The Joy of Reading

chapter fifteen

Only Yesterday

Most of the authors treated in Chapter 14 produced their best-known work before or during World War II or, in a few cases, before 1980. The authors discussed in this chapter are definitely children of the last half of the twentieth century. If they wrote about World War II, it was in the past for them but perhaps not in their novels. Many of them had been in the service, but they emerged from that experience with new ideas about the world they were inheriting. For a while the Cold War haunted their dreams, but then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the United States emerged as apparently the only great power of the future. Of course no one was watching China at the time, but what would history be without surprises?

I began my reading career at the age of seven, which was in 1933. I read many of the books discussed in the previous chapters when I was young—in my forties or early fifties at the latest. In 1965, when I was thirty-nine, I moved to Chicago to take a position at Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., and for the next twenty years I didn’t read much (although I did reread many of the “classics” as part of my work). I retired in 1982, when I was fifty-six, and began to read at a frantic pace in order to catch up with the literature of my time. In the past twenty-five years I may have read five hundred or so books just because I had the time, and it was a great pleasure to be free to read whatever I wanted and not what I had to. This chapter includes the books that I have most enjoyed in those years.

FRED BODSWORTH

1918–

Last of the Curlews

Fred Bodsworth was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1918. He is an amateur naturalist and has had a long career of studying and writing about the natural world. He is a very good writer as is manifest in his best-known book, Last of the Curlews, which was first published in 1954. A new edition was issued in 1995 with a foreword by the poet M.S. Merwin and an afterward by the Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann. They were as impressed and moved as I was by this remarkable little book.

It is a first-person account by a male bird, who has spent months seeking a mate, a female of his species, the Eskimo curlew, that once and not too long ago was very common in much of eastern Alaska. This particular bird is aware that he must soon leave for the long flight first eastward over Hudson’s Bay and the islands of eastern Canada, then southward across the ocean to Venezuela and straight down the South American continent to Patagonia. He will spend five months there and then prepare to fly northward again over a different track, crossing Guatemala, passing over Texas and Saskatchewan, and finally arriving at the small valley from which he departed six month before.

He does not find a mate, but he leaves anyway, knowing he has to and hoping to find a female bird in the southern land that he remembers from previous journeys. He does so, and their love is rewarded with an offspring in her body that will be born when they reach home. They fly together, the male bird constantly watching the female, knowing she is burdened by her pregnancy and guiding her when he thinks she may be losing her way, until they reach the plains of central Texas where a man, seeing this odd creature in the air, shoots and she falls to the ground. For days the male bird circles the place where she fell, wishing, hoping, until he realizes there is no help and continues his long journey to his native land. When he arrives he continues his search for another mate, always seeking, never giving up hope …

How does this beautiful book end? I will not tell you but allow you to feel, to hope, to weep and laugh … It is a common story, of course, of love between a boy and a girl, or a man and a woman, or two birds, male and female because that is the way things almost always are.

PRIMO LEVI

1918–1987

The Periodic Table

If Not Now, When?

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1918 and trained as a chemist. He was a Jew and he experienced difficulties, but not until Germany took over the Italian government was he in any real danger because his work was valued by Italian firms. In 1944, however, he was arrested as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz.

His “shipment” in twelve unheated and crowded cattle cars arrived on February 4, 1944. There were 650 persons in the “shipment”; only twenty survived to be liberated by the Red Army. Before that the SS took the inhabitants of the camp on a forced march behind the lines, during which large numbers died of exhaustion and cold. Levi was one of the lucky ones because he had been stricken by scarlet fever and the Germans didn’t want to take him with the other prisoners, so they left him behind to die, which, somehow, Levi managed not to do. However, it was eleven months before he reached Turin. At first no one recognized him, he was so emaciated and worn down.

On his journey homeward he began to tell people about his experiences and they urged him to write them down. He did so, publishing them in a book called If This Is a Man in 1947. The book was hard to write because his memories were so raw even years after his escape, but he knew there were still stories that had to be told and he tried to do so. One book, a collection of stories, was called The Periodic Table (1975), because each chapter deals in one way or another with a different element, from argon and hydrogen to vanadium and carbon. It’s a fine book, too.

If Not Now, When? unlike his other books, is a novel, although it is based on stories Levi had heard from others about events in the fateful year of 1945. It follows a group of Jewish partisans behind the lines who are fighting to survive. One scene in the book is chiseled in my memory. The partisans turn the tables on a group of SS and are about to shoot them all when one of their number says, “No, let’s not do that–I know a better way.” They order the Germans to lie down on their bellies in a room and then, taking very careful aim with a pistol and slowly, one by one, they shoot each of the men in the lower spine. They are paralyzed from the waist down and the partisans watch them for a while as they try to get up, reminding Levi of a scene in Paradise Lost when the Devils at the bottom of Hell are twisting and squirming in the mud, unable to even raise their heads. The SS troops beg for food and water. The partisans do not even laugh.

Primo Levi died on April 11, 1987. He had fallen from the balcony of his apartment house in Turin. His life had not been happy; his memories were hard to live with. But the rumor that he had committed suicide is probably not true.

LEO ROSTEN

1908–1997

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N

K*A*P*L*A*N

The Joys of Yiddish

Leo Rosten was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1908 and moved to Chicago when he was three. He graduated from the University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in 1937. The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N was published in 1931 after chapters had been appearing for months in the New Yorker. I must have been too young to read that first edition, but I soon read a second one and have been chuckling over it ever since.

Mr. Kaplan is in a class taught by a professor of English for students wishing to learn the language. He signs all his papers with the asterisks because, he says, the teacher will notice him better. He has no problem being noticed because he drives the teacher crazy with his sly comprehension of more than the teacher realizes. For just one example, Kaplan writes on an examination about his uncle:

“His eye fell on a bargain and he picked it up.” “You can’t say that, Mr. Kaplan,” says the teacher. “You have to say, ‘He saw a bargain and picked it up.’” “No,” said Mr. Kaplan. “I am right, because mine onkel has a glass eye.”

The teacher sighs in despair.

The bibliography of works by Leo Rosten (sometimes under the pseudonym of Leonard Q. Ross) fills a large page. One of the items is The Joys of Yiddish (1968), one of my favorite books.

I am not Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and love The Joys of Yiddish. It may not be my native language, but I’ve heard it from friends all my life and am sorry that so many American Jews have forgotten it, although their parents may not have. Even so, it is one of the most expressive languages in the world and includes many typical gestures. It is like the dialect of Italian that is still spoken by some people in Sicily. It too is very expressive and involves a lot of hand movements.

Leo Rosten was a humorist and compiled several collections of Jewish humor and Yiddish quotations. They are all good. He was the source of many fine quotations. For example: “A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.” “Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.” Rosten died in New York in 1997, at the age of eighty-nine.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR

1922–2007

Slaughterhouse-Five; or,

The Children’s Crusade

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He was studying at Cornell when World War II broke out. He enlisted in the army, which sent him to Carnegie Tech to study mechanical engineering. This didn’t last long, and eventually he found himself in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge. Together with three other men he became lost behind the lines. The four of them wandered for days until they were captured by Wehrmacht troops in December 1944. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war and was incarcerated in cells beneath the city that had held frozen carcasses of cattle. On the night of February 13, Dresden was obliterated by firebombs from a thousand allied planes that flew over the city in waves creating a firestorm so intense that almost no one on the streets or in houses and other buildings survived. Estimates of the number of civilian deaths vary between 38,000 and 138,000 but the real number is probably closer to the latter. The problem is that there was no way to count the dead because, although the Germans at first tried to bury them all, they realized there was no way they could do that; they handed out flame throwers and burned every body they could find.

Vonnegut was one of only seven American prisoners of war who survived this holocaust. He had been immured in Schlachthof-Fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five), which was deep enough beneath the city so that the heat did not penetrate to it. Discovered, he was given the job of helping to find bodies. He was rescued by Russian troops in May and exchanged for prisoners of other nationalities.

He was a born writer and soon successful. He wrote many fine and funny books, but the only story he really wanted to tell was about what had happened to Dresden on that night in February 1945. He was finally able to do this in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969. The subtitle of the book, The Children’s Crusade, is an example of the kind of mordant humor to be found in this and many other Vonnegut titles. The subtitle reminds us of a terrible thing that happened in the twelfth century. Fifty thousand children, led by a boy named Stephen, tried to go to the Holy Land and conquer the Paynim with love, not arms. Instead, owing to mistakes and simple greed, most of them were sold into slavery as soon as they reached land. Vonnegut thought of soldiers as children being used by grownups. The book’s combination of simplicity and sense, irony and rue, said a critic, is very much in the Vonnegut vein. Its ironic phrase, “So it goes” in reference to death, became a slogan for anti-Vietnam-War protestors.

As time went on he grew more and more critical and pessimistic about what his country was doing in and to the world. The Vietnam War enraged him, and the misadventure in Iraq did so even more. “By saying that ‘Our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees,’” he wrote, “am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers? Their morale is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

He died as I was writing this, in April 2007. I won’t be the only one to miss him. There are thousands more. So it goes.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

1922–

Blindness The Cave

José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922, to a family of landless peasants. He had little education, but this didn’t stop him from becoming one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, or maybe of all time.

He is an iconoclast with many curious beliefs. A communist, an atheist, and a pessimist, he is also a lover of women. And he’s fond of dogs—there is a dog that plays a part in every one of the eight novels by Saramago I have read. I wonder if anyone else has noticed?

His prose style is decidedly strange. You have to get used to it. He never uses quotation marks to delineate conversational speech, and he hardly ever uses periods to end sentences, which run on in some cases for an entire page, with the clauses separated by commas. But once you have become used to this, you find it is a novel and intriguing way to describe the endlessly confusing actions and thoughts, as well as the words, of human beings, which is what Saramago is most interested in.

Blindness was published (in the United States) in 1995. A man and his wife are driving in a city and have stopped at a red light when the man suddenly becomes blind. His wife does not, and she is able to work her way out of the traffic jam caused by the sudden blindness of many other drivers. Neither of them is ever given a name. He is simply “The first person to become blind.” and she is “The wife of the first man to become blind.” The plague is not universal but it is nearly so, and the blind populace of the city make desperate efforts to rearrange their lives in order to live. Of course there are great difficulties, not least because a gang of criminals tries to take over the city, threatening everyone who does not obey them with death (they have found weapons and are willing to use them).

The wife of the first man to go blind turns out to be the salvation of the city and perhaps the entire race, because she alone can see and works her way into the gang and overcomes it. There is no explanation of why this has happened and why the plague ends. That is not the kind of thing Saramago does. Nevertheless, despite all its mysterious unanswered questions, this is one of the great novels of our time. In 1996, José Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Cave was published (in the United States) in 2002. It is a love story between a man and a woman who cannot speak to one another until almost the last page. Here, the dog, whose name is “Found” because it just turns up one day, is a charming and eloquent interlocutor. The man has a daughter who is married to a man who does not understand what is really going on, though he finally discovers an underground cave in which a group of persons are seated, staring at a wall. There is a light behind them; a machine is displaying pictures on the wall. The son-in-law is suddenly terrified and returns home to inform his family of this strange happening, which they understand because, whether they have read Plato’s Republic or not, it is clear to them. Which it will be to you when you read this beautiful book.

Other fine novels by Saramago are The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula separates from Europe and starts to drift slowly westward; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, in which a proofreader in a publishing house leaves out a “not” in a sentence and this changes the history of the world. There are many more. Prepare to be intrigued as well as delighted and amused.

JOSEPH HELLER

1923–1999 .

Catch 22

Joseph Heller was born on Coney Island, New York, in 1923. He flew sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier, returned safely, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to Oxford in 1949–50. After that he began to write the one book that everyone remembers. Called Catch 22, it was published in 196l.

In case you don’t remember, the absurd premise of the book is as follows. According to an extremely vague USAF regulation, anyone who is willing to fly combat missions (particularly in a B-25) must be considered insane. However, if you apply for release from the service on mental grounds, the act proves your sanity and you are reassigned to combat. That, in a nutshell, is Catch 22.

Yossarian is a captain in the air force who is trying to understand Catch 22. He is in love with Nurse Duckett and she is in love with him, but they don’t make it somehow. Milo Minderbinder is a mess officer who is willing to do anything if he can get paid for it, including hiring out his air force group to the Germans, who use it to kill many Americans. He is accused of treason but gets off by claiming that he was only being a capitalist. Ex-PFC Wintergreen is called that because he went AWOL. Later he becomes Ex-Sgt. Wintergreen and hopes someday to become a General so he can go AWOL and become ex-Gen. Wintergreen.

Yossarian is more or less the hero of the book. He spends most of his time trying to avoid being killed by officers who keep increasing the number of missions he has to fly before being allowed to go home on leave. He has decided to live forever or die in the attempt. Eventually he realizes he can just leave and sets out in a rowboat to row all the way to Sweden, a neutral country. For all we know he gets there safely. And of course even if he dies en route he will live forever in the minds of the millions who read his book or saw the movie made by Mike Nichols, in which Alan Arkin plays Yossarian. Can’t you see him now in his rowboat as the scene fades to black?

Joseph Heller didn’t live forever. He died in 1999. His later books weren’t as good as Catch 22, but, as he once said: “When I read someone saying I haven’t done anything as good as Catch 22 lately, I’m tempted to reply, ‘Who has?’”

JOHN BERGER

1926–

Ways of Seeing

About Looking

John Berger was born in London in 1926, the son of an infantry officer on the Western front in 1916–18. Berger enlisted in the British army and served from 1944-46, after which he studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London.

As time went on he grew closer and closer to the Communist Party, which didn’t keep him from serving The New Statesman as its art critic. From time to time they thought of releasing him, but he was such an astute critic and good writer that they didn’t do so for ten years. By 1961 he was a freelance writer and lived the simple life he preferred. In 1972 his first book, Ways of Seeing, was published and won the Booker Prize, the highest British award for a literary work.

It is an extraordinary book, which, if you read it and think about what it says, will probably change the way you look at a work of art, at least any work of art before about 1850, say—the Old Masters, as they’re called. According to Berger, practically every painting was an advertisement for something, usually the wealth of the person—man or woman—who commissioned it. You don’t see this right away, but then you begin to notice small details: a ring on a woman’s finger, a fur collar on a man’s jacket, silver buckles on his shoes, an expensive harness on a horse, a jeweled collar on the neck of a dog—to say nothing of a mansion in the background or a fine stand of timber or a lake with a temple in the distance. Or the dress of a maidservant, the uniform of a footman—anything and everything is there for an ulterior purpose. And really always the same kind: to reveal the wealth of someone, either the subject of the painting or the buyer of it or the patron of the painter himself.

This is not always true. Take Rembrandt, for instance. Early in his career, when he was a society painter who painted portraits of rich and famous people, this was certainly true. But midway through his career Rembrandt ceased to be successful in that way, ceased to find patrons or wealthy subjects, and finally was reduced to painting portraits of his wife, who sat for nothing, and of himself, seen in a mirror. And, as Berger admits, these were his greatest paintings, the ones that lead us to name him one of the greatest artists of all time.

Berger’s analysis of paintings in Ways of Seeing is fascinating. I have only hinted at its complexities. I hope you will see for yourselves.

About Looking is another extraordinary book. It is mostly about photography. If that interests you, you should read it. The first chapter of the book moves me very deeply. It is called “Why Look at Animals?”

Berger begins by pointing out that most of us, nowadays, have almost no contact with animals, may never even see an animal unless it is someone’s dog on a leash or a cat slinking in an alley (or a rat in the same alley). Not so long ago, Berger says, this was not so. Most of us, until about 1900 or even later in many countries, lived with animals, shared our lives with theirs, depended on them for many kinds of help and services, as they depended on us. Of course, we killed and ate them, but that didn’t mean we were unaware of their existence; we knew where our food came from, how it grew under our care, what it meant to slaughter them or wring their necks or steal their eggs. And now, if we ever look at animals, it is in zoos.

And there’s the rub. Animals in zoos are not the kind of animals we used to live with. They are captives, serving life sentences for our amusement and pleasure. They are lazy, sleepy—most animals sleep if they have nothing else to do—bedraggled, unhealthy, and unhealthy looking. And when we look at them, they look at us. And what do they see? Do they recognize us as fellow inmates of an industrial culture that treats animals as things instead of living beings, and treats human beings as things as well, things that can be exploited for their labor or for warfare, or as amusing automata flickering on a screen?

If you disagree about this, don’t argue with me. Argue with John Berger, and even if you win the argument it will have done you good to engage in it.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

1931–

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,

et al.

John le Carré (the pseudonym of David J.M. Cornwell) was born in Dorset, England, in 1931. He was educated at Oxford, taught at Eton, then served for five years in the British Foreign Service. Recruited to MI6, his career was destroyed by Kim Philby, who blew the cover of dozens of British agents to the KGB. He analyzed Philby’s weakness and death in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and A Small Town in Germany (1968), which introduced one of his major characters, George Smiley. The latter book, a tour de force, consists mostly of dialogue, which is fun for a writer to do but not always very easy to read.

My three favorite novels by le Carré are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), and The Constant Gardener (2001). I remember well the excitement I felt about Spy, which was one of the first to deal with a subject that le Carré and others later made almost a cliché. I was scared for the secret agent and hopeful, when he threw himself over the Berlin Wall at the end, that he would survive to live another life. And I understood very well why he couldn’t stand to continue conducting his entire life in secrecy, because I was doing a little of that myself.

The young female protagonist of The Little Drummer Girl captured my heart. She is so brave and so frightened, and also so torn between love of her victim and hatred of the man he is becoming. Le Carré is a very good writer who can tear your feelings into shreds continuously for two hundred pages, as he does here.

I think he never has written a better book than The Constant Gardener, partly because his own feelings are so deeply involved.

ALAN FURST

1941–

Historical Espionage Novels

Alan Furst was born in Newark, New Jersey, and brought up on the West Side of Manhattan. He received a B.A. from Oberlin and an M.A. from Penn State. He was urged by his grandfather to be a teacher and write only in his spare time—advice that, fortunately for us, he refused.

His early novels were reasonably successful but it was not until 1988, with the publication of Night Soldiers, that his career took off and in the process revitalized the entire genre of spy novels. He called it “historical espionage,” but it was the depth and intensity of his writing about heroes who had to depend mainly on intelligence and luck that set him apart from the authors of most such thrillers except for Joseph Conrad, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré. His books, besides Night Soldiers, including The Polish Officer, Dark Star, Dark Voyage, and The World at Night, are all exceptional—that list contains several very good books, but you can count on him, whatever the title, not only to teach you about the dark secret world of the period from 1933 to 1944 but also to cause you to wonder how we ever survived as a nation and, indeed, as a society. Furst’s knowledge of the underside of the period is unparalleled, and he is a very good writer whom I highly recommend.

CZESLAW MILOSZ

1911–2004

The Captive Mind

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Tsarist Russia, to partly Polish, partly Lithuanian parents, and was brought up in the multinational milieu of Wilno (Vilnius). He graduated in 1934 with a degree in law and the next year received an award from the Alliance Française in Paris. During the late thirties he worked for the Polish State Broadcasting Company, but with the emergence of the Nazis he became active in underground circles in Warsaw, where he spent most of the war. Between 1946 and 1951 he served as a member of the Polish Foreign Service, but despite his initial sympathies for radical change he left his post as cultural attaché in Paris and remained in the West thereafter.

The Captive Mind (1953) is his most influential book. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s and Furst’s works, it is not fiction, but it is as gripping as anything in their books. It was written in Paris at the time when a majority of French intellectuals resented their country’s dependence on American help and placed their hopes on what they saw as a new world to the East, ruled by a leader of incomparable wisdom and virtue—Joseph Stalin. Those, like Albert Camus, who pointed to the existence of a network of concentration camps as the very foundation of the Socialist system, were vilified and ostracized. His book, as Milosz states in a note at the beginning of it, “displeased practically everybody.” Admirers of Soviet Communism found it insulting, while anti-Communists suspected its author of being a Marxist at heart. “A lonely venture,” he went on to say, “it has since been vindicated by facts and defends itself well against both kinds of criticism.”

Its subject is the “vulnerability,” as Milosz called it, of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future. As such, the book transcends limitations of place and moment as it explores the deeper causes of today’s longing for any, even the most illusory, certainty.

Americans may say, fifty years after the publication of this book, that its comments do not apply to us; any of us who were ever tempted by Communist and totalitarian social concepts have long since changed our minds and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have begun even to accept non-Communist Russians as partners in the future. But, as Milosz would point out if he were still alive, there are many kinds of totalitarianism in the world, many of them religious, and we are perhaps just as vulnerable as we ever were to the lure of “hypothetical certainties.” Or if “we” feel we are not, we have to recognize that there are many of “them” who are willing to risk and even to give up their lives for the sake of their beliefs. It is for that reason that this book is important, although it is not pleasant to read.

Czeslaw Milosz was a good poet as well as a historian, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He died at the age of ninety-three in 2004.

SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT

1931–2003

The Sleeping Car Murders

A Very Long Engagement

Sébastien Japrisot (an anagram for his real name, Jean Baptiste Rossi) was born in 1931—the same year as le Carré—and he too is a very good writer. He published his first novel when he was seventeen, and wrote dozens since then. He wrote in French and, while not all of his books are available in English, his two translated works are both terrific reads.

The Sleeping Car Murders (1963) was published in the same year as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it is a very different book from le Carré's. It is much more traditional—except for one very special thing. The story is rather simple: a sleeping car arrives in Paris with a dead woman in one of the compartments. The police are alerted and at first the investigation seems to be routine. Attempts are made to discover other occupants in the compartment besides the murdered woman. But these attempts lead nowhere, because whenever a fellow passenger is found, he or she too is dead. Something here is very mysterious and very frightening, especially for two persons in the compartment, a young woman and a seventeen-year-old boy. It seems that the boy was more interested in the young woman than she was in him, but as the net is drawn tighter and tighter around her she becomes terrified and tries to enlist the boy’s help. He refuses to help her. Why? She doesn’t know, the detective doesn’t know, and you don’t know. But then, suddenly, you do know and are deeply satisfied by this fine love story.

A Very Long Engagement (1993) is a story about a young man named Manuch, or “Cornflower,” and a young woman named Mathilde. She is wealthy but crippled by polio; he is poor and a soldier in the Great War. The first sentence of the book is this: “Once upon a time there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war, because that’s the way of the world.” The rest of the book, which is inexpressibly surprising, astonishing, and moving, is told in that same style, as if the author doesn’t care about his characters and thinks you don’t either, or at least you don’t have to; they’re just ordinary people, the kind that other people don’t care about. But before you have read fifty pages you care about one of them so much your heart aches. This is Mathilde.

They were young lovers just before Manuch left for the army, and that too is the way of the world. That Mathilde should love him is, for Manuch, the most astonishing thing that has ever happened and ever will happen, and his happiness is so overwhelming that there are times when he can’t breathe. He goes off to war promising to take care of himself and assuring her that he will return soon, that they will be married and have children and do all the good things that good people do. She is not as sure as he is because she can’t walk easily and often is confined to a wheelchair, but at least she knows they can make love because they have done so, once, before he left. And if once, why not many times?

Then a very sad thing happens. Desperate to see Mathilde again, Manuch wounds himself and applies for medical leave. But the authorities are convinced his wound is self-inflicted, a common occurrence. He protests, but they don’t believe him; they are sure he has wounded himself, this happens all the time, and he is court-martialed, convicted , and sentenced to be placed in no-man’s-land, in between the French and German trenches to be shot at or not, who cares. He will certainly be killed, he and the four others who are in the same situation. So that is the end of the story of Mathilde and Manuch.

Ah, but the Fates have not reckoned with Mathilde. I can’t tell you what happens except to say that you’ll be surprised. It is a very fine book of its kind. It will not disappoint you, but you will probably have to read it twice before you understand everything that happens. (I’m slow—I had to read it three times.)

Sébastien Japrisot died in 2003.

TONI MORRISON

1931–

Song of Solomon

Beloved

Toni Morrison (her real name is Chloe Anthony Wofford) was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931—apparently, a good year for authors. She studied humanities at Howard University and earned a B.A. in 1953; she then went to Cornell, where she gained an M.A. After graduation she became an instructor at Texas Southern University (1955–57), then returned to Howard to teach English. All the time she was writing with increasing craft.

Her third novel, Song of Solomon, was published in 1977. Beloved appeared ten years later. A sensation, it earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The Nobel citation described her as one “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Morrison embodies the African-American voice; her books see the American reality from the viewpoint of someone who is in some ways an outsider and in others at the center of things. Her eminently readable novels are very fine and strange, which the best books almost always are. But they are eminently readable by all kinds of people, young and old, male and female, black and white. That includes just about everybody, doesn’t it?

CORMAC MCCARTHY

1933–

The Border Trilogy

The Road

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933. He moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937 and studied at the University of Texas from 195l-52. He served in the U.S. Air Force in 1953–57, then returned to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee, bought a barn, rebuilt and renovated it, largely with his own hands. He is that kind of a man. He was a MacArthur Fellow, which allowed him to live wherever he desired. He moved to Tesuque, a town north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and began to write full time. I believe he had always known that was likely to happen.

The three books of The Border Trilogy began to appear in 1992, with the publication of All the Pretty Horses. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). The trilogy is an extraordinary achievement and constitutes one of the finest literary works of the twentieth century.

My wife, Gerry, and I were driving west to Chicago and then Aspen from our Connecticut home in 1993, and I had bought an audio tape of All the Pretty Horses for the ride. Neither of us was prepared for the power and beauty of the first part of the book as read by Brad Pitt (at a time when he wasn’t Brad Pitt yet). Several times we had to stop along the Interstate to rest and try to get our breath back, to prepare ourselves to resume the reading. At the time Pitt had not recorded the unabridged version, so I bought a copy and read it to Gerry while she drove, and she read it to me while I did. We were enormously impressed.

The experience was particularly moving because driving south and east from Aspen we traversed some of the Texas country in which the story is set. Not exactly the same, but the same kind—horse country, where cattle used to roam. I’m no horseman, although my wife was a good rider when she was young, but I somehow felt that I was on the horse with John Grady Cole as he rode through those dry, parched, empty lands. I felt with him and understood his suffering as the country changed before his very eyes, as it has done by the end of the trilogy, much of which takes place in northern Mexico.

The Road is a novel about a father and son who are riding eastward after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed all of the world they inhabit. I know it is a very fine book but I haven’t gotten the strength to read it yet; but I will, because it is by Cormac McCarthy.

LARRY MCMURTRY

1936–

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936. He went to high school in nearby Anchor City, the backdrop of his novel The Last Picture Show, published in 1966. Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It had been preceded by other good books and has been followed by still others, but it is unique. It deserves to be considered in the same breath as The Border Trilogy, although it is not as “grand.”

The story is mainly about two men, “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, both of them retired Texas Rangers, who with the help of several others are driving a herd of cattle north from Texas to Montana. There is also a blue pig who accompanies them all the way and a young woman who was abandoned by her man and has become a prostitute because there is nothing else she can do. Her name is Lorie, and she is very pretty. She owes her life to Gus so she goes with them, too. Extraordinary things happen along the way, things you will never forget, not least the capture of Lorie by Blue Duck, a malicious half breed who threatens to burn her alive if … Well, Gus doesn’t let that happen, but he is wounded and … I don’t want to tell you any more; it’s too much fun finding out for yourself—fun and sad, too.

DANIEL QUINN

1935–

Ishmael

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935. He studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University, but he was all the time thinking about the history of mankind and the question Rousseau had answered with his Discourse on Inequality: Why does inequality and the inevitable poverty that accompanies it exist, and how did they come into being? As a very young man, Quinn discovered a very simple answer to the question—namely, that sometime in the not too distant past, some of the people on Earth locked up all the food and charged all the rest a fee if they wanted to eat it. They also declared that all the agricultural land belonged to them, and if others wanted to use it, they had to pay a fee for that, too. Simple, right?

But what to do about it? That’s more complicated, and it’s the subject of Daniel Quinn’s fine book, Ishmael (1996), and of its successors, The Story of B (1996) and My Ishmael (1997). Answering the question requires a lot of searching into the past, for example into the Book of Genesis, where the story of Cain and Abel is given a slant that may never have occurred to you. Many other hoary truths are shown to be not necessarily true, and probably false. A vision of a good world on a good Earth eventually emerges, seen through the bright eyes of Ishmael, who is not a person. What he actually is will shock you, but you will soon get over that discovery and feel you have learned something very important, although you will have trouble trying to explain it to anybody else. As I am having trouble now.

It will help, I think, to remember Daniel Quinn’s mantra: “If they give you lined paper, write sideways.”

J.M. COETZEE

1940–

Disgrace

Elizabeth Costello

John Marvell Coetzee, born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, was educated in schools there and at the University of Cape Town, from which he graduated with degrees in English and Mathematics. He then went to the University of Texas, from which he graduated with degrees in English, Linguistics, Computer Science, and German. In 1972 he applied for U.S. citizenship but was denied. Do you suppose it was because he was too well educated?

He began writing in 1969 and quickly published a number of novels, including Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980; Life and Times of Michael K. in 1983; and Age of Iron in 1990. Disgrace was published in 1999.

It is a dreadful story that you hope could not be true—but it surely is, in more ways than one. The protagonist—hardly the hero in any sense of the word—is a professor in an unnamed university, either American or Canadian. He is introduced in the first sentence thus: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, in his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” The object of his affections, if that’s the word, is one of his students, a tall, lissome young woman whose parents are not as pleased by his sexual arrangement as he and perhaps she are. One thing quickly leads to another, and he soon finds himself without a teaching job anywhere in the country. With no prospects of any other kind of work paying enough to keep him alive, he returns to South Africa, where his daughter lives on a ranch, and offers to help her out in any way he can in return for a bed and three meals a day.

At first this arrangement is satisfactory, until a shocking event occurs that I will not describe because you must discover it yourself when you read this remarkable, perhaps great, book. The event seems to him to require a response that his daughter does not think is correct. He realizes that this difference between them is symbolic of the change that in one way or another is going on in the world almost everywhere, and certainly in Africa. The change is inevitable. From one point of view it is very unpleasant, but from another very appropriate and good. I know I am being vague, because I don’t want to unravel all these mysteries before you have read the book. Of course, you can put your head in the sand, but that is hardly ever a good idea because it leaves you open to a kick in … well, you know.

Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, is a very strange book. It isn’t easy to say what happens in it. On the surface, the book is a report of several long, controversial lectures given by the protagonist about the way we treat animals and including the suggestion that we ought to change places with animals and let them treat us the way we treat them. One critic said that she could be thought of as one of those large cats that eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open body, give you a cold yellow stare. Quite so. Be brave and read this book, too.

ROBERTO CALASSO

1941–

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Roberto Calasso was born in Florence, Italy, in 1941. He studied English literature at the University of Rome and graduated with a thesis on Sir Thomas Browne, a fascinating and little-known—especially in Italy—English doctor and antiquarian who wrote two astonishing books in the seventeenth century. Calasso began to work for Adelphi Edizioni when it was founded in 1982 (he was twenty-one) and since 1999 has been its chairman. It has published several of his books, which have been translated into most of the European languages.

The Ruin of Kasch (l983, translated 1984) is an absolutely crazy book. The first half of it is a brilliant biography of Metternich, the political genius who reshaped Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (and created a new world that made inevitable the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 and the First World War of 1914-18). The second half of the book is about a lost Central African Empire—Kasch—that was swallowed up by the jungle five hundred years ago. I read it all the way through, but I really don’t know why.

Yes, of course I do. It is because I had previously read The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988, translated by Tim Parks into English in 1993), which in my opinion and that of many others is the finest book ever written about the Greek myths. It is a subject I love because I have written about it, too, but when I read Calasso’s book I was flabbergasted. It is one of the books I wish I had written.

It begins wonderfully, telling and retelling the Myth of Europa, who was raped by Zeus, the Bull that rose from the sea, and gave birth, in a manner of speaking, not only to the Greece we know but also to Europe. “How did it all begin?” is the recurring theme, and there are many answers, all of which Calasso describes with stunning scholarship and beauty. In the remainder of the book he shows how each of these various beginnings ends up in one great, heart-breaking event, when Cadmus, an old man, defeated and torn and his children torn too, but united with his bride, herself an old woman now, gives to the Greeks his last gift, the alphabet, with which they will begin to create—leaving the gods behind because they are no longer needed—the new world that we know because we still live in it today.

MARK HELPRIN

1947––

Winter’s Tale

A Soldier of the Great War

Mark Helprin was born in New York in 1947 and grew up there and in the British West Indies. He holds degrees from Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and he did post graduate work at Oxford University. He has served in the British merchant navy, the Israeli Infantry, and the Israeli Air Force.

He began to write stories as a student and published several in the New Yorker before he was twenty. Winter’s Tale was published in 1988; it had been written before he was thirty. It is a fantastic story of early twentieth-century life in New York City. One of my favorite scenes describes a trip on the New York Central Railroad south from Saratoga. In a tremendous five-day blizzard, the train is practically covered by snow and cannot move. It is terribly cold. Fires are built in the cars using the floorboards and the now-useless luggage for fuel, but the passengers soon run out of food and water. Several people die of exposure and starvation.

Unknown to them, a search party from a neighboring village has set out with twenty-five sleighs loaded with food and warm clothing, snow shoes, and skis. It takes days before the train is found and the farmers from the village with all their equipment finally arrive. The two hundred desperate passengers can hardly believe their good fortune as they quickly don the warm clothing. Those who know how to ski put the skies on their feet; those who do not are told they must learn, because this is an emergency, and that’s what happens. And because this book is a ceaselessly interesting fantasy they all survive and return to their lives, but much changed in their understanding of what life is. There are other mysterious goings and comings, and a battle between good and evil that is very exciting. The book was highly praised when it appeared and is still described as Helprin’s best book.

I disagree. Not because it’s not wonderful but because he wrote an even better one, A Soldier of the Great War (1991). This too is a kind of fantasy but the time frame is much shorter—basically, the four years of World War I. His experiences in the war are told by Alessandro, now an old man, to a young man with whom he is forced to walk for fifty miles to their destinations, which in the case of the young man is love and in that of the old man, death. Everything that could have happened to any Italian soldier has happened to Alessandro, and he describes it all with a passionate sense of the horror and excitement and beauty that it entailed, especially the story of his falling in love with a nurse in a military hospital. Her name is Ariane and he thinks he has lost her, and if it were not for a painting by Giorgione called “La Tempesta” he might have. The painting is in the Accademia in Venice and I went to see it as soon as I could and discovered why Alessandro tells his young friend that it is “the meaning of all history,” but you will have to read the book and see the painting, even if only in a reproduction, to understand what Helprin evokes. Please take my word, doing so will be worthwhile.

Saying that, I recognize, perhaps for the first time, that you may not share my sense of the meaning of history and the world. However, I hope, if you have gotten this far in this book, that you will try to follow me into my wildly imaginative sense of things. Buona fortuna!

Mark Helprin has won many honors and has also been an adviser to the U.S. and Israeli governments in various capacities and at various times in the past decade. He may be as disappointed with both governments as I am, but for different reasons.

DONNA LEON

1942–

MICHAEL DIBDIN

1947–2007

HENNING MANKELL

1948–

Thrillers

Lest you believe me to be totally square and unaware of the pleasures of popular fiction today, I include in this entry titles by three fine writers whose work I have learned about with the help of my brother, who discovers them before I do and gives me copies on my birthday each year. Curiously, the three authors have much in common; that is, they are all deeply distressed by what is happening today in the worlds they describe but do not actually live in.

The first of the three is Donna Leon, who was born in the United States in 1942 of Irish and Spanish descent. Before settling down in Venice twenty-five years ago, she taught in the United States, Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia—an itinerary that certainly taught her a lot about the way the world works. She published her first thriller, Death at La Fenice, in 1992. It introduced an excellent detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, and his delightful family: his wife Paola and their children, Raffi and Chiara, whom we have seen grow up over the past fifteen years, although perhaps more slowly than you would expect. That doesn’t matter because all of them, thank goodness, are there in every book, together with Sergente Vianello, Brunetti’s right-hand man; Signorina Elletra, who is always beautifully dressed and who can invade any computer system on the planet (or at least in Venice); and Vice-Questore Patta, Brunetti’s “self-serving buffo,” as he has been called.

There is always at least one murder, and it is always very difficult to determine who committed the crime, until the finale. That of course is of the essence of this kind of tale, but what is not of the essence is the deep and growing pessimism not only of Brunetti but also of author Leon, who delves deeper and deeper into the corrupt underbelly of Venice, that glorious “little jewel” built on an island that is slowly but surely sinking into the sea. Certainly Venice has been corrupt for centuries, but the corruption in every sphere of life grows more blatant with every passing year, as the inhabitants abandon the city to the cruise ships whose careless passengers invade it every week or day.

Leon's books are excellent, but I think the best, because the most puzzling, may be Death in a Strange Country, Acqua Alta, Uniform Justice, Doctored Evidence, and the latest, Suffer the Little Children. These cover some twelve or thirteen years and, reviewing the list, I realize how much darker the later ones are than the earlier. That isn’t her fault; it is Venice’s—which doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

The second author is Michael Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1947, and grew up in Northern Ireland. The son of a physicist, he studied at Sussex University and at Edmonton University in Canada. He lived for four years in Italy and obviously visited it many times. He died in Seattle in March 2007.

His protagonist is another Italian, also a Venetian, named Aurelio Zen. (Dibdin is careful to point out that this is a Venetian name although it may not sound like one to a non-Venetian.) Zen, as a critic called him, is an “anti-hero” without family except for his aging mother, and only in the last two of his books is seriously involved with a woman, Gemma, whom he finally abandons—why, I don’t know. His first book, Ratking, opens in Rome but ends in Venice, and the other novels range all over the Italian landscape as Zen anti-heroically confronts the Mafia and bravely tries to stand against it, always without success, of course. The villain of Dibdin’s nine or ten Zen novels is not Venetian corruption alone, but the broader underworld power of the Mafia, which continues as it has for several hundred years to strangle the economic and political life of Italy, that jewel of a country built on a small peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea.

The color and tone of these fine novels, from Vendetta, Cabal, and Dead Lagoon, to A Long Finish, Blood Rain, and And Then You Die, grow ever darker as time goes on, and I have the feeling that Dibdin may have been overcome by his hero’s despair before he died. As one who has spent much time during twenty-five years in Italy, I can well understand this, although I have to admit that there are reasons to despair not just in Italy these days.

In Sweden, too, as Henning Mankell, the last of our three entertaining instructors, lets us know. He was born in Stockholm in 1948 and grew up in a cultured family. His career as both author and play director began when he was twenty, and in 1985 he founded the Avenida Theatre in Maputo, Mozambique, where he now spends much of his time and which has provided background for some of his books. In fact, he has spent quite a lot of time in Africa, which hangs like a dark planet over his Swedish world.

Mankell’s protagonist is Inspector Kurt Wallander, who lives and works in Ystad, Sweden. His first thriller was Faceless Killers, the story of some vicious thieves who murder a family in a remote farm house and try to withdraw their money from a bank. You will have to read the book to find out whether they succeed in doing this, but it will not take you long to apprehend Wallander's consciousness of the changes that are occurring in Swedish society, until recently so apparently immune to the social ills we ourselves (and Italians too) know so well. These feelings are accentuated in the succeeding books, which include The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, The Fifth Woman, Firewall, and especially The Dancing Master.

Considering these three exceptional authors and their exceptional books, I am reminded of the famous Armory Show of 1913, which introduced to an American audience the avant garde art of men like Picasso and Matisse, and especially Marcell Duchamp, whose “Nude Descending a Staircase” was explosively controversial. One viewer, who like most of the others was shocked and surprised, nevertheless saw the writing on the wall. He was James Stillman, a financier who was president of the National City Bank (now Citibank), and as he walked slowly through the exhibits he was prompted to say (as he later put in writing): “Something is wrong with the world. These men know.” Incidentally, even though he disliked them, he bought several paintings that when they were included in his estate were valued at several million dollars.

Something is wrong with the world. These three authors know.

CARL HIAASEN

1953–

Novels

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. This definitely applies to me when I’m working, but I don’t work all the time and there are books that I read just for the fun of it. For example, any novel by Carl Hiaasen, who was born in 1953 near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1974 with a degree in journalism and not long after went to work for the Miami Herald, first as a reporter but later as a columnist, which he remains till this day. His columns are one of the few good reasons to read the Herald, which I did faithfully during the time when we owned a little Conch house in Key West.

Our first visit to Key West occurred in 1973, I think. We bought the house two years later. I remember going into the bookstore in 1986 and asking if there was anything Floridian I should read. “Have you tried Carl Hiaasen?” the woman asked. “No.” “Well, you’re missing something.” She was right.

That was the year when he published his first Florida novel, Tourist Season. It’s a wild and wooly tale involving all Hiaasen’s “regular” characters: shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, sunburned tourists, and apathetic retirees. In his hands it is a rich mix that he churns this way and that, all the time making you guffaw at the dialogue. I have never laughed so hard and so continuously at any other books, unless maybe Rabelais’s.

The next year we read Strip Tease, which may be his best, although Lucky You, about people who share a winning lotto ticket, is probably just as good. His latest novel, Nature Girl (2007), is more sardonic than humorous, which may mean he is losing his touch or that he has given up on Florida—which wouldn’t surprise me.

MICHAEL POLLAN

1955–

The Botany of Desire

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan was born in 1955 and received a B.A. from Bennington, continued with graduate studies at Oxford, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1981. For some years he and his wife and their son Isaac summered in the town where I live in Connecticut. But there was no way we could keep his genius with us, and he moved to California as a Professor of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and is head of an institute that studies environmental journalism, of which he is one of the most important practitioners in the country.

He has written many articles and two very good books—not just good, but astounding. The first, The Botany of Desire, was published in 2001. It is about the concept of what he calls co-evolution, in this case between mankind and four plants—apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato. They are all important products in human life (and pleasure, too), and Pollan carefully describes the history of mankind’s relation between each of them. It is a sad story in each case, particularly that of the apple and the potato. Now, after two hundred years of striving, almost every commercially grown apple is a relative, more or less close, of the apple called “Delicious,” which unfortunately is very hardy and disease-free and almost always dominant when it is grafted onto other apple stocks. The result is that the great, tasty, and succulent apples of my childhood (and no doubt of yours if you are over fifty)—for instance, Baldwins and Northern Spies—are now rare. And when it comes to the potato, the discoveries about how to maximize production of the vegetable have led to the exhaustion and in fact desecration of fields all over the Middle and Upper West. We eat the same potatoes, whatever their names, and have learned to accept and not to desire the kind of potatoes we used to enjoy in our youth.

That is all very well, but the story gets worse, as Pollan shows us in his second book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007). Humans are omnivores; that is, we can eat and thrive on almost anything from meat to vegetables to fruit to insects if needed (and desired in some cultures). But if we could choose, what would be the best kind of food to eat? Pollan describes three different food chains: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer, following each of them all the way to the table. He finds a “fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry.” What we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world, and he warns that modern agribiz is a destructive, precarious agricultural system that has wrought havoc on the diet, nutrition, and well-being of Americans as well as the inhabitants of the other developed countries of the Earth.

In the end he advises us, when we are confronted by the “bewildering and treacherous landscape of the supermarket,” to choose no food that “would not have been recognized as food by our grandmothers” and to avoid any food item that has a list of ingredients longer than three items, if that. Good advice, I think, but hard to follow in today’s world.

Read Pollan, but don’t think he will bore or castigate you. He can be very funny as well as very persuasive, and since, after all, it is your own life that is at stake, it makes sense to take a chance.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

1914–2000

The Aubrey-Maturin Series

Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, which places him well out of chronological order, but several of the books in this series were published in the 1990s, which allows me to put him here.

For years O’Brian was a kind of “mystery man”; for example, he allowed it to be thought that he had been born in Ireland when in fact he was born in England. Nor was his birthname Patrick O’Brian, but instead Richard Patrick Russ; he legally changed his name to O’Brian in 1945, the year when he married Mary Tolstoy (née Wicksteed), the divorced wife of Count Dmitri Tolstoy. He wrote all his books in longhand, and Mary retyped them “pretty,” as he said, for his publishers. In many ways, in fact, she played the same role for him that Count Leo Tolstoy’s faithful and patient wife had played for him a century before. When she died in 1998, he became “lonesome, tortured, and nearly paranoid” and died a little more than a year later, on January 2, 2000, the second day of a new millennium. Ever since 1949 they, and finally he, had lived in Collioure, a Catalan-speaking village near Perpignan. It was the kind of place the character Stephen Maturin could have come from.

O’Brian wrote novels and stories and translated a number of books from French into English, but his great career began in 1970, when Master and Commander was published and introduced Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin to the world. I remember very well when I read that book. I was mesmerized and told my son about it; he was mesmerized, too. From that time on we awaited the publication of each volume in the series and shared the pleasure of reading copies a thousand miles apart and calling one another every day or so to delectate particular events and scenes.

Jack and Stephen were—still are, of course—a wonderful pair. But so are many of the other persons in this great series of books. For John and me, and for many thousands of others, they were beloved friends and companions for twenty years. Our only cavil, and it isn’t a minor one, was that O’Brian killed off his faithful bo’sun and also Stephen’s wife, the spirited Diana, in the next to last volume. Of course this was the year in which his Mary, “the beautiful and spirited English wife” of Count Tolstoy, was either dead or dying. It was as if he couldn’t stand to let Stephen’s Diana live when his own Mary was gone.

J.K. ROWLING

1965–

The Harry Potter Series

Joanne “Joe” Rowling was born near Bristol, England, in 1965. She attended local schools and “Hermione is loosely based on me—at age 11,” she has said. She earned a B.A. in English and Classics at the University of Exeter and in 1990, while on a delayed train trip, jotted down notes about a young boy attending a school of wizardry. In 1994 she moved to Edinborough, Scotland, to be near her sister. Divorced, unemployed, and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel, writing in local cafés because she would take her daughter Jessica out for walks and, when she fell asleep, would duck into the nearest café and continue the story.

She completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1995 and found an agent who submitted the manuscript to twelve publishers, all of whom rejected it. The thirteenth, a small publisher in Bloomsbury, accepted it because the eight-year-old daughter of the chairman read the first chapter and “demanded the next.” Rowling received an advance of 1,500 pounds, about the same number of dollars at that time.

The book was published in 1997 with a first printing of one thousand copies, five hundred of which were distributed free to libraries. Such copies now sell for between $25,000 and $35,000. Rowling received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council of 8,000 pounds to allow her to go on writing, and in fact that first book was named British Children’s Book of the Year. It was published in the United States in 1998 by Scholastic after they had won an auction. Over the author’s protests, Scholastic changed the name of the book to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The seventh and last of the Harry Potter series was published on July 21, 2007, and sold more than 250,000 copies in the first 24 hours. More than eight million copies have been sold all told, and J.K. Rowling is now the wealthiest woman writer in history, with a net worth for the books alone estimated at more than eight billion dollars. Well, in my humble opinion “Joe” Rowling deserves every penny of it. The books have gotten better and better as time has gone on, and the last—I truly hope it is the last—is the best of all. I read it through in the first four days and then joined John and Sally and our two grandchildren, Sam and Charlie, while they read the last hundred pages out loud to one another. We were aware that many thousands of people were doing the same thing at the same time. Maybe half of them were youngsters, but the other half were grownups, even oldsters like me. It has turned out to be hard for some grownups to admit this, but all I can say is I’m sorry for them.

Why has this extraordinary success come to Rowling? Does she have a secret? If so, what is it?

I don’t think there is a secret. In a way, she does what all authors of novels, and especially series of novels, do: She imagines a situation and invents characters and events. She creates a world, peoples it, describes it, makes us care about it. She tells good stories, being sure to build suspense. She leaves us hungry for more, which is what the best series do.

Rowling’s tale opens in a special school where students are taught about magic—what it is and how to do it. It isn’t easy to get to this school, because you have to know a secret place where you can board a special train. When you arrive at the school you find that it too is special, secret. Not just anyone can go there. That’s exciting. It’s a good start.

The characters are also interesting, but not unique. There is a girl and two boys; they start as children and grow up as seven years pass. There are families and one of the boys finally falls in love with the sister of the other boy. That is good but not unique, either.

There is something very special about the first boy, though. He has a tragic past; his parents were killed when he was a child, his mother, when she was trying to protect him: giving up her life to save him. This is fine; it adds a tragic note even if the characters are just children and then teenagers.

The circumstances surrounding the death of the boy’s parents are mysterious, which is good. Some kind of evil was involved; only very slowly do we begin to understand that the evil is represented by a single individual who grows more powerful as the series proceeds. In the last book he has become all-powerful, and there is no hope left for the world.

Or so it seems, even to Harry, the boy-hero. But his courage, which has always been remarkable, permits him to face the prospect of certain death if he does not yield to the evil lord. Even so, he does not yield. His courage, in the last analysis, is greater than that of his foe.

It is Harry’s beautiful courage, I think, that makes this series unique. We accept it, we believe in it. We are frightened for him at the end of the series; we can’t see any way out. But Harry Potter can.