I know what you’re thinking: you are the problem, Katha, alienating Trump voters with your snobbish liberal elitism and addiction to “identity politics.” Yes, I wanted them to have health care and child care and good schools and affordable college and real sex education and access to abortion and a much higher minimum wage. And yes, I wanted the wealthy to pay more taxes to provide for it all.
Books
The Heroic Age of New York Movie Theaters
This poignant, thrilling, and at times painful walk down Memory Lane made me recall taking a date to see Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers at The New Yorker and being so bowled over by its tragic beauty, while she was somewhat mystified by my enthusiasm, that I knew there was no hope for our affair. I remember writing articles for The Thousand Eyes, the Carnegie Hall Cinema’s ambitious rag, and someone sending in an angry letter attacking me for clinging to narrative film. I remember my itch to work at a repertory theater, which led me to apply for a job with Ursula Lewis, the owner of The Thalia who was looking for a programmer for her uptown theater, the Heights. Needless to say, I didn’t impress her with my unprofitable schemes for showing obscure back titles of minor auteurs like Paul Wendkos and Gerd Oswald.
Year One: Our President Ubu
I hate everyone you hate, was Trump’s message over and over again, and these numbskulls who can’t even tell the differences between an honest man and a crook nudged each other, knowing exactly whom he had in mind. Since Trump became president, every time I told myself this man is bonkers, I remembered Ubu Roi, realizing how the story of his presidency and the cast of characters he has assembled in the White House would easily fit into Alfred Jarry’s play without a single word needing to be changed.
Nightmare in Berlin
In the Foreword to his penultimate novel, Nightmare in Berlin, Hans Fallada concludes, “The book remains essentially a medical report, telling the story of the apathy that descended upon a large part, and more especially the better part, of the German population in April 1945.” He admits that “the author, too, is a child of his times, afflicted by that same paralysis.” The dateline is “Berlin, August 1946.” Six months later, Fallada died of heart failure. Addicted to morphine and mentally broken, he had, astonishingly, completed the two works — Nightmare in Berlin and Alone in Berlin — that crowned his literary reputation. And now Nightmare in Berlin, first published in 1947, is available in English, in a supple and graceful translation by Allan Blunden.
A compressed epic of despair, venality, shame, and endurance, this “strong book about a weak human being,” like most Fallada novels, mirrors its author’s travails. “For twelve years he had been bullied and persecuted by the Nazis,” Fallada writes of his protagonist, Dr. Doll, “they had interrogated him, arrested him, banned his books some of the time, allowed them at others, spied on his family life.” And Nazi defeat brings only a different despair. So it was for Rudolf Ditzen. Born in 1893, he assumed the pen name Hans Fallada in 1920, when Young Goedeschal was published, a novel of psychosexual turmoil, clearly inspired by real events. (In high Romantic German fashion, Fallada, at eighteen, had fought a mock duel with a fellow student — in fact, a suicide pact — in which he accidentally killed his friend and then tried to kill himself.)
Fallada’s youthful tragedy brought the first of many confinements. Imprisoned more than once for embezzlement; denounced and briefly jailed in 1933; hospitalized repeatedly for mental breakdowns, for alcohol and drug addiction, he nonetheless continued to write. Success arrived with the 1932 novel Little Man, What Now?, which Richard Simon, of Simon & Schuster, described in a 1933 letter to Fallada as “perilously close to a masterpiece.” And for a time Fallada’s novels, (the best known, perhaps, being Every Man Dies Alone), were as popular internationally as those of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Decades later, it is easy to see why. Fallada’s urgent, laconic style plunges the reader into the quotidian detail of lives deformed by the struggle to survive. Nightmare in Berlin, for example, sets us down in a tranquil, domestic landscape that is saturated with fear. “Well into the night,” Fallada writes, “after a day filled with torment, they stayed sitting by the windows, peering out into the little meadow, towards the bushes and the narrow cement path, to see if any of the enemy were coming.”
In April 1945, in a small town in northern Germany, Dr. Doll, his young wife, and their neighbors await the arrival of the victorious Red Army. Eager to welcome the Russians as liberators, Doll spends hours tidying his garden, “clearing the last tangles of wire and rolling them up neatly.” For surely appearances will matter. But when three soldiers enter the house and Doll salutes them with a clenched fist and “Tovarich” on his lips, he is regarded blankly, as a thing. “All his cherished hopes for the post-war future lay in ruins, crushed under the withering gaze,” he admits. “He was a German, and so belonged to the most hated and despised nation on earth.” Soon the Nuremberg war crime trials will dispel any remaining illusions. “Had I known then what I know today about all these horrors,” Doll confesses, “I probably still wouldn’t have done anything — beyond feeling this powerless hatred.”
The novel is driven by these surges of emotion, but Fallada keeps our gaze on everyday details, on petty betrayals and intimate crimes. There’s “the mail clerk who had been a sergeant in the local Volkssturm . . . the landlord of the station bar, a bully, and, as it now turned out, another Nazi spy.” Hoping to reclaim their city apartment, the Dolls leave for Berlin on a freezing, overcrowded train that reeks of desperation. “We’re probably going to die soon anyway,” Doll consoles his wife, “but you can do it more discreetly and comfortably in the big city. They have gas, for one thing!” Fallada’s corrosive wit — used sparingly in this novel and to devastating effect — is oddly affecting. It draws us closer to these characters even as they surrender to the oblivion of morphine or to the macabre regimen of the sanatorium. “He loved the place,” Fallada writes of Doll in the asylum, “this corridor with its rust-red linoleum, onto which so many white doors opened, but all without door handles.” (Outside lies Berlin, “a nocturnal stone jungle . . . a dark sea of ruins” from which Doll eventually sees courageous survivors emerging. “Life goes on, always,” he concludes. But Fallada’s tightly constructed novel — a snug nesting doll of horror within horror — makes even that bland assertion seem foolish.
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The Pity of It All
Ken Burns achieved renown with lengthy film histories of the Civil War, World War II, jazz, and baseball, but he describes his documentary The Vietnam War, made in close collaboration with his codirector and coproducer Lynn Novick, as “the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken.” Ten years in the making, it tells the story of the war in ten parts and over eighteen hours. Burns and Novick have made a film that conveys the realities of the war with extraordinary footage of battles in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations in the United States.
The Case of Isabel Archer
The Portrait of a Lady can rightfully claim to be the novel that began to edge fiction out of a Victorian concern with spectacle and plot and to introduce us to what became, in the early twentieth century, in the hands of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and others, fiction that is concerned with the ebb and flow of individual consciousness as it ranges across the mundane events of daily life. James frequently pauses the action and allows us to eavesdrop on Isabel Archer’s most intimate thoughts, feelings, and fears, in a manner that readers in 1881 would have found both startling and thrilling. John Banville’s seventeenth novel, Mrs. Osmond, seizes the narrative baton from James.
Under the Banner of New York
New Yorkers choose to gather under the banner which says “New York”—which is so elastic it really means nothing at all—and that is exactly what I love about this place. The capacity to gather without precise definition I experience as a form of freedom, here where we do not have to be the clerk to the heir of wherever, where we can be unattached to our old European pedigree, or lack of same, and loosened from the bonds of distant villages, with their strictures and demands, their ideas regarding our sexuality or gender, their plans for our future.
John Hodgman
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
When you’re talking with the writer and performer John Hodgman, it doesn’t seem like any page, or chapter or volume could contain his restlessly inventive mind. It’s impossible to find a subject that Hodgman isn’t curious about, eloquent about, or really funny about – sometimes all within the same sentence. And a conversation with him is like being part of a piece of improv comedy in which you had better be on your toes if you want to keep up. While you might know Hodgman best from his appearances on The Daily Show or elsewhere on television and in film, the former literary agent has his roots in books: he’s the author of three bestselling works of absolutely, hilariously not-true anti-facts, including The Areas of My Expertise, More Information than You Require, and That Is All. He joins Bill Tipper on this episode to talk about his quite different new book, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches. He spoke about what it’s like setting aside the”expert” character he’s made so famous, to speak more directly — though with characteristic wit — about growing up, growing older and (could it be?) growing wiser.
John Hodgman—New York Times bestselling author, semifamous personality, deranged millionaire, increasingly elderly husband, father, and human of Earth—has written a memoir about his cursed travels through two wildernesses: from the woods of his home in Massachusetts, birthplace of rage, to his exile on the coast of Maine, so-called Vacationland, home to the most painful beaches on Earth.
Vacationland is also about Hodgman’s wandering in the metaphoric wilderness of his forties, those years when dudes especially must painfully stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weirder dads that they are.
Other subjects covered include the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison, and advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.
After three bestselling books of fake facts, Hodgman is finally ready to tell the truth—in the same outlandish, audacious, and inimitable style that has won him fans in every medium he has worked: books, stage, social media, television, and movies.
Click here to see all books by John Hodgman.
Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.
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Reservoir 13
Set in our own day in a village in England’s Peak District, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 opens with searchers assembling to look for thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw, last seen out on a walk in the countryside with her parents, who had somehow lost sight of her. It is year’s end, and the family has been spending the holiday in the village, a place surrounded by hills and moors, marshy areas, watery ravines, caves, abandoned lead mines, quarries, and reservoirs — all possible sites of misadventure. And, of course, there is always the thought of abduction and foul play. Rebecca has been gone for hours, then days. Divers are called in to search the river and reservoirs. The media descends with all its paraphernalia and presumption.
At this point it is only right to say that if you are expecting a missing-girl thriller: don’t. This extraordinary novel is a different and much greater affair. As the pages turn into weeks and months and years, our attention — along with that of the villagers themselves — never drifts entirely from the girl and her possible fate; but the everyday goings-on around the place, of the people and, equally, of the creatures of nature, come increasingly into focus and begin to take over. Blackbirds, swallows, butterflies, foxes, badgers, and other beasts, birds, bugs, and even vegetation, are shown following their annual cycles regardless of human drama.
The villagers eventually return to their own traditional round of activities: the New Year’s celebration, the Spring Dance, “well-dressing,” Mischief Night, Bonfire Night, sheep tupping, lambing, and so on. But at the same time, the village is following a larger, by-now familiar course: It is dissolving under the corporate rationale of late capitalism. The new owners of the adjacent great estate do not hold themselves responsible for the upkeep of public amenities as the original owners had and have hired lawyers to prove it. The butcher shop cannot compete with the new supermarket, and the owner loses the business, along with the knives that were his father’s before him. His wife leaves him, and he is reduced to working at the supermarket’s meat counter. (“They gave him a striped apron and a badge saying “Master Butcher,” but it wasn’t butchery. The meat came in ready-jointed, and he was just there to hand it over.”) The dairyman is increasingly pressed and depressed by the low price of milk. The village youths grow up to find there are no jobs.
The novel unspools, becoming a mural in time depicting the changing lives of these people over a dozen or so years, but the continuing question of Rebecca’s fate gives the progression a dark tincture. Events are reported in a detached, almost hypnotic manner, the story becoming an intoxicating distillate of gossip. The adolescents who had known Rebecca form and reform into couples; they grow up, go away, come back. The girl’s parents stay on, the father roaming the countryside, ever searching; the marriage breaks up. Protesters come from afar to block the blasting out of another quarry. They set up an encampment that flourishes, fades, disappears. The village Don Juan discovers he has lost his irresistible appeal; his brother breaks off his affair with a young schoolteacher and marries the mother of his son; they have another child and eventually separate again; the school caretaker is charged with downloading child pornography. The divers show up year after year, reviving the memory of the search for the girl’s body in the river and reservoirs, though now they are unclogging spillways and making routine checks of the dams for structural deterioration.
Unadorned and tightly controlled, the style possesses plain-spun eloquence, and for all its bland affect and austerity it conveys a lived feeling of the rhythm of things in the village. Here, for instance, is what happens when there is blasting at the quarry:
When the first siren sounded over at the quarry the workers cleared the area. When the second siren sounded the birds fell silent. In the village, windows and doors were pulled shut. The third siren sounded, and the birds rose in the air, and the explosion came from deep behind the working face, spreading through the body of the earth, a low crumping shudder that shrugged huge slabs of limestone to the quarry floor. The dust rose and continued rising and drifted out through the air for five minutes or more. The first all-clear sounded, and the birds returned noisily to the treetops. The second all-clear sounded, and the workers returned to their places. In the village, the windows and doors were kept closed as the dust spread. On the bus back from town Winnie saw Irene and asked whether she’d had her hair done. Irene’s hand went up to her head, although she hadn’t meant it to. She told Winnie it was only the usual.
This style gives plenty of scope for the sort of inadvertent, deadpan humor that is the special province of police logs and committee-meeting minutes. (“Miss Dale asked Ms. French if her mother was any better, and Ms. French outlined the ways in which she wasn’t.”) In fact, despite the novel’s grim start, it is leavened throughout by wry humor. (“In an attempt to meet the county council’s target for budget cutting, the parish council agreed to the street lighting being turned off between midnight and five, not without much discussion, during which Miriam Pearson was advised that the expression black hole of Calcutta was no longer acceptable.”)
I have never read a book quite like this, a novel whose stark, declaratory sentences are so vital, whose overall plotlessness is so completely absorbing, and in which the universes of nature’s creatures and human beings are so powerfully presented as inhabiting the same world, though running along parallel courses, oblivious to the other’s concerns. McGregor’s previous novel won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and I truly hope this one achieves a similar honor.
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How to Solve the Catalan Crisis
Catalonia does not have a right under international law to unilaterally declare independence from Spain. But if it becomes clear that a large part of the people, possibly a majority, favor independence, then the only sensible thing for Madrid to do is to hold a dialogue with the leaders of that region. Negotiations do not imply that the government is going to accept independence, any more than the British government accepted a united Ireland in the Good Friday negotiations. The conservative government in Madrid, however, has always refused any such dialogue.
Sig Nordal 