Dirda on Books

Prize-winning columnist Michael Dirda takes your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.

Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or rediscovering some minor Victorian classic. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts.

These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. His most recent books include "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments" (Indiana hardcover, 2000; Norton paperback, 2003) and his self-portrait of the reader as a young man, "An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland" (Norton, 2003). In the fall of 2004 Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays and reviews. He is currently working on several other book projects, all shrouded in the most complete secrecy.

Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Montaigne, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell, P.G. Wodehouse and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Ghost Story Society, and The Wodehouse Society. He enjoys teaching and was once a visiting professor in the Honors College at the University of Central Florida, which he misses to this day.

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Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on Books! I"m in the public library in Virginia Beach, where I've spent the past three days with my family, swimming, eating seafood, riding bicycles on the boardwalk and in general behaving like a normal American on vacation. I'll be back in DC this evening, and am rather looking forward to it. After a while the sun starts to get to me and I find myself daydreaming about going native. In these daydreams I am, of course, just slightly older than my own sons and I have their swimmer's builds and muscles. I wear sunglasses and draw admiring glances from women of all ages. And . . . Well, we don't really want to go here, do we? So it's probably wise that I get back to work soon.

Anyway, let's go to this week's questions (gosh, I sound like talk show host).

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Lenexa, Kan.: Mr. Dirda: In your "Bound to Please" essay on the great Brazilian writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, you write: "Yet like Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Machado covers his pessimism with a cloak of high spirits--the kind touched with gallows humor and an Olympian resignation before the sheer foolishness of mankind." Jog my memory. I can't think who "Thomas Bernhard" is? (I'll probably regret displaying my ignorance.)

I hope to get to Machado's "Dom Casmurro" in a year or two (your synopsis made it sound interesting). Professor Burt had the novel in his second hundred. Thanks much.

Michael Dirda: Thomas Bernhard was the great Austrian novelist and playwright, who famously loathed his country for its Nazi sympathies and Catholic consevativism. Many of his books were reprinted by the University of Chicago, the best known being Correction, Concrete, The Loser (which features a fictinoalized Glenn Gould), and Extinction. I reviewed Extinction and thought to include it in Bound to Please. Fact is, I thought it was in the book, but I must have left out that essay at the last minute because the book was already so long.

Who is Professor Burt?

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Boston, Mass.: I've gone into a variety of new bookstores lately, and I've noticed something a bit peculiar. The stock of a good bookstore can seem fairly close to a mediocre bookstore, but something in the good store (layout, organization, displays, browsing happy customers) makes me want to move into the store and set up camp, exploring new books for the rest of my life. Yet if motivated, I could probably find many of the same books in the dull, mall- ish Barnes and Nobles down the street.

Michael Dirda: Well, independent booksellers know that what they offer is a place that reflects their own tastes, not that of some corporate headquarters. They know their stock, read books themselves, and hand-sell favorites. This isn't to say that you don't find some of this in a Borders or B and N, but smaller places can offer you individual attention, make you feel as if your passion for books made you part of the literary scene in your town and not just a consumer plunking down cash for a best seller.

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Jonesborough, Tenn.: Have you read the debut novel of Rufus Hill's called THAD DUVAL FROM ROBERTSON? I'm right excited about it. It's laid in the South in the early '60s (before the "sexual revolution" AND before the most active part of the civil rights movement in the South). It's essentially a love story. But early in the book it presents a moral dilemma of the protagonist (I won't call him a hero)if he shoud go to a brothel to "become a man" (things were kinda different 40 years ago!). And later there is the moral dilemma of whether the young lawyer protagonist should defend his family's cook's 16-year-old son in court, after the boy tries to integrate the town's high school ostensibly alone(which was courageous) but who is caught lying twice and even seems threatening to the young lawyer who has bailed him out of jail. One can get the book on Amazon.com or in your area, Mr. Dirda, at Politics and Prose in DC.

Michael Dirda: Thank you for the recommendation. It does sound interesting, if only for its linking of the two kinds of revolution for which the 60s are known.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: What is your opinion of John Fowles (particularly "Daniel Martin"). Is he still actively writing?

Michael Dirda: I've not read Daniel Martin, but I do know it's a book that divided Fowles' admirers. Some found it flat and uninvolving after the excitements of The Magus and The Collector, for instance.

Fowles' journals were recently published in England and a biography appeared earlier this year. But the novelist suffered a stroke a few years back and his fiction writing days are apparently over. Indeed, it's possible he may have died without my knowing it. It's even possible that he may have died and I never saw the notice.

Apparently Fowles the private man was fairly disagreeable and exploitatitve of those around him. But isn't that the way of artists?

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twin cities: New Michael Chabon or new John Irving? Any idea if author Geln Gold of Carter Beats the Devil has any plans for a new novel?

Michael Dirda: Chabon. Don't know about a new Glen Gold. Poor guy, he must spend his time explaining that he's not the pianist. If you like books about magic, you might try the three or four Houdini detective novels by Dan Stashower. There's also an apepaling recent book on the history of the famous Indian Rope Trick. And of course you should check out Christopher Priest's wonderful The Prestige and the nonfiction albums of Ricky Jay.

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Dirda Fan: Hi Michael, Just finished John Le Carre's THE CONSTANT GARDENER, which I very much enjoyed. Le Carre's still at the top of his craft and it's a fairly compelling read. I'm actually looking forward to seeing the film adaptation later this month as well. But what struck me about the book is the overarching timeliness of the subject: multinational pharmaceutical corporations running amok, bribing politicians, attacking or even killing whistleblowers, all the while letting new drugs be tested on people that clearly are dangerous to them due to the inadequancy of clinical trials. Throw in the AIDS situation in Africa and have you a highly volatile mix that makes me wonder if art is imitating life or vice versa. My question: can you think of any of other recent novels that so expertly definined a topical issue at the time of their publication that made the book resonate with readers? Many thanks.

Michael Dirda: Hmm. There must be plenty, but I"m drawing a blank---too much time lying on a blanket recently--so maybe others can offer suggestions.

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Colorado Springs, Colo.: There's been a bit of buzz surrounding Paul Anderson's 12-years-in-the-writing, 1300 page debut novel. Have you read it? Should jaded readers assume any correlation between book and hype (a la Donna Tartt's first novel)?

Thanks.

Michael Dirda: I've seen the book--it's the one about Sor Juana de la Cruz, right? (Sor Juana was a Mexican nun from very early in the European conquest of the Americas, who became a major poet, much admired by Carlos Fuentes among others). It could be great, but I couldn't face reading it. There was a time when I read and reviewed lots of meganovels--I admire the ambition that tries to embrace a nation or a time period in a single volume--and so wrote pieces on Harold Brodkey's Runaway Soul, Pychon's Mason and Dixon, Gass's The Tunnel, DeLillo's Underworld, and several others, most recently Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and even The Historian. I've jsut read a longish fantasy novel by Paul Park too. So I can't advise you on this new Anderson book.

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Michael Dirda: By the way, folks, I'll need to relog on at 2:30, so don't go away when I temporarily stop typing to do so. I"ve jsut been alerted that I have less than 10 minutes left for now.

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Annapolis, Md.: Hello Michael and Fellow Bibliophiles,

I've just discovered a new to me author that I just adore, Charles de Lint. I've finished his novels "Someplace to be Flying" and "Trader" and I am just in awe; provocative plots, fantastic writing, I could go on and on. I am also slowly savoring his short story collection "Dreams Underfoot." I feel I need to pace myself or I'll run through his catalogue too fast and be feeling bereft too soon.

I did also stumble on another book with a similar urban fantasy flavor, "Child of a Rainless Year" by Jane Lindskold. She's not quite as good as de Lint, but still several notches above most modern fiction.

Any leads to other authors in this direction?

Michael Dirda: I only know De Lint from his column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but he's been around for quite a while as contemporary practitioner of a kind of urban fantasy. YOu might enjoy Tim Powers or James Blaylock, though they do tend to set many of their books in the 19th century, but not all. In one Powers book the Tarot and Las Vegas are somehow melded. (Melded, quite tha apposite word, if I do say so for books about cards. Sigh--has it come to this, Dirda, that you've sunk to congratulating yourself on your diction? Pitiful.)

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Washington, DC: Hi there Michael. Do you have an opinion of author Mordecai Richler? I sometimes find his work quite humorous, any thoughts?

Michael Dirda: Yes, he's very funny. Duddy Kravits, Solomon Gursky, St. Urbain's Horseman are all very fine novels about Jewish-Canaidan life.

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Casa de Oro, Calif: Michael, you have let us know about your musical favorites as well as the books. I am listening to my iTunes selections while I sit here today and I think about how my emotions can be manipulated with music, but not so much with reading. Do you find this to be true also?

Michael Dirda: My computer time will be out in less than two minutes. So please stick around while I re-sign on.

I'll stick my answer to the music question on to the next reply I send, along with that reply. If this is clear.

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Michael Dirda: Okay, I'm back.

Favorite music? I have a little section on this in my forthcoming book from Holt, but in general I like a lot of classical music, especially the Mozart operas Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, as well as Wagner's Tristan and lots of Puccini. That betrays my sentimental side, and so I also find myself growing weepy over 60s oldies, and lots of American songbook standards, especially those sung by Ella Fitzgerald, and not least I also like country and western heartbreakers, in particular songs like "Maybe it was Memphis" sung by Pam Tillis, George Strait's "Nobody in his right mind would've left her" and lots of Lorrie MOrgan and REba McEntire. I don't follow contemporary rock or hip-hop.

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Brooklyn, NY: Do you think there's a trend towards mega-novels? So many seem to be coming out, and I can't quite deal with it. There's no way to take a long walk in the park with a 1300-page novel.

Michael Dirda: Oh, there's always been a place for the meganovel--think of Thomas Wolfe or John Dos Passos. Back in the Fifties we had Gaddis' The Recognitions and in the 60s John Barth wrote some famous essays about the literature of plenitude.

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Jonesborougn,TN & Anderson, S.C.: TO THE DIRDA FAN ASKING FOR RESONATING TOPICAL NOVEL:

Recently in "STYLE" in your newspaper, Mr. Dirda, the "Washington Post" there was an

article about a Brit whose novel about a

subway in London's being bombed was published on August 7th -- day of first

terror bombing in London. But I can't remember his name or title of the book.

Michael Dirda: Many thanks. This is similar to the scicnce fiction author who described the making of the atomic bomb just a few months befoe the U.S. finished making one.

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Mount Desert Island, Maine: Last week, someone wrote in asking about books about the coast of Maine and mentioned The Secret Life of Lobsters, Trevor Corson's account of the lives of lobsters, lobstermen, and lobster scientists on Cranberry Island, just off Mount Desert Island.

I work in a local bookstore on the Island and would also recommend Colin Woodard's Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier and Philip Conkling's Lobsters Great and Small.

Also new this season is Geoffrey Wolff's The Edge of Maine and John Gillis' Islands of the Mind, which encompasses stories about nearby Gotts Island and those that Odysseus encountered; the book is a cultural history of the idea of islands.

In recent "coast of Maine" fiction, try Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Dreams and Beth Gutcheon's Leeway Cottage.

There's also a book of wonderful local history, Jock Herron's Summer Restoration: Rosie Dresser and The Cobbler's, the story of his aunt's restoration of a dilapidated house in the summer of 1947.

If that proves to be too many islands the reader could go upstairs (to Biography) and peruse Michael Dirda's An Open Book, or remain downstairs (in Collections and Essays) and look over Readings and Bound to Please.

And if books prove too much the reader could pay homage to Marguerite Yourcenar by visiting her grave, just a few blocks away.

Michael Dirda: Thank you for the guidance to recent books about Maine. The mention of Islands of the Mind makes my mind remember that John Fowles--whose name came up earlier today--wrote a long essay on Islands for a picture book about them.

Also, whatever happen to the Maine novelist Carolyn Chute?

And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Elizabeth Hand, the fine fantasy novelist, lives in Maine.

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Schoeneck, Pa.: RE: Mega Novels

I've SEEN the network TV coming attractions for the fall.

I've LOTS of use for mega novels.

Michael Dirda: TV?! Here on vacation I've channel-surfed through the motel's cable offerings and discovered that you can have 72 channels and still nothing better to watch than a marathon offering of James Bond films. Of course, there aren't many things in life better than a James Bond marathon.

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Minnetonka, Minn.: Michael, What is your opinion of Book Art? We have The Minnesota Center for Book Art and I recently visited the Getty Center Library and viewed their exhibit. I don't get the art object but would pay anything for an English Hound with dust jacket.

Michael Dirda: Would you settle for a German dachshund in lederhosen?

Getting silly here, are we?

I am of two minds about book art. I like pretty books, and I like illustrated books where the pictures are the sort that work for me. (I hate most of the Jane Austen illustrations that you used to see in things like the Heritage Press.) I've also studied bookbinding and have bound a couple of books, once commissioned a design binding (for a Nonesuch edition of Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying), and my wedding invitation of lo these many years was done by Sheila Waters and her son Julian Waters. Sheila made the front of the invitation--caliigraphied interlocking initials--and Julian wrote out in his beautiful hand the actual details of when and where. (Sheila Waters was then widely regarded as the greatest living calligrapher; her son has been the White House calligrapher, anong other things. The, alas, late Peter Waters, husband and father, was one of the world's greatest bookbinders, having worked with Roger Powell on the rebinding of the Book of Kells and later overseen book conservation after the Florence Flood. Quite a family--the Arts and Crafts Movement in one household.)

Anyway, I used to think of modern children's albums as our equivalent to the livre d'artiste and often approached them in this vein.

So I guess I do approve of Book Art.

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Washington, D.C.: Re: Bond - Are Kingsley Amis's critical works on 007 worth checking out?

Michael Dirda: Yes, he was a great fan, knew the oeuvre well, and is always fun and provocative to read. I didn't like his Bond novel, Colonel Sun, all that much. I love the fact that Amis and Larkin both adored the locked room mysteries of John Dickson Carr, these Bond books, and Dick Francis thrillers. Of course their close friend at unviersity was the the terrifically funny and witty mystery novelist Edmund Crispin.

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Great Falls, Va.: RE: Casa de Oro, Calif. saying that reading doesn't affect one's emotions, I strongly disagree. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten caught up in a book where it affected my mood! Two examples: as a young woman, Jane Eyre made me feel (and still does!) that I could do anything, while more recently, The Kite Runner left me feeling quite sad, and a little wiser to the ways of the world ... Just food for thought.

Michael Dirda: Oh, books are terribly affection. I have a little chunk in my new book--sorry, two advertisements--about the perils of fiction. I just find reading novels, particularly sad one, like going through an emotional wringer. It takes me a long time to recover. Oscar Wilde said that he had never recovered from the death of Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre.

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Casa de Oro, Calif: Michaael, I had to respond to the fact that you like some country music. When I was a young kid I used to sit in front of the radio and cry over the country stuff. When my mom died recently, listening to Red River Valley allowed me to finally cry about it!

Michael Dirda: Ah, Red River Valley--just about the only tune I can play on the harmonica. Of course, for many it is probably the only tune they've ever heard played on the harmonica.

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Washington, DC: Have you read Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (sp?). I love C's poetry and notebooks, and am thinking of dipping into this one. Thanks. Oh, and for anyone out there interested in the English Romantics, Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge is amazing. I just finished it.

Michael Dirda: Yes, I've read BL. The first half is fascinating, but the later sections grow more theoretical and philosophical and German philosophical at that. Some of the one volume selections from Coleridge's work contain long extracts and that's probably the way to approach the book.

The Holmes biography--in two voluems--is splendid, and very moving. Wordsworth comes across as a first-class louse, at least in later life. And till I read volume 2 I had no idea how much Coleridge suffered from his opium addiction. I somehow used to think it was just a kind of social drugging, not realizing how physically debilitating it was (ie. an inability to evacucate the bowels, requiring constant enemas.) Holmes Shelley biography The Pursuit is also very good, as are his collections of essays Footsteps and one other the title of which escapes me.

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Lenexa, Kan.: I've just looked--"Extinction" is in a later (European) section of "Bound to Please." I see you also cover Sebald who I do know and have read.

I'm turned 65 today--been retired for ten years (pretty much read the ten years away). Thank you for the great help this forum has been (as was the earlier version of the Post's Book Club) to my furthering education. Hope you can keep it going for the next ten years. Best always.

Michael Dirda: Happy Birthday! And many more to come. I hope we'll spend a few of them together, at least on line.

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Boston, Mass.: After The Great Gatsby, what F Scott Fitzgerald should one read? I've only read the classic.

Michael Dirda: Tender is the Night. I actually like it more than Gatsby, though GG is pretty nigh perfect and TN has its flaws. Beyond that you might dip into the notebooks collected as The Crack Up.

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Brooklyn, NY: Michael, Any thoughts on Norman Cantor's biography of John of Gaunt? I loved Cantor's book on the Middle Ages, which I knew nothing about, and was excited to see this work, also on a subject about which I know nothing. But I admit to being put off by the amazon.com reviews, which claimed that it wasn't up to his usual standards.

Michael Dirda: Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages--about the modern historians who rediscovered or championed the Middle Ages--was wonderfully lively and gossippy, and as you know opinionated. Cantor writes fast, sometimes I think too fast, and he does tend to be a bit swasbuckling. This may account for the negative reviews. On the other hand, he is a knowledgable and passionate historian and fun to read.

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Bel Air, Md: I am currently reading "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" by Julian Barnes. The book purports to be a novel, but each chapter is wholly unrelated to the next and there is no chronologic, geographic, or character similarities amongst the chapters. They share similar themes and will often allude to something in another chapter, but each chapter is a self-contained story.

Wouldn't this more accurately be a collection of short stories? Isn't the author just trying to be clever (and cheeky) by calling it a novel? While each story is a worthwhile read, trying to consider it a novel has left me not enjoying it as much as I might have.

Michael Dirda: I reviewed the book and as I recall there are links and echoes among the stories that give the book a kind of unity. I suppose that one must expect a certain amount of heterogeneity in a history of the world. That said, Barnes is nothing if not clever in his early books--see Flaubert's Parrot--and so there is a show-offy element in them. But he's fun to read, no?

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Kilpen House: A few chats back, you mentioned that when asked at a public gathering which literary character you'd like to be, you said "Bond, James Bond." My response to you was I'd have chosen Travis McGee, but it got me to thinking that although I've read much detective fiction, I'd never read the Bond series so I started on that.

I've only gone though about 5 books, but I have to say I'm surprised anyone would want to be Bond. At least the Bond of the books. I think they're great, very entertaining reads, but man, the guy gets his butt kicked a ton, he's beat up looking (scars on his face), he is very introspective and not always sure of himself, there are a lot of other issues but perhaps most of all, he doesn't always get the girl.

Anyway, I'm enjoying them a bunch so no complaints here, I just had no idea how different the Bond books (both the Bond character and the plots) were from the movies. Moonraker? It's not a space base but an ballistic missile. The Spy Who Love Me? It is written from a woman's point of view, takes place in a mountain resort in Up-State NY, and only had Bond in about 1/2 of the chapters.

I guess no real question, just can't get over my surprise in the difference between the books and movies.

Michael Dirda: Yes, after the frist three Bond movies, the producers took liberaties galore and often merely used a book title as the springboard to a movie plot. The Bond of the novels is a much more hard-boiled character than the smooth urbane spy of the films. I like both avatars of the character. What I suppose I admire most about Bond is his omnicompetence and determination.

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Arlington, Va.: What is your opinion of Reading Lolita in Tehran? I'm reading it, and at first I really liked it, but half way through I'm losing motivation to continue...

Michael Dirda: Never had any interest in reading it. I like reading Lolita in Silver Spring.

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Oklahoma City, Okla.: At the end of last week's chat you noted that you "easily tire of fiction," and that you were working on a book section on the "perils of fiction." That struck a chord with me: I, too, often turn from reading fiction to biographies or nonfiction, and I think I know why. Nonfiction is essentially journalism, which only asks us to absorb fact, while fiction simply demands more of a reader. We are expected to envision scenes and characters, discern motives, anticipate plot elements . . . a true interaction between writer and reader. A "peril," perhaps, but also a mental stimulant, no?

Michael Dirda: Yes. Plus there's the emotional commitment demanded by a serious novel.

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Rockville, Md.: Posting early since I will be returning a child to college today. It was too late last week to respond to the one poster who was derogatory of Jim Dale and his reading of the Harry Potter books, even though he had never listened to them. I have been commuting between Rockville and northern Virginia for 9 years and books on tape have saved my sanity. I sometimes listen to two in one week. I have heard all the readers that that individual mentioned, but none of them have ever come close to Jim Dale's reading of Harry Potter. He is in a league, a class of his own. Listening to them, you can tell which of hundreds of characters is speaking from how Jim is reading it. I have no idea how he does it - pure talent. If you have never heard him, you really can have no idea how much better he is than everyone else. David Ogden Stiers' reading of Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" was closer than most but he still has a ways to go. I don't generally listen to mysteries, so there may be a reader or two who just focuses on that genre who might be better. But I doubt it.

Michael Dirda: Thank you for this informed posting. As I've only read the first two Potters, it sounds--oh no, not another time, Dirda--as if I should listen to the Dale readings of the others.

And with that, friends, it's time to bid you adieu before the library kicks me off this computer.

And so, till next week, at Wednesday, keep reading! Oh yes, I'm sorry I didn't get to all the postings. Please try again.

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