Mothers and Sons is an intricate, compelling novel about the power of stories and, especially, about the need to let go of those stories that keep people stuck. Maybe, in that sense, it's a fitting novel for the new year after all.
The novel offers a compassionate portrayal of a laconic, tenacious protagonist as she tries to rebuild a shattered life, without ever masking the low drumbeat of grief that rumbles beneath.
Biblio-memoirs can be as distinctive as the lives and books they document, but they tend to support the idea that reading is good for you—that it can teach you things, or help you better understand yourself and others. The first hint that Sarah Chihaya’s darkly humorous new entry in this small genre will follow a different path lies in its title, Bibliophobia. It is not a paean to the healing powers of narrative, but an account of how her reliance on books played a major role in a crisis, leading her, for a time, to fear them.
Agnes Callard doesn’t just admire Socrates, the philosopher forced by his fellow Athenians to drink hemlock in 399 BCE; she wants to be him. Entirely conscious of himself as an icon, Callard writes, Socrates “presented himself as a person one can become.” Following in his path, she styles herself as the sort of philosopher who doesn’t just do philosophy at work, but strives to live philosophically. Even as a college student, Callard tried to be a public philosopher in the Socratic mold, setting up shop on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute, the city’s most agora-resembling locale, inviting random museumgoers to engage in philosophical conversations. Those who accepted her invitation were grilled with questions about the meaning of life.
The non-modest mission of her sprightly new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is to develop a strand of ethical thought that she labels “Neo-Socratic,” and which departs entirely from the prevailing ethical systems of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. Among the challenges of the project, she notes, is that Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call “the Socratic method”—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the questions being asked, not simply prove a point.
Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has given us a definitive biography of the scholars who produced the most disturbing collection of fairy stories ever published. Rigorously and at times densely written, this is a book that aims to situate the Grimms and their studies of language in the larger historical context of the intellectual and political movements of their time, and in this it succeeds admirably. But it is also an implicit commentary on the constancy of the human mind. Grimms’ Fairy Tales plants a question mark over what it means to be a fully developed human being.