English Club Chatter

Summer Reading

“Summer Reading” irritates me. Why is there this assumption that when the weather gets nice, and you finally have a little time to read, all you want to read is tripe? I mean, sure, you can hardly read Ulysses on the beach, and I like a good mystery as much as the next guy (though the “good” part is key). But when you have time to read, why not read something hearty, something that will rock your world, change your life, and make you cry, laugh, gnash your teeth, and leap to the aid of your fellow human beings? So, here are some of my suggestions for “Summer” Reading – I hope others, students, faculty, staff, will add theirs to the list.

I always feel like I’ve never read anything, and that my knowledge consists mostly of gaps, so what about some classics, those milestone works that have influenced all writing and much else after them? Mark Twain said that a “classic” was a work that everybody praised but nobody read. Prove him wrong. These are all works that will live with you the rest of your life.

Homer, The Iliadand The Odyssey. These are the great, original epics. The first concerns the battle of Troy, and the second (a kind of sequel), the 10-year return of Odysseus from that war. I recommend the recent translations by Robert Fagles. They’re powerful and readable, and don’t seem overly antique or precious. Richmond Lattimore’s translations are also excellent––the state of the art for the previous generation.

Virgil, The Aeneid. The essential Roman epic, maybe a little less directly appealing than Homer, but powerful nonetheless. Again, Fagles is the preeminent recent translator, but Allen Mandelbaum is good too.

Ovid, Metamorphoses. Ovid is the badboy of classical culture, the poet of shifting and changing, of eroticism and revolution. The Metamorphoses is the source of many of the most famous of the classical myths, and has been one of the most influential works of literature for millennia. Incidentally, this was perhaps Shakespeare’s favorite book. Try the translation by Rolfe Humphries. It’s very accessible. For a more stylish translation of some of the stories by a twentieth-century English poet, try Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes.

Cervantes, Don Quixote. A modern classic, the book some call the first novel (not really true, but it’s certainly early, and probably more influential than anything earlier). The Don is either a madman or an idealist, or maybe both. Too much reading of Romances (tales of knights, love, and adventure) addles his brains, and makes him believe he is a latter-day Lancelot. Hilarious and powerful. As with the Greek and Roman works, there are loads of translations. Choose one that reads well. The recent one by Edith Grossman seems excellent.

Melville, Moby Dick. Hooray! Something in English. I love this book, but it is genuinely weird. By the end you’ll know more about whales than you ever thought possible, but you’ll also have much more. Melville’s contemporaries hadn’t a clue about what to do with this totally original novel, but it’s become one of the American classics.

OK. So shifting away from “classics,” here is my recommendation for a recent novel. I could include more, but I’ve hogged enough space already, and others (YOU TOO) will want to add their top picks.

My pick is Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. Anything by Sebald is a good choice, but this is probably his masterpiece. Sebald, who died in 2001, was an expatriate German who spent much of his life teaching in England. Though he lived in England, he wrote entirely in German, but his work has had at least as great an impact in the English-speaking world as in Germany. Part of this credit must go to the translator, Anthea Bell, who has won prizes for her work. One aspect of her success is that you never feel as if you are reading a work in translation. Everybody from Susan Sontag to Dave Eggers (and including Anthony Lane, W.S. Merwin, Anita Brookner, Michiko Kakutani, and ME) has gone gaga over Sebald's work, partly because it's so original. And how rare is it to come across writing these days that's genuinely original! You are never quite sure with Sebald whether you're reading fiction or non-fiction, as he blends together precisely detailed architectural schematics, cityscapes, excerpts from the history of ideas, meditations on botany or landscapes, and actual photographs, with a compelling narrative of a man (who seems rather like we imagine Sebald) trying to uncover the secrets of his own past. Sebald's great preoccupation is with the seminal catastrophe of modern times, the Holocaust, but he seems more generally interested too in what might be called historical entropy -- decline, decay, collapse, forgetting. Everything gets worse. He's not a happy author, but he's a brilliant one, and he's also a remarkably easy read for someone so deep. Read this book and you'll want (a) to read it again right away (how often does THAT happen!), and (b) to read everything else he's written.

Posted by hhamlin at June 6, 2006 03:57 PM