Books & Reviews Archive

Henry is a neurosurgeon living in London with his wife, a lawyer, and two children: his son, a musician, and his daughter, a poet temporarily living in Paris. He wakes up one Saturday morning, watches an airplane make an emergency landing from his window, and imagines it to be an act of terrorism. Thus begins Saturday, a day shaped both by broader events (television news reports on the impending war in Iraq, the anti-war pacifist march, the aftermath of the plane's emergency landing) and private occurrences (his relationship with his wife, a squash match with a friend, a visit to his mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, attending his son's gig, preparing dinner for his daughter’s return and the arrival of his father-in-law, himself an eminent poet). The narrative unfolds within this contrast between the catastrophism of the external world and the quest for domestic peace, for a serene existence beyond the external turbulence. This attempt fails, and a minor car accident is enough to let violence and the unforeseen burst into intimate, family life. To avoid the peace march, Henry commits a traffic violation and collides with a car carrying a group of thugs, who attempt to assault the surgeon. Henry nevertheless manages to extricate himself from a perilous situation by destabilizing the thugs' ringleader, named Baxter, recognizing that he suffers from a severe neurodegenerative disorder. Baxter vows revenge for the humiliation and breaks into Henry's home just as the family is celebrating the arrival of the daughter and the grandfather, the renowned poet. Baxter threatens Henry’s wife and orders the young woman to strip: amid extreme tension, she recites lines of poetry, which mollify Baxter; he abandons his violent intent and is subsequently pushed down the stairs by Henry and his son. The novel concludes with Henry’s decision to operate on Baxter, who was gravely injured, followed by a series of existential reflections on the surgeon’s part: > all he feels is fear. He is weak and ignorant, frightened of the unpredictable consequences of an action that has slipped out of control and is generating new events, new consequences, until you are led to a place where you never dreamed of being and would never have chosen, a knife to your throat . The book revolves around deeply philosophical themes: human helplessness in the face of an increasingly inexplicable world, the impact of catastrophism on everyday life, the pursuit of domestic serenity, the fragility of the barriers separating the outside world from intimacy, the burden of heredity and a life beyond our control, and the role of affective bonds. Yet the narrative's most compelling theme is the clash between scientific culture—which strives to impose order and rationality—and literary culture, poetry in particular, which interprets the world through frameworks irreducible to scientific reason and, perhaps for this very reason, succeeds in grasping the innermost meaning of things and resolving crises. It is the poem recited by his daughter that draws Baxter out of his madness, not Henry’s logical reasoning. What, then, is the way out of a situation that can no longer be comprehended through the tenets of scientific rationality? One finds oneself at an impasse, encapsulated by the words of the poet Matthew Arnold: > ah, love, let us be true to one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new. Hath really neither joy, nor light, nor love, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night . The clash between desire (the love that makes us see the world as a land of dreams) and reality, which appears to us only as a bearer of death—is this contradiction not resolvable solely through a rational approach? The heavy philosophical content and the multiplicity of themes do not serve the narrative pace or the cohesion of the discourse. It is, as usual, very well written, yet at times it leans too heavily into intellectualism, and the characters remain flattened within assigned roles that conform more to stereotypes than to any genuine depth of character.

According to the introduction, the four stories encapsulate the author’s style and evolution. The first story revolves around a love of myth and beauty. In *The Last of the Valerii*, an Italian count has married a wealthy and beautiful American heiress, yet falls in love with a statue of Juno unearthed on his estate. The narrative is related by a character who seems to stand in for the author, watching with amusement, wonder, and keen interest as a living being falls in love with a statue. In *The Real Thing*, an artist who routinely works as a book illustrator is approached by a genteel couple fallen on hard times. They ask to serve as models for the artist, who initially agrees, but soon realizes that real life is one thing, and a figure in an artistic representation is quite another. The story is thus entirely constructed around the tension between real life and artistic expression, which is itself the offspring of the imagination. *The Lesson of the Master*, the least successful of the stories, takes duplicity as its subject. A young writer falls in love with a young woman, but is persuaded by an older writer to devote himself entirely to art: marriage or any strong romantic attachment are, after all, disruptive forces, compelling one to confront the prosaic nature of ordinary life. Upon returning from an extended journey to Italy, the young writer discovers that his “master” has married the young woman: it was all a ruse. Finally, the last story, *Daisy Miller*, is set in continental Europe, and specifically in Rome. Several of the author’s signature themes are present: Americans abroad; an independent yet naive young American woman; the corrupting Italian; and the smitten young lover. The settings are those of the upper middle class traveling abroad, and a Rome fraught with malarial fevers, however captivating in the remnants of a great civilization. The contrast between American society—uncouth yet wholesome—and European, particularly Italian, society—decadent yet the heir to a grand culture—is unmistakable. James’s style is invariably fascinating, at times convoluted, yet richly evocative. In particular, it is the descriptions of nature, cities, and settings that constitute the author’s greatest strength, whereas the dialogue often proves tedious and predictable.

This is a short story. The narrator’s father is admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, where he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which will soon lead to his death. He is a taciturn and reserved man who opens up to his daughter, the narrator, speaking of the family and the grandfather. One of the themes is his wife’s habit of “telling lies”—that is, inventing family episodes. The narrator thus realizes that “much of my past could have been fabricated by my mother.” The theme of the story is the family myth: the capacity to mythologize, idealize, and imagine a familial memory, which subsequently exerts a decisive influence on the mental, psychological, and cultural development of descendants. > During those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins. I thought around my grandfather. I also thought about certain origin myths I had pieced together as a child to explain things that were important, my sense of being from the north, the fear of art, the inevitability of the end . Mythological elaboration is the defining element of this memory, which does not photograph reality, is not history, but allows one to receive a world of values and sensations. The narrator imagines that her paternal family was like the pantheon of Norse gods, “wild, extravagant, harsh, sturdy, and terrifying,” and that > her mother’s lies were to sweeten and soften my father’s stormy, cold world . Invention in storytelling is a way to free ourselves from grief, from the barrenness of life, from the inexorable approach of death: > what is all this, this entire story I am telling you, if not a careful selection of things that can be spoken, that can be brought into the light of day? Alongside this construction stretch the dark shadows of unspoken things, because I do not want to, or do not dare to say them, or else I do not remember them, have misunderstood them, have forgotten them, or never knew them . If life is not what is real, but what is remembered and therefore narrated, then life is literature. It does not restore people to us: “none of these words can bring him back to us.” Only the myth and the story remain. A short story, yet one of profound depth, both philosophical and literary. The style is highly effective, constructed around an elaborate yet lucid syntax that makes reading it both pleasurable and effortless.