In a column earlier this year, I recommended A. G. Mojtabai’s latest book, a short novel or novella called Thirst. Mojtabai is a writer I have been following since her first novel, Mundome, appeared in 1974. I can still remember standing in the bookstore and reading the start of the novel, which entranced me:
When I think of our library I think of nothing less than the archive of the human estate, the house of the memory of man, and more than a house, memory itself, and more than memory, the slow cess of the spirit: vanity and devotion, illusion, and the martyred rose of prophecy—torn, yet living still.
The narrator and protagonist of the novel is a librarian, an archivist. The opening paragraph combines a sense of wonder, of inexhaustible richness, with deep disillusionment. That passage has often come to my mind over the years as I am thinking about books: the thousands of them in our house, on shelves and tables, on the stairs, in stacks on the floor—but also books not yet published, announced in catalogues (now digital-only, alas) or otherwise made known as “forthcoming” (that seductive word). Isn’t it wildly arbitrary, a vain exercise, to single out a mere handful? Maybe so. But then again, maybe one of these (one that wouldn’t have otherwise come swimming into your ken) will turn out to entrance you, or at least beguile you for a while.
You may already know that I’m a great admirer of the Polish science fiction writer and polymath Stanislaw Lem. A year ago, I wrote a piece for the Englewood Review of Books about MIT Press’s reissues of six Lem titles in paperback, and in particular about his superb novel The Invincible. I am happy to report that MIT’s fall list includes two new Lem titles. The Truth and Other Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, features twelve stories, nine of which are appearing in English for the first time; Dialogues, translated by Peter Butko, is described as the “first English translation of a nonfiction work . . . ‘conceived under the spell of cybernetics’ in 1957 and updated in 1971.” I will be writing about both of these in due course; I can’t wait to see them.
If you are a regular reader of First Things, you should be aware of the Canada-based novelist Randy Boyagoda, whose fiction combines sardonic wit with a robust Catholic faith. His new book, the sublimely titled Dante’s Indiana (due in September from Biblioasis), will be the second installment in the trilogy that began with Original Prin. (Perhaps you were fortunate enough to catch the conversation—was it Zoomed under the auspices of Image?—in which Boyagoda mentioned that he reads from The Divine Comedy every day.)
Hopping back to MIT’s fall list, I am much looking forward to Nina Kraus’s Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (also due in September). By now you may be a bit tired of my huffing and puffing about sound and “soundscapes” and such. It all goes back to my junior year in college, when a passing mention of a scholar named Walter Ong in a book by Hugh Kenner prompted me to read Ong’s own book The Presence of the Word, which had been published just the year before (in 1967) and which has had a lifelong impact on me. The catalog copy for Kraus’s book is enticing: “Our hearing is always on—we can’t close our ears the way we close our eyes—and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don’t just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brain when we hear a word—or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.”
This reminds me of a book published just this week by LSU Press: Surprised by Sound: Rhyme’s Inner Workings, by Roi Tartakovsky. I’d love to see poet and critic A. M. Juster review it. I’m also reminded of a book that I will be writing about, recently published by University of Chicago Press: Nicholas Harkness’s Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (based on research in South Korea). Which makes me think of. . .
But I should stop there. If in due course any of you track down one or more of these books, please do let me know.
John Wilson is a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books.
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