Microreview: Surprised by Hope

Surprised by Hope
by N.T. Wright
HarperCollins, 2008

N.T. Wright is Church of England Bishop of Durham, and as such he really ought to know better than to give his latest book a title which will invariably remind his readers of better books. Students of theology will see Surprised by Hope and immediately think of C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy – but they will not find such a graceful, knowing text herein. Students of literature may be reminded of the line from Milton that is the ultimate source of all such variations – but needless to say, Wright is no Milton.All this is a shame, since Bishop Wright has nevertheless written yet another densely-packed, deeply intelligent work of Christian exegesis and inquiry. Christianity, just like any other complex living organism, grows dottier and dottier as it enters senescence … it needs all the smart books it can get, and Wright is one of its best authors.

Surprised by Hope is, at its heart, a study of the heart of the Christian faith: the physical resurrection of the body through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Wright searches into the underpinnings of believing in life after death, but he’s a thrilling intellect and cannot resist juicy digressions along the way:

If God is indeed the creator of the world, it matters that creation is other than God. This is not a moral problem, as has sometimes been thought (if a good God makes something that is not himself, it must be less than good, and therefore he is not a good God for making it). Nor is it a logical one (if, in the beginning, God is all that there is, how can there be ontological room for anything or anyone else?). As we said earlier, if creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God.

When he hews to his main subject, Bishop Wright has many fascinating observations, all impeccably grounded in Scripture. Surprised by Hope is far more two-fisted and pragmatic than anything Lewis ever wrote, and it’s more appealingly humble than it ever occurred to Milton to be. And in its care and gentle zeal, it’s worth the attention of all the faithful. And maybe the good bishop will choose his next book’s title less cavalierly.

–Steve Donoghue

More Marilynne Robinson

Readers of the latest Harper’s magazine are treated to a transcript of a lecture American novelist Marilynne Robinson delivered at Amherst College this year. The lecture begins thus:

I have often wondered in what way forgotten history abides, and what the consequences are of its being forgotten or brought to mind again. I have always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that pass through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and so are names. Universalism is beautiful, and so are particulars.

It goes on for some time in that incomprehensible and vaguely frightening way, until the conclusion that Robinson is a few songs short of a hymnal is virtually inescapable. To the many fans of Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, this will no doubt be dismaying. Those fans are encouraged to click on over to Sam Sacks’ long analysis of Robinson’s career in our December 2007 issue.

A Visit from the Pope

As has been featured prominently in the news for the last few days, Pope Benedict XVI is visiting America and, among other things, offering victims of Catholic Church sex abuse unprecedentedly candid avowals of sorrow and indignation – avowals that must, it’s supposed, be taken as sincere, despite the fact that this current Pope (and certainly his vast Vatican clerical staff) must certainly have known about that abuse, and the Church’s very conscious maneuvers to cover it up, for years and years before the story broke in the press. For a fuller examination of this ambiguity on the Pope’s part – one might almost call it a moral schizophrenia – click on over to our far-flung freelancer Ignazio de Vega’s illuminating review of Benedict XVI’s best-selling book Jesus of Nazareth.

Microreview: A Carrion Death

A Carrion Death
by Michael Stanley
HarperCollins, 2008

Michael Stanley is actually two men – Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, both long-time veterans of all the various crazinesses Africa has always and will always throw at the people hardy enough and crazy enough to spend any time there – and between them they have written a mystery novel about present-day Botswana that bursts with humor, pathos, danger, and the essential quirkiness of African life.And of course, it all revolves around tourists. Everything about Africa is only about Africa because people have gone to Africa as long as it’s been Africa. At the beginning of A Carrion Death, a tourist has been found murdered, and this naturally invokes the intervention of many levels of bureaucracy (the abiding law of Africa).

In this stunning, wonderful debut novel, our man in Botswana is Assistant Superintendent David Bengu, nicknamed “Kubu” – hippo (both for his size and docility and for the latent ferocity for which hippopotami are known in the wild) – who’s called in to help investigate the crime. ‘Michael Stanley’ brings to life an African interior so overbrimming with memorable detail that armchair travelers will find everything to satisfy themselves. But always the first and best detail is our enormous chief detective, who will fight for the truth of the case no matter what. He’s indelibly realized from the very first:

Assistant Superintendent “Kubu” Bengu of the Botswana police hoisted his not inconsiderable bulk onto the front seat of the police Land Rover and settled himself for the long drive. This involved selecting a CD of one of his favorite operas with a baritone part. He fancied that he had a reasonable voice and sang with gusto, but restricted this to periods – of which there were plenty – when he was on his own. Most of his friends were not opera lovers, and the others knew him too well to be polite.

This great debut character goes up against innumerable levels of interference simply to do his job, and ‘Michael Stanley’ clearly means this to be the first in an ongoing series. On the strength of this debut, we can only hope this projected series materializes. The forces of right – Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Aurelio Zen, and the rest – need the help, but Africa might have other choices in mind.

                                                                                                                         –Steve Donoghue

lynx doncha know

some gems from the web…

Open Letters contributor A.I. White reads Charlotte Bronte’s Villette;

how do you organize your disastrous overflow of books? Here’s how it’s done at A Work In Progress;

our nonfiction editor gets physical (with the Physics);

a star-studded tribute to Norman Mailer;

Shanna Compton on how Amazon’s new decision is bad news for small publishers;

a charming stroll in The Atlantic with the toxic Joan Crawford;

Achewood waxes Horatian;

check out national library week;

and the dirty, shameful secret of inkjet printers is finally revealed…

Microreview: The Years of Extermination

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
by Saul Friedlander
HarperCollins, 2007

New in paperback last week, and newly awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General History this week, is the second volume of Saul Friedlander’s epic study of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination, the sequel to his epic and engrossing Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939.In The Years of Extermination, the storm clouds that were gathering in the first volume over eastern Europe have broken, and the worst crime of modern times is engulfing every peaceful town, every centuries-old center of culture, every village and hamlet from the Ukraine to the shores of occupied France. Friedlander’s second volume is even more darkly compelling than his first, as he plumbs every inch of his unpalatable sources:

On April 4, 1940, the minister [Goebbels] noted once again: “New version of the Jew film. Now it is good. As is, it can be shown to the Fuhrer.” Something must have gone wrong nonetheless, as Goebbel’s June 9 entry indicated: “Reworked once more the text of the Jew film.” At least the minister could be pleased by Jud Suss: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I am happy about it.”

Friedlander’s thorough command of the unimaginable vastness of his material is what sets his work apart, even in a field as crowded with great and searching masterpieces as that of Holocaust studies. He paints the larger canvas of his terrible story with a sure hand, but he also consistently grounds his story in heartbreaking little details:

The next day [Lodz ghetto diarist] Seriakowiak witnessed the arrival of a transport from Prague; again he noticed the cartloads of bread, the luggage, the clothes: “I have heard,” he added, “that they have been inquiring whether it’s possible to get a two-room apartment with running water. Interesting types.”

The gradual, systematic, bureaucratic elimination of hope from an entire ethnic group is grim and unappealing stuff, but the same impulse that draws generation after generation of first rate historians to study it is the same impulse that urges us to keep reading about it. Not to understand it, it cannot be understood, but to continue trying to understand.

Friedlander can help in that ongoing task. His book is a masterpiece.

–Steve Donoghue

Pulitzer Prize winners

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, and one thing is startlingly clear: it helps to have Open Letters in your corner! Two of the biggest winners, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for Fiction and What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe for History, were both anointed first right here at Open Letters. In September 2007, Sam Sacks sat down with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – and of course took in Drown too – in a long and pithily evaluative review. And in February 2008, Steve Donoghue dug into What Hath God Wrought in some detail. In both cases, the reviews were generally positive, and the Pulitzer committee was clearly listening!

Open Letters extends its congratulations to Walker Howe and Diaz, and indeed to all the winners and those in the running.

glistening in the webosphere

we’d like to share…

how governments use legalese to justify anything, from the inimitable Dahlia Lithwick;

a poetry magazine created in six impromptu hours, featuring OL contributors Elisa Gabbert, Chris Tonelli, and our esteemed (and lately absent) poetry editor;

Scott Esposito helps you diversify your reading of criticism (you can’t only read Open Letters, after all);

V.S. Naipaul inspires a spirited conversation at The Reading Experience about whether we can appreciate good books by awful humans;

a genial primer of the philosophical views on change at Wisdom of the West;

a Human Rights Watch post to get us banned in China;

National Poetry Month with your broiled asparagus;

&

Human Tetris, courtesy of Quiet Bubble.

Politically Speaking…

Politically speaking, anyway, these are tough days to be Mark Penn. As Hillary Clinton’s chief advisor, he was the architect of the idea that her victory in the quest for the Democratic nomination was “inevitable” – a disastrous by-product of which was that Senator Clinton skipped a number of small-state caucuses where she could conceivably have acquired some delegates that went to Senator Obama instead. As Elizabeth Drew points out in this week’s New York Review of Books:

It’s never a good idea to have a pollster in an important policy position in a campaign, since he or she can design the polling to get the answers he or she wants, as some believe Penn had done in the Clinton White House….

An now there’s the news, that Penn – in his second job as a lobbyist – met with Colombian officials who are advocating a trade agreement between their country and the United States. It’s a trade agreement Senator Clinton vigorously opposes, and Penn has been forced to resign as a result.

Open Letters is too high-minded to invoke any relevant Biblical passages about the blind leading the blind, but to be fair, there were warning signs. Specifically, the only kind of warning sign Open Letters is interested in: a bad book. Back in October 2007, Steve Donoghue somewhat crankily reviewed Penn’s book Microtrends and warned of the dire consequences that might result if anyone in a position of power took much of it seriously. Click on over to that review (as perhaps Senator Clinton is also doing, somewhat dolefully?) and read the tea leaves!

Microreview: God’s Middle Finger

God’s Middle Finger
By Richard Grant
Simon & Schuster, 2008

With his marriage collapsing and his life increasingly given over to morbid drinking binges, Richard Grant conceived of a project to snap him from his malaise: he would travel through the lawless, murderous Sierra Madre in Mexico, a mountainous region ruled by various warring drug cartels, and then he would write a book about it.If the God invoked in Grant’s title actually existed and there really was such a thing as justice, Grant would be a bullet-ridden corpse in a dry wash and a person who died doing something innocent would still be alive. But since such is not the case, we can be glad that Grant did escape (by a hair’s breadth) his idiotic quest in order to write a book as zesty and eye-opening as God’s Middle Finger.

Like the best travel writers, Grant is attentive to the telling eccentricities of the cultures he eavesdrops on, as in this description of the Easter ritual of an indigenous group called the Tarahumaras, which mostly involves drinking huge amounts of corn-based beer:

Four centuries ago the Jesuits had tried to bring Christianity alive for the Tarahumaras by staging Easter morality plays. They formed the Indians into companies and showed them how to reenact the persecution of Christ, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. In the Jesuit days, the soldiers and the Pharisees were the joint persecutors of Christ. But many drunken Holy Weeks had passed since then and now the Pharisees and the soldiers had ended up on opposite sides, representing good and evil, although their affiliations are switched in some villages. Here it was obvious who was who. You can always tell the evil bastards in the Sierra Madre by their AK-47s.

It’s the evil bastards—the “whoreson goat fornicators” and “sons of obscene perpetrations,” in Grant’s funny transliterations—who own the mountains, making the Sierra Madre one of the most savage, stygian, illiterate, corrupt, misogynistic, bandit-infested, nihilistic regions in the entire world, the sort of place where people shoot one another for no more reason than “to please the trigger finger” (as Grant was told by a man who would shortly try to kill him). For all the grimness of his material, though, Grant gives God’s Middle Finger a merry, sarcastic flair that will thoroughly entertain you even as it eradicates your interest in ever setting foot in this vicious hellhole.

–Sam Sacks