Archives for July 17, 2007

“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears here on Tuesdays. Sometimes I’ll make the list, sometimes the list will come from someone else.
A while back my friend Mark Sarvas shared some of the titles on his James Wood reading list, described as “essentially a list of books we’ve collected over the years that Wood has written about approvingly at one time or another.”
Reading this, I thought, “What a terribly geekish admission, Mark.” Then, “Would you please post the rest of the list?” Internerd, indeed. So in the spirit of reciprocity, here are five favorites from my own James Wood reading list (and if you haven’t read the Shchedrin yet, you really should correct that — it’s incredible):
1. The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin (translation by Natalie Duddington): Wood wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the novel; you can download it here.
2. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul: Wood’s love for A House for Mr. Biswas is well-known; here he takes umbrage at the novel’s entry in The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII, declaring it “almost morally offensive.”
3. Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes: In “How Shakespeare’s ‘Irresponsbility’ Saved Coleridge” (The Irresponsible Self), Wood writes that Holmes’s two-volume biography of Coleridge “gives us the best portrait” of the poet.
4. Berryman’s Shakespeare by John Berryman (edited by John Haffenden): Wood quotes Berryman’s essays in “Shakespeare in Bloom” (The Broken Estate), and “Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling” (The Irresponsible Self).
5. God: A Biography by Jack Miles: In a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Wood notes that “Bloom is enormously shadowed” by Miles, whose books he calls “Feuerbachian adventures.” (See also Wood’s review of Miles’s Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.)

Last week I wrote about Maugham’s The Magician, a gothic novel written early in the author’s career. Another unlikely dabbler in the form: Emerson.
From Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

In writing, as in other endeavors, Emerson did not find his characteristic voice while at college, although some traits begin to emerge. In prose he was working on wildly diverse projects. One was a lurid gothic tale about a Norse prophetess and sibyl and her magician son. The fantasy is overheated and overwritten — more dream than anything else, a sort of Norse Vathek. The heroine Uilsa speaks:
“Did I not wake the mountains with my denouncing scream — calling vengeance from the north? Odin knew me and thundered. A thousand wolves ran down the mountain scared by the hideous lightning and baring the tooth to kill; they rushed after the cumbrous host. I saw when the pale faces glared back in terror as the black wolf pounced on his victim.”