all at a loss to explain the central purpose of the pop dissertation Dolnick had cobbled together. The fractured contents entertain and inform, but they never quite agree which story they are trying to tell.\n"},{"title":"Mapping Dual Injustices in \u0026ldquo;We Are Green And Trembling\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-03-22-green-and-trembling/","date":"March 22, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Mapping Dual Injustices in \"We Are Green And Trembling\" What are good 21st-century progressives to make of a transgender colonialist? Put differently, what lesson can be drawn from a marginalized protagonist whose primary accomplishment was the brutalization of marginalized natives? It’s a fascinating question that Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and her Booker Prize-longlisted English translator Robin Myers, render in handsome prose. But We Are Green and Trembling, their fictionalized biography of 17th-century Spanish explorer Antonio de Erauso, seems more committed to constructing an appealing trans hero than to wrestling with colonialism\u0026rsquo;s horrifying legacy of injustice.\nTrans Hero From the first page of the book, Cabezón Cámara signals that her primary objective is to secure the reader’s allyship with its genderqueer hero. “I am as innocent and forged in the image of God as any other” is Antonio’s first sentence. Okay, then. That line activates readers\u0026rsquo; sympathies, enlists a benevolent divine authority, and establishes 21st century progressive bona fides, all in one sentence. The ensuing pages tend to sidestep that kind of flatfooted obviousness, but they never truly complicate Antonio’s fundamental likeability despite his slaughter and incineration of Indians on the say-so of his doctrinaire conquistador commanders. Antonio successfully transitions from a girl in a convent to a swashbuckling male hero. He writes kind letters to his dear Spanish auntie. And, most significantly, he is effectively a responsible foster parent to two native toddlers, even when they smear him in feces and make blasphemous jokes about his cherished Holy Trinity and Blessed Virgin.\nMoments of satirical lucidity fail to compensate for the novel’s overall timidity in applying hindsight to a ghastly epoch. When Antonio describes himself as a “fearsome beast” who has “killed for my honor or for my life,” it is an attempt to acknowledge the character’s complexities. But it doesn’t fully ring true because the author’s admiration for the hero is never convincingly challenged. Cabezón Cámara could have had Antonio battle his latent need for violence. If she wanted to suggest victimization, she could have attributed Antonio’s darker side to his need to conceal his core self from the bigots around him. Instead, she makes him do terrible things and lets him off the hook with underlying cuddliness.\nColonial Villains The book is much more successful in exploring the nihilistic cruelty of its devout colonial villains. Rather than traumatize the reader by depicting evil with naturalistic frankness, Cabezón Cámara achieves a delicate deadpan irony that distances the reader from the described atrocities while still grappling authentically with their significance. This distance does not employ the methods of classic farce. She does not segregate the violence from its consequences, like Roadrunner dropping an anvil on Wile E. Coyote. Instead, she emphasizes the surreal extremity of the consequences and the absurd, contradictory piety of the perpetrators. Consider this passage, in which Spanish King Philip II tries to deter God’s use of natural disasters by sacrificing homosexuals:\nAccording to the Bible, the scent of flesh consumed by fire shall appease Yahvé…. The blaze of the New World sodomites \u0026hellip; had brought such ills upon the Empire. Storms on the high seas. Pirates. Lost wars. King Philip II himself, God hold him in his glory, penned a letter to the viceroy and urged him to be less lenient. To forswear his benevolence. His tolerance, we might say.\nIn this way, the author indicts the appalling illogic of the Spanish in a way that is unflinchingly honest and bitterly funny.\nMaps Without a Point of View Unfortunately, such moments of satirical lucidity fail to compensate for the novel’s overall timidity in applying hindsight to a ghastly epoch. “History is not the past,” declared 20th-century historian Henry Glassie, “but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler.” Granted, Cabezón Cámara is crafting fiction, not an academic dissertation. But surely a book about a trans conquistador affords a unique opportunity to navigate the reader through the topography of dual injustices. It is a topic that cries out for a Glassie map.\nInstead, the reader is asked to indulge meandering scenic detours. Exhibit A is Cabezón Cámara’s treatment of Christopher Columbus, the explorer long celebrated for stumbling into the Americas on his way to South Asia:\nYou told me of the Admiral, my aunt, of how Christopher Columbus had sailed from Sanlúcar, of caravels like walnut shells, of how he’d wished to travel to one place but found himself in quite another, and founded a world there, of the Indians who sailed on rafts cut from the bases of trees, marvelously carved, you said. In your cell you told me of that other world, and you filled it with lords, with ships, with Indians, with strange lands, though all lands were strange to me save those of the convent, as they were to you, my dear. I was your little girl and you let your mind roam and led me into your American daydreams, with all those souls awaiting conversion to the one true faith, and in that moment I had no knowledge of it, but the thirst for world was growing in me, the thirst to leave that place, to meet those innocent people who gifted skeins of spun cotton and parrots to the admiral.\nColumbus’s name appears in the novel six times, but this passage is the one that comes closest to providing cartographic guidance for the modern traveler. What assessment does Cabezón Cámara (or her character) make of “the admiral?” Founder of a new land? Genocidal pillager? Some nuanced middle ground, perhaps? The issue is sidestepped entirely in favor of hazy nostalgic poetry. Readers of this review are granted preemptive amnesty for questioning whether this Columbus excerpt even comes from the same book as the incisive condemnation of Philip II in the prior paragraph. Too much of the book sacrifices intellectual credibility for pretty jungle atmospherics and slack structure.\nKid Gloves It’s admirable that Cabezón Cámara wants to give voice to a hidden historical minority, but reducing a complex context to simple identity cliches obscures the central tension. Marginalized characters needn’t be handled with kid gloves. What we really want to know is, how could a hero who exhibited such unimpeachable personal courage cave so cravenly to the brutality that surrounded him?\n"},{"title":"Six Chekhovs","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-03-18-six-chekhovs/","date":"March 18, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Six Chekhovs  “I have tried … to avoid unnecessary dwelling on my own feelings, or my own needs, or my own—oh dear—character. … I now wonder …whether all writing has a tendency to flow like a river towards the writer’s body and the writer’s own experience.” A.S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale\nThe gradual acceptance of self-revelation is a rite of passage for many introverted authors, a fact I contemplated while reading the introduction to Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a short fiction compilation translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. “He constantly portrayed himself in his work,” asserts Pevear, “and constantly denied it.” The necessity of exposure is explored in Chekhov’s plays, too. In the opening scene of The Seagull, Konstantin Treplev is an explosively insecure dramatist who writes inscrutable symbolist poetry to experience the rewards of self-expression without the risks of self-revelation. By the end of the play, he has matured into a short story writer heavily influenced by his rival Boris Trigorin, a novelist so addicted to self-exposure that he can’t take a walk without being tortured by ideas for autobiographical stories. Chekhov had more in common with Treplev than Trigorin. He too was uncomfortable with dwelling on his own—oh dear—character. He would have hated me for saying this, but to read the thirty Selected Stories that span from an 1883 comic trifle to a 1903 meditation on mortality is to gain a fuller understanding of Chekhov. Despite his desire to hide behind his pen, the author cannot help revealing at least six distinct versions of himself.\nI have known Chekhov for decades through his four masterpieces of dramatic literature, and it is shocking to me that it took me this long to read even one of his short stories. I first read Three Sisters as a college sophomore, and—like so many others—I failed to grasp his greatness through the page. It was probably my first experience of Russian literature, and I was daunted by the sheer number of characters, each with patronymics and copious nicknames. It was Constance Garnett’s stiff Victorian translation. Everybody was so godawful unhappy. But when\u0026#9670;Vanya on 42nd Street at Barbican Cinema I saw Andre Gregory’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street at the Barbican movie theater in London, with its world-class actors (Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith), each marinated in character through years of private rehearsals, tightrope-walking the comedy and despair in David Mamet’s lively translation, I became a Chekhov fan for life. To this day, that Vanya is my favorite and most watched film of all time. You can chart your own age and personal growth by how you relate to the characters over the years. In my first screening, when Yelena blunderingly interrogated Astrov about his feelings for Sonya, it felt uncomfortably close to my own undergraduate romantic blunders. Seven years later, I showed the film to undergrads I was directing in The Seagull, and my Arkadina told me it was the first time she understood her role. Then, to revisit the film at the exact age of Uncle Vanya and measure his famously wasted life against my own—what a gratifying and slightly mortifying experience. I should have raced to the short stories then, just to see what else Chekhov had up his sleeve, but I was still foolish and unaccustomed to reading short stories.\nThe atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets in world literature. Chekhov the Artist Now that I have, I am struck by the counterpoint between, on one hand, his utter rejection of artistic vanity and, on the other, his reverence for craft and the sheer guts it takes to try. “A Boring Story” introduces the opinionated pedant Nikolai Stepanovich, whose impending mortality is teaching him the worthlessness of his literary and theatrical judgments. This is juxtaposed with the soulful artistic appreciation of his actress daughter Katya. Like Nina in The Seagull, Katya begins her career with an open heart only to be crushed by awareness of her own paucity of talent. Still, she possesses an artistic wisdom that her father can only envy. After Chekhov’s death, his friend Aleksandr Kuprin described how “shyly and coldly he regarded praises lavished on him.” Chekhov couldn’t bear literary pretension. But his description of a monk’s religious poetry in “Easter Night” speaks volumes about the depth of his love for written expression:\nEvery exclamation should be composed so that it’s smooth and easy on the ear. “Rejoice, lily of paradisal blossoming!” it says in the akathist [an Orthodox religious poem] to Nicholas the Wonderworker. It doesn’t say simply “lily of paradise,” but “lily of paradisal blossoming”! It’s sweeter and smoother on the ear. And that’s precisely how Nikolai wrote! Precisely like that! I can’t even express to you how he wrote! Anton Chekhov, “Easter Night”\nAgain and again, artistic accomplishment is outweighed by kindness in these stories. In “The Fidget,” a housewife discovers her own potential as a painter only to realize that her artistically oblivious husband is a far superior human being.\nChekhov the Saint The emphasis on human kindness is often framed in directly Christian terms in Selected Stories, which surprised me given Chekhov’s reputation as a materialist. Consider his own self-description in a letter to a friend:\nAs yet I have no political, religious and philosophical view of the universe; I change it every month and will be compelled to limit myself solely to description of how my chief characters make love, get married, give birth, meet death, and how they talk. Anton Chekhov, Letter to D. V. Grigorovich, 9 October 1888 in Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Letters of Anton Chekhov\nTheology does not play a major role in the plays, apart from Sonya’s moving declaration of faith at the end of Uncle Vanya: “We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world.” But Chekhov’s Orthodox upbringing manifests itself in story after story. His ultimate denial of God’s existence—he reminds us in “The Student” that Saint Peter made a similar denial in the Gospel—did nothing to diminish his fundamental Christian values. Like Jesus, Chekhov abhorred Pharisaic piety. In the story “Pankikhida,” an outraged priest scolds a bereaved father who eulogizes his daughter as a “harlot” because she was an actress. With characteristic humor and compassion, Chekhov sides with the suffering mourner who uses the wrong language over the punitive prelate who is technically right. This is why Jewish critic Leonid Grossman declared that “the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets in world literature.”\nChekhov the Doctor However, Chekhov was more than a compassionate observer; he put his convictions into action as a doctor. Grossman alluded to the writer’s scientific side by calling him “a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature.” Chekhov’s purpose for practicing medicine was to serve, not to cash in, for he profited far more from his literary works than his medical ones. Nowhere in the short stories does this Chekhov come through more clearly than in “Ward No. 6,” about the director of a mental hospital. The depiction of mental illness here is sophisticated and accurate. Chekhov describes a patient who suffers from feelings of terror and shame because he fears people perceive him as a murderer, despite being innocent of any actual crime. Chekhov’s description of the duality of paranoia, its capacity to hold two realities at once, is penetrating: “Ivan Dmitrich knew very well that they had come to reset the stove in the kitchen, but fear whispered to him that they were policemen disguised as stovemakers.” The head doctor is eventually committed as a patient himself partly because he is kind to Ivan Dmitrich. This reframing of madness comes up again in “The Black Monk,” when a student receives treatment for his hallucinations only to retort, “Why, why did you have me treated? … I was losing my mind, I had megalomania, but I was gay, lively, and even happy, I was interesting and original. Now I’ve become more solid and reasonable, but as a result I’m just like everybody else.” If being sane meant losing empathy and imagination, Chekhov wanted no part of it.\nChekhov the Grandson of a Serf Chekhov once confessed that he strove to “squeeze the serf out of myself.” The novelist Elif Batuman observes that Chekhov, whose grandfather was a forced laborer, never understood the Tolstoyan demand that the intelligentsia embrace poverty. Rather, Chekhov wished to encourage the peasants to embrace education. Chekhov expresses this view in a remarkable passage from “The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story” that shows his vision of a more equitable society:\nImagine that all of us, rich and poor, work only three hours a day, and the rest of our time is left free. Imagine, too, that in order to depend still less on our bodies and to work less, we invent machines to work for us, and try to reduce the number of our needs to the minimum…. What a lot of free time we’d have in the end! All of us together would devote this leisure to the arts and sciences. Anton Chekhov, “The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story”\nThis quote reveals that we have been anticipating the “leisure society” for a century and a half. Economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted a 15-hour work week on the eve of the Great Depression. Today, artificial intelligence advocates suggest that work may soon be optional. Chekhov would have been more concerned about preventing the mass economic displacement of workers than accumulating leisure time for his own class. This belief in social justice appears repeatedly in Selected Stories, from the peasant Varka who murders the exhausting baby in her charge to the declaration in “In Exile” that “people can live in Siberia, too. Li-i-ive!” Perhaps the strongest statement of Chekhov’s commitment to economic equality comes in “A Medical Case.” In it, a doctor admires a woman for losing sleep over her position as a factory owner and rich heiress. The author suggests that his generation’s conscience augured well for the coming decades. Of course, those decades brought the Russian Revolution, with its concomitant chaos and disillusionment. Chekhov’s heiress inhabited a historical island in the shadow of a tsunami, but she inspires in him a cautious meliorism.\nChekhov the Poet of Hopelessness That note of optimism is surprising for a writer best known for his motif of personal unhappiness. Philosopher/critic Lev Shestov called Chekhov the “Poet of Hopelessness.” He is indeed the poet who wrote “The Lady with the Little Dog,” about an affair that leaves both parties in love and miserable. The poet who invented “The Darling,” a woman who can only be content when she has an outlet for her own powerful capacity for love. The poet who wrote Sonya’s devastating final lines in Uncle Vanya: “You\u0026rsquo;ve had no joy in your life; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait.” Finally, he is the poet who had Konstantin Treplev, a writer incapable of controlling his feelings about self-revelation, throw in the towel on life rather than persevere long enough to realize his own potential.\nThis surrender to hopelessness troubled the student playing Konstantin in my production of The Seagull. He asked me what the message of the play was, and I talked about “stamina,” the word Tom Stoppard substituted for “perseverance” or “endurance” in the translation we were using. The actor looked at me skeptically. “It’s all just about depression, then,” he said. On closing night\u0026#9670;The Seagull, Trinity Christian College , after igniting his manuscript as usual in the kerosene lamp on his desk, the student brazenly added a single word of dialogue to Chekhov’s masterpiece.\n”Stamina,” he muttered with just the right note of ironic scorn. And off he went to that final surrender.\nChekhov the Consumptive Stamina was not an idle concept for Chekhov, who knew significant suffering. The doctor was also a patient, and the specter of mortality colors much of Selected Stories. The playwright first began coughing up blood at the age of 37 and was dead by the age of 44. That means that the last 150 pages of Pevear’s book—a full third—was written in the shadow of tuberculosis. Surely that shaded Chekhov’s examination of two major themes. The first, man’s insignificance in an indifferent universe, is expressed most clearly in “Gusev,” about a sailor whose corpse becomes food for sharks under a splendid sunset. The second theme, the importance of meeting death with dignity and grace, presents a bar that Nikolai in “A Boring Story” cannot clear, remaining at his lecture podium despite the internal conviction that he should leave it to a younger professor. Another dying man in Selected Stories, “The Bishop,” faces death alone due to his elevated position in the church—it’s lonely at the top. Even his mother treats him like an intimidating authority figure. Despite this, the bishop is courageous and dignified on his deathbed. It reminded me of Sonya’s exhortation to Vanya: “When our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly.” If the realization that one is older than Uncle Vanya gives one pause, the idea that one has outlived the great Anton Pavlovich Chekhov—brave, compassionate, perspicacious Chekhov—is more than enough reason for personal humility.\nIn a photograph of rare candor for the era, a relaxed and youthful Chekhov lives, admiring his brother Nikolai’s artwork.\nThis piece is dedicated to my brother, who kept the Six Chekhovs from running together.\n"},{"title":"Splitting the Baby","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-03-14-hardboiled/","date":"March 14, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Splitting the Baby I admit that I can be fussy when selecting an edition of a classic novel. It was not ever thus. Heck, I suffered through hundreds of yellowed, eyestrain-inducing, 7 x 4” Bantam Classics pages of The Brothers Karamazov before I finally dumped the parsimonious bitch in exchange for the comparative luxury of a 9 x 6” Farrar, Straus and Giroux. When the time came to mamba with Middlemarch, I two-timed my brainy but disheveled Norton Critical Edition with a sleeker Oxford World Classics model long before Rosamund Vincy did the same to Tertius Lydgate. I also agonized for weeks over the philological disparities between four different Underground Men in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground before deciding I would overlook Pevear and Volokhnosky’s hubristic translation of злой as “wicked” when all of their peers were content with “spiteful.”\n1 KINGS 3:16-28 Imagine, then, the heights of indecision I reached after discovering that the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World I’d purchased had recently been superseded by a new one. Oh, the paralyzing minutiae. Jay Rubin’s 2024 version had about 100 pages of new material that Alfred Birnbaum left out of his 1991 edition. But Birnbaum’s was supposed to be brisker and funnier. Birnbaum’s had been canon for decades, but Rubin’s had been requested by the author himself. Rubin was more philosophically probing, but Birnbaum would occupy fewer precious reading hours. And, for the love of God, was “kokoro” better translated as “mind” (Birnbaum) or “heart” (Rubin)? In the end, I decided that the answer to the question “which translation should I read?” was a resounding “Yes.” Murakami’s decision to alternate between two distinct stories afforded a Solomonic strategy perfect for readers with more curiosity than time: I split the baby. I’m happy to report that reading Birnbaum in the rollicking Tokyo-set “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” chapters and Rubin in the more lyrical, otherworldly “End of the World” chapters is a satisfying way to experience a fine second-tier Murakami novel. His writing here is strong enough to warrant Rubin’s reevaluation, yet, as an emergent early work, still benefits from Birnbaum’s freewheeling enhancements.\nOLD TESTAMENT AND NEW TESTAMENT The most impressive component of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the way its widely divergent storylines convincingly converge. The “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” chapters feature a vaguely Bogartesque noir narrator who learns that his corporate employer is experimenting on his brain. “End of the World” describes an amnesiac newcomer to a beautiful and mysterious walled-in city. Faced with the loss of everything that constitutes the self—represented, in a recurring Murakami theme, by a severed shadow—the “End of the World” narrator is advised to “believe in your own powers.” This is textbook existentialism, where meaning is derived not from the trappings of experience, but from self-determination. The same issue emerges in “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” where a scientist inquires “whether human actions are plotted out in advance by the Divine, or self-initiated.” Murakami seems to be suggesting that his narrators are sketchily defined with intention. (Although, as this is Murakami, both naturally know their way around libraries and record shops.) Drama critic Martin Esslin famously observed that absurdist characters have no pasts, operating exclusively in the framework of the present. Murakami’s have pasts that are being gradually stolen from them, along with their capacity for joy and sadness.\nGENESIS When it was published in Japan in 1985, Sekai no Owari to Hādo-Boirudo Wandārando, an unwieldy title apparently most accurately translated as End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland, was Murakami’s first work to be sold in bookstores and not in literary magazines. From all accounts, the book experienced some success in the Japanese market even if its sales were dwarfed by the naturalistic 1987 monster hit Norwegian Wood. Still, American publishers were more interested in the former’s stylistic virtuosity than the latter’s melancholy depiction of Japanese universities and mental hospitals, according to David Karashima’s book Who We’re Reading When We Read Murakami. Released stateside in 1991, Birnbaum’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland was met with modest plaudits that primarily succeeded in opening doors for later, more mature works by the Japanese scribe. In a 2018 interview, Murakami admitted to Karashima that when the book was crafted, “I was still unable to write as well as I thought I was capable of.”\nNOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN That’s an honest assessment of a work that plays fitfully with ideas more satisfyingly explored in subsequent works. Structurally, its pair of elegantly dovetailing stories anticipates Kafka on the Shore, which see-saws between Kafka and Nakata, and 1Q84, which uses the same technique with Aomame, Tengo, and Ushikawa. Thematically, the early book’s preoccupation with the tentative mooring of identity echoes Toru’s self-dissolution through divorce in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Hard-Boiled Wonderland’s interest in fate and determinism comes up again in the Oedipal allusions of Kafka. But these later thematic investigations are organic outgrowths of the personalities and circumstances of credible protagonists. True, psychological development has never been Murakami’s strong suit, but I had a strong sense of what drove Kafka, Tengo, and both of his Torus (there’s one in Norwegian Wood as well). By contrast, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World lacks a single fully realized, flesh-and-blood human—none of them even have real names. They do spend chunks of text musing about meaningful topics (if sometimes seemingly pulled from a college syllabus), but it often feels like the author is working out what the book is about simply by adding words. Mature Murakami usually feels painstakingly planned. Still, if End of the World… does not root its themes in character, it does discover nice resonances as the intertwined plots unwind. The final chapters are authentically haunted by the futility of identity in the face of death. Similarly, the disturbing arc of the beautiful beasts in the “End of the World” chapters is moving and thoroughly earned. But when measured against the nutty ingenuity of Kafka and the creeping desolation that reverberates through Wind-up Bird, this earlier effort feels uneven and slightly sophomoric.\nWhen I felt like speeding up my reading, I would sometimes pick up Birnbaum. But when I wanted to soak in the atmospherics and playful intellectualism, I turned to Rubin. THE WOMAN SHOULD BE SILENT Unfortunately, the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” chapters also provide a template for Murakami’s trademark sexism. The narrator speculates at length about the sexual attractiveness of fat women in an early passage that displays the author’s customary obliviousness to his alienation of at least half of his potential readers. The relationship between the tricenarian narrator and a 17-year-old female he literally names “the chubby girl” (that’s Birnbaum’s translation; Rubin helpfully upgrades this to “fat girl”) anticipates the cringey flirtation between Wind-up’s Toru and his adolescent neighbor May Kasahara. I’m not being flip when I say that the good news here is that the women are painted with the same monochromatic brush as the men. The sting of the feminist critique is alleviated when the perfunctory character development is Equal Opportunity.\nKING JAMES VERSION Due in part to Murakami’s inexperience and introversion in working with translators, Birnbaum’s version is closer to an adaptation than a literal transcription. His boldness is reflected in his decision to reverse the titles so that the more original part (“Hard-Boiled Wonderland”) comes first. It was also shrewd of him to reflect Murakami’s untranslatable use of contrasting personal pronouns in the two storylines by alternating between the past and present tense. But his most significant contribution was to streamline the young Japanese author’s meandering excesses. An admirer of economic language a la Raymond Carver, Birnbaum slashes hundreds of words from the original. The result is snappy, fluent, and eminently American. Among the most noticeable cutting-room-floor edits eventually restored by Rubin are Murakami’s bland words of praise for Lewis Carroll and a passing reference to Elton John’s pink sunglasses. But for the most part Birnbaum just tightens the rhythms of Murakami’s prose. For example, consider this passage from Rubin’s work:\nI didn’t know for sure. It might well have been despair. A Turgenev might call it disillusionment. A Dostoevsky might call it Hell. A Somerset Maugham might call it reality. Whatever others might call it, it was me myself.\nHere is Birnbaum’s version:\nWho knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me.\nThis condensed style works especially well for the suspenseful adventure story in the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” chapters, but it also excises some thoughtful content in both halves. Too, Birnbaum’s taste for stock character types tends to magnify the juvenile aspects of early Murakami. Birnbaum likes to embrace the comic book vibe of Murakami creations like the chubby girl, Big Boy, Junior, and the Colonel. Sadly, the translator’s crisp editorial instincts do nothing to curb Murakami’s sexism, which he presents at face value. Birnbaum’s most bewildering choice is to give Murakami’s avuncular professor an inexplicable country twang that distracts from intriguing discourse on topics like determinism, Freud, and theology: “All [Freud and Jung] did was t’invent a lot of jargon t’get people talkin’.”\nNEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION By contrast, Rubin’s strength is his patience with Murakami’s slow, descriptive world building in the “End of the World” chapters. The relationship between the “End of the World” protagonist and a girlfriend who has had her heart extracted (this is where Birnbaum used the term “mind,” much less effectively) is moving and sweet in Rubin’s telling. It gives the final chapters a metaphysical weight that Birnbaum does not achieve. The most notable restorations in Rubin are the lyrics Murakami wrote for the chubby girl in a scene about the importance of music to a world that is threatened by corporate-imposed silence. Birnbaum rifles through a section on the rhythmic sound of squishing shoes, but in Rubin’s hands that section is evocative and relatable. When I felt like speeding up my reading, I would sometimes pick up Birnbaum. But when I wanted to soak in the atmospherics and playful intellectualism, I turned to Rubin.\nREVELATION Solomon’s threat to split the baby revealed which caretaker had the infant’s best interests at heart. If you must choose between the two English editions, Rubin’s faithfulness to the original makes him the better “mother” of this formative Murakami novel. But if you are a hopeless nerd… er, demanding perfectionist with respect to the editions to which you devote your reading hours, I highly recommend sampling both. It is a happy coincidence that each of the translators seems to specialize in a distinct ethos that matches precisely one of its two narrative lanes. Birnbaum evokes the breezy pace and wit that Murakami gave “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” while Rubin is just as skilled at rendering the ennui of advancing mortality presented in “End of the World.” A divided reading perfectly transmits a meaningfully divided novel.\n"},{"title":"Opera as Obsession","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-02-27-lisbon-traviata/","date":"February 27, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Opera as Obsession “Opera is a disease,” Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing (from 1950-72) once said. “Those who have it don’t want to be cured, and those who don’t have it can’t understand why the others want to be ill.” The Lisbon Traviata documents the symptoms endured by the opera afflicted and the caregiver burden shouldered by their loved ones. It is the only play in Terrence McNally’s informally titled “Night at the Opera Trilogy” told from the perspective of opera fans rather than opera professionals. Yet it is a more satisfying panegyric to soprano Maria Callas than the biographical Master Class and a more visceral depiction of the art form’s appeal than the behind-the-scenes history Golden Age. It begins as a riotously funny sendup of 1980s opera vinyl collectors and evolves into a devastating exploration of the fine line between life’s vital passions and its destructive obsessions.\nACT ONE: OPERATIC RIFFING Act One is a verbally rambunctious farce in the tradition of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest or Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story. It introduces gay opera enthusiasts Stephen and Mendy, the kind of besties who are simultaneously entertained and exasperated by each other’s company. In their quest for a mutually satisfactory LP to listen to, the duo riff on virtually every opera in the canon, weighing in vehemently even on obscure compositions like Cherubini’s Medea (“boring music” whether sung by Callas or Ethel Merman) and Pelleas et Melisande (“Debussy has balls. He just doesn’t wear them on his sleeve”). They also namedrop most of the divas who graced the Metropolitan Opera stage from Bing’s era to the mid-80s. Joan Sutherland has legato but “always sings behind the beat.” Marilyn Horne “sings like a truck driver.” The nonstop banter ripples with opera in-jokes, but its Aaron Sorkin-esque musicality is entertaining even for non-cognoscenti.\nIt gets pretty hard coming home night after night to a man who doesn’t like Idomeneo. ACT TWO: THE COST OF FANDOM Act Two is nowhere near as much fun, but it broadens the discussion of obsession in devastating fashion. McNally draws connections between unhealthy fanboy passion and unhealthy romantic passion by shifting the narrative to Stephen’s relationship with his former lover and current roommate Mike. Their clingy and deteriorating romance is as unfulfilling as Stephen’s one-sided devotion to Callas. Moreover, the artistic obsession is actually a cause of love’s demise. In the first half, we laugh at Mendy for being so obsessed with Callas that she is named in his divorce papers. In the second half, a similar revelation about Stephen \u0026ndash; his preference for Callas cassettes over supportive pillow talk catalyzed his breakup with Mike \u0026ndash; is anything but funny. Mendy later leaves petty answering machine messages about his need to listen to the titular “Lisbon Traviata,” an iconic live recording of Callas as Verdi’s Violetta, just as Mike prepares to walk out on Stephen. The juxtaposition between trivial preoccupation and genuine anguish provides a resounding dénouement.\nPRECEDENT McNally is hardly the only writer to meditate on the dark side of fandom. Other treatments of this theme include Rajiv Joseph’s basketball-themed play King James, Nick Hornby’s portrait of a record store owner who puts away childish things, High Fidelity, and Junot Diaz’s novel about alienating nerdom, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The idea that shared artistic interests are crucial to compatibility (Stephen says “it gets pretty hard coming home night after night to a man who doesn’t like Idomeneo”) is also well-represented in literature. Ian McEwan movingly expresses that thought in a novel I recently finished, What We Can Know. “I had made a sacrifice in marrying a man who had no taste for reading,” reports its narrator. “I had a partner and a playmate, but I also wanted a thought-mate.”\nCELEBRATING OPERA’S QUEER SIDE Still, McNally’s work stands out because its cautionary tale about the opera disease also acknowledges the legitimate emotional nourishment art can provide. Callas’s talent for spur-of-the-moment interpretation of aging masterpieces made her an authentic companion for millions. “Maria never sang ‘just another Traviata’ in her life,” effuses Mendy. “The whole point of Maria is that she never sang ‘just another’ anything. It’s what killed her.” Callas’s tragic death had special significance for a generation of gays living in the isolating shadow of AIDS, particularly given opera’s historic appeal to queer men. “What’s so obvious about two men going to Parsifal together?” asks Stephen. “Face it,” replies Mendy. “Ice hockey at the Garden it’s not.” This blend of wit and poignancy secures The Lisbon Traviata a place not only as the best in McNally’s opera trilogy but also my personal favorite within his extensive catalog.\n"},{"title":"\u0026ldquo;The Biographer\u0026rsquo;s Tale\u0026rdquo; Is Not Your \u0026ldquo;Possession\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-02-22-biographers-tale/","date":"February 22, 2026","tags":null,"text":"\"The Biographer's Tale\" Is Not Your \"Possession\" The internet tried to warn me off reading A.S. Byatt’s 2000 portrait of the scholar as a young man, The Biographer’s Tale. I had a free book coming from Thriftbooks, and this seemed right up my alley: a disillusioned graduate student of postmodernism pivots to a new career by writing a biography of a biographer. It checked all the right boxes: award-winning author whose masterpiece I had just read? Check. Genre-bending examination of the limitations of biography? Check. Polymathic thematic multitasking? Check. But the consensus of the online cognoscenti was thunderously negative. The New York Times cautioned that it was “a dry, tendentious and thoroughly irritating narrative designed to hammer home a single philosophical point.” The top review on Goodreads thought it “veered from mildly interesting to excruciatingly boring.” The Guardian’s Hermione Lee, who literally wrote the book on Virginia Woolf and Tom Stoppard and ought to appreciate an erudite dissertation on biography, “found the book\u0026rsquo;s playfulness laborious, its knowing erudition airless and its characters whimsical and unappetizing.” Screw it, I thought, the book is free anyway. I’m going to give it a shot. The risk paid off: The Biographer’s Tale is thrilling in its defiance of literary convention.\nTHE NEGATIVE:\nLiterary Fifty-two Pickup Now that I’ve finished The Biographer’s Tale, I understand what provoked all the carping. For much of the novel, Byatt seems determinedly indifferent to narrative niceties such as dramatic arc, character development, and the “show don’t tell” aesthetic that every writer learns in seventh grade. It’s as if Byatt were presenting a solipsistic middle finger to fans who enjoyed the compulsive readability of her 1990 breakout smash Possession. The two novels are alike in their formal innovation and literary/historical erudition. But Possession grounded its intellectual fireworks in page-turning romance and mystery, whereas The Biographer’s Tale doles out fragmented snippets of biographical research scrawled on index cards with all the structural organization of a game of Fifty-two Pickup. Byatt demands that we labor through pages of decontextualized musings on taxonomy and debunked scientific theory without even revealing which historical figures are being referenced.\nByatt describes a biographical masterpiece in detail but steadfastly refuses to model good biographical writing. There may be something to the perception that Byatt deliberately followed her most accessible creation with her least accessible. In a 2001 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Byatt described her difficulties getting Possession published in the United States. One American editor told Byatt, “You have spoiled a fine intrigue with all this excrescent matter, and you must take it all out again.” The publisher only agreed to print 7,000 copies of the original manuscript after it won the British Booker Prize. Within months it sold 17 times that number. Let’s just say Byatt’s bestseller status gave her the freedom to attempt more challenging work.\nThe genius of Possession is that Byatt not only invented two great Victorian poets but also dared to write examples of their poetry. In contrast, The Biographer’s Tale describes a biographical masterpiece in detail but steadfastly refuses to model good biographical writing. We are treated to mounds of research on the biologist Carl Linnaeus, the statistician Francis Galton, and the playwright Henrik Ibsen—fascinating subjects all—but she never quite brings them to life. She hits the highlights of Linnaeus’s remarkable life: he writes journals exaggerating his adventures in Arctic Lapland, debunks a phony biological specimen, and finds the drowned corpse of his best friend. But she never captures the comically pompous manchild that Jason Roberts rendered so memorably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Every Living Thing. The letters she excerpts between Galton and Charles Darwin are amusing and fascinating, but she only scratches the surface of Galton’s potential as a dramatic subject. She makes shrewd connections between Ibsen’s dramaturgy and Linnaeus’s taxonomy. And she uses the famous personality-as-unraveling-onion soliloquy from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to underscore the futility of biography. But Byatt seems to give short shrift to Ibsen’s story compared to the two scientists, and her rejection of traditional storytelling structure is ironic when juxtaposed with a “Master Builder” renowned for his powerful plotting.\nTHE AFFIRMATIVE:\nResearch Drudgery as Bildungsroman However, to moan that The Biographer’s Tale is not as conventional as Possession is to favor formula over ingenuity. Byatt’s bold experimentation with form is exciting if you can get over its lack of comforting familiarity. Her fragmented index cards may not be as immediately entertaining as the literary detective work in Possession, but with a little effort they are just as fascinating and rewarding. The latter book is about research as intellectual joyride. The former is about research as tantalizing drudgery that often leads to dead ends. Both are true. If you expect every day of research to yield long-forgotten love letters, as happens in Possession, you are going to be as sorely disappointed in your academic career as is Phineas Nanson, the protagonist in The Biographer’s Tale. He gives up postmodern literary deconstruction only to get immersed in postmodern biographical deconstruction. His craving for tangible facts is met with the hyperbolic lies of his biographical subjects.\nNor is The Biographer’s Tale without traditional literary pleasures. The final pages blossom into a bildungsroman as compelling as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. Phineas spends most of the book obstinately trying to avoid self-revelation. But that shyness dissolves when he falls in love with two women concurrently: the niece of his favorite biographer and the spitfire apiologist who helps him understand Linnaeus. It is a dual romance (not really a love triangle) that is less familiar (read: formulaic) than the contemporary romance in Possession. Phineas begins the book as the studious author of a paper titled “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham” and ends it by exploring female desire firsthand.\nCLOSING ARGUMENT\nInnovation Is Its Own Reward I was sometimes frustrated and challenged by The Biographer’s Tale, but I found the book richly rewarding when I accepted it on its own terms. I do recommend familiarizing yourself as much as possible with Linnaeus, Ibsen, and Galton before embarking on the journey. I had read Roberts’s book on Linnaeus and almost all of Ibsen’s plays. But more importantly, I recommend keeping an open mind. I am reminded that legendary literary critic Harold Bloom dismissed Toni Morrison’s masterpieces Beloved and Jazz as “top-heavy books with very strong political programs; they’re not aesthetic accomplishments.” Bloom was so convinced of the virtues of the Western canon that he couldn’t recognize genius when he read it. “If you teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing,” Tom Stoppard once wrote, “you end up with a lot of people saying you write well.” This is not to suggest that The Biographer’s Tale scales literary heights as skillfully as peak Morrison or even Possession itself. It is simply to suggest that innovation is sometimes its own reward. I’m grateful for the internet’s caution—better not to be blindsided by the book’s oddness—but I’m far more grateful for Byatt’s boldness.\n"},{"title":"Who Cares About These Awful People?","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-02-19-what-we-can-know/","date":"February 19, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Who Cares About These Awful People? I sometimes regret not having read Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement . Director Joe Wright’s 2007 film adaptation, which I have seen, deftly explores the fine line between commonplace childhood self-absorption and casually cruel deceit with lasting consequences. It leaves an impression of masterful, must-read source material that may lose its power on the page once you’ve taken the journey on screen. That sense of missed opportunity even motivated me to check out McEwan’s Kafkaesque novella The Cockroach a couple years back, but that was, um, not a comparable experiece. When I heard that his 2025 novel What We Can Know was his best reviewed since Atonement , it made sense to grab the newcomer in hardcover before Matin Freeman and Sally Hawkins are cast as its dual narrators in some future film version. The decision paid dividends. McEwan’s tragicomic novel is a finely calibrated indictment of the present from the perspective of a compromised future.\nA FUTURE WITH MORE REGRETS THAN FLYING CARS The book is split between 2025 and 2125 (and the surrounding years), giving McEwan an opportunity to construct his own dystopian reflection of our era in the hall of mirrors of contemporary science fiction. I haven’t read enough sci-fi to rank his dystopia against all the others, but McEwan’s vision of the coming century felt like a reasonably fresh take to me. Instead of describing flying cars and hostile robot overlords, he constructs an Earth that is just beginning to work its way back to the technological accomplishments of our era.\nMcEwan’s main contribution is to ask not what I s knowable about yesterday, as did Stoppard and Byatt, but what will be knowable about today when tomorrow arrives. Biodiversity, too, is starting to recover from the mass extinctions of our Holocene epoch, although the organic food supply seems beyond renewal. Future generations are loathe to forgive ours for ignoring the climate crisis, empowering reckless artificial intelligence, and mounting nuclear conflicts that apparently have their roots in Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. They are not impressed that our cultural and artistic output dwarfs theirs, and their attitude toward studying our history can be summarized by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s memorable assessment of the 1995 film Carrington: “Who cares about these awful people?”\nTHE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE I feel better qualified to comment on McEwan’s exploration of the futility of biography than to compare dystopias. Like many of my most cherished literary works, McEwan’s novel portrays biographers struggling to learn critical truths about their subjects. My favorite playwright, the late Tom Stoppard, was fascinated by the theme of “What We Can Know,” and he famously distrusted biography. In his 1995 play Indian Ink, a footnote-happy poetry editor effuses about the opportunities that artists afford biographers: “This is why God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published.” The elderly sister of a famous poet rejoins, “biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” Stoppard’s finest play, Arcadia, pits a Byron biographer with a galling confidence in his own “gut instinct” about 300-year-old mysteries against a colleague who relishes her own uncertainty (“If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final”). Stoppard admitted he had “pinched” Arcadia’s structure from A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, one of the best books I read last year. The latter work is about a contemporary scholar who finds an uncatalogued love letter from one major Victorian poet to another in a library book, raising questions about who ultimately owns the secrets of the past. Another Byatt novel, The Biographer’s Tale, depicts a disillusioned graduate student yearning to trade the abstractions of postmodern philosophy for the tangible facts in which a biographer traffics. In this respect, What We Can Know is treading well-worn territory, even hallowed ground.\nWHAT WILL OUR DESCENDENTS THINK OF US? McEwan’s main contribution is to ask not what is knowable about yesterday, as did Stoppard and Byatt, but what will be knowable about today when tomorrow arrives. In this novel, the denizens of the present largely hold the power to choose what is remembered of their time, but their choices usually end up obscuring the very things they most wish to preserve. In this way, McEwan recalls Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “each man kills the thing he loves.” In the novel, Francis Blundy, the most renowned poet of 2025, dreams that his poem “Corona for Vivien” (a corona is a union of several sonnets) will leave an indelible mark on the future: “Would it, could it be understood? He thought it might need footnotes, sensible, helpful ones, unlike Eliot’s at the end of The Waste Land. He believed that this work equaled or surpassed Eliot’s poem.” Yet when the future arrives, Blundy’s poem is remembered not for its literary achievements but because it seems irretrievably lost to history. Although it remains concealed from the public, rumors circulate about its contents. Based on rumor alone, the poem is celebrated as a paean to a clean environment. In reality, however, Blundy was an intransigent climate denier, the poster boy for our generation’s callousness toward our descendants. Some in the future imagine the corona was an ode to the lost art of interpersonal intimacy. Ironically, Blundy’s wife Vivien may have prevented its publication due to her own marital dissatisfaction.\nPROBING OUR DISSOLUTION WITH WIT The author presents all this moral reckoning with a light comic touch. McEwan’s breezy and confident wit provides a gently barbed send-up of academia that has more in common with the works of Michael Frayn than the dazzling wordplay of Stoppard. Imagine the characters and tone of Frayn’s novel The Trick of It, a comic romp in which a pedantic adjunct marries the novelist he teaches to undergrads, merged with the epistemological themes of his play Copenhagen, in which Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle illuminates the impossibility of reconstructing the past. In one scene, McEwan narrates a poetry reading from Blundy’s perspective, and his oration leaves the audience in stunned silence. A woman wipes away tears. Then, one by one, we enter the listeners’ minds and discover that none of them were paying attention. The woman’s tears were inspired by something else entirely. In another scene, the students of the future stage a walkout of a lecture on Blundy out of righteous disgust with our generation. The superficial suavity of Vivien’s lover Harry Kitchener, whom she deliberately wounds by dating a superior writer, is itself worth the price of admission.\nAN ELEGY FOR THE PRESENT Despite its amusing veneer, What We Can Know is at its core a lament for a society incapable of sustaining itself. McEwan masterfully captures the simultaneous talent, depravity, generosity, and brutality of humanity. When he writes about a 20th century mother dropping acid while her child suffocates in its crib, he is conjuring the greed and convenience that motivate our neglect of the future. When he poignantly portrays an Alzheimer’s victim’s gradual mental disintegration, he gestures toward the loss of communal memory that humanity seems destined to endure. The central question of the book may be whether our heirs will care any more for us than we do for them. Who cares about these awful people, indeed.\n"},{"title":"Wrestling with Murakami`s \u0026ldquo;1Q84\u0026rdquo;","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-01-19-1q84/","date":"January 19, 2026","tags":null,"text":"Wrestling with Murakami`s \"1Q84\" From my first day in the outlandish world of Haruki Murakami to the day I completed his most time-consuming and ambitious novel, 1Q84, he became both my most intense literary attraction and my most vexing source of literary frustration. During those seven months—and consider yourself served with a data geek trigger warning—I read 38 books by 28 different authors. Of those books, seven were by or about Murakami. He was my reading companion for fully half of those 150 days, and counting the two titles I completed after I first wrote this essay, I have now read more pages of Murakami in my lifetime (4,164) than of any other author. I have now read more pages by Murakami than by Toni Morrison (10 books), E.M. Forster (five), or even Fyodor Dostoevsky (seven). The attractions of Murakami can be distilled into four categories: his bewitching narrative talent, probing thematic exploration, delightful supernatural weirdness, and Western cultural fluency. If the “pro” side of the ledger is impressive, the “con” side is daunting. It consists of his graphic sexual obsession, serial misogyny, and suspected underlying superficiality. 1Q84 provides a fine case study for both sides of the ledger—and left me wondering whether I’d squandered 4,000 pages of reading time on a peddler of delicious literary snake oil.\nBEWITCHING NARRATIVE TALENT Though 1Q84 is not nearly as narratively rewarding as top-tier Murakami, it still exhibits his undeniable gifts as a storyteller. Throughout the first two of the three 400-page volumes, the third-person narrative alternates between two protagonists. The “Aomame” chapters are about a female physical therapist who moonlights as an assassin of domestic abusers. The “Tengo” chapters feature a math professor at a “cram school” (test prep academy) who moonlights as an up-and-coming novelist. In the third volume Murakami inserts a third wheel to the rotation: the obsequious corporate gumshoe Ushikawa, a refurbished extra from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle who ranks with Satoru Nakata (Kafka on the Shore) among Murakami’s most original creations. The story begins to cook when Aomame is asked to off the leader of a religious cult that has been exposed to the public in a novel ghostwritten by Tengo. It’s a loopy plot, told with little narrative restraint, but the pages fly by.\nPROBING THEMATIC EXPLORATION Murakami dips a toe into several genres (science fiction, mystery, romance), but most observers place him firmly in the literary fiction camp due to his introspective thematic interests. 1Q84 questions society’s ability to hold sexual predators accountable and asks if vigilante justice is a viable option. It also pokes at the boundaries between reality and fiction. But I was most intrigued by its contrast between the controlling God worshipped by the book’s religious fundamentalists and the passive-but-permeating God that Aomame comes to know. The former forbids life-saving blood transfusions, creates distance within families, and seems more concerned with public relations than spiritual enlightenment. The latter “doesn’t give and doesn’t take away” but soothes a victim’s consuming righteous anger with unwavering quiet companionship. Murakami finds his thesis in an inscription at psychoanalyst Karl Jung’s home: “Cold or Not, God is Present.”\nDELIGHTFUL SUPERNATURAL WEIRDNESS However, most accomplished authors tell compelling stories and explore weighty themes. What really sets Murakami apart is his winking magical realism. While 1Q84 lacks the quirky brilliance of Kafka’s talking cats and raining fish, it does offer tiny spiritual beings that pop out of a dead goat. It also establishes a parallel Earth, which Aomame calls “the year 1Q84”; this is apparently a Japanese pun that doesn’t translate. The most salient symptom of 1Q84 is that our planet has sprouted a second moon. This dreamlike surrealism, rendered with a matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of Murakami’s filmmaking countryman Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), is usually the most enjoyable facet of the Murakami formula.\nWESTERN CULTURAL FLUENCY The appeal of this distinctively Japanese strangeness is rivaled only by the appeal of the wide-ranging Western cultural allusions. 1Q84 features a lengthy passage from Anton Chekhov’s scientific travelogue Sakhalin Island. It provides a brief biological sketch of the baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann. One of its supporting characters is a 17-year-old who seemingly has no hobbies apart from listening to Duke Ellington on vinyl. My favorite allusion is literary advice from Aomame’s badass bodyguard Tamaru, to my knowledge the most notable queer presence in the Murakami Cinematic Universe. “I’ve never been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can’t read the whole of Proust.”\n1Q84 should have been the book that acquitted Murakami of egregious misogyny. I was lured into braving this 1,200-page epic after I asked ChatGPT to recommend my next Murakami read. It confidently assured me that the novel echoed the Enlightenment message of The Magic Flute. That proved to be an unusually vivid hallucination; it had confused Mozart’s opera with Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Still, a sci-fi tinged romance inspired by Sarastro and the Queen of the Night was a perfectly plausible misrepresentation of Murakami. His work bubbles with high-culture fanboy tangents that have turned me on to the pleasures of Sibelius’s 5th Symphony, the films of Francois Truffaut, and Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. Moreover, these allusions are seldom gimmicky one-offs. They are usually integrated thoughtfully into the narrative.\nGRAPHIC SEXUAL OBSESSION In enumerating the less savory characteristics of Murakami’s fiction, I hesitate to include his persistent interest in the sex lives of his characters. I am sometimes troubled by an increasingly prudish streak in 21st century artistic discourse, particularly on social media. The shift is largely generational, and it seems prompted—and to some extent justified—by an increasing impatience with chronic male misbehavior. But while most of Murakami’s novels contain graphic descriptions of sexual activity, they are probably not much racier than the celebrated works of John Updike, Milan Kundera, or D.H. Lawrence. Much of the strongly worded condemnation of Murakami’s sexual obsessions reflects this widening gap in generational values. The guy is a product of the free love generation, not the #MeToo generation, and it’s worth bearing that in mind. That said, I personally could do with fewer references to penetration, oral goings-on, and genitalia. 1Q84 is no exception.\nSERIAL MISOGYNY What I find exponentially more disappointing than the frank sexuality is my consistent inability to defend Murakami against charges of misogyny. It has been a problem with almost every Murakami book I’ve experienced. Reading the short story “An Independent Organ,” I was shocked at the casual way the male characters accept the preposterous suggestion that women are biologically prone to mendacity. The idea is not even dramatically germane, but Murakami serves it up earnestly as potentially sagacious insight. I get that the teen hero’s conquest of his mother in Kafka on the Shore supports the novel’s Oedipal themes, but does he have to dream-rape his sister? Kafka also contains a revealing scene in which a trans woman puts a nasty feminist firmly in her place. This scene’s heavy-handed depiction of myopic political correctness feels like a strawman: Do Japanese feminists really complain about unfavorable placement of female authors on library bookshelves? It’s not an ironic question: the extent to which Murakami’s attitudes toward women are rooted in Japanese gender hierarchies is difficult for a stateside reader like me to evaluate, and that complicates the moral judgment. But one thing is clear: 1Q84 should have been the book that acquitted Murakami of egregious misogyny. Aomame is probably his strongest female protagonist, not only tough as nails but also a warrior for feminist justice. The problem is that Murakami keeps undermining her. I don\u0026rsquo;t mind that she is sexually aggressive, or that she likes anonymous, emotionally meaningless sex, but it\u0026rsquo;s hard to think of a textual defense for a sixty-year-old man inventing a conventionally attractive young woman who fetishizes conventionally unattractive men old enough to be her father—or her author. Particularly when many of the thoughts he puts in her head are about the inadequate size of her breasts.\nAomame’s feminist agency is further undermined by her eventual admiration for the most powerful patriarch she takes down. At the risk of including a substantial spoiler, I will note that the abusive monster she is hired to eliminate turns out to be a wise and powerful spiritual leader who has—regrettably!—been “forced” to rape children by vaguely developed interdimensional beings that strongly resemble Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. (“Ho ho!” is about the most sinister thing they say.) It’s possible Murakami thought he was injecting solemn complexity into a seemingly black-and-white moral issue, cautioning against rash judgments and vigilante justice. But that’s not the impression I get. I think he was just preoccupied with his plot twist and accidentally took down the moral seriousness of the book in the process. What is the value of invoking horrific injustices if real-world evil suddenly dissolves into an empty narrative stunt? It’s the equivalent of Dostoevsky ending his legendary Grand Inquisitor chapter by having Jesus stage a daring escape on the Millennium Falcon.\nUNDERLYING SUPERFICIALITY That bothers me in no small part because it lends credence to my sneaking suspicion that my attraction to Murakami’s fiction ultimately amounts to a highfalutin guilty pleasure. Yes, he tackles some interesting themes with stylistic daring, but is his writing driven by genuine curiosity in those literary motifs? Or is he dabbling superficially in serious topics that might cast his output in a deceptive aura of prestige? There is much to admire in Murakami that should not be dismissed out of frustration with his shortcomings. I have two more Haruki novels lined up on my TBR, and I don’t expect to banish them like Lear disowning Cordelia. But nagging doubts persist. Does Murakami deserve a place among our literary giants, or is he merely a captivating mountebank?\n"},{"title":"Virginia Woolf Sets Sail Beyond the Self","url":"https://www.septimuscarr.com/posts/2025-02-02-voyage-out/","date":"February 2, 2025","tags":null,"text":"Virginia Woolf Sets Sail Beyond the Self My first exposure to Virginia Woolf’s first novel was an excerpt read for a work assignment: a young Edwardian girl drifting mentally and physically in the opening days of a lengthy maritime journey. So when I committed to reading the whole novel two years later, I expected to spend the whole novel bobbing through the waves. I’d been had. The boating expedition ostensibly referenced in the title, The Voyage Out, ends a quarter of the way through the 437-page narrative, and its characters remain landlocked for the duration. Woolf was more interested in an experience at once more particular and more universal: the voyage out of the self and into relationship with others. Woolf portrays this voyage as perilous and its destination as enticing but ultimately inaccessible.\n“What one saw and felt but did not talk about” This focus on the unattainability of authentic human connection is in part a critique of Edwardian English society. The book’s protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, is a 24-year-old woman with the life experience and comprehension of an early adolescent. While she has been exposed to certain touchstones of European culture, such as Shakespeare, Austen, and Wagner, her guardians and educators—primarily men—are more interested in protecting her from the details of life they consider sordid than in preparing her for adulthood. She observes the emotional incompetence of her elders and instinctively finds her inherited culture absurd, preferring to withdraw into the comfortingly nonverbal realm of classical music. She complains that “nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt,” while intuiting that reality itself is defined by “what one saw and felt but did not talk about.”\nNo Division, Then Far Away Rachel’s perspective is echoed by her love interest, an aspiring novelist whose latest effort is titled Silence, or The Things People Don’t Say. This young author, Terence Hewet, proves a spiritual match for Rachel despite their seeming inability to surmount the communicative inhibitions that plague their fellow countrymen. Their mutual attraction fuels chapters of unacknowledged obsession, plunging Rachel into manic depressive cycles that probably reflect those famously experienced by Woolf herself. Even after Rachel and Terence finally unite as a couple, their attempts to connect meaningfully alternate between euphoria and futility. The relationship is only consummated through conversation. When they stop talking, their feeling of connection is painfully interrupted: “They remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment separate and far away again.”\nOnly Connect This thematic emphasis on the importance of genuine human communion might be familiar to readers of Woolf’s friend and fellow Edwardian bard, E.M. Forster. His dictum “Only Connect” was a central theme of his masterpieces Howards End, in which emotionally fluent middle-class women struggle to comprehend stunted upper-crust men, and A Passage to India, in which British verbal acumen is reduced to nonsense during a visit to India’s Marabar Caves. Forster was a fan of The Voyage Out (“here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights), though he rightly observed that Woolf\u0026rsquo;s four leading characters lacked the psychological complexity achieved by a Dostoyevsky. Rachel’s characterization, for example, is convincing enough but the reader never quite escapes the sense that she is as much symbol as flesh-and-blood human.\nUltimately, The Voyage Out does not condescend to its communicatively inhibited inhabitants. Symbolism also trumps humanity in Woolf’s romanticized depiction of South American natives, who are nevertheless described with uncomfortable frequency as “savages.” Woolf never actually visited South America, a fact Forster probably knew when he praised her for creating “a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis.” For Woolf, the natives are not so much people as foils for her English characters’ difficulty with authentic communication. On a journey into an unspecified jungle, her narrator tells us that the British “felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people” from whom the hapless Europeans are “removed … far, far beyond the plunge of speech.”\nThe Dalloway Prequel However, if Woolf’s character development is not beyond critique, her creations movingly convey the modern individual’s longing for and lack of access to meaningful connection. As if drawn from the dusty attic family photo albums of Nick Hornby characters, they substitute shared appreciation of art and literature for intimacy. This results in some delightful exchanges and allusions, particularly from the acerbic St John Hirst, who was reportedly inspired by the author Lytton Strachey, and Clarissa Dalloway, whose engaging discussions of art and literature, of course, later inspired a Woolf novel of her own. Mrs. Dalloway is of course a far braver and more fully realized replica of human thought than The Voyage Out, but I liked Clarissa better on the boat. Less obsessive social butterfly, more posh culture analyst. The connective tissue is the pained communicative distance in both novels. In the debut, she is obliviously charming while her husband impulsively two-times her. In the celebrated pseudo-sequel, she stifles inchoate longing for her female almost-crush.\nCelebrating Little Victories Ultimately, The Voyage Out does not condescend to its communicatively inhibited inhabitants. Instead, she celebrates the little victories they manage to achieve. Rachel and Terence’s affair is compelling throughout. We also hear the author’s voice in the response of Rachel’s aunt, Helen, to her niece’s description of their community’s interactions as “aimless, trivial, meaningless.” Rather than belittling her English companions, Helen reflects on “the little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon,” concluding that “underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great things were happening—terrible because they were so great.”\n"}]