Books

PULSATIONS:

The Lion, the Wizard, and the Great Physician (Nina Maksimova, 4/15/25, Christianity Today)

I was five years old when my family immigrated from Russia to the United States, fleeing life-threatening antisemitism. From the safety of our new home, I pondered a question: Why, beneath the skin-flaying sorrow of the human story, could I sense in every capillary of my being the throbbing pulse of heartbreaking joy?

This was the question that kept me up reading, and the first fictional world where I began to glimpse answers was Narnia. Here was a story that persuasively imagined the necessity of friendship and courage in the face of hatred and terror––a story in which the heartbeat of joy beat louder. It emanated from Aslan the lion, who followed me home out of the wardrobe. He started accompanying me to kindergarten and playing tag with my friends at recess. He let me fall asleep nuzzling his mane, and the tenderness of his presence felt like déjà vu, like something I could almost recognize or a good dream I could almost remember.

One might argue I was simply recognizing C. S. Lewis’s allusions to the gospel story. But that was impossible. My family had inherited the Soviet Union’s atheism. When I met Aslan, I had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth,” never opened a Bible, never knowingly encountered Christianity.

Aslan stayed with me for the next two years until the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. My family went to see it, and the heartbeat of joy that had reverberated in Lewis’s Narnia now surged from the depths of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

It crescendoed with nearly unbearable resonance into a longing that pulled me toward Gandalf the wizard. When I watched him die, I was so upset that I begged my mom to read me the next book in the series, The Two Towers. There, Gandalf came back from the dead, transfigured with white light, and took Aslan’s place as my imaginary companion. He remained with me for the next ten years—until they turned dark, then dangerous, and I told him to go away.

I did so because, as a teenager, I encountered more and more evil, not only outside myself but also inside. I did not need to read children’s stories anymore to know that adults could shape-shift into monsters, that we were capable of any horror. Louder than that heartbeat of joy, I began to hear a hissing in my thoughts that demanded to know why I should be kind to my enemies when I could be cruel; why I should seek good when I could seek power, pleasure.

I had no answers, only the emotions Narnia and Middle Earth had inspired. So I stopped using my imagination to indulge in “childish” stories and started digging for answers in the nonfictional abysses of 20th-century Europe. I stopped talking to Gandalf and matriculated at Dartmouth College. My first professor was a Christian.

His lectures on 20th-century Europe dissected me. I imagined myself a citizen of the Third Reich and understood I could not stop its gears from grinding up blood and marrow. I could perhaps shelter my Jewish neighbors, but that would not halt the cattle trains headed to Auschwitz. If anything, I would be arrested and gassed myself, so all my logic ordered me to opt for self-preservation.

But I could still hear that joy from my childhood, pounding like the heartbeat of a dying bird.

AMUSING THE LAST MAN:

What Moby Dick Still Teaches Us (Andy Owen, 02/26/2025, Merion West)

The Children’s Commissioner for England recently released a report on the July, 2024 riots that followed the horrific murders of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The riots, which lasted almost a week and included racially-motivated attacks, arson, and looting were the largest incident of social unrest in England since 2011. In a series of interviews, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, found that children who took part in the riots were primarily driven by curiosity and the “thrill of the moment” rather than far-right ideology and social media misinformation, the initial culprits blamed by the authorities.

De Souza’s report noted that poverty and a lack of opportunity in their communities also contributed to the rioters’ involvement. Human beings need more than the satisfaction of their base desires. They strive for status, belonging, and meaning. They can find these in the service of political parties, religious creeds, non-nation-state groups; in the pursuit of wealth and possessions; in the creation of art, music, and objects of value; in building a family or a network of friends; and in adventure and thrill-seeking. When other opportunities to achieve status, belonging, and meaning are limited, the risk that increasing numbers will turn to the thrill of violence and law breaking will increase. A 2018 study led by psychologist Birga Schumpe supports the report’s insights. While previous research linked people’s search for meaning with their willingness to use violence for a cause, Schumpe’s research suggests that the search for meaning is strongly associated with a need for excitement, which, in turn, was associated with greater support for violence.

I first read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick while working in counterterrorism for the British government. The story of how the narrator Ishmael becomes part of the vengeful hunt for the titular white whale onboard a New England whaling ship, provided more of a window into the minds and motivations of modern-day extremists than any contemporary book I could find.

LESS SOUND, PLEASE:

Do You Write, Mr. Faulkner? ( Ron Rash, Feb 7, 2025, Sporting Classics Daily)

This anecdote tells us much about Faulkner, a private man who disdained the attention of intellectuals and literary critics, preferring instead the company of simple, unassuming men who, as he once put it, were not “even very literate, let alone literary.” He was also a man who, as an accomplished hunter and outdoorsman, was much more comfortable in the silence and isolation of the wilderness than in the sound and fury of a city.

The “big woods,” as he called them, offered Faulkner an escape from the pressures of his art, a turbid personal life and, at least late in his life, fame. But the hunt and the wilderness were more than just an escape for Faulkner; they were also an inspiration for some of his greatest literary works.

“He taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward.” —Go Down, Moses, 1942

William Faulkner was probably destined to be a hunter and outdoorsman, for patience, self-discipline and an ability to work in solitude — the traits of both a writer and an outdoorsman, marked his character and temperament. These traits were developed amidst a family and society that made his interest in hunting and outdoors almost inevitable.

IF HE’D BEEN A GOOD MAN HE’D STILL BE ALIVE TODAY:

How we misread The Great Gatsby: The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel lies in its details. But they are often overlooked (Sarah Churchwell, 1/22/25, New Statesman)

Many of our most recycled, plagiaristic observations about Gatsby miss the point, failing to read between the lines. For example, it is often noted that Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for self-improvement provides Gatsby with a manual for upward social mobility, that he is a representative American who buys into the nation’s founding dreams. But Jimmy Gatz’s plan focuses on physical activity and hard work, omitting the spiritual dimension of Franklin’s schedule, who asked himself every morning, “What good shall I do this day?” Franklin centred morality as well as industry, and Fitzgerald expected his audience to recognise what was missing. The Great Gatsby renders a society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement. Gatsby, like the country he embodies, forgets that he should be trying not just to be great, but to do good.

This is why it’s a comedy not a tragedy. Gatsby is just a social climber focussed on personal wealth rather than his soul. (Sound familiar?)

IT’S HIS ENTIRE INTENT:

Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith on the Queer Subtext of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin Series (Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, February 4, 2025, LitHub)

Concerns aside, as someone who enjoys both historical fiction and not being straight, I was ready to give the books a chance to charm me on both fronts.

Here’s where I ended up, three months and seven thousand pages later: the Aubrey/Maturin series is not only a military-historical epic but also—I would even say primarily—a work of domestic fantasy about a life partnership so codependent it breaks the space-time continuum.

First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.)

All great literary romances are about the love between/among men: it’s the text, not the subtext. It just isn’t sexual.

INTREPID:

The prescient politics of Tintin: The character was in effect Hergé’s alter ego, reflecting his intense interest in news and contemporary affairs (Michael Farr, January 9, 2025, The Spectator)

Already in that first Soviet adventure, we have the Bolsheviks seizing the grain of the peasant farmers for their own stockpiles, leading to famine and starvation. Hergé had read up on the Soviet grain procurement crisis of the previous year (1928) and in his narrative anticipates the alienation of grain and property from the kulaks, the land-owning peasantry, that came in 1930-31 after the book’s publication. The Great Famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians and others followed as a consequence of Stalin’s policies, exposed by Tintin and condemned by Hergé.

Politics was never far from Hergé’s agenda. National Guardsmen drive Native Americans off the reservation at bayonet point after oil has been struck on their land in Tintin in America (1932). But the next deep political involvement came with The Blue Lotus in 1934. Here, against the trend of western sentiment, Hergé sided with the Chinese against Japanese agitation and aggression in Manchuria. He depicts the staged Mukden incident when in September 1931 Japanese saboteurs blew up the South Manchuria Railway tracks. […]

Politics was also at the core of King Ottokar’s Scepter (1938) inspired by Nazi Germany’s Anschluss, or absorption of neighboring Austria, in March of that year and anticipating its takeover of the Sudetenland and the threat posed to some of the vulnerable kingdoms of central Europe. Tintin thwarts the plot hatched by the unsubtly named fascist Müsstler — an amalgamation of Mussolini and Hitler — allowing the king to retain his throne and his kingdom, the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia, to remain intact.

LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE:

Is Oedipus Rex the Mother of All Drama? (Thom Delapa, 12/01/24, The Collector)

It is keenly ironic and tragic that Oedipus’s steely, admirable determination to solve this mystery and save his people sows the seeds of his own undoing. Throughout the play, Sophocles provides instance after instance of his protagonist making pledges and oaths that, in retrospect, not only prove to be wrong but serve to implicate him in the “cold case” of Laius’s homicide. But perhaps the greatest irony in Oedipus Rex is that its hero undertakes a noble and indeed universal human quest—to discover his true origins, that is, find out who he is—but the answer itself spells his own doom.