What surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous sufferiWhat surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous suffering: losing her young son and husband. She’s able to write keenly about her irrational moments, when she was waylaid by grief, including her anger at those hoping to condole with her. At the same time, she uses what she’s learned from her work as a scholar of the so called secret gospels. So the book’s to an extent a recapitulation of her agony and subsequent self-analysis. What she had to do to come through. It’s astonishingly moving and filled by uncanny coincidences that remind me of what C.G. Jung said about synchronicity.
“This second loss [of Heinz] striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’:
Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring . . . . This culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief.
“In his essay Rosado tells us how he shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief— especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he swore to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off his head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could ‘carry his anger.’
“Dismissing what they told him, Rosado kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidentally fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with ‘powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . The mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.’ At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging, he sometimes wished ‘for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger— can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?’
“His question challenged me: Are the elusive [uncanny] experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls ‘a solution of the imagination’? Noting that some Ilongo men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerful our culture shapes them.”
This is the story of a Christian family and how it negotiates the slow fade of its patriarch, the Reverend Robert Boughton. Add to that the recent jilThis is the story of a Christian family and how it negotiates the slow fade of its patriarch, the Reverend Robert Boughton. Add to that the recent jilting of daughter Glory who has suffered humiliations from a married man. And the life gone wrong of son Jack, a troublemaker and petty thief since boyhood, now the prodigal son returned.
The sad thing to see is how locked they all are into their conceptions of sin, transgression, dishonor. One wishes they could lighten up, especially old Boughton. But their moral views are set in stone, and this is the context in which the reader must accept them. Otherwise why read this excellent novel?
Jack Boughton is the family scapegrace: “…the weight on the family’s heart, the unnamed absence, like the hero in a melancholy tale.” (p. 42) The failing pastor’s love for the reformed rogue Jack is heartbreaking almost on a line by line basis.
There are things I don’t understand about families. Like the yearning need on the part of some family members to know how another—Jack, for instance—is doing. Deprived of those status reports some family members, like old pastor Boughton, are tormented and abject, as if he has failed as a parent. This is an element of dysfuction many families go through. Some parents react viscerally to being purposefully excluded from the lives of their children.
But even such a kind pastor must meet his own moment of moral failure. The story is set ca. 1960. The Birmingham Campaign is underway. Sadly, the old pastor sees the demonstrators as base provocateurs. He has no clue about their suffering. It’s an incomprehensible ugliness he turns away from. Jack understands, though, and his refutation of his father’s ignorance is bracing and satisfying.
If you admired Gilead, as I did, and Lila, I think there’s a good chance you’ll love this one, too. There’s also a new novel by Robinson, her most recent. It’s called Jack.
PS: My partner just read Home and wept profusely....more
I’ve been looking for someone like either Karen Armstrong and/or Elaine Pagels, whose works I have devoured. It’s funny, I guess it’s because I’ve heaI’ve been looking for someone like either Karen Armstrong and/or Elaine Pagels, whose works I have devoured. It’s funny, I guess it’s because I’ve heard him on TV so often, but I can hear Aslan’s professorial voice as I read—a bit of synesthesia.
I think of this as exegesis for the non-religious person who nevertheless finds the complex history of Christianity–and monotheism generally—a fascinating area of inquiry. I particularly like how scholars of religion pick the historical bits out of the morass of the fantastic—so we can see what function the mythologizing serves? If we are to believe, as I do, that the stories were created out of a fundamental need to understand.
Very interesting is Aslan’s discussion of the diminishment of John the Baptist “...from from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except your acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.” (p. 86)
“‘I myself saw the Holy Spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove,’ John [the Baptist] claims of Jesus, correcting another of [the gospel] Mark’s omissions, before expressly commanding his disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. For John the evangelist, it was not enough simply to reduce the Baptist; the Baptist had to reduce himself, to publicly denigrate himself before the true prophet and messiah. ‘I am not the messiah,’ John the Baptist admits in the fourth gospel. ‘I have been sent before him . . . He must increase, as I must decrease.’ (John 3:28-30)”
“This frantic attempt to reduce John’s significance . . . betrays an urgent need on the part of the early Christian community to counteract what the historical evidence clearly suggests: whoever the Baptist was . . . Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples.” (p. 88)
Interesting, too, is the story of how Paul broke the ur-church away from its Jewish underpinnings—defying James et al. in Jerusalem who constituted the brain trust for Jesus’s message—and began to virtually invent aspects of the way Jesus is still viewed today, i.e. that fidelity neither to the Temple nor the Law of Moses was required, that circumcision was no longer necessary. Moreover, Paul preached that Jesus’s intention all along had been for the creation of a celestial Kingdom of God, not an earthly one meant to take on the Roman usurpers, and this according to Aslan was entirely new. Paul, on reaching Rome, moreover, decided he would in the future preach exclusively to gentiles, and ignore the Jewish community which resisted his innovative message. He believed himself, you see, to be in almost daily touch with the spirit of Jesus, who spoke, and revealed his ministry, now solely to himself.
It was with the Roman destruction of the Temple and the people of Jerusalem in 66 CE, that the mother assembly of Jerusalem consisting of Jesus’s disciples was destroyed, and Paul’s famous letters, the only writings about Jesus that then existed, “became the primary vehicle through which a new [largely gentile] generation of Christians was introduced to Jesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by the letters. One can trace the Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the Gospel of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in narrative form.” (p. 215)...more
Harrowing. I’ve always wanted a book that could describe simply and clearly what happened in Ireland during The Troubles. Not being Irish, I’ve too ofHarrowing. I’ve always wanted a book that could describe simply and clearly what happened in Ireland during The Troubles. Not being Irish, I’ve too often felt the pall of incomprehensibility daunting me. I never found the right book, until now. Say Nothing is indeed that longed-for book. The prose is just perfectly freighted, and the reader is hoovered into the narrative maelstrom from the very first page with the mad scene of Jean McConville being torn from the arms of her huge and loving family—never to return—by masked goons.
The hatred here is like hatred everywhere—irrational. Be it the Nazis and the Jews, the new “discoverers” of America and its indigenous peoples, the Tutsi and the Hutu—the list is abysmally long. And let’s not forget the Legacy Museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, also known as the lynching museum. I long to visit it. Why? What can I possibly do at this remove? I guess it’s as Victor Klemperer once said, or rather wrote, one must bear witness, even if it’s at second or third hand.
There were five hostile entities in Belfast in the early 1970s. There was the IRA which was Catholic Nationalist and which split into two rival camps: (1) the Official IRA, which was Communist, and sought to remove Northern Ireland from the UK and create a workers' republic; and (2) the Provisional IRA, which sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, and bring about an independent republic, and who were known as the Provos—the largest and most active republican paramilitary group. Other bellicose parties included (3) the loyalist paramilitaries, which were Protestant militia opposed to Catholic Emancipation and supporting the British occupation; (4) the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC, which was a Protestant police force; and finally (5) the British Army, the key military force of a (largely Protestant) nation which had recently lost virtually all of its colonial possessions. Other paramilitaries formed later.
After Jean McConville was “snatched,” to use the tabloid argot, and her ten parentless children were left to fend for themselves in the execrable Divis flats—their father Arthur had died of cancer some time before—no one from the surrounding community took the orphans under their wing. These traumatized children received no care. Even the local parish priest was unsympathetic. With good reason, it turns out, since Jean had been taken by the papist IRA. This resulted in a culture of silence in Belfast not unlike that in the USSR under Stalin, when even next door neighbors would not speak to one another due to the mutual fear of denunciation.
In the Provisional IRA, the members were all very young. Kids, really. They generally volunteered as children, with many assuming important roles by their teenage years and early twenties. These were the snipers and bombers and hit persons then so feared. Dolours Price was eighteen when she volunteered, having been raised by parents who’d both been IRA members back in the 1950s.
It was Dolours Price’s idea to take the bombing campaign to London. ”The English public, removed on the other side of the Irish Sea, seemed only dimly aware of the catastrophe engulfing Northern Ireland. It was a case study in strategic insanity: the Irish were blowing up their own people in a misguided attempt to hurt the English, and the English hardly even noticed.” (p. 117) I abhor the religious irrationality which drives pietists and which here can be traced back to the 12th century. It is a long and labyrinthine historical view you’ve got to have to kill in the name of this very ancient idea. One wonders if everyone was a scholar here—if the origins of the conflict were as fully understood and recalled and recited chapter and verse as would seem necessary to justify so much killing?
It’s now 1973 and the IRA is about to plant four car-bombs in London near government facilities. Dolours Price is given command of the operation. I was living in America when these horrors occurred. I can almost see the headline in the Washington Post. The author is now destroying that distance. The night before the bombings Dolours and her companions go to a West End play by Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City. The next morning London police are scurrying about bright and early to locate the cars; they were tipped off 14 hours in advance by a Provo mole. That day there’s a transit strike so London is chockablock with cars. Fortuitously the cops find one vehicle and disarm it. It’s alarm-clock timer was set for 3:00 p.m. They infer that they have until then to find the three remaining cars.
However, I don’t mean to be too hard on the NRA. So how’s this for balance? “Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or the outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless stream of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanized by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services.” (p. 274)
Say Nothing is nonfiction. It’s every bit as good as, say, Killers of the Flower Moon. In some ways, one might argue, its better, which is taking nothing away from David Grann. But to my mind Killers is a little thin at the end. It almost peters out. Say Nothing by contrast has a consistent verbal density and narrative compression throughout.
How did I not know that the Irish Potato Famine has been justly laid at the feet of Britain, who was exporting food from Ireland for its own needs as one million Irish died and another million emigrated? Now Dolours and Marian Price, locked up with a sentence of twenty years each in H.M.P. Brixton, begin a hunger strike which echoes that genocide. “If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them. Dolours Price had always felt that prison was where an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause was truly tested. Now she told anyone who would listen, she stood more than ready to die.” (p. 151) The young women’s hunger strike will break your heart. That’s the surprise about this book. It knocks you off your moral high horse. Two-hundred and fifty people injured by the bombs—terrible!—but miraculously no one killed. So when the British decide to force feed these young women, you know this is a violation of their civil rights; you know it is wrong; only long after the fact is it condemned and prohibited by the state.
After developing an eating disorder from the 207 days of forced-feeding, Marian is released near death. She has served 8 years. Dolours is released for the same reason after serving 13 years. To have kept her in jail would’ve been to kill her. She renounces the IRA and its violence. We skip ahead to Bobby Sands’s election to Parliament on the 41st day of his hunger strike in 1981; PM Margaret Thatcher’s recalcitrance in the face of all good sense; Sands’s death, followed by nine more hunger strike deaths that summer, one every week or so; the rise of Gerry Adams—blackly tarred for giving away the store as his onetime fighters see it—and with him Sinn Féin, the Good Friday Agreement etc. One aspect of the peace that the GFA did not provide for is the truth and reconciliation process; thus the last part of the book, The Reckoning. Boston College undertakes this role when it is apparent no one else will. (The city has a large Irish-American population.) It’s called Project Belfast. The sheer tonnage of mental derangement and searing regret shouldn’t surprise us, not after a war this prolonged and bitter, but it does, it does.
Then Boston College “screws the pooch,” to quote former test pilot Chuck Yeager, when the old RUC, trying to take down General Adams, obtains the transcripts via subpoena in 2003 or so. None of Boston College’s agreements with the interviewees, it turns out, were ever vetted by in-house counsel, so the pledges to withhold the transcripts until after the interviewee(s)’s death(s) could not be honored. I was reading this and whispering: “oh God, oh my God,” which shows you how clichéd I become when dumbfounded. You may wish to brace yourself....more
Excellent content but very dense prose. Mellifluous it isn’t, but then he’s chosen a story of immense complexity to cover in two volumes. 2,500 years Excellent content but very dense prose. Mellifluous it isn’t, but then he’s chosen a story of immense complexity to cover in two volumes. 2,500 years covered here in 421 pages equals 5.9 elapsed years per page. I’m thinking back to Schama’s sprightly Citizens of 1990. What did he cover there in 750 pages, was it 60 years? By comparison volume one of The Story of the Jews is super concentrated....more
Great stories of heroic black Americans escaping slavery and the noble whites who helped them. Reading the book is heartening. It’s an astonishing talGreat stories of heroic black Americans escaping slavery and the noble whites who helped them. Reading the book is heartening. It’s an astonishing tale meticulously pieced together from disparate sources. Author Foner came across the papers of Sidney Howard Gay, Corresponding Secretary at the American Anti-Slavery Society of New York, which detail specifics of the many runaways the Society aided. This view from New York City forms the core of the tale, which is supplemented by heretofore obscure abolitionist newspapers and such. Admittedly, the narrative is thin in places. But then you get to the escape of Henry “Box” Brown, an industrious “slave” who cleverly had himself boxed up in North Carolina and shipped to the Society’s offices in NY in 27 hours. When he was uncrated he emerged singing a hymn of praise, so exhilarated was he with his newfound freedom. There’s discussion, too, of the “slave” Margaret Morgan who, without objection from her “owner,” crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania where she married and started a family. Five years later, after the owner’s death, his grasping niece sent a team of abductors to Pennsylvania who entered the Morgan home while the husband was away kidnapping Morgan and her six children, all of whom were carried to Maryland and slavery. This case resulted in the notorious SCOTUS decision Prigg v. Pennsylvania that allowed the kidnapping to stand! There are three or four sickening examples here of the Court supporting the peculiar institution of slavery. Oh, the outrages come thick and fast, friends. The Morgan tale had me gasping aloud. There are many other cases here— such as the kidnapping of free blacks into slavery; see Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave—that tend to leave the reader exhausted and stunned. This truly was, to use Gil-Scott Heron’s words, Winter in America. It is astonishing that the nation prevailed. Thanks, Abe.
Background from the New York Times, 2015:The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad.
That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.
But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom....more
A few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs oA few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs of collectivization (20 million dead) and Hitler's genocide (11 million dead). I am largely unshockable. However, the avarice and deceit of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (15 million dead) has been something of a revelation. I hereby enter his name in my Rogues Gallery roster. It is important that we remember what he perpetrated for his own personal gain. Adam Hochschild's book does an excellent job of registering these crimes in the collective memory. The book has been justly praised. Let me add my own.
Also, it turns out the first great unmasker of Leopold was an American, George Washington Williams. He was a lawyer, minister, popular author and activist. He wrote an open letter to Leopold that was published in the Times in 1890 and which might have saved millions of lives had he been listened to. Williams was a man of considerable intellectual acumen and courage. Largely because he was black, however, he was ignored. I had always thought that that great whistleblower was Roger Casement. And certainly Casement's key contribution is recounted here, as is that of the great popularizer of the Congo cause, E.D. Morel, but Williams' audacious early warning was a surprise to me. I hereby enter his name into my book of latter-day Cassandras, and decree he be given greater emphasis in all relevant texts and courses....more
Oliver Sacks mentions this work in his book Hallucinations for its depiction of groups experiencing mass delusions. I do not know if Arthur Miller reaOliver Sacks mentions this work in his book Hallucinations for its depiction of groups experiencing mass delusions. I do not know if Arthur Miller read this when working on his play The Crucible, but I wouldn’t be surprised....more
Author Elaine Pagels includes here discussion of not only John of Patmos's Book of Revelations, so well-known from the New Testament, but also discussAuthor Elaine Pagels includes here discussion of not only John of Patmos's Book of Revelations, so well-known from the New Testament, but also discussion of the numerous revelation texts found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945. These are the so-called gnostic or apocryphal texts expunged by order of Egyptian bishop Athanasius in the 4th century C.E. Because of the range of her sources she's able to give us a picture of Christian revelatory thinking and mindsets through the ages.
For instance, the original "beast" or anti-Christ as conceived by John of Patmos was clearly Rome. John, a Jew, wrote in 90 C.E. This was just twenty years after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jewish people. Once Constantine adopted the faith (312 C.E.) and ended the persecution of Christians, however, the beast was reinterpreted to mean all so-called heretics: Jews, ironically, pagans, essentially any nonconformist.
Pagels also discusses how due to the thematic broadness of much of what John wrote he created imagery that has over two millennia been capable of being projected onto any perceived threat of the moment. The list of examples is extensive, but includes Martin Luther's depiction of the pope as the beast, and the Church's depiction, in turn, of Martin Luther as such. We might also add Hitler as beast, Stalin as best, western sexual and moral laxness as beast, and let's not forget the current favorite: Obama as beast. Recommended.
Let me add that there's a wonderful book by Norman Cohn called Pursuit of the Millennium which I discuss elsewhere that looks at this penchant for flexible interpretation of anti-Christ during the 11th through 15th centuries or so, and how this capacity in turn engendered the most appalling mass hysteria and genocide in central and southern Europe. Cohn's is an astonishing book and I recommended it highly....more
This is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that tThis is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that the late 19th-early 20th century scholars for the most part accepted and reinforced the views of the early church polemicists (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.). She gives detailed example after detailed example. We look at the work of Harnack, Reitzenstein, Bousset, Bultmann, Bauer, Jonas and others. She then undertakes a review of shifting scholarly positions after the astonishing discovery in 1945 of a trove of ancient mostly Gnostic manuscripts near the Upper Egypt village of Nag Hammadi. These manuscripts, written in Coptic, were hidden in a jar under the sand and estimated to be 1,600 years old. They threw much light on the formation of the early church and raised many questions. Does King belabor her point a bit? Yes, she is nothing if not a scholar, but it's such a fascinating overview, requiring only minimal googling for the general reader, that one is borne along nicely. Her writing is clear and free of jargon save for the first chapter or so where she pays the requisite obeisance to scholarly argot. Though she isn't the writer her peer Elaine Pagels is, King nevertheless does a rock solid job. She wants to follow the sequence of ideas and compare and contrast them as she goes along. Just the sort of treatment I was looking for. Thorough and admirable....more
What an elephantine statement. I began the novel with the impression that it was kind of a Christian millenarian Germinal in terms of the bleakness ofWhat an elephantine statement. I began the novel with the impression that it was kind of a Christian millenarian Germinal in terms of the bleakness of its storyline. By the end, however, it was clear to me that Vargas Llosa's model was predominantly Russian. When AC says here that "there is a certain archaism and hieratic nature in the writing," I think this is in part what he means, though the limited third-person voice never widens to full God-like omniscience.
The novel is based on the Canudos or backlands rebellion in Brazil of the late 1890s, which is known to us primarily from Euclides Da Cunha’s pioneering Sertões (available in translation from Penguin as Backlands: The Canudos Campaign), which has been called the starting point of Brazilian letters. Brazil has deposed its monarchy and established a young, unstable republic. The disenfranchised monarchists want to hang on to their property rights and are in a political fight with the republicans. This conflict forms the novel’s lethal backstory. In the foreground is the messianic figure, Antonio Conselhiero (the Counselor), who, over thirty years of preaching in the backlands has assembled a flock of congregants, including many notorious bandits, made up largely of poor farming families forced off the land by devastating drought.
The Counselor views the new republic as the Anti-Christ because of a provision in the new constitution that separates church and state. The republic's transgressions include the institution of civil marriage, when, as the Counselor knows from direct contact with his deity, a perfectly valid form of religious marriage already exists. Also cited as fodder for rebellion is the collection of taxes, viewed as an encroachment on Church tithing; and a census, which is seen as a way to both reinstitute the slave trade, abolished under the monarchy, and provide the Anti-Christ republic with the information it needs to undertake a pogrom of all declared Catholics. An entirely baseless claim yet one that is not without irony given the story's genocidal conclusion.
In time the dispossessed pilgrims settle on one of the landholdings, Canudos, of the Baron Canabrava. The pro-republican propagandist, Epaminondas Gonçalves -- a man whose murderous PR would make even Joey Goebbels burst with admiration -- paints the squatters as recidivist monarchists in league with the elderly baron. This is false. It is true, however, that the squatters have rejected the republic. When Gonçalves arranges for a shipment of English rifles and ammunition to Canudos he conveniently exposes the "monarchists" as traitors to the fledgling republic and publishes accordingly. Because of this deft bit of disinformation, the republicans and their armies and most of the public do not know that Canudos is in fact a religious settlement with eschatological leanings. Even during the last prolonged campaign against Canudos the commanding general still believes that the jagunços have monarchist tendencies and that English officers are advising them. Three times the republic sends the army against Canudos and loses ignominiously, thanks to the insurgents' ruthless guerrilla tactics. The fourth campaign succeeds.
Vargas Llosa spends the first 200 pages alone establishing his characters. They are a rogue’s gallery, too, and include the “nearsighted journalist,” a character based on Euclides Da Cunha himself; the elderly Baron Canabrava, head of the (real) ousted monarchists; the newspaper owner and lethal republican, Gonçalves; Galileo Gall, a Scottish socialist, whose over-zealousness and lack of self-examination bring him to an ugly pass; the ex-slave, Big João, who ruthlessly slices his mistress to bits during a backlands excursion; Abbot João, formerly Satan João, Pajeú, Pedrão, and other murderous bandits turned upstanding Christians; the Vilanova brothers, itinerant merchants; the filicide Maria Quadrado; the Lion of Natuba, a literate, deformed young man who serves as the Counselor's scribe; and the entire Brazilian army -- a Tolstoyan dramatis personae if ever there was one.
On the whole, the novel is an admirable endeavor. The narration is straightforward, the diction very flat. There's no fancy vocabulary, except for the occasional Portuguese word, and no structural sleight-of-hand. The writing strives to stay out of its own way, and largely succeeds. But neither does the prose exhibit any real "nicety of style," to use E.M. Forster’s phrase, at least it doesn't come through in this translation. In other words, it doesn't sing. The book’s achievement is in its structure and its length (580 pages). A bit too long for me, the battle scenes especially. As we hurtle toward the end, increasingly there's a tendency toward melodrama. Cliches start popping up: "A chill ran down his spine." Then again there are many beautifully vivid renderings of action and space: the sere landscape, the streets of the impoverished squatter town. ...more
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