THE LIFE OF DAVID
by Robert Pinsky
Schocken, 2005.
(209 pages)
I was prepared to dislike Pinsky’s book, and the howler on the first page of the text was not encouraging (“David and the Witch of Endor”!?). My dislike deepened as the book progressed: Pinsky, a widely admired poet who teaches in Boston University's creative writing program, plays source critic for a few pages, gossips inconclusively that Jonathan and David might have been homosexual lovers (thus missing the point of Jonathan's disrobing before David: namely, Jonathan abdicates as crown prince), passes on the bizarre legend that Goliath and David were cousins.
Yet, the book has its strengths, as Pinsky captures the drama and passion of the David story, as well as the complex piety of the man after God's own heart, that is missing from most commentaries on 1-2 Samuel.
— Peter J. Leithart
JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL
by Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005
(846 pages, $15.95, paperback)
Alan Jacobs wrote in The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis: “The surreptitiousness of Faery’s true dangers is harder to capture [harder to capture than the “overt” dangers of Faery Tolkien portrayed in The Lord of the Rings]; I have seen it done nowhere better than in Susanna Clarke’s extraordinary novel. . . . That surreptitiousness lies primarily in the old idea that Faery overlaps our world — that one can, unwillingly and unwittingly, pass from one into the other.”
It is an extraordinary novel about two magicians trying to return English magic to its former glory. Mr. Norrell clutches his knowledge of magic, Gollum-like, to himself, while Jonathan Strange, his only pupil, attacks the study and practice of magic with abandon and, eventually, madness. Both help England win the Napoleonic Wars. There are many haunting scenes, both in our world and in the world of Faery, whose thistledown-haired king is the most endearing and fearful villain you will ever encounter.
Anyone who likes the writings of the Inklings will love this book. The only caution here is that there are horrendous scenes graphically, but not gratuitously, displayed. One of the novel’s delights, for those so inclined, is its generous use of long elaborate footnotes which include many stories of magic and Faery. This is a bookish book. Yet it is a novel that provides, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “an enlargement of our being.”
— Frank Freeman
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK:
MEANING AND MESSAGE
by George Martin
Loyola, 2005
(477 pages; $22.95; paperback)
Martin, the founding editor of God’s Word Today, helps ordinary Christians apply the best of modern and ancient scholarship for an imaginative entry into the biblical text and the biblical world. His Gospel According to Mark is a verse-by-verse commentary with maps and many helpful, concise articles on historic, cultural, and geographic background. Martin devotional presentation, moving from historical material to practical life-application, provides enough information, but not too much for the general reader. This is the first volume in Loyola's “Opening the Scriptures” series.
— Mike Aquilina
THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS
by Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Andrew Hurley & illustrated by Peter Sis
Viking, 2005
(236 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
Borges is a humble virtuoso, a skeptic fascinated by religion. In this new translation of a book that first appeared in 1957, Borges gives the reader a modern bestiary (or mostly bestiary, as it does include other beings) culled from books of folklore, myth, and even from C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (Lewis gets two entries, Kafka three, Poe one).
“Like all miscellanies,” Borges writes, “like those inexhaustible volumes by Robert Burton, Fraser, or Pliny, The Book of Imaginary Beings has not been written for consecutive reading. Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”
This alphabetical miscellany includes 116 entries, such as The Monster Acheron, Swedenborg’s Angels, Banshees, The Brownies, The Centaur, Elves, Fairies, The Golem, The Hippogriff, The Kraken, The Unicorn, Valkyries, et. al. Most of the entries are one to three pages long and refer to a wide range of classical and esoteric works. He includes Dante’s versions of various famous creatures, and mentions G. K. Chesterton’s dream of a tree “which devoured the birds that rested in its branches and which put out feathers instead of leaves when springtime came.”
Borges’s skepticism, though it can be soul-wearying in his other works, here works to his advantage and his touch is light. He gently mocks all religions, but also the modern age’s claim to know oh so much more than the Dark Ages. He does not practice what Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”
— Franklin Freeman
LIQUID LIFE
by Zygmunt Bauman
Polity Press, 2005
(164 pages)
Liquids are protean, shape-changing substances. According to Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw and one of the chief observers of “postmodernism,” contemporary life is liquid life. In a liquid society, conditions change so fast that the society never has the time to freeze into routines, habits, institutions and “individual achievements cannot be solidified into lasting possessions because, in no time, assets turn into liabilities and abilities into disabilities.”
Unlike premodern societies, where individuals are “raftsmen” carried by the currents of tradition, modern society produces “sailors” who have to chart their own course. Liquid Life is a vigorous exploration of liquid society, especially as life is shaped and reshaped by market forces, turning all activities and goods (including religion) into consumables that lose their value in use and are tossed away as trash.
Bauman urges an ethic of responsibility for those who are excluded from the top echelons of the global economic hierarchy, and urges the renewal of loyalty and enduring friendship. Liquid Life suggests a radical strategy for combating the world: A strategy of staying put.
— Peter J. Leithart
THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
by Ian Shapiro
Princeton University Press, 2005
($24.95, hardback)
If method in science (as the search for what is true) may be regarded as dialectical movement between visions of wholes — theory — and experience, refined and controlled as “experiment” in the natural and social sciences, truth is harmed by any fault in the movement. Ian Shapiro’s The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences is a Baconian objection to the all too frequent dominance of theory over reality in the human sciences — particularly in his own field of political science — such that the researcher is far more concerned with how reality can be made to fit the theory than the actual state of things which is his putative object of study.
The catalog description of the book caught my eye because Shapiro is dealing here in his own field with what theologians define as heresy: attempts to minimize and distort the subject matter of theology in service of a vision of reality controlled by the illegitimate dominance of one of its aspects. In Arianism, for example, the humanity of Christ overcomes his deity, in egalitarianism, equality dissolves the divine and human hierarchies.
All such intellectual movements may be understood as the attempt to make reality fit an explanatory theory with insufficient attention to the reality itself, the inevitable result of which is failure of the theory. The book is written for specialists in the “formally oriented social sciences that are principally geared toward causal explanation.” The monitory finger Shapiro raises here, however, points to a rule of universal application.
— S. M. Hutchens
AUDEN AND CHRISTIANITY
by Arthur Kirsch
Yale University Press, 2005
(207 pages)
Famous for being a Christian and an artist, W. H. Auden was once asked to describe his particular brand of Christianity. Auden distinguished: Theologically, an Augustinian with an apophatic reticence; liturgically, “Anglo Catholic, though not too spiky”; organizationally a skeptic, since “none of the churches look too hot, do they?”
Kirsch, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of various works on Auden, has written the first book-length study of Auden’s profoundly comic faith. Kirsch weaves together biography and literary analysis, quoting at length from Auden’s diverse corpus of poems, essays, lectures on Shakespeare, Melville, and Cervantes, sermons, and letters, to reveal a deeply idiosyncratic, and not altogether appealing, believer.
Auden’s homosexuality is well-known, but Kirsch shows how, in Auden’s own words, his thoughts “pottered / from verses to sex to God / without punctuation. His exploratory sort of orthodoxy veers close to heterodoxy at various points. Yet, he remains an essential and essentially Christian thinker and poet, and Kirsch’s book provides a fine introduction to his work.
— Peter J. Leithart
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