What I Read in April 2012

Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander. I have long been a fan of Renault’s historical novels set in ancient Greece — The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, Fire from Heaven among others — but this is the first biography I have read. It is a measured account of an extraordinary life, with careful attention to the contemporary accounts.

Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen. This novel is the middle book of Waugh’s trilogy about the adventures of Guy Crouchback during World War II. I read the first book, Men at Arms, but too long ago, so I had trouble keeping the many characters straight. Vintage Waugh, in which the capers of the officers come up against the realities of the evacuation of Crete.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. Their voices rise in a chorus together, yet each separate voice can also be distinguished. The speakers are the “picture brides”, the women who came to the United States from Japan to marry men they had seen only in pictures.

Susan Cheever, Treetops: A Family Memoir. The daughter of writer John Cheever tells the story of three talented and complicated families. Treetops is the summer place in New Hampshire where they gathered to love and to fight and to remember.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. A short, sweet novel about the relationship between a mathematics professor, his housekeeper and her young son. Due to a brain injury, the professor’s memory is limited to 80 minutes and all new experiences must fall within that time frame.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. This is my first complete reread of the 1868 classic after many years. I am preparing a course on Louisa May Alcott and will be posting extensively on this, her most popular book in July, as I participate in A Year of Feminist Classics.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick. I finished rereading Melville’s great classic about the struggle between mad Captain Ahab and the White Whale. This time around, my sympathies are with the whale and all of his persecuted companions. Some read the novel as the struggle between good and evil. I read it as the insanity of man, abusing this world which provide so much if we take its gifts in moderation.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men. This is the sequel to Little Women, written three years after it. It continues the story of Jo March, no Josephine Bhaer. With her husband she runs Plumfield, a school for boys. It continues the spirit of fun of Little Women, but we now find Jo in a warm maturity, reminiscent of Marmee.

Caroline Stoessinger, A Century of Wisdom. Subtitle: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor. A pianist, Alice Herz-Sommer survived Theresienstadt to create a new life for herself and her son in Israel and England. This book is a tribute to survival, but also to a cheerful old age and, most of all, to the power of music.

The Nature of Alexander

Mary Renault wrote a series of historical novels based on the legends and history of ancient Greece. They include The King Must Die, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and The Last of the Wine, set in the era of Socrates. Her novels devoted to Alexander the Great — Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy — take us into the life (lives, really) of an extraordinary man. What was fact and what was fiction? In her biography, The Nature of Alexander, Mary Renault sorts out the known history and the legends.

Her biography lacks the drama of the novels, but it is compelling just the same. Renault tells us what sources we have in the ancient writers and, when the stories conflict or seem unlikely, she tries to see her way into the probabilities of Alexander’s world. That world was one with tribal customs, many of which Alexander tried to surmount as he built his empire. The book is well titled The Nature of Alexander, because it is that nature she is concerned to understand. Again and again, she shows us his actions in the context of his time. After a great victory over the Persians,

He buried the Persian generals with the honours of war, and gave the dead Greek mercenaries [who fought for the Persians] a proper Greek funeral. To fourth-century men there was much more in this than a gesture; it was the rite of peaceful passage to the land of shades. What to modern man may seem synical seemed to contemporaries generous and unusual; his effect on them will be better understood if this is borne in mind.