On Books

Review: Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Begin

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments
Cover image of Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: Here My Troubles Begin" by Art Spiegelman

Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Spiegelman. Pantheon Books (ISBN: 9780679729778), 1992.

Summary: Volume 2 of a graphic novel on surviving Auschwitz, the story of Art Spiegelman’s parents and his struggle to care for his father.

At the end of Maus I Vladek and Anja Spiegelman arrive at the gates of Auschwitz. Maus II tells the story of their survival. It came down to currying the favor of one’s captors. Vladek gets preference for teaching a Polish guard English. He works as a tinsmith and a shoemaker, and is able to smuggle food to Anja. It comes down to a game of calories in a regime of slow starvation. The weak or sick are “selected” and sent to the ovens.

Vladek sees the ovens, which are described and rendered. His detail tears them down for transport to Germany as the Russians approach. He describes the terrible conditions of the transports, stuffed into cars, left on sidings for starvation and typhus to take them. Vladek and Anja are separated, liberated, eventually reunited and they find their way to America. Art is born. As we learned in the first volume, Anja took her life in 1968, never free of the Holocaust nightmares.

Things have worsened for Vladek. At the beginning of the Maus II, Mala, Vladek’s second wife leaves him for Florida. Alone at his summer bungalow and in fragile health, he calls Art and Francoise for help. They come for a weekend and he tries to talk them into staying for the summer. They encounter the fussiness that drove Mala crazy. And his neighbors, who tried to help, expect the young couple to step in. Later, Vladek goes to Florida and he and Mala re-unite. Then his heart condition worsens and Art brings him back to New York, where he eventually dies.

But Vladek’s death isn’t the end of suffering. Because Vladek had inflicted his pain, the struggle against survivor’s guilt, on Art, Art could never live up to his expectations. Now a success, he feels bad to prove his father wrong. Through recounting the conversations with his psychiatrist, also a survivor, Spiegelman portrays the intergenerational trauma Holocaust families experienced.

Through the graphic format, we experience the prisoners struggle to survive. While their bodies weaken, they hope for liberation–that they will live just long enough. Meanwhile, friends go to the ovens. And the pall and the smell hangs over them. In the re-telling, we witness a father and son trying to make sense of their shared pain to each other. Through rendering this story, Spiegelman bears witness graphically to the horrors of the Holocaust, the resilient courage of the survivors, and their enduring pain and sadness.

[Maus I review]

Review: Reading Genesis

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment
Cover image of "Reading Genesis" by Marilynne Robinson

Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (ISBN: 9780374613440), 2024.

Summary: Marilynne Robinson’s interpretation of Genesis, exploring the problem of evil in the world and the goodness of God.

“The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply.”

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson offers in these opening lines not only her perspective on the Bible but the central themes of her reading of Genesis. Though theologically astute, she does not approach Genesis as a theologian but as a coherent narrative–a story. She’s not interested in controversies over creation or flood but in what they reveal of the God of the Bible. Nor is she interested in the efforts of critical scholarship to dissect the book into its component sources. Rather, she offers a reading that considers Genesis as a whole book within our Bibles.

She’s not put off by other ancient creation and flood narratives. Instead she highlights the distinctives of the Genesis narrative. Among those distinctives is the reticence to speak of God’s activity prior to creation. Also, we see the goodness of the creation and the elevated status of humanity. Likewise, the flood is not a story of utter obliteration but of severe mercy in which God recognizes both Noah’s righteousness and what he has made.

Robinson traces the story of human evil throughout Genesis: the fall, the murder of Cain. The boasts of Lamech. The hubris of Babel. Even in the story of Abraham and his descendants, Genesis narrates flawed human beings. Abraham passes off his wife as his sister, sends Hagar and her son into the wilderness. Isaac and Rebecca play favorites with their sons. Jacob practices deception. And Joseph seizes the land of the Egyptians while giving his family choice land in Goshen (an observation by Robinson I’ve not seen elsewhere).

Robinson notes the singular lack of an effort to sanitize this history. It’s “unsanitary” nature is the basis on which she argues the grace of God. God protects Cain rather than kills him. Despite Abraham’s failures, God makes extravagant promises that Abraham believes and God hears Hagar, and makes of her son a great nation as well.

And the family begins to imitate the mercies and generosity of God. Jacob recognizes the justice of his brother’s grievance and seeks to make what amends he can and the brothers embrace. A cautious rapprochement to be sure but better than the threatened vengeance. And the brother with the greatest cause for vengeance most freely forgives. Joseph offers home and help (after testing) to brothers who sold him into slavery.

I was most interested in the episode of the binding of Isaac. Robinson focuses on the episode’s clear ban on child sacrifice, in contrast to the surrounding nations. I appreciate that she notes the parallels with the sending of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. Yet I wonder, as does Richard Middleton, how well does Abraham do on the test. He obeys implicitly. But might God have wanted more from “the father of nations”? Why does Abraham not intercede, as he did for his nephew Lot and evil Sodom? Why doesn’t he say, “take me instead of your son, that your promise might be fulfilled in him”? Nor does Robinson explore the consequences for Isaac, for the relationship between him and his father (they live apart afterward) and for Sarah. As a storyteller, I found her discussion of this incident incomplete at best.

That said, the book is an invitation for us to read Genesis with Robinson. Marilynne Robinson’s interpretation of Genesis, interesting as it is, is not as important as encountering the story for ourselves. To help with that, the book includes the text of the King James Version (KJV) of Genesis. I don’t know the reason for this choice of version other than the stateliness of the language and the fact that the KJV is in the public domain. For most readers new to this text, I would recommend reading it in a contemporary translation, perhaps the New Revised Standard Version or the New International Version.

Regardless, rather than arguing about the science or versions or historicity of the book, Robinson invites us to explore this story, of God’s dealings with humanity at their occasional best and more typically worst. Instead of remaining aloof, God wades into the mess, laying the groundwork for redemption.

[One minor quibble. The cover design makes it difficult to read the title and author of the book either on physical copies or with digital images like that above. My bookseller searched and searched the section where the book was supposed to be before finally locating it.]

Review: The Hermit of Eyton Forest

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "The Hermit of Eyton Forest" by Ellis Peters

The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael #14), Ellis Peters. Mysterious Press/Open Road (ASIN: ‎B00LUZNWNG), 2014 (originally published in 1987).

Summary: A hermit’s arrival brings death and mayhem in a quarrel over a boy’s fate, damage to Eyton Forest, and a search for a fugitive villein.

Richard Ludel is a spirited ten year old boy being educated at Shrewbury Abbey. Richard’s father, severely wounded in the war between Stephen and Maud, entrusted him to the care of Abbot Radulfus. Brother Paul sits Richard down in the fall of 1142 to tell him his father has died. He is now the lord of Eaton Manor. Because Richard is a minor, Sheriff Beringar oversees the manor and steward John of Longwood ably care for it. But they have not reckoned with another interested party, Richard’s grandmother, Dame Dionesia.

She comes to the funeral with her newly acquired hermit, Cuthred and his assistant, a young man named Hyacinth. He lives in a hermitage in Eyton Forest, between the manor and the abbey. She demands that Richard return with her. Richard knows it is part of her design to marry him off to the much older daughter of an adjacent landowner. Having accepted the charge by Richard’s father to educate him until his majority, Abbot Radulfus refuses the request.

Suddenly, Eyton Forest, on which the abbey depends, turns hostile. Hyacinth brings a message that it is due to the boy being withheld from his grandmother that all this is occurring. Then a tree falls on Eilmund, forester of the abbey. Hyacinth rescues him and fetches Brother Cadfael to attend him. Hyacinth meets Annet, Eilmund’s daughter. Immediately they are smitten with each other.

With the arrival of Drogo Bosiet, Peters introduces a new plot element. Drogo seeks his fugitive villein, a talented young man, Brand. Brother Jerome tells Bosiet that a man fitting the description is Cuthred’s assistant. Young Richard overhears the conversation. Previously, Hyacinth had treated Richard with kindness. Now Richard returns the favor and sets off to warn Hyacinth. Meanwhile, Drogo also goes after Hyacinth. Neither returns to the abbey.

The next day, Cadfael goes to the forest to check on Eilmund. He finds Bosiet’s riderless horse on the path to the hermitage. Soon, he finds Bosiet as well–stabbed in the back. Meanwhile, back at the abbey, the brothers discover Richard’s absence. Hugh and his men scour the countryside, both to find Richard, and Hyacinth, the leading suspect in the murder.

Once again, Cadfael and Hugh engage in a delicate dance of “don’t ask; don’t tell.” Cadfael knows where Hyacinth is hiding and that he couldn’t be the murderer. Both know that to capture Hyacinth means turning him over to Bosiet’s son. And Bosiet’s son is as vicious as the father. And when Cuthred is murdered, both Hugh and Cadfael walk a line that distinguishes justice from law.

This one finishes delightfully. The abbot gets the last laugh while Dame Dionesia gets her comeuppance. And don’t forget that there is a love story. Peters loves to throw these into her plots. In this story, she expertly weaves three subplots together. And for once, she tells a story that turns more on what Cadfael does not do.

Review: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage" by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do The Heathen Rage, Jessica Hooten Wilson with illustrations by Steve Prince. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436185), 2024.

Summary: The text of O’Connor’s unfinished work with commentary on her literary process and the tensions she wrestled with in writing.

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 from lupus at the young age of 39. Despite her illness she penned a number of short stories and two novels. She also wrote numerous letters, essays, and reviews. She was working on a third novel at the time of her death, a fact known mostly among O’Connor scholars. But none dared put the fragments of this novel into print until now. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes how she was a fan of O’Connor since her teen years. During her doctoral research on O’Connor and Dostoevsky, a friend encouraged her to look at the unpublished novel as the most Dostoevskian of O’Connor’s works. This began research that culminated in this work.

In this work, Wilson has arranged the fragments of the novel into something of a coherent narrative. Between fragments she offers her commentary on the work, O’Connor’s process, and the literary influences on the text, and her struggle to complete it. Portions of the novel are introduced by woodcut illustrations by Steve Prince of One Fish Studios. He provides an afterword describing his work with the O’Connor text.

The principle characters of the story are Walter Grandstaff Tilman, a scholar who spends his days writing letters to all and sundry between bouts of illness (shades of O’Connor’s own life?). His father, T.C. Tilman, is nominal head of the family but has suffered a stroke, and is tended by Roosevelt. His mother keeps up the slowly fading farm, directing the efforts of the farm help. She is frustrated but has come to accept Walter’s lack of interest in the farm.

Oona Gibbs is the one other character who plays a significant part. She is a civil rights activist. She lives with a domineering mother and one gets the sense that her correspondence and activism is part of her liberation. Walter begins corresponding with her. He tells her about his life but portrays himself as lack. Too late he realizes the consequence of his deception. Her interest awakened, she wants to visit. To avert the visit, he writes asking her not to come, trying to end the relationship. Too late. She is on her way.

Wilson takes liberty with what O’Connor wrote in the final part, fashioning a crisis and conclusion of sorts from a cross-burning scene on a neighbor’s farm. Wilson borrows scenes from other stories and acknowledges this as presumptuous. To me, it seemed an effort to offer some kind of closure to what was plainly unfinished and unsatisfying. While it would have busied up the text, I wish she would have annotated this chapter: what was from Why Do the Heathen Rage, what came from other works, and what was Wilson.

Wilson interleaves commentary with the fragments of O’Connor’s work. She traces the different iterations of the story, including the name changes Asbury/Walter and his different backstories. Speaking of backstories, Wilson introduces us to the friendship of O’Connor with Maryat Lee, a New York playwright. Lee, a polar opposite to O’Connor, is the likely inspiration for Oona Gibbs, with shades of Ivan Karamazov.

Wilson’s commentary also explores O’Connor’s wrestling with race. She contends that this, as much as illness, helps account for O’Connor’s inability, despite three years of work, to fashion and finish a coherent novel. She notes the plot elements of Roosevelt, Walter’s conflicted choice to write as a Black, and Oona’s activism, as well as the closing scene as part of O’Connor’s struggle. Wilson discusses O’Connor’s segregated life, her blind spots of experience, and a bifurcated spirituality that relegated civil rights to an “earthly and political position.” Yet she sees the novel as an attempt to address the racism of the South.

For Wilson, the unfinished novel represents the unfinished racial awakening in O’Connor’s life. But how ought we evaluate this unfinished story? On one hand, O’Connor fans will revel in new material to read. On the other hand, despite Wilson’s efforts, O’Connor’s text is fragmentary and lacks cohesion. Given all this, the book is one for O’Connor scholars and devotees. For me, as one who has read O’Connor on and off since college, it added to my appreciation of this complicated Southern Catholic writer. And I grieved afresh that she died so young.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program for review.

Review: Dear Dante

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Dear Dante" by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Iron Pen | Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640609372), 2024.

Summary: An imagined conversation with Dante responding to the three sections of the Divine Comedy in sonnets and terza rima.

On the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell set herself a goal of reading through the Divine Comedy in three months. As she read, she wrote a series of poetic responses. She engaged Dante in the forms he used, the sonnet and terza rima. In all, she wrote 42 poems: a Prologue, thirteen poems for each of the three sections, and an Epilogue of two poems. A quote introduces each canto to which she is responding.

Commenting on the poems, she writes:

“Some of the poems I wrote endorse and enlarge on Dante’s vision, others challenge it, and still others reject it out of hand. In these poems, I dare to differ with Dante–an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic act that creates a space for encounter with the master poet, acknowledging a tension that isn’t easily resolved” (p. 9).

From Inferno IV she reflects on what Christ would have thought of Dante’s hell and wonders how the Savior who forgave so many sinners could approve eternal punishment. She wonders if Jesus would have grieved the sinners he failed to retrieve.

Inferno XII describes Dante’s encounter with the bloody river. She equates this with anger and reflects on how anger can be both a pleasure and a cage.

In Purgatorio IX, O’Donnell reflects how we cannot go through Hell, Purgatory, or heaven unchanged. And there is no turning back to what we were. For Christ, however, though he knows of Purgatory, he cannot go through it as the sinless one. And Virgil, Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, cannot join Dante in passing the gates to Heaven. O’Donnell reflects upon the greatness of his sacrifice.

Heaven is not all sublime for Dante. He grasps the folly of humans who do what they are not supposed to do, Yet they look for mercy undeserved. When Beatrice leaves in Paradiso XXXIII, O’Donnell chides him that he is surprised. He forgets the lessons learned in Hell and Purgatory that we never get what we expect.

O’Donnell ends her reflections with “Dante’s Bargain.” a sonnet. She observes: “His tale of exile and his tears, / the lifetime that he spent / composing lines, creating rhymes / to make the perfect poem / have all survived the test of time.”

While Dante’s time differs from ours, O’Donnell introduces us to the magnificence of the Divine Comedy. And she voices the ways it may seem strange to our ears. I never got past Inferno in my own reading of Dante. O’Donnell has served as a kind of Virgil. Perhaps she will get me to the gates of Paradiso. And who will be the Beatrice to meet me there?

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Social Life of Books

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home, Abigail Williams. Yale University Press (ISBN: 9780300240252), 2018.

Summary: A study of reading together in the eighteenth-century home, looking at how books were used and contributed to social life.

In modern life, reading is by and large a silent and solitary activity. We may gather for an author reading or a bookclub. But most of our reading, even via audiobooks is a solitary activity. The big idea in this book was that reading was a social activity, in family and social gatherings in the home. It provided evening entertainment in the home as well as sustaining spiritual life through the reading of sermons and devotional works. Friends gathered to read plays or enjoy poetry. And with the advent of the novel, reading together served to head off the fears of the fantasy life that might be indulged in private reading.

Abigail Williams offers a study at once both scholarly and a fascinating read for anyone interested in reading practices. She draws on elocution manuals, marginalia, library catalogues and subscription lists, letters and diaries, to construct for us the eighteenth century practices for reading, particularly in England. And one of the first things plainly evident is that reading often meant reading aloud. This explains the importance of elocution manuals. She details how people learned to read aloud to convey the cadences, the content, and the feeling of a work, holding the listener’s attention.

She explores the spaces in which reading occurred, primarily around the setting of the home. Within the home, she traces the rise of the library and the furnishings that would go into one. But reading also occurred in taverns, coffeehouses and other settings. She also goes into matters as diverse as lighting, font sizes, and reading habits, which often show a great deal of skipping around.

How did people access books? This varied by class. Full-length books were often too expensive for many in the working classes. Chapbooks and pamphlets and serialized books helped with this. And then there was borrowing, whether from an employer, or a circulating library. People exchanged books, making them available to more than one household. People also created their own “commonplace” books, whether by writing out a poem, or clipping one from a newspaper.

Williams chronicles the rise of the novel. This brought questions of the appropriateness of private novel reading? In addition to saving people from the dangers of private reading, public readings could “edit” out more titillating or otherwise objectionable material. Novels also offered the chance to imagine other lives.

Finally, Williams considers religious reading. Sermons underwent a shift from more extemporaneous to more structured and elaborated as they were written and published. Elocution was vital both in the pulpit and the home, to hold attention. People read together for self-improvement. It could be the Bible, works of devotion, history and science. Williams acquaints us with the most popular books of the time.

The book includes an abundance of illustrations of paintings of different readers and settings, reproduction of various forms of books including commonplace books and diaries and letters. Williams breaks the stereotype of reading as anti-social, at least in the eighteenth century. The book also gestures at the opportunity for books to be shared entertainment in our day. She introduces us to what may be a lost art, except among actors, of elocution. And it made me wonder what future cultural historians might write about books and reading in our time.

Review: Righteousness: Volume 1: History of Interpretation

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment
Cover image of "Righteousness: Volume 1: History of Interpretation" by Jeffrey J. Niehaus

Righteousness: Volume 1: History of Interpretation, Jeffrey J. Niehaus. Pickwick Publications (ISBN: 9781666738018), 2023.

Summary: The first of three volumes, beginning with a history of defining biblical righteousness, considering the leading interpreters in the light of the author’s own definition.

Definition and Approach

If I asked you to define what the Bible means in talking about “righteousness,” how would you answer? I guess there would be a number of different answers. And this is what Jeffrey J. Niehaus found as he studied biblical scholars who have written on this word. Niehaus undertakes, in three volumes, to study this crucial concept, running through both Testaments. The author proposes a definition against which he will consider the relevant biblical and extra-biblical material. Very simply, his definition is “that righteousness is conformity to God’s Being and doing.” He also makes an important distinction, observed throughout the work that the masculine form of the Hebrew denotes the idea itself; the feminine, the idea in action.

Niehaus defends this working definition as rooted in the lexical definition of the words used as “conformity to a standard/norm.” He proposes a deductive approach, not of reading into passages the definition but determining if the definition validly applies to usage in scripture. Niehaus defends this against the seemingly more open approach of induction by observing that every interpreter using the inductive approach arrives at different conclusions. He believes his approach actually better guards against the subjectivity of the interpreter.

The plan of Niehaus project is to first survey the leading interpreters and evaluate their ideas in light of his own proposed definition. Then, in volumes two and three, he will consider righteousness in the Old and New Testaments respectively. He will thus test how well his definition explains and holds up against this material. But first, he considers the interpreters who have already tackled the subject.

The Interpreters

The first three chapters consider the pioneering scholarship of three men, beginning with Ludwig Diestel. Diestel argued that righteousness consists of that which conforms to or proceeds from God’s purpose. Albrecht Ritschl, strongly influenced by Diestel, considers the divine purpose, which is righteousness, has to do with God’s saving grace. Hermann Cremer differed in advancing the idea that righteousness has to do with the relationship of God with humans, a relationship that entails salvation. With each, Niehaus reviews the biblical evidence for each of the views, the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments on their own merit and in light of his proposal.

Chapters 4 and 5 consider German and Anglo-American scholars in the “righteousness as covenant faithfulness school.” In addition to discussing the three German scholars already considered, he briefly sketches the views of Gerhard Von Rad and Walter Eichrodt as touching on righteousness in light of God’s covenants. Then he turns to Anglo-American scholars, briefly reviewing the work of J.I. Packer, Elizabeth Achtemeier, James D.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright. who is discussed at greater length, particularly his ideas of forensics, the covenant lawsuit. He notes the differences between Wright and John Piper, highlighting Piper’s understanding of righteousness as God’s zeal for his glory.

Chapters 6 and 7 turn to two more individual interpreters. First, Niehaus considers H.H. Schmid and his idea of righteousness as conformity to the created order. Second, he turns to C.L. Irons and iustitia distributiva, or distributive justice, an idea of fairness or equal justice for all, which has an advantage of both biblical and pagan philosophical support. Niehaus would not disagree but roots his thinking in the underlying idea of conformity to God’s Being and doing.

Evaluation

Essentially, this volume is prolegomena and literature survey. Niehaus clearly sets out his thesis and method and warrants for these. Following this, he situates his thesis in the scholarly discussion, offering an appreciative discussion while noting places where his thesis differs. Perhaps most notable is his disagreement with the covenant faithfulness school, which dominates contemporary discussion. In addition to the literature of modern scholarship, he offers an appendix surveying the idea of righteousness from antiquity through the Reformation, In all of this, he evidences scholarship both thorough and catholic. Of course, we await the demonstration of his thesis in volumes two and three (published). But he has laid good foundations.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Purgatory Ridge

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Purgatory Ridge" by William Kent Krueger.

Purgatory Ridge (Cork O’Connor #3), William Kent Krueger. Pocket Books (ISBN: 9780671047542), 2002.

Summary: A murder investigation becomes far more when a kidnapping plot involves Cork’s own family as well as that of a prominent mill owner.

Slowly, the wounds of the past are healing. Cork O’Connor is back at home with Jo. He’s enjoying slinging burgers with his kids at Sam’s. Then an explosion changes everything in a moment. The explosion at Karl Lindstrom’s mill not only caused extensive damage. It took a life of a tribal elder, Charlie Warren. And the sheriff asks Cork to assist with the investigation because he is part Anishinaabe. Also, the sheriff is not running for office again. There are many, including the sheriff, who are encouraging Cork to run again.

Lindstrom’s mill is at the center of controversy. He’s wants to log a sacred stand of white pines. Not only the tribe is protesting. So is a figure known as the “Eco-Warrior” as well as a mother and son team, which could be one and the same. Attention focuses on them. As Cork is drawn into the investigation, tension arises with Jo, who fears what will happen if Cork becomes sheriff.

Meanwhile, across the lake from Lindstrom’s grand home, John La Pere nurses a grievance. Fourteen years earlier, he took his brother Billy on the final voyage of a lake freighter before it was to be decommissioned. Storms hit Superior that night and the freighter broke up. Only John survived of all on board. He suspects the breakup wasn’t due to the storm. What makes matters worse is that Lindstrom’s wife Grace is the daughter of the freighter owner.

He teams up with Wes Bridger, a gambler at the casino with some special skills, locating the freighter only to have their efforts sabotaged. He agrees to a plot Bridger has proposed that will give him the money to investigate the sinking and get the evidence against the company. While Cork is protecting Lindstrom at a speaking event, Bridger and La Pere kidnap Grace and her son. There’s one complication. Grace had invited Jo O’Connor and her son Stevie for a confidential conversation. The kidnappers take them as well.

Krueger has given us another page-turning thriller as Cork and Lindstrom, along with law enforcement try to rescue their families. Meanwhile, the women and their sons are doing what they can to survive and escape. Jo’s sister Rose exercises a faithful presence that steadies the family. She believes in God when Cork and Jo cannot. Henry Meloux offers insight that enables Cork to step back and get perspective. We also get intimations that young Stevie will someday be a force to reckon with. When Karl Lindstrom cannot raise the ransom, the casino owner, a tribal member offers him a no interest loan. Krueger weaves the fabric of a moral universe deeper and richer than treacherous actors. He draws characters for whom we care deeply as well as evil actors, and one tragic figure. This novel has all the elements just right.

Review: Diary of an Old Soul

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald, Introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen.

Diary of an Old Soul, George MacDonald, with introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514007686), 2024 (originally published in 1880).

Summary: A new edition of MacDonald’s extended devotional poem, with seven line stanzas for each day of the year.

In 1880, George MacDonald, the prolific fantasy writer, published a work he titled A Book of Strife in the Form of a Diary of an Old Soul. He intended the book as a gift to friends, assuming the cost of publication. As historian Timothy Larsen notes in the Introduction, devotional works were common during this time, supplementing daily Bible readings with spiritual reflections. What MacDonald did was write an extended poem broken into 365 seven line stanzas. Opposite the poems, he provided a blank page for the reader to write his or her own reflections, which would become part of the work.

The New Edition

IVP Academic has just published a new edition of this work. Unlike later versions, this edition preserves the interleaving of blank pages with the poem with one to three stanzas on a page with a blank page opposite. Wheaton historian Timothy Larsen, drawing upon the resources of the Marion E. Wade Center, provides an introduction to the life, context, and content of The Diary. He also lightly annotates the work, mainly defining unusual words and giving context for some allusions. I appreciated the unobtrusive character of the notes. They did not distract from the text. The IVP edition is 4.25 x 7 inches in size, with a cloth binding and bookmark ribbon, ideal for devotional use.

The Poem

The original first part of MacDonald’s title gives us a clue to the character of the poem. MacDonald portrays the strife of the soul against sin, spiritual inertia, and the vicissitudes of life, in order to love God as one would desire. This is not for lack of his intimacy with God but because of it. That intimacy is evident in these lines from January 5:

My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.

The poem does not follow the liturgical year. MacDonald was from a Low Church background. He makes an exception only for Christmas, which he loved. Rather, his poems sometimes follow the circumstances of his own life: the memory of a lost child, the loss of a home due to straitened finances, or even a rainy, gloomy spring.

Given the extended poem nature of the work, consecutive stanzas are often thematically related. The stanzas for August 21-23, for example, focus on our forgetfulness of God. He observes how often our thoughts are upon other things than God. While he recognizes that this reflects his own finitude, he does not want to fall into sin. Rather, he longs to never stray far from God though not always conscious of God.

The verses remind us of God’s utter sufficiency and our utter dependence upon him in every moment, in our living, aging, and dying. This verse, from August 6 is a good example:

O Father, thou art my eternity.
Not on the clasp Of consciousness--on thee
My life depends; and I can well afford
All to forget, so thou remember, Lord.
In thee I rest; in sleep thou dost me fold,
In thee I labour; still in thee, grow old;
And dying, shall I not find in thee, my Life, be bold?

Using The Diary

Unlike my reading for this review, The Diary is best read one stanza a day. That said, be aware of the stanzas before and after. Timothy Larsen suggests his own practice of reading and re-reading each day’s reading. To this I would add turning your reading into prayers. And use the blank pages to crystallize your own thoughts and impressions. Just as in our reading of scripture, some passages will resonate more deeply at a given time. I suspect one may come back to this in another year and connect with a very different set of verses.

Even in my initial read-through, MacDonald caught my attention at numerous points. On December 23, for example, he speaks of the loneliness of God. That’s one I want to think about further! What makes The Diary so good is that MacDonald gives voice to all the seasons of our spiritual journey, not just the exalted times. In doing so, he often provides words for us in the times our own words fail us. What a gift this must have been to his friends!

[I will be interviewing Timothy Larsen, who introduced and annotated this work on July 9, 1 pm ET. If you are interested in listening to the live interview, sign up for the weblink here.]

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments
Cover image of "Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History" by Art Spiegelman.

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman. Pantheon Books (ISBN: 9780394747231), 1986.

Summary: Volume one of a graphic novel rendering the tightening control over Polish Jews, portrayed as mice, which ends at the gates of Auschwitz.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the pioneering works of graphic literature. It has been celebrated with a Pulitzer Prize (1992) and banned in at least one Tennessee school district as well as in Russia, and subject to a book burning in Poland. The Tennessee board banned its use in an eighth grade class for an image of Jews who were hung, an image of Vladek’s wife in a bathtub (no private parts are visible), and a few instances of profanity (probably far less than could be heard in an eighth grade locker room).

It is a story within a story. It is the true story of Anja and Vladek Spiegelman, Polish Jews subject to increasing anti-Semitism in a confined ghetto while friends and relatives are transported to Auschwitz. And it is the story of the author’s interviews with his father in the late 1970’s, re-telling the experience. In this graphic history, the Jews are portrayed as mice, and the Germans as cats and Gentile Poles as pigs.

Vladek Spiegelman was an enterprising young man who built a textile business with the help of his wife’s family. During an affair, he meets Anja, leaves the other woman and marries. They have a child. Then the Germans invade. Vladek loses his business. The noose begins to tighten. He has to register as a Jew. People are forced into a ghetto, into shared quarters with other families. Food becomes scarce, only available on the black market. The hanging portrays those buying food on the black market.

Then the transports begin. Germans separate the Jews into those who do essential work and others who are never heard from again. Jews make efforts to smuggle their children to safer places. Anja and Vladek do this with Richieu, their son. Later, an aunt poisons Richieu to prevent the Germans from taking him.

They realize that the Germans are trying to eliminate all Jews. Spiegelman describes the hiding places they use–rooms behind coal cellars, rooms behind false walls in attics. But one mistake can lead to arrest and capture. Anja, portrayed as nervous, wants to stay. But Vladek hears of smugglers who can get them out for a price. They leave but are betrayed and arrested. Volume I of Maus ends here.

During the interviews with his father, we learn Anja survived the camp, gave birth to Art, but was marked for life with what we would call PTSD. In a tense scene, Vladek comes across an earlier comic Art had drawn, Prisoner on the Hell Planet. In it, Art tells the story of Anja’s suicide in 1968. He spent three months in a mental hospital, which he portrays as a prison. His father destroyed diaries that would have helped Art in his research.

Part of the story is one of Art and his father groping toward reconciliation, understanding how the Holocaust had marked each of their lives. Spiegelman also vividly portrays his father’s memory. As the subtitle states, he bleeds history. It just comes out of him. And the story Spiegelman tells of one family’s struggle, tells the story of many others. He vividly shows the brutality of the Germans. He chronicles the increasingly desperate conditions, the ingenious ways Jews sought to elude capture, and the heart-breaking betrayals. And all the while, there is this spark, call it hope or delusion, that they will escape the worst.

The graphic history approach couples narrative and visual in a way that removes the Holocaust from the realm of the abstract. Holocaust survivors are dwindling in number. At one time, they visited school classrooms. Maus is another means by which a Holocaust survivor can visit a classroom. This is history we cannot forget. That does not stop people from trying, whether in Russia or Poland or Tennessee. Antisemitism is on the rise. We can repeat this terrible history. Spiegelman’s graphic history is one way to say “always remember” and ‘never again.” But will we?