The Lion of Chaeronea

Reading The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, by the great Peter Brown. Like so much of his work, it brings home the profound differences between the ancient Mediterranean mindset and our own, as well as the complex ideological disagreements and conflicts that lurked behind even such a commonly expressed view in antiquity as "sexual continence is good". (As I, a classical philologist by training, take baby steps into the worlds of late antiquity and early Christian studies, I continue to be both amazed and slightly intimidated by the sheer amount of stuff I don't know.)

Current fiction reading is Fallen Angel, a 1945 novel by Marty Holland (the pen name of Mary Hauenstein, a movie studio typist turned crime writer). It's a deliberately seedy look at love gone crooked, in the vein of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and was itself adapted into a movie by 20th Century Fox, with Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, and Linda Darnell. (For the screen rights to this, her first novel, Holland was paid $40,000 -- the equivalent of $600,000 today. Not a bad deal.) Recommended for crime fiction fans, film noir aficionados, and those who (like me) are both.

Currently reading the science fiction novel Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, winner of the 1968 Hugo for Best Novel. It's a complex mix of Hindu and Buddhist thought with speculation about advanced technology and human colonialism on other worlds. I know there are folks* who dismiss SF as unworthy of the status of "literature," but while I read and enjoy literary fiction often, I also love the infinite canvas of the imagination that SF affords.

*Whom I would characterize as "tiresome snobs," but that's just me.

Reading the Complete Poems of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana, the world's first named author, as edited and translated by the Sumerologist Sophus Helle. Call me corny if you like, but I get a genuine chill thinking that this woman is speaking to me (and to every reader) across the gulf of four millennia.

Current fiction reading is The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart (b. 1938), translated from the French by the late Barbara Bray. Originally published in 1972, it's a stunningly beautiful tale of several generations of Black women on the island of Guadeloupe as they face life's triumphs and tragedies. Schwarz-Bart writes in a style that effortlessly blends the literary and the oral, so that you feel as though you're sitting on a Caribbean shore being told the story while the sun sinks in the west. What an extraordinary, mesmeric book.

Current reading is The World of Odysseus by Sir Moses Finley, originally published in 1954. It's Sir Moses's attempt to reconstruct the society of "Dark Age" Greece (=the tenth and ninth centuries BCE) by close reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. As great a historian as he was, I'm finding the book a little disappointing. Sir Moses seems to have had little interest in, or appreciation for, the history of ideologies (ironic in a Marxist), nor for the complexity of gender roles in the Homeric poems: all he wants to do is strip the epics down to a supposed "kernel of truth," as if everything else were so much rust that needed to be sanded away. At times, I've found myself genuinely wondering whether he'd really paid attention to what he was reading. Some of his dogmatic statements are breathtaking in their wrongheadedness: there's "no trace of the polis in the Homeric poems" (what about Troy in the Iliad or Ithaca in the Odyssey, both of which show many hallmarks of polis-organization?); the poems have nothing to say about Greek colonization, and so must predate it (what about Odysseus in Odyssey IX making plans to colonize and develop the island of Polyphemus?); Penelope is "little more than a convenient 'mythologically available character'" with no real personality (seriously?) Granted, criticizing a book that's seventy years old, in a field where so many methodological advances have since taken place, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but still -- I can't help but feel that the whole exercise could have been improved by a shift in perspective on his part.

I have a week-long break from work coming up (hooray!), and I'm trying to decide on what to read. I've narrowed it down to a couple of choices from my bookshelf:

So...

Current reading is Compulsory Games, a collection of eleven short stories by the English author Robert Aickman (1914-1981). Aickman described his oeuvre as "strange stories," and it's a label that fits: they are deeply, deeply strange, in a way that leaves the reader shaken long after they've set the book down. It's not a matter of conventional horror tropes (though Aickman has been classed, with debatable merit, as a "horror writer"), but a willingness to abruptly, almost casually, discard the agreed-upon laws of reality. Then there's his sense of humor, which was finely tuned and dark as pitch. The result is a heady mix of laughter and terror, a drawing-room comedy of manners at the end of the world. I can see why Aickman's peers and successors hold him in such high regard.

If anyone's looking for a fiction recommendation, I just finished an exceptional novel from the 1980s, The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns. It's based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, but it completely recontextualizes that story and subverts it in astonishing ways. The novel may not be for everyone -- it breaks a number of the "rules" of good fiction -- but I found it unforgettable.

I just bought another translation of Beowulf. Burton Raffel's for Signet Classics, to be specific -- I already own Seamus Heaney's and Kevin Crossley-Holland's versions. I know some people find Beowulf dull, but it speaks to me as few other works of literature do. And, silly though it may sound, it gives me courage.

At the moment, I'm reading the Penguin Classics edition of the so-called Apocryphal Gospels, edited by Simon Gathercole. Specifically, I'm on the Gospel of Marcion, an influential second-century thinker who saw the vengeful God of the Old Testament and the merciful God of the New as separate deities, implacably opposed to one another. Marcion produced his own, heavily edited version of Luke's Gospel, stripping out all references to Jesus' Davidic genealogy and human relatives, as well as any mentions of divine judgment. My training is as a classicist, not as a scholar of early Christianity, so much of this is terra incognita for me. But hey, if one is never willing to learn new things, one will never grow as a person, am I right?

I'm proud to say that I've finished the 885-page Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca (and learned a fair bit of Spanish in the process). Now, on to Pablo Neruda!

Reading Tayeb Salih's 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, an intricate, gripping parable of European colonialism's effects on the people of Sudan. Rarely has so compact a work (only 139 pages in this edition) contained such multitudes.

Current nonfiction reading is The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity by Edward J. Watts. It's a sort of collective biography of the last Romans to be born before Constantine's pro-Christian measures, focusing on four individuals: Libanius, Themistius, Ausonius of Bordeaux, and Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. With considerable skill and imagination, Watts reconstructs the environment that would have shaped these men's thinking, arguing (persuasively, I think) that the imaginative constraints placed on them by their schooling and their society made it nigh impossible for them to imagine a Roman Empire without paganism. Watts sometimes strains a bit in his attempts to connect his material to the present day -- this is the first, and thus far only, time I've seen Ausonius compared to Eminem -- but that really doesn't detract from what is, overall, an excellent book.

Current reading is Derek Walcott's Omeros, a stunning book-length poem in which Walcott translates the Trojan War myth cycle to the contemporary Caribbean and his home island of St. Lucia. I've read many, many "reimaginings" of the classics, in nearly every conceivable period and geographic setting, and this may be the finest of them all.

Reading Anne Carson's An Oresteia -- an amalgamation of three Greek tragedies (Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Orestes) that treat the myth cycle of the House of Atreus from radically different perspectives. I was a little skeptical beforehand as to how well the undertaking would work, but it turns out it's marvelous. Carson's translations carry an exceptional charge that crackles even on the page, to say nothing of performance.

I'm reading His Master's Voice, a novel by the great Polish SF writer Stanisław Lem about a government project to make radio contact with extraterrestrials. If there weren't still a pointless divide between science fiction and "real literature" in the minds of critics, Lem would have won the Nobel Prize. His work blows most lit fic out of the water in its complexity, perspicacity, and philosophical heft.