Michael Mott

Neville Jason's Proust

itself a prize contender—for the Hatchet Job of the year. sexton points to what he considers the novel’s “conceit and verbosity,” its “intolerable affectation,” its “melodramatic story,” and its fundamental dedication to structural elaboration on the model of astrological charts. He acknowledges its technical accomplishment as an explanation for the Booker victory and offers a suspicion that “some exhausted reviewers praised it for the same reason. it doesn’t necessarily make it any good, of course. a ship made of matchsticks in a bottle is a feat of construction but not necessarily a great work of art.” this is rattling good persiflage, and one can see what sexton objects to, but his impatience with what does indeed look affected renders him unable to appreciate the story. there is no need to impugn the Booker judges— robert Macfarlane, robert douglas-Fairhurst, Martha Kearney, natalie Haynes, and stuart Kelly, a book reviewer, a television journalist, a classicist and book critic, and two dons, one from oxford and one from cambridge. the easy decision would have been to reward crace or toibin for long service, or Bulawayo, ozeki, or lahiri for crosscultural understanding. it was brave to give the prize to a precocious young woman (described in one catty review as “marginally beautiful”) for an ambitious novel that risked ridicule by its enormous length rather than playing safe by being far less verbose. and, if the gloomiest predictions are correct, this will be the last nonamerican novel given the Booker, so it’s good to see the British empire go out with some high panache.

Filling Bookshelves for a Lifetime

1954 was my Wander Year. I abandoned a trunk in florence, a knapsack in Cairo. By the time I went by Jeep over snow-covered mountains to Petra, everything I possessed was in a paper bag. four books, all of them small, survived to reach home with me: my journal, a king James Bible, The Duchess of Malfi, and a Penguin translation of plays by sophocles. the Bible was a library in itself, of course; but the 1024 pages, in double columns, in Collins’s clear-type, defeated me. I was hardly the first or last to discover that the Book of Genesis is one beautifully crafted short story after another. I reread the New testament between Byblos and Bethlehem. I read The Duchess of Malfi enough times to convince myself that Webster’s Bosola was my favorite character after shakespeare’s enobarbus. the small Dent edition I was reading has proved more faithful to the original of 1623 than any I have read since. But it was Watling’s translation of sophocles that brought about the perfect match between what I was reading and what was going on about me. We were on board the Semiramis, soon to land at Piraeus. the covered main hatch where I had spent a cold night made a stage with the running sea behind it. When I looked up from my book because of a sudden quiet, I found a chorus of women in black between me and four policemen and nervous recruits. the doctor from second class stepped away from the man on a stretcher. a political prisoner, he had been brought on board the afternoon before at Corfu, chained to the stretcher, shivering and raving. everyone was hurrying now to be ready to leave the ship. knowing the man was dead, I had no more to do than recover my coat.

Forgiveness at Königsberg

Sesto, non più: torniamo Di nuovo amici, bring tears into the eyes of the most hardened traitors, as I have myself witnessed at Königsberg, after the terrible retreat from Moscow. On our re-entering the civilized world, we found the Clemenza di Tito, very well got up, in that city, where the Russians had the politeness to give us twenty days’ rest, of which, in truth, we stood greatly in need. —L.A.C. Bombet, The Lives of Haydn and Mozart