Reading list for February 2007

Currently reading
St. Augustine, Confessions
Joseph Roth, Hiob

Recently read
Paul Auster, The New York trilogy
Alan Bennett, Vater, Vater, lichterloh
  ditto, Die Lady im Lieferwagen
  ditto, Cosi fan tutti

Much to do with Mr. Bennett this month, three very short novels bundled together with assorted essays and short stories. Wonderful stuff about life and learning to live with disappointment. One laughs a lot when reading Bennett, but he does not write comedy.

I'm uncertain where to put Paul Auster, other than in the category of "overrated." He spends so much time being clever that he forgets to tell a proper tale. I conclude that "Timbuktoo" and "Auggie March's Christmas Story" (both of which I loved) were flukes.

Reading St. Augustine is an odd experience. He writes well and with insight about himself and his times, and then jumps to page-length hymns of praise to the goodness of God which are nearly as vapid as the mock-sermon in Monty Python's The meaning of life. Frankly, after reading the first few of these I've started skipping them. It's odd that one who writes so well could be so dismissive of reading and writing, which he refers to as "meretricious" and "trivial" and "worthless." I am aware of a growing unease as I read into the book, I do not trust him. This reminds me of a character from my student days, the husband of the manageress of the catering service who was a lay preacher. We had many interesting discussions of life and the search for meaning while he was behind the bar. I remember once finding him in a foul mood: angry, betrayed, disillusioned. He had been reading the Confessions and didn't believe them: "He lied! That cannot be how it happened. St. Augustine lied!" I can see what he meant.

While writing that paragraph I had a start: the thesaurus fell off the shelf and landed with a loud BANG on the floor. The crash transported me back nearly forty years in an instant, to the day that the dictionary broke. This was a big, thick, heavy single-volume dictionary, a foot tall and nearly as broad and too thick to be held by the spine. It was a professional word-wrangler's tool, a treat for word-lovers that included the words' etymologies and in many cases an extensive "see also" section of related or opposite words. My father was very fond of this book, he would look up a word and then spend half an hour following the connections (it's odd that he hasn't taken to the Internet, which is nothing but words and connections; perhaps he has the professional's disdain for amateur writing). On that fateful day, my mother distractedly, unattentively put the book down on the edge of the dining-room table, half supported and half in thin air; and of course somebody then nudged the table; and of course the dictionary fell. When a book that big falls, damage is done: the spine broke and the cover was wrenched away from the threaded backing. Dad was furious, I honestly thought that he was going to hit her. He patched the book together with duct tape. It was perfectly serviceable, but clearly the joy was gone because he seldom spent half-hours reading it after that. I'd forgotten the episode. Memories carry the full emotional load of the instant of their creation, when my thesaurus fell I experienced again the fear, surprise and confusion of that moment.

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