W. B. Yeats: The Poems

The spouse went to Ireland, and because I had to stay home, he brought me back a truly splendid gift: W. B. Yeats: The Poems, a hardcover collection from the British version of Everyman's Library. I really love Everyman's Library; it's an imprint of Random House that publishes the classics in these relatively compact but kinda sumptuous hardcover editions. (Interestingly, W. B. Yeats: The Poems is not part of the American version of Everyman's. Which seems a terrible oversight, but I guess Yeats still does not have the stature in the U.S. that he does in Europe. That's a shame.)
So the book includes most but not all of Yeats' poetry. Yeats was very prolific, so even this abridged version is 395 pages of poetry. His major works are represented in full, so it appears to have the complete content of books such as The Wind Among the Reeds, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, and Last Poems, just to name a few. Then it has extensive notes. Also, a chronology of Yeats' life and a critical introduction. AND an index of titles and an index of first lines. Awesome, awesome, awesome!
I am very pleased with this book. It's my new favorite book.

New translation of Divine Milieu by Sion Cowell

I love books as objects -- I do, I do, I do! And I much prefer hardcovers to paperbacks. I'm in my 30s, and I've seen beloved paperbacks lose their structural integrity over the years and literally fall apart before my eyes. Not so with hardbacks. They are sturdy things, built to last.
So I've been looking for a hardcover copy of The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This book is hard to explain; it's very different from most other books. It was written by a paleontologist Jesuit priest in the 1920s as a way of reconciling Christianity and evolution, but it's also something of a spiritual self-help book, too, if I can say that without diminishing its theological complexity.
The latest copy of the book describes itself this way:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, in a newly revised translation by Sion Cowell, is addressed to those who have lost faith in conventional religion but who still have a sense of the divine at the heart of the cosmos. "The heavens declare the glory of God," sings the Psalmist. Teilhard would agree. "We are surrounded," he says, "by a certain sort of pessimist who tells us continually that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not say rather that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?" He sees a universe in movement where progress is the spiritualisation of matter and its opposite is the materialisation of spirit. Teilhard opts for progress. The Divine Milieu is the divine centre and the divine circle, the divine heart and the divine sphere. The Divine Milieu is written for those who listen primarily to the voices of the Earth: its purpose is to provide a link to traditional Christianity (as expressed in Baptism, Cross and Eucharist) in order to demonstrate that the fears prevalent in contemporary world society as it abuses its very foundation - Mother Earth - may be better understood by the Gospel path. Teilhard's primary purpose is to show a way forward, which he sees as the "Christian religious ideal".

Clearly, this is not a book for everyone, but it really rings bells for me as I have long seen science and religion as mutually reinforcing, not opposites. This is what happens to a person when her early education is overseen by the sisters of the Sacred Heart.
So my wonderful new translation in HARDCOVER arrived yesterday. I had to pay $36 (!) for it in these difficult economic times, but I did anyway, and that was Amazon's deep discount from the $50 list price. It is a lovely slim volume with a groovy cover design that implies cutting-edge sophistication. Interestingly, the cover resonates with some recent popular science writing.
Compare the cover of the new Divine Milieu ... :


... with the cover of a recent(ish) book, completely scientific on string theory by scientist Brian Greene called The Fabric of the Cosmos:


Kinda looks the same, doesn't it? Speaking of Greene, wouldn't that would be a dream dinner party: Teilhard de Chardin and Brian Greene. Throw in Pema Chodron and Jonathan Safran Foer for an ecumenical foursome. I'd cook a delicious feast and we'd talk late into the night ...

Book talk on The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Here is my book talk on The Book of Chameleons for my library science class after finding it on the Three Percent blog, an excellent source for news and reviews of translated literature. As I've noted before, the assignment requires that our book talks have to be very positive. But I honestly liked this book just as much as my book talks says! (Librarians, feel free to use this book talk as you like.)

Lovers of dreamy, experimental fiction, The Book of Chameleons is for you! Set in modern-day Angola, our narrator is a self-reflective gecko -- that's right, a lizard -- who lives on the ceiling in the home of Felix Ventura. Felix Ventura is an albino antique books dealer and seller of memories, and there's no shortage of customers. "They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals -- people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these peoople lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. The businessmen, the ministers, would like to have women like that as their aunts ... old ladies swathed in fabrics, authentic bourgeois bessanganas -- they'd like to have a grandfather with the distinguished bearing of a Machado de Assis, of a Cruz e Souza, of an Alexandre Dumas. And he sells them this simple dream."

This fantastic premise actually works well with its real-world history of contemporary Angola, a former Portuguese colony on the southwest coast of Africa. In 1975, factions began fighting in a civil war there that was to last 27 years, dominated by Cold War politics. In 2002, the civil war ended. Angola has since been rebuilding its economy, primarily through oil exports. The cross-section of people who come to buy memories in 2004 from Felix Ventura represent the cross-section of people trying to reinvent themselves in post-civil war society.

In The Book of Chameleons, a retired photojournalist and war photographer comes to Felix Ventura and buys the identity of Jose Buchman, a persona that Ventura has invented based on his history books and antiquities. Buchman returns not long after, telling Felix he has been to the village where his "father" lived and photographed his father's grave. Buchman travels to New York City to find his American "mother," then follows her to South Africa. How can this be, Felix wonders? Meanwhile, the gecko meets Buchman in a series of dreams. The neighborhood hobo -- formerly, one of Angola's once-powerful Marxists -- is staking out Felix's house, while Felix's new lady love Angela Lucia visits regularly. The characters all take their parts in a murder mystery that comes together only at the book's conclusion.

The book's author, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, was born to Portuguese parents in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. The Book of the Chameleons won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, a prize for fiction in translation published in the United Kingdom, and it was the first book written by an African author to win the book. Agualusa, a fiction writer and a journalist, has written seven novels, including Creole which was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Both The Book of the Chameleons and Creole were translated by Daniel Hahn, who also translated the autobiography of Brazilian footballer, Pelé, which was shortlisted for the Best Sports Book of 2006 at the British Book Awards. The 2008 American edition of The Book of the Chameleons includes a question and answer with the author and a book group reading guide.

With its emphasis on magical realism and post-colonial politics, this book is particularly recommended for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Fans of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges will enjoy the sly joke that the gecko narrator is Borges reincarnated.

This is literary fiction at its most dreamy and interesting, but it's also accessible to more casual readers, thanks to our approachable lizard narrator. The book is also short in length, so if you are looking for something to expand your horizons that's not too much of a time commitment, this book be for you: The Book of the Chameleons, by Jose Eduardo Agualusa.

D.T. Max on David Wallace (DFW Memorial Part V)

D.T. Max of The New Yorker has a heart-breaking story about David Foster Wallace -- his career as an author and his last days. Wallace was working on a novel called The Pale King before he died. His publishers expect to issue the incomplete manuscript next year.
Max writes:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

First, I find this description so poignant, and it vibrates on the same frequency as the Alcoholic Anonymous credo that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest: One day at a time. Second, his passing yet again stikes me as so utterly sad -- an artist unable to complete his work, dead by his own hand from depression. Finally, I find it personally endearing that Wallace had become obsessed with taxes. I have my own obsession with taxes that developed relatively recently. It is its own arcane language, like a priestly code. Perhaps aliens will one day assume the IRS tax code was our holy book.
Read the entire article. Max wrote a previous article on the awe-inspiring literary archive at the University of Texas at Austin, so he has a great deal of sensitivity for Wallace's place in American letters.