studeronomy's reviews
97 reviews

The Great Twitter Novel.

I really liked the exercises—they were simple but useful. Nothing too challenging or mind-blowing in this short meditation on self-knowledge. You could probably get all this information by watching six or seven School of Life videos. But the exercises were good.

Orthodox Christians will naturally be interested in St. Gregory of Nyssa's treatise on the soul, the soul's origins, its properties, and the doctrine of resurrection and theosis. This review is for non-Orthodox and non-Christians. I recommend On the Soul and Resurrection to general readers of philosophy just as I'd recommend any of Plato's dialogues (St. Gregory's treatise most resembles the Phaedo, as the introduction by Catharine Roth explains—the introduction alone is worth the price of admission).

Whether you're sympathetic to the ideas of Plato and other philosophers who affirm the existence of the soul or you're a hardened materialist, you cannot deny that the soul—the essence and consistency of "the self," our sense of a stable and continuous "self"—is a persistent and fascinating problem within philosophy, western *or* eastern. The soul and its nature have inspired some of the best philosophical writing. On the Soul and Resurrection engages directly with this ongoing conversation and develops classical Greek ideas about the self within a doctrinally sound *and* intellectually rigorous Christian framework. Just as you needn't worship the Greek gods to benefit from Plato, you needn't be Orthodox to benefit from St. Gregory.

I would also recommend this treatise to anyone interested in philosophical Buddhism and eastern conceptions of the self. St. Gregory explores the relationship between our conception of self; our true nature; and their relationship to suffering, pain, and what Orthodox Christians call "the passions." He contrasts our passionate nature with our true nature, which is God-like and love-oriented. He explains why purification—the return of the self to its created nature, which exists in harmony with God and creation—can be such a painful process. Just as you don't need to be a Buddhist to benefit from Buddhist insights, you don't need to be Orthodox to benefit from St. Gregory's insights.

St. Gregory of Nyssa is a sensitive thinker. He "steel-mans" his opponents' best arguments about the existence and nature of the soul. He structures his treatise as a dialogue between him and his sister, St. Macrina the Younger. Both Gregory and Macrina confront death as they discuss the soul: Gregory has just lost a dear friend and Macrina conducts the dialogue from her own deathbed. Within the conceit of the treatise, Macrina explains the doctrine of the soul while Gregory offers objections to the Orthodox view. These objections are powerful. I frequently find myself nodding along as Gregory responds to Macrina's account of Orthodox doctrine...which makes Macrina's responses to Gregory all the more compelling.

Again, you don't need to agree with this treatise to benefit from it. If you enjoy classical Greek philosophy, I strongly recommend the theology of the early Church Fathers, whose intellectual heft rivals that of the best classical philosophy. On the Soul and Resurrection is rigorous, stimulating, and enjoyable to read.

I read Blood Meridian in graduate school (it wasn’t assigned, but I was the type of student who failed at grad school because I was always reading things that weren’t assigned). I loved it. McCarthy’s language was so intense. The prose was so lush and gorgeous and High Modernist, like something from Faulkner. The Southwestern vistas and desert imagery were so vivid. The violence was genuinely shocking. The novel’s setting seemed to drift back and forth between the Mexican-American border and some kind of weird, cosmic, post-historical space. I even enjoyed little details, like how McCarthy’s chapter titles summarized the content of the chapters, which made the novel feel like a “found” object, like something archaic, like something from the nineteenth century. The whole novel was so self-consciously ambitious and “important.” I absolutely loved it.

At that time (the mid-2000s), it wasn’t common to hear people frame the political and cultural inception of the U.S. in terms of the genocide of Native peoples (even the use of the term “genocide” to describe U.S. policy toward Natives wasn’t super common back then). So everything about Blood Meridian felt bold and innovative and true.

After enough time passed, I decided to reread Blood Meridian. And while the prose was as gorgeous as I remember and the violence was as shocking and brutal, the whole nihilistic tone just…wore me down. After a while, the tone began to ruin even the most beautiful moments of McCarthy's prose. And after about fifty pages, I was just like, “I get it. I get it. I get it. Red in tooth and claw. God is dead. The cosmos is cruel. I. GET. IT.”

Unlike the novels it aspires to imitate ("Moby-Dick" above all), Blood Meridian has one or two big ideas, and there’s very little else to enjoy about it. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t require that a novel have multiple compelling ideas, but Blood Meridian is so thoroughly an “ideas” novel—not a “plot” novel or a “character” novel—that after you’ve enjoyed the imagery and the prose, you’re not really left with much else. It’s all just McCarthy beating his nihilism over your head for hundreds of pages. He keeps going and going, beating your head until it’s reduced to a pulp of blood, brain, and bits of skull.

No thanks.

Still, I’ve got to give it three stars for the imagery and for the prose. Read it once for that, if you can handle the violence.

I’m from Iowa. My wife is from Massachusetts. I’m pretty sure she read A Thousand Acres while we lived in Boston, and then she read it again (and taught it to her English class) after we moved back to the rural Midwest. Her experience the second time was very different from the first: living with and around farmers gave her an entirely new perspective on the genius of Jane Smiley’s characterization.

So my wife insisted that I read this, and I eventually did (in April 2023). I have to say, I was blown away by the characterization. Smiley’s insight into the psychology of Iowans is…pretty incredible. And spot-on. If you want to understand the farmers who operated enormous family farms in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s—i.e., those farmers who preceded the current conglomeration of American agriculture into the corporate behemoths that overwhelm the middle of America today—then you should definitely read this book. The “domestic realism” (a derogatory term for fiction by women that nevertheless applies here) is really top-shelf.

That being said, I have one major complaint: ickiness. This is an icky book. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, except to say that ickiness emerges, ickiness persists, and ickiness doesn’t really resolve itself or arrive at a satisfying, uh, climax.

Gross.

Five stars for characterization, for Smiley’s uncanny ability to capture the uniquely Midwestern neuroses of her rural characters.

Four stars as an interpretation of King Lear; the parallels to Lear are sometimes a little too on-the-nose, but on the whole she does a great job reimagining those characters in this context.

Three stars for plot, which isn’t really the point.

One star for ickiness, which never really feels earned and goes basically unresolved (as, alas, it does in life…oh well).

Ick.

This is a wild, weird translation of Job. Greenstein is committed to reconstructing the original text's shape, meaning, and poetic force. He's willing to do a lot of guesswork and take risks with a book whose original text is stitched together from multiple versions and written in at least two languages. Greenstein's talents as a philologist and a poet serve him extremely well: his Job feels startlingly fresh and frightening...and uniquely Jewish, too. Sometimes this translation reads like dark Yiddish theater. Greenstein foregrounds the sarcasm and humor of the book; Job kvetches and his companions scold him with frightening metaphors written in effective Hebrew parallel structure. It's a fast, thrilling read. Greenstein's Introduction is also fantastic, full of informed speculation about the purpose, authors, and audience of Job.

It's hard not to compare Greenstein's approach to Job with Robert Alter's magisterial translation of the Hebrew Bible. Alter clearly felt great responsibility while translating the Bible. He labored under the weight of the seriousness of his endeavor: he knew his translation would be influential and widely read, and he translated accordingly, carefully. You can sometimes feel him straining as he writes. Greenstein is downright mad by comparison, in the best way possible, and he clearly had a blast working with this remarkable narrative.

"The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please." That's the closest George Saunders comes to giving definitive, categorical writing advice in this book about writing. In most places, he hedges and hesitates on questions of method. This isn't a typical guide to creative writing, and Saunders is pretty humble about his ability to impart authoritative knowledge to his readers...especially, perhaps, because he's using the great Russian writers as his case studies, and those guys are pretty intimidating.

But this guide to fiction writing is extremely practical and, I think, more useful than the typical guide. The book is based on Saunders's years of teaching the Russians to creative writing students, and you can tell he has honed his observations over time. Even for those of us who aren't fiction writers or creative writers, this is a great book: it's about creative thinking, really, and relating to other people in more humane ways. Fiction teaches us to understand the complexity of the world and to empathize with other people, Saunders concludes (this is hardly an original conclusion, which he admits), and the Russians are as good as anyone at teaching us to understand complexity and to empathize.

"The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please." The Russians would have vehemently disagreed with this, as Saunders knows. Tolstoy in particular was extremely prescriptive about the function of art, and it had nothing to do with creative freedom (perhaps Chekhov would have felt differently). Tolstoy would have aligned more closely with Socrates in "The Republic," with the view that artistic license and aesthetic freedom are suspect, especially if the artist isn't producing art that edifies us. For the Russians (as for most artists and critics throughout history), art had a definite and normative purpose. Saunders is very much a product of the late-twentieth-century Workshop culture, which emphasizes pragmatism, utility, novelty, and craft over questions of function, purpose, and the ethics of the aesthetic. Consequently, Saunders occasionally strains to make a work like Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot" a model for modern short story writers. But his strain is enjoyable to read, and he makes the most of it.

The stories Saunders selects—by Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy—are extremely well-chosen and moving. It makes me wonder why I ever read anything but Russian literature...although Saunders's friendly, casual prose reminds me of everything I like about American fiction at the turn of the millennium. The juxtaposition between Tolstoy's aristocratic moralism and Saunders's workshop pragmatism works pretty well! The last chapter (the one about "Alyosha the Pot") and the epilogue are worth the price of admission. I definitely recommend this for writers of fiction, for anyone who likes thinking about fiction, and (of course) for anyone who loves the Russians.

Eugene Vodolazkin is medievalist, which gives him incredible insight into the medieval Russian mind. That insight is on full display in Laurus, an absolutely gorgeous novel. We see this world through medieval eyes, and this prismatic worldview colors otherwise familiar settings—the forest, rivers, the sea, Venice—with a strange and brilliant newness, as if we're seeing them for the first time.

As one reviewer of Laurus noted, it's very difficult to write a novel with a saintly main character. Vodolazkin achieves this by giving the saint a thoroughly Orthodox mindset: Arseny, the protagonist, is hard on himself and light with others, and is deeply conscious of his own sinfulness. His faith is earthy and grounded, as is the culture he inhabits. The relationships he forms throughout the novel are deeply moving. Vodolazkin's many vignettes are beautifully crafted, and the novel's relationship with time is fascinating.