Twelve passages from books I read this year

As I did last year and the year before, I’ll wrap up this year in newsletter writing by sharing some favorite passages from the books I read in 2023. This reading year was very heavy on European literature in translation from the first half of the 20th century, perhaps because I’m on a kick, or perhaps because a mood of impending or unfolding catastrophe feels suitable.

My roundup from 2022

My roundups from 2021: Part One, Part Two

In no particular order:

Marcel Proust ends In Search of Lost Time with its own origins: the narrator realizing that he must write a book. From Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson [my post from January]:

Finally, this idea of Time was valuable to me for one other reason, it was a spur, it told me that it was time to start, if I wanted to achieve what I had sometimes sensed during the course of my life, in brief flashes, on the Guermantes way, in my carriage-rides with Mme de Villeparisis, which had made me feel that life was worth living. How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labor awaited him! To give some idea of it, one would have to go to the most elevated and divergent arts for comparisons; for this writer, who would also need to show the contrasting aspects of each character to create depth, would have to prepare this book scrupulously, perpetually regrouping his forces as in an offensive, and putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries, the explanations for which are probably to be found only in other worlds, while our occasional inklings of them are what, in life and in art, move us most deeply. In books of this scope, there are parts which have never had time to be more than sketched in and which will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect’s plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished! One feeds a book like that, one strengthens its weak parts, one looks after it, but eventually it grows up, it marks our tomb, and protects it from rumors and, for a time, from oblivion.

I spent a long weekend this spring sick in bed and, for some reason, wound up reading all of Chekhov’s plays. From Uncle Vanya, translated by Peter Carson, the doctor Astrov bids farewell to Yelena, the beautiful and disruptive visitor to Vanya’s country house:

ASTROV [shaking her hand]: Yes, go… [Reflectively] I think you are a good, sincere person but there’s also something strange in your whole being. You came here with your husband and everyone who was busily working here and creating something had to drop what they were doing and devote the whole summer to looking after your husband’s gout and you yourself. Both of you — he and you — infected all of us with your idleness. I was attracted and did nothing for a whole month, and during that time people were ill, and the peasants put their cattle out to feed in my woods with their young trees… and so, wherever you and your husband tread, you bring desctruction. I’m joking of course, but still… it’s strange, and I’m convinced that if you had stayed, the devastation would have been enormous. And I would have been lost, and you… it wouldn’t have been good for you. So, leave. Finita la commedia!

Mrs. Copperfield pays the delinquent hotel bill of another guest. She admonishes the hotel’s assistant manager for not being delighted enough. From Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles:

“The most horrid thing about you,” continued Mrs. Copperfield, “is that you’re just as grouchy now that you know your bill will be paid as you were before. You were mean and worried then and you’re mean and worried now. The expression on your face hasn’t changed one bit. It’s a dangerous man who reacts more or less in the same way to good news or bad news.”

Since he made no effort to speak, she continued: “You’ve not only made Mrs. Quill completely miserable for no reason at all, but you’ve spoiled my fun too. You don’t even know how to please the rich.” The assistant manager raised his eyebrows.

“You won’t understand this but I shall tell it to you anyway. I came here for two reasons. The first reason, naturally, was in order to get my friend Mrs. Quill out of trouble; the second reason was in order to see your face when you realized that a bill which you never expected to be paid was to be paid after all. I expected to be able to watch the transition. You understand — enemy into friend — that’s always terribly exciting. That’s why in a good movie the hero often hates the heroine until the very end. But you, of course, wouldn’t dream of lowering your standards. You think it would be cheap to turn into an affable human being because you discovered there was money where you had been sure there was no money to be forthcoming. Do you think the rich mind? They never get enough of it. They want to be liked for their money too, and not only for themselves. You’re not even a good hotel manager. You’re a boor in every way.”

Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, reflects on the nature of the mistake she has made in marrying Gilbert Osmond [here’s my previous post].

Suffering, with Isabel, was an active condition; it was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a passion of thought, of speculation, of response to every pressure. She flattered herself that she had kept her failing faith to herself, however,—that no one suspected it but Osmond. Oh, he knew it, and and there were times when she thought he enjoyed it. It had come gradually — it was not till the first year of their life together, so admirably intimate at first, had closed that she had taken the alarm. Then the shadows had begun to gather; it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily deepened, and if now and again it had occasionally lifted there were certain corners of her prospect that were impenetrably black. These shwdows were not an emanation from her own mind: she was very sure of that; she had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the truth. They were a part, they were a kind of creation and consequence, of her husband’s very presence. They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing — that is but of one thing, which was not a crime. She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her. That was all she accused him of, and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a crime, for against a crime she might have found redress. He had discovered that she was so different, that she was not what he had believed she would prove to be. He had thought at first that he could change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like. But she was, after all, herself — she couldn’t help that; and now there was no use pretending, wearing a mask or a dress, for he knew her and had made up his mind.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom wrestles with a map, thwarted in his attempt to escape his life by driving endlessly south in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run [here’s my post from this summer]:

He burns his attention through the film fogging his eyes down to the map again. At once “Frederick” pops into sight, but in trying to steady its position he loses it, and fury makes the bridge of his nose ache. The names melt away and he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somewhere caught in. He claws at it and tears it; with a gasp of exaggeration he rips away a great triangular piece and tears the large remnant in half and, more calmly, lays these three pieces on top of each other and tears them in half, and then those six pieces and so on until he has a wad he can squeeze in his hand like a ball. He rolls down the window and throws the ball out; it explodes, and the bent scraps like disembodied wings flicker back over the top of the car. He cranks up the window. He blames everything on that farmer with glasses and two shirts. Funny how the man sticks in his throat. He can’t think past him, his smugness, his solidity, somehow. He stumbled over him back there and is stumbling still, can’t get him away from his feet, like shoelaces too long or a stiff stick between his feet. The man mocked, whether out of his mouth or through his hairy ears, somewhere out of his body he mocked the furtive wordless hopes that at moments make the ground firm for Harry. Figure out where you’re going before you go there: it misses the whole point and yet there is always the chance that, little as it says, it says it.

In Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, translated by Tami Calliope, the violent and self-loathing Marcello is comforted by the rise of fascism because it gives him a sense of normalcy:

Perhaps he had desired and still desired Franco’s victory for love of symmetry, like someone who is furnishing his house and takes care to collect furniture all of the same style and period. He seemed to read this symmetry in the events of the past few years, growing ever clearer and more important: first the advent of Fascism in Italy, then in Germany; then the war of Ethiopia, then the war in Spain. This progression pleased him, he wasn’t sure why, maybe because it was easy to recognize a more-than-human logic in it, a recognition that gave him a sense of security and infallibility. On the other hand, he thought, folding the newspaper back up and putting it in his pocket, it couldn’t be said that he was convinced of the justice of Franco’s cause for reasons of politics or propaganda. This conviction had come to him out of nowhere, as it seems to come to ordinary, uneducated people: from the air, that is, as when someone says an idea is in the air. He sided with Franco the way countless other people did, common folk who knew little or nothing about Spain, uneducated people who barely read the headlines in the papers. For simpatia, he thought, giving a completely unconsidered, alogical, irrational sense to the Italian word. A simpatia that could be said only metaphorically to come from the air; there is flower pollen in the air, smoke from the houses, dust, light, not ideas. This simpatia, then, rose from deeper regions and demonstrated once more that his normality was neither superficial nor pieced together rationally and voluntarily with debatable motives and reasons, but linked to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith, that is, shared with millions of other people. He was not a loner, abnormal, crazy, but one of them: a brother, a citizen, a comrade; and this, after the long fear that Lino’s murder would divide him from the rest of humanity, was highly consoling.

In Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According To G. H., translated by Idra Novey, the narrator passes through a spiritual crisis while watching a cockroach die.

No, there was no salt in those eyes. I was sure that the roach’s eyes were saltless. For salt I had always been ready, salt was the transcendence that I used to experience a taste, and to flee what I was calling “nothing.” For salt I was ready, for salt I had built my entire self. But what my mouth wouldn’t know how to understand — was the saltless. What all of me didn’t know — was the neutral.

And the neutral was the life that I used to call the nothing. The neutral was the hell.

The Sun had moved a bit and stuck itself to my back. Also in the sunlight the roach was split in two. I can’t do anything for you, roach. I don’t want to do anything for you.

From Alberto Moravia again, in Boredom, translated by Angus Davidson, the narrator Dino describes his condition [here’s my post from this fall]:

In reality, and leaving metaphor aside, boredom had thoroughly corroded my life during those years, down below the surface of my job as a painter, leaving nothing unimpaired; so that once I had given up painting I felt I had been transformed, without noticing it, into a kind of shapeless, truncated fragment. And the main feature of my boredom was the practical impossibility of remaining in my own company — I myself being, moreover, the only person in the world whom I could not get rid of in any possible way.

And so at that time my life was dominated by a feeling of extraordinary impatience. Nothing that I did pleased me or seemed worth doing; furthermore, I was unable to imagine anything that could please me, or that could occupy me in any lasting manner. I was constantly going in and out of my studio on any sort of futile pretextt — pretexts which I invented for myself with the sole object of not remaining there: to buy cigarettes I didn’t need, to have a cup of coffee I didn’t want, to acquire a newspaper that didn’t interest me, to visit an exhibition of pictures about which I hadn’t the slightest curiosity; and so on. I felt, moreover, that these occupations were nothing more than crazy disguises of boredom itself, so much so that sometimes I did not complete the errands I undertook. Instead of buying a newspaper or drinking coffee or visiting an exhibition, after taking a few steps I would return to the studio which I had left in such a hurry only a few minutes before. Back in the studio boredom, of course, awaited me and the whole process would begin over again.

From Anita Brookner’s Falling Slowly, a protagonist who is bored for different reasons:

The monotony of her current situation was of a different order, had something shameful about it, userless; without attachments she saw her desire to please as unmotivated, unsolicited. And although this might in a pinch be counted a tribute to some residual innocence, as if she were still an eager girl in quest of friends, she knew that this was not the case. Age had invested her with new emotions — resentment, fear, sorrow — and she was shocked by her consistently ruminative mood, not previously encountered, regretting all the time now the breathless expectations of youth, which her continuance in the world had somehow put to shame. Even the brief willed peace of her former life, or that part of it that she could invoke, as if she were to swallow a sleeping pill, had vanished, to be replaced by what she imagined was a permanent scowl, though when she looked in the glass she saw only bewilderment. She had determined, so many years ago, to be good, but had somehow ended up compromised. Praised on all sides for her devotion, she felt impatience.

From Arthur Schnitzler’s short story Death of a Bachelor, translated by Margret Schaefer. A man instructs that, upon his death, his friends should gather at his deathbed to read a letter he has left for them.

“For God’s sake, read the ending,” commanded the doctor in a new voice. The businessman reached over, took the letter from the writer, who was feeling a kind of paralysis creep into his fingers, quickly dropped his eyes down to the end of the letter, and read these words:

“It was fate, my friends, and I can’t change it. I have possessed all your women. All.”

The businessman suddenly stopped and leafed back through the pages. “What are you doing?” asked the doctor.

“The letter was written nine years ago,” said the businessman.

“Read on,” commanded the writer. The businessman read:

“They were of course very different kinds of relationships. With one of them I lived almost as though married, for many months. With another it was more like what is called a wild advenure. With the third it went so far that I wanted to die together with her. The fourth I threw down the stairs because she betrayed me with another. And another was my lover just once. Are you all breathing in relief again, my friends? Don’t. It was perhaps the most beautiful hour of my… and of her life. So, my friends, I don’t have any more to say. I am now folding this piece of paper and putting it in my desk, and here may it wait either until I destroy it while in another mood, or until you get it in the hour that I’m lying on my deathbed. Goodbye.”

From The Man Without Qualities by Robert Müsil and translated by Sophie Wilkins, Ulrich’s cynical view of the failures of humanism [more passages in my post from earlier this year]:

[It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and the rules of the moral life are only metaphors that have been boiled to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen vapors of humanism billowing around the corpses, and if a digression is permissible at this point, it can only be this, that one consequence of this impression that vaguely hovers over everything is what our era should frankly call its reverence for all that is common. For when we lie nowadays it is not so much out of weakness as out of a conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie. We resort to violence because, after much long and futile talk, the simplicity of violence is an immense relief. People band togeher in organizations because obedience to orders enables them to do things they have long been incapable of doing out of personal conviction, and the hostility between organizations allows them to engage in the unending reciprocity of blood feuds, while love would all too soon put everyone to sleep. … The coupling of a “philosophy” with activities that can absorb only a very small part of it, such as politics; the general obsession with turning every viewpoint into a standpoint and every standpoint into a viewpoint; the need of every kind of fanatic to keep reiterating the one idea that has ever come his way, like an image multiplied to infinity in a hall of mirrors: all these widespread phenomena, far from signifying a movement toward humanism, as they wish to do, in fact represent its failure. All in all, it seems that what needs to be excised from human relations is the soul that finds itself misplaced in them.

From Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday, translated by Anthea Bell, in which he describes the circumstances under which he must write his memoirs as a refugee from war:

I am well aware of the unfortunate circumstances, so characteristic of our times, in which I am trying to give some kind of form to these memoirs of mine. I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and with nothing to jog my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room. There is nowhere I can go for information, because all over the world postal services between countries have been halted or are subject to censorship. We all live apart from each other, just as we did hundreds of years ago before the invention of steamships and railways, air travel and the postal system. I have nothing left of my past, then, but what I carry in my head. At this moment everything else is either lost or beyond my reach. But our generation has learnt the fine art of not mourning for what is lost, and perhaps the loss of documentation and detail will even be an advantage in this book of mine. For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. Only what I want to preserve for myself has any claim to be preserved for others. So I ask my memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark.