I fell behind a little bit. The start of teaching is always overwhelming, and the commencement of a school year online was moreso. Finding time to be online for pleasure or personal musings is difficult when you end the work day with achy half-blind eyes from staring at a screen 12 hours. But, I am catching up here on some recent reads.
I discovered Renault by reading a collection of essays by Daniel Mendolsohn, an editor and contributer to the NYRB who corresponded with Renault as a teen. This is the 3rd of her wonderful novels about ancient Greece I've had the pleasure to read this year as a result. She had a remarkable gift for inhabiting and re-imagining this past and its characters. I'd rank her with Graves, Williams, and Vidal easily, and she might best them all. What she can't learn via astute scholarship she infers and weaves seamlessly into the known.
Alexander as a youth had to navigate between the machinations of his mother Olympias--a princess from Epirus, regarded by the Macedonians as a backward and feral tribe much the way the Macedonians were regarded as such by Athenians--and Philip, his scheming and systematically ambitious father. Olympias consults oracles and sacrifices in her role as a cultist of Dionysus, while Philip conquers just about everyone and bit by bit advances toward his dream of bringing all of Greece under his empire and then moving East. Olympias and Philip are in constant struggle with each other, often to Alexander's dismay, but also to his benefit later in life. What he learns about power and influence in this household makes him the commander and gifted politician he later became. Renault's gift is showing it all, rather than telling.
The writing is beautiful, the characters are alive, and Macedon at the approach of its apex is fascinating. But the most lovely thing about the novel is Alexander's relationship to Hephaestion. From childhood pals to teenage lovers and into adulthood, there are few relationships drawn with so much tenderness and sympathy out of the hundreds I've read. We also get to meet Peritas and Bucephalus along the way.
The second volume of Renault's novels about Alexander is told from the viewpoint of his Persian eunuch and lover Bagoas. The first chunk of the narrative is Bagoas's own, and we witness the sad fate of his family and his capture. His decline from prince in an aristocratic Persian house to eunuch in another's is rendered with nigh unbearable sympathy by Renault. One can't help but root for Bagoas as he rises through the ranks of eunuchs kept for pleasure by wealthy men until at last he winds up as the favorite of Darius, King of Persia.
Of course along the way there are rumors about the barbarian Alexander, who has taken charge of armies following the assasintation of Philip, and is marching eastward. Bagoas is rightfully terrified about what awaits him if Darius is defeated and Persian conquered, and in this finely wrought and delicious novel we see indeed what occurs. After the fall of Darius Bagoas ends up in Alexander's service, and then in his bed. Renault deftly re-imagines the perspective of a Persian in the barbarian culture, and his surprise at Alexander's humanity and compassion and erudition. Bagoas as a long-time keen observer of intrigues at Persian courts becomes an invaluable advisor to Alexander, competing with Hephaestion for his love and attention, and through Bagoas's point of view we see many of Alexander's substantial victories, his illnesses and injuries, his close calls, and eventually his demise. A fantastic historical novel, easily one of the best I've read, and it surpasses even its glorious predecessor.
Not nearly as interesting nor as entertaining as the first volume (The Shadow of the Wind). Kind of a rehash of the same plot elements but the execution and the characters are a bit less engaging. But had just enough momentum to pull me through to the end and to interest me in continuing the tetralogy.
These stories are top-notch Borgesian journeys into the outer reaches of creativity and imagination. Delightful and disturbing by even measure, I expect her to out-do Kafka and Calvino. This is truly a young author to marvel over. I want to learn more Spanish and read her novels in the original.
And speaking of learning more Spanish in order to read the original--this is another young writer with tremendous gifts. Mexican Gothic is a Lovecraftian tour-de-force. An isolated European family inhabits a grim manse deep in the Mexican wilderness. The residents of a nearby town whisper about the manse and its inhabitants, and with good reason. They have created a monstrous fungi cult and are transforming their patriarch into an unspeakable horror from beyond time and space. Though Lovecraft seeps through this work (I see that Sylvia Morena-Garcia has edited a Cthulu-themed collection of mythos in the HPL universe), her main influence in English is likely Shirley Jackson, whose Hill House also permeates this creepy book. You can, and likely will, polish it off in an afternoon.
Sergio Argones has a mad and unrestrained imagination both as scribbler and as story-teller. I used to get MAD Magazine as a kid and the first thing I would do was look at all the marginal scribbles Argones had doodled in and around the panels of others' work. Groo was funny to my middle-school self, and still gives me chortles as that middle-school self fades more and more into the deep recesses of time.
Learn the language of these symbols. Dig their resonance with the subconscious. Let them awaken the eternal within you. Hand over the reins to the Universal and escape the cycle of samsara. And confront about 1,000 typos, mis-spelled words, and sentence fragments along the way.
I'm a long-time fan of Lewis Lapham. I used to lap up Lapham's intros to Harper's Mag, and when he stepped down from that post and moved over to Lapham's Quarterly I eagerly followed along. I bought this book from a recent list of books Lapham regarded as most influential. Reading Durant I can see stylistically and philosophically his influence on Lapham. This collection of essays on major themes in the study of history provided many useful gems for further discovery, and each topic could serve as provocation pieces for inquiry units in Humanities courses. Humane, erudite, and with an unparalleled grasp of world history, Durant might indeed take a large chunk of my remaining reading time here on Earth.
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