When Paddington Bear set out for London in 1958, equipped with only a small brown suitcase and a tag around his neck imploring strangers to “Please look after this bear,” he claimed his homeland as “darkest Africa.” Of course, Africa is filled with all sorts of magnificent beasts, but bears, unfortunately, are not one of them.
Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington, was blithely unaware of this fact when he sent his manuscript to literary agent Harvey Unna, who swiftly responded enthusiastically, but with an important correction.
Lately, I have been interested in completism. I have been moved to embrace fannish obsession, to consider a writer’s bibliography deeply, to try and read every book in a single author’s oeuvre (even the bad ones). I’m curious about them all: the books that may have been written out of desperation and for money, the ones that came easily, the volumes that still don’t quite click.
The early ones, too—the books in which you can see the writer still half-formed, still moldable, not yet hardened into whatever self, whatever public pose or affectation, they will later self-consciously sink into. The young writer, scratching out the words and themes they’ll return to over the arc of their career.
My brother and I would always order a large half regular, half pepperoni. A simple pie, sweet-sauced and oily, which we’d take home. When I think of pizza, I think of those afternoons with my brother: Pardon the Interruption; green bean bags; the space-age boot-up sound of our Sega Dreamcast.
Strange, but often remarked upon, is that food is the pathway to memory. Stranger, I’ve learned, is that when memory is distorted by loss, the food distorts too. Pizza, which I’ve always loved for its humbleness, has become redolent of grief.
The miracle of “The Brothers Karamazov” is that somehow it all fits. This cacophonous novel, made up of wildly divergent arguments written by an author who refuses to let any point of view go by without cross-examination, coheres. Its elements are all made, by Dostoyevsky, to belong. Every digression becomes key to the case, every forgotten character is called to the stand. United by guilt, they all own up to the parts they played. Like good siblings, they learn to share.
True, Barker’s poetic sensibility can feel willed; this is the sort of book that sees fit to describe Glasgow as “this most marcasite city”. But more often the diction hits the bullseye: playful as well as serious, mashing near homophones to layer meaning (“the messh of existence”, say, which more or less sums up the book’s theme), and a slyly sexual undertow that hints at the range of the narrator’s unvoiced feeling. In this novel – a fleeting requiem – the problem of finding the right words ultimately leads to none at all: “what’s to be said? / When your blood’s full thrumming / but all you have is A-Z.”
When Millhauser is on, he hands you a periscope of his own unique design, and he allows you to really look and feel. You can bring your own allegory.
After reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, “The Country of the Blind,” you will look at the English language differently. You will even look at the word “look” differently. (And, at intervals: “reading.”)
Leland is a prolific podcaster and longtime editor at the literary magazine The Believer, whose troubles in recent years had some wags calling it The Beleaguered. He is also beleaguered by — or, his book suggests, maybe blessed with — a rare genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa that is gradually causing him to lose his vision. While posing considerable challenges, this has given him what most authors of nonfiction crave: a definitive Big Topic.
Though this is a book often driven by exasperation, a labour of love written with scholarly precision, Gillett’s passion for the transcendental, communitarian experience of dancing shines through throughout.