My Words Without Borders debut

Starting today, I’m also blogging at Words Without Borders, the online literary magazine that has published the anthologies Words Without Borders and Literature from the “Axis of Evil”. Words Without Borders also has a strong presence at the annual PEN World Voices conferences. I’ll be writing at least twice a month about African literature in translation, and once in a while about other literature in translation.

Many thanks for this opportunity to Bud Parr, the editor of the Words Without Borders blog. (Be sure to check out Bud’s own blog at Chekhov’s Mistress.)

John Updike

John Updike has been such an enormous presence in American literature for so many years that I’ve sometimes thought we take him for granted, like the weather.

It will be a shock when he is finally gone, I thought—and so it is.

I first started reading Updike as a freshman in college. Steve Erlanger, the instructor in my expository writing class (now a reporter for the New York Times), assigned an Updike story called “Plumbing.” It was about a taciturn plumber laboring in the basement of an ill-at-ease suburban man, and about the curious invoice that arrived later, in which the tiny cost of every valve and washer and dab of solder was meticulously listed, only to be dwarfed by an enormous sum for “labor.” Nothing seemed to happen, and yet the story was strangely gripping.

The Centaur was probably the first complete Updike book I read. I remember being stunned by the exactness of some images (a copper rain gutter the color of pistachio) and the boldness of others (the cosmos of reflections in the hood of a black Buick). In the many years since, it’s been a comfort to know that a new Updike would appear at least once a year. I have read most of them, and even blogged about a couple (Terrorist and Gertrude and Claudius).

I think I saw Updike in person only once, at a memorial reading for E.B. White. I remember his slight stammer, his surprising height, and the courtly way he bent down to listen to an old lady’s compliments about his novel Roger’s Version, which had recently been published. He said, a little sheepishly I thought, that he hoped she would enjoy the rest of the book. I wondered whether he was thinking about some of the racier scenes, which the old lady might not have gotten to yet.

I will miss the feeling of opening a fresh new book by Updike, and in a way, though I never knew him personally, I will miss the man himself.

The Oil and the Glory by Steve LeVine

Over breakfast recently I’ve been hearing reports on NPR about how a dispute
between Russia and Ukraine over a gas pipeline has left hundreds of thousands of Europeans freezing in their homes. The control of oil and gas is a powerful weapon for those who seek wealth and power, and The Oil and the Glory describes in detail how the struggle for oil has played itself out around the great saltwater lake known as the Caspian Sea.

Though five countries border the sea, Steve LeVine focuses primarily on Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which face each other across the water. His story is long and convoluted, with a numerous cast of conmen, rogues, and entrepreneurs. It is nearly impossible to summarize, but much of it concerns the efforts of companies like Chevron and BP to gain access to some of the world’s richest oil fields and the efforts of middlemen to curry favor with local governments.

For a while, it may seem that the moral of this story is that nice guys finish last. One of the book’s central characters is an operator named Jim Giffen, who made himself the “king of Kazakhstan” and a very rich man through a combination of bluff, intimidation, toadying to the powerful, and some genuine talent for the oil business. Yet by the end of the book, he and some others like him have had their comeuppance.

A closer reading shows that some of the players could have succeeded just by being a little nicer. Chevron, in particular, seems to have skipped charm school. At one point the company learned that one of its ex-employees had just become a senior official in the government of Kazakhstan. We’re in, they thought. But the ex-employee apparently didn’t have fond memories of the way he was treated as a foreigner and an underling at Chevron.

LeVine doesn’t have much to say about the “resource curse”—the idea that countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that sit on top of oil or other mineral wealth so often end up poorer than their neighbors. Indeed, he doesn’t introduce the concept until late in the book. His focus is mostly on the major players. But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that few of these folks are interested in the well-being of the average Kazakh and Azeri, or that much of the wealth that comes out of the ground is spent on luxury goods or political influence. 

Thoreau’s one-liners

Thoreau’s gift for aphorism is well-known, but those that are buried in the Journal are likely to be much less familiar than those that found a place in Walden. Here are a few examples from Greg Perry’s Blog of Henry David Thoreau:

I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms.

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake.

Our work should be fitted to and lead on the time, as bud, flower, and fruit lead the circle of the seasons.

Corn grows in the night.

If you would obtain insight, avoid anatomy.

River towns are winged towns.

Genius is like the snapping-turtle, born with a great developed head.

It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees but much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common.

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau

My copy of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau arrived the other day, and I spent the long weekend reading it. The selections, which I’ve been enjoying on the blog itself, are well chosen and work well together, and the book itself is quite handsome. The front cover features an old engraving of an aspen leaf, and in a good light you can see that the textured background on the back is actually an electronic circuit board: signaling, I suppose, Thoreau’s relevance to the modern world.

The book is subtitled “a transcendental day book,” and editor Greg Perry favors the more speculative and “transcendental” of Thoreau’s writings. There are a number of passages about rivers and skies, about music and the colors of the earth, about the turn of the seasons, and about sleep and dreams (but not the haunting passage where Thoreau dreams he is climbing an unknown mountain that rises where the real-life Concord has a graveyard). There are also several passages about clothes, including a description of Thoreau’s new clay-colored corduroy pants. “Most of my friends are disturbed by my wearing them.”

Perry has included some of my favorites, including a partridge’s lucky escape from a train, Thoreau’s attempt to revive a frozen toad, his long description of the death of a lofty pine, and his lovely, melancholy passage in which the coming of the autumn is likened to one of the 19th century traveling panoramas painted on canvas, which slowly unrolls to show the banks of the Mississippi or the Nile.

The November twilights just begun! It appeared like part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased.

Some of the passages from the Journal that I have found most memorable aren’t here, perhaps because they don’t fit the transcendental lens. Missing are some of the darker scenes: the grisly aftermath of the explosion at the gunpowder factory, the carnage wreaked by the muskrat hunters, and even the time Thoreau set the woods on fire. But missing also are Thoreau’s taming of a woodchuck and the call of the mysterious “night warbler.”

Well, you can’t have everything. Each reader of the Journal might create his own version of this “blog.” Greg Perry has done a fine job with his, and has highlighted some passages whose beauty I had never noticed before. Here are two of these, each one from January:

The sun has been set some minutes, and as I stand on the pond looking westward toward the twilight sky, a soft, satiny light is reflected from the ice in flakes here and there, like the light from the under side of a bird’s wing. It is worth the while to stand here at this hour and look into the soft western sky, over the pines whose outlines are so rich and distinct against the clear sky. I am inclined to measure the angle at which a pine bough meets the stem. That soft, still, cream-colored sky seems the scene, the stage or field, for some rare drama to be acted on.

This is a very mild, melting winter day, but clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. The snow lies very level there, about ten inches deep, and for the most part bears me as I go across with my hatchet. I think I never saw a more elysian blue than my shadow. I am turned into a tall blue Persian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in rapture at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?