Books of death: new in bookstores

balloonist When Julian Barnes writes about losing his wife to a brain tumor, he writes instead about the adventures of 18th and 19th century balloonists. It makes for the most unusual kind of memoir -- and it highlights how truly difficult it is to express what we're feeling when one of our loved ones dies.

The loss goes deeper than any words can reach, and that may be why Barnes turns to the early history of ballooning in his forthcoming book "Levels of Life" (Alfred A. Knopf). He's able to speak of the harrowing experience of losing his wife, Pat Kavanagh, only in terms of something else.

Joyce Carol Oates recently weighed in on the U.K. edition of the book in the TLS. She called its approach and perspective "unorthodox" -- but she means it as a compliment. I can't help but agree. Most memoirs of death and dying sound the same. I think we've all lost loved ones, right? If it's a loss from illness, there's an existential formula you just can't escape: symptoms, diagnosis, terror and treatment, slight improvement and hope, sudden decline, death. Grief. Every book about such a loss can't help but sound the same. The Illness Industry is mercilessly efficient.

I think that's why Barnes has recorded his own sorrow in such an "unorthodox" vehicle. He avoids the formula. His love for his wife, and the meaning of her loss, deserve more than the typical formula. His pain is still there, between the lines, hovering at the margins. He doesn't directly confront it for many pages. Still, as we read about the excitement and perils of hot-air ballooning in the pages that precede, we can feel his grief indirectly in passages like this one:

In August 1786 -- ballooning's infancy -- a young man dropped to his death in Newcastle from a height of several hundred feet. He was one of those who held the balloon's restraining ropes; when a gust of wind suddenly shifted the airbag, his companions let go, while he held on and was borne upwards. Then he fell back to earth. As one modern historian puts it: 'The impact drove his legs into a flower bed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out on to the ground.'

I'll risk saying it -- isn't that how you feel when someone you love dies? Like you've been ripped off your feet and driven into the ground? If it were just a book about ballooning's history, I'd call this a colorful anecdote. In a book about losing his wife, it means so much more. This is also Barnes at his best. Something to pre-order at your neighborhood bookstore for your fall reading.

Also this season...

endings happierYou can tell from the title that Erica Brown's "Happier Endings: Overcoming the Fear of Death" (Simon and Schuster) isn't coming from the same personal sense of loss as Barnes' book. Instead, what Brown gives us is an excellent overview, a little in the Mary Roach vein, of death and dying in the contemporary world. Bucket lists, ethical wills, cremation or kafn, last words, final forgiveness, suicide and survivors -- it's all here. A scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, Brown capably navigates a myriad number of topics and issues connected with the Great Beyond. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Brown marshals a compelling amount of information to illuminate an often gloomy subject. Hence her book's title. The fact is, she reports, "the grim reaper is not always grim."

bright abyss coverChristian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is about what Wiman, a published poet, thought about after being diagnosed with cancer. His book assembles several essay meditations, full of poetic allusions and excerpts from world literature, on his struggle to understand his faith in the face of his mortality. What he realizes is that faith, true religious faith, is something different from what's taught in church on Sundays. It's "tenuous, precarious," he says. "The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility."

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Early Nabokov: new in bookstores

Nabokov grave, Switzerland Plays are supposed to be performed, not read — that’s the rule, right?

An acquaintance of mine once arched his eyebrows when I told him I was rereading Hamlet. "You’re not supposed to read Shakespeare," he said, rolling his eyes. (Ok, sure, but can you point me in the direction of a good, local production of Hamlet?)

In Vladimir Nabokov’s case, the opposite is probably true.

This month Alfred A. Knopf has published one of his earliest major works, “The Tragedy of Mister Morn,” and it’s a pleasurable experience to read this play (one of few by the sublime writer/butterfly-chaser).  There’s the familiar wordplay that's in his novels, and the jarring metaphors — all kindly rendered in English by translators Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy (yes, that Tolstoy).

But I could never imagine it performed--it wasn't--and I could never imagine an actor handling some of these lines.

 Too many mouthfuls. Like the character Tremens, a revolutionary, who offers this meditation:

What is the ecstasy of death? It is a pain, Like lightning. The soul is like a tooth, God Wrenches out the soul — crunch!--and it is over... What comes next? Unthinkable nausea and then-- The void, spirals of madness—and the feeling of being A swirling spermatozoid—and then darkness, Darkness—the velvety abyss of the grave, And in that abyss....

Edmin: Enough! This is worse Than talking about a bad painting.

The language is rich and strange — have you ever thought of God as a dentist before? -- but it just seems like it would be difficult for an actor to pull off. (At least Tremens gets interrupted by Edmin.)

Be quiet, I beg you! It’s quarter to... This is unbearable! The clock-hands move Like hunchbacks; like a widow and an orphan Behind a catafalque....

Still, the publisher calls it a major work, and that feels right. This book is a necessity for your Nabokov collection. Here’s the young writer, homeless and fatherless (after the Bolshevik revolution, after his father's assassination), speaking out  in beguiling fashion at the age of 24 — just 24! -- against tyrants and revolutionaries before he firmly wrapped the greatcoat of fiction around his shoulders.

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New this month: John Banville's "Ancient Light" and the fantasies of young men

In his new novel, "Ancient Light" (Alfred A. Knopf), John Banville does what he's always done best: Gives us a brooding narrator with an evocative, meaning-laden name and a past in need of unraveling. And don't forget the lyricism. Always there's lyricism. There must be lyricism. We meet Alexander Cleave (there's the name, suggesting some inner turmoil, division), his troubled daughter, and his memories of his youth. Those memories include his teen affair with an older woman, and that's all I want to center on now. When you're caught in the middle of countless distractions, when your mind is cluttered, a little dose of Banville clears the mind. Restores focus. Reminds you of the possibilities of language again.

As in the following lyrical reflection about Cleave's desires as a young man, and his youthful inexperience:

I knew precious little about girls--and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed--and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance--but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?--and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

Banville captures an entire kind of experience in a single paragraph: an incredibly difficult feat he makes seem effortless. A memory of youth that acquires a mythic aura in the adult narrator's mind. And for me it was that phrase "honeyed haze of childhood" that refreshed me, just when I needed it.