A Reading Rut

One of the things I worried about before coming to Rome was the challenge of getting English books here. What I've found is that it's actually very easy to find books in English. Finding the exact ones you want, however, is difficult.

Right in my neighborhood, Trastevere, there are two English-language bookstores: Almost Corner, which sells new books (including both of mine--hooray), and the Open Door, which sells used. If I go downtown, I can also find English-language book sections in the big chain bookstores like Mel and Feltrinelli, though usually they only have books I've already read or books I'd never want to read, the latest in chick-lit or testosterone-driven thrillers. Otherwise, I can check out the library here at the Academy, or if I feel very patient, I can order books from amazon.uk, which seems to take about a month, by which time I'm interested in reading something else.

My problem is I can never predict what it is I'm going to want to read, and it's usually something that isn't readily available, for example, Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, or a story by an obscure Yiddish author.

Until recently I was doing fine with the books I'd brought with me: the indelible Mayor of Casterbridge by Hardy, a collection of essays and stories by my current obsession, E. M. Forster, which includes a breathtaking piece called "Inspiration." But lately I can't seem to stick with anything. I don't know if it's the book themselves or maybe just my mood.

For example, I tried picking up the new Michel Houellebecq novel, The Possibility of an Island, which I got in the UK edition. (I don't know why, but his books tend to come out there six months earlier than in America.) After about fifty pages, I had to put it down. In the past I've been an avid fan of his, but somehow the fourth time around, his voice, with all its lusty pessimism, simply feels tired. Maybe it's not any fault of the author's. It's just that the world is depressing enough these days. If I'm going to read five hundred pages about how we're going to hell in a handbasket, I'd like a little hope, the kind David Mitchell gave me in Cloud Atlas. Or, at least, something in the way of character other than world weary Parisians making crude ethnic jokes and having glorious jaded sex. And maybe, if it's not too much to ask, a moment of genuine feeling. Perhaps the biggest secret about Houellebecq is that he yearns to be a sentimentalist. When I look back on his last two books, what I remember most are the painful, pathetic scenes, a boy drowning his sorrows in endless bowls of Corn Flakes, the narrator of Platform giving up on Western Civilization after the end of a love affair that caught him by surprise.

Next I tried a slim novel in Italian called "Novecento" by Alessandro Barrico, who's a big cheese here. My Italian skills are still fairly weak, so it's hard for me to comment too much on this book, which is a novel in the form of a monologue which is actually supposed to be the treatment for a film. It was actually made into a film with Tim Roth, and is the story of a pianist who's born on a cruise ship and goes back and forth across the Atlantic and never gets off the ship. All very ironic and world-weary. Capitalism and show business are brutish and so forth. I put it down.

Now I'm working on a mammoth book called The Nazarene by Sholem Asch, a writer I admire greatly for his vision as well as his achievement in his book Three Cities, which I keep haranguing people to dig up. The Nazarene has a more interesting back story than Three Cities, but the part I've managed to get through can't compare in terms of brilliance. Published in 1939, during the height of Nazi atrocities in Germany, The Nazarene is an epic life of Jesus Christ written in Yiddish. You can imagine the response Asch got from the Jewish community when the book came out. The literary community, on the other hand, hailed the book as a great achievement. So far, I can't agree. The book opens fetchingly, with a daring conceit: a Jew in Poland goes to work as a translator for a rabid anti-Semite who reveals that he's actually a reincarnation of one of Christ's murderers. The relationship between these two is rich and intriguing. Too bad that after thirty pages, Asch chucks it entirely and instead relates the anti-Semite's "memories" of Christ in Imperial Judea. Suddenly the language and details of place and character that were so finely etched in the opening disappear. Instead we get the usual Roman carping about that nasty little colony of Judea that gives us so much trouble. If you've seen any movie along the lines of Ben-Hur, you get the idea.

So what's next? Well, I hate to sound like a wimp, but I think I'll just go back to re-reading E. M. Forster.