Harry Miller's Blog, page 5

Book Review: Abigail, by Magda Szabó

The passage from childhood to adulthood is marked by an exchange of cares from the petty to the existential. A certain reorientation of perspective occurs as well: The child lives inside her petty cares; the adult views her existential ones from a certain sensible distance.

In Magda Szabó’s Abigail, Georgina Vitay must make the transition all at once, at the command of her father, the General: “From this moment onwards, Gina, your childhood is over. You are now an adult, and you will never again...

Book Review: Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter narrates the epic romance of a serious woman and an unserious man. The latter is just serious enough to resent the former’s resentment of his unseriousness, resulting in the main crises of the storyline.

One such crisis produces the following masterpiece of hurt:

Certainly she had been wrong many times before, and in anger she had often spoken mean and vile words to her husband. But what offended her most bitterly was that Erland would never offer to forget and forgive unle...

Book Review: Iola Leroy, by Frances E.W. Harper

Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy is a portrait of slavery and its aftermath in mid-19th century America. It focuses on two protagonists of mixed race, the mother and daughter Marie and Iola Leroy, to illustrate the absurdity of American slavery: One moment, the two light-skinned women are paragons of gentility – with Iola going so far as to defend slavery at her Northern girls’ school – the next moment, they are slaves.

Covering the Civil War and emancipation, Iola Leroy is an inspiring story of...

Morning in America, January 7, 2021

Alas and alack,
The rednecks hate us back.

Book Review: Farnsworth’s Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth

The main argument made in Farnsworth’s Classical English Style is that good writing involves the balancing of contrasts. Many of these contrasts are rhythmic, and one good way to vary rhythmic flow, treated extensively in the first part of Farnsworth’s book, is to set off polysyllabic Latinate words from monosyllabic Saxon ones. Other contrasts that distinguish good writing are those between abstract and concrete imagery and front-loaded and back-loaded sentences. Farnsworth’s general watchword,...

Book Review: A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

As is known, Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is a retelling of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights that takes the form of a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, triangulating on the character of Taro Azuma, the racially impure pauper who makes the best of the various table scraps the world throws to him and becomes a millionaire. As such, it illustrates the triumph of the middle class over residual aristocracy, a theme that is developed on other levels as well, outside the main storyline....

Mind Trails

At the school I attended from pre-k through fifth grade was a wooded area with a network of nature trails where my teachers would often take us for walks. As a small boy, I marveled at the woods’ vastness, and since my classmates and I were always chaperoned, I never learned to navigate the trails on my own. Over the years, I grew familiar with certain features of the woods – a stream, a gully with planked steps going down one side and up the other, various pieces of Outward Bound equipment such...

Book Review: The Third Son, by Julie Wu

Julie Wu’s The Third Son is economically written, powerful, and unsentimental. The latter virtue keeps it well clear of the saccharine exoticism that taints many depictions of Asia, particularly of Asian family life. The protagonist, Saburo (a Japanese name often given to third sons), is low in his family’s hierarchy and is treated appallingly by his parents and oldest brother.

The story includes a superlative panorama of Taiwanese history of the mid-twentieth-century and would make an excell...

Book Review: The Man with the Golden Touch, by Mór Jókai

In Mór Jókai’s The Man with the Golden Touch, the protagonist, Mihály Timár, builds his fortune from an ill-gotten capital. He does not connive for it, but it falls into his hands unearned, and he spends most of the book in a cloud of self-reproach, unable to enjoy the happiness that properly belongs to others. Even when he resettles the fortune upon its rightful possessors, he claims no absolution, knowing that it was never his to bestow.

“Self-reproach” is an apt term, as is the idea of cla...

Book Review: Peony in Love, by Lisa See

It is odd to encounter pride in subservience, but it should not be surprising. In China, the standard was set centuries ago by a woman named Ban Zhao, who argued that women were too important not to be taught to serve their men. The forcefulness of her advocacy for female education has led some modern scholars to call her a feminist, but the object of her advocacy – the inculcation of complaisance – has led the rest of us to balk at the term. There are few things more mind-blowingly paradoxical ...