What We’ve Been Reading—January 2025

R. R. Reno

A friend was shocked that I had not read Saul Bellow. He sought to remedy my grave literary deficit by sending me a copy of Herzog, the novelist’s much acclaimed 1964 novel. I dutifully opened the book, but in truth I could not muster interest in the fate of the title character, Moses E. Herzog. I formed a firm intention to persevere. But the same friend had sent a copy of Willmoore Kendall’s essays, Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum. The delicious iconoclasm of Kendall’s ideas and the sheer energy of his prose captivated me.

Kendall recognized the incoherence of an “open society” ideology. This approach asserts that there can be no creed or orthodoxy undergirding a political community. We’re to allow free and open debate, the liberal says, a marketplace of ideas. But this amounts to a creed—the open society orthodoxy. It has a commandment: Thou shalt not found a society on a shared vision of truth. As Kendall observes, this commandment rules out every known society, including the United States, which rests on truths deemed self-evident. 

It’s a delight to read Kendall’s written-out remarks prepared for public debates. His fertile mind was unable to resist framing his opponents’ positions in striking and inventive ways (often going on for long, long paragraphs) before refuting them. His account of the essential difference between modern liberals and conservatives bears reflection. He says that the liberal regards securing equality of opportunity as the foremost political task. The conservative demurs, not because he disdains this liberal ideal, but because he thinks other matters are more pressing. Public order, continuity of tradition, inculcation of virtue, national defense, liberty itself—many civic goods may be more important to protect, buttress, and promote than equality. I’ll add that the same holds for classical liberalism. Yes, of course freedom is a political good. But there are others. As Jonathan Haidt observes in The Righteous Mind, conservatives have the full range of moral taste buds. As a result, the conservative is alive to the vagaries of history. Today’s most pressing challenges are not the same as yesterday’s. Beware political commentators bearing “principles.”

Veronica Clarke

Perusing the Austrian shelf at London’s famed Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street (which organizes books geographically), I came across a novella titled Baron Bagge by Alexander Lernet-Holenia. The premise captured my interest: Set during World War I, a young aristocratic Austrian cavalry officer is ordered to lead a desperate charge against Russian forces across the Ondava river, only to suddenly find himself in an idyllic country village. Bullets and ice give way to champagne, waltzes, and romance. Magic and reality bleed together to create, in the words of Stefan Zweig, a “realm of visionary luminescence.” He called the novella “unforgettable,” written “in a state of grace.” High praise indeed; I was surprised I’d never heard of it before. 

I didn’t end up buying the book (I have a bad habit of buying books that I then don’t read) but felt compelled to order it online after I looked into its author: Lernet-Holenia hated the Nazis (who burned his work), converted to Catholicism, and was an outspoken conservative throughout the tumultuous sixties. Take my money.

Coincidentally, I recently bought another Austrian novella: The Woman Without a Shadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated for the first time into English by Vincent Kling and published by Wiseblood Books. (Kling has also translated Heimito von Doderer’s Strudlhof Steps—one of those aforementioned books that I’ve bought but haven’t yet read.) The novella expands on Hofmannsthal’s “feverish” libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera.

“Hofmannsthal’s story is both deeply Catholic and folkloric,” Dana Gioia writes in the introduction. “The natural expression of sexual love is marriage and children. For Hofmannsthal, love is individually motivated, but its consummation brings lovers into the universal cycle of life.”

Gioia asks, “Why did Hofmannsthal choose the novella as his form?” The answer, he says,

is found in the German literary tradition. . . . The true character of the German imagination [is] found . . . in folk tales, called Märchen (“little stories”) in German. . . . To a degree unparalleled in English, German authors have based stories, poems, novels, plays, and operas on folkloric forms and themes. In English, the fairy tale suggests children’s literature; in German, it is a venerable narrative mode.

Perhaps this is why Lernet-Holenia also chose the novella form for his supernatural tale. 

Virginia Aabram

I’ve often found it difficult to sink into the Bible; I get easily distracted by footnotes and caught up in the chapter numbering. It’s hard to find Bibles that aren’t drowning in extra-textual features, especially Catholic ones. So when I saw a picture of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the New Testament on my friend’s social media, I didn’t immediately recognize it as Scripture since it was laid out as any other book: No columns, footnotes, or cramped text to interrupt the flow of the narrative. It’s illuminating to read Mark’s Gospel in this simplified format. Lattimore brings the immediacy of the language to the foreground. Mark is so fast-paced, he’s almost breathless in telling the Good News. One can imagine his hand cramping as he compiles the most important elements of Christ’s life as quickly as possible, jumping right into Jesus’s ministry almost without prelude. Without chapter breaks, the signs and wonders Christ performs lose their episodic feel and accumulate, inspiring awe: “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

Mark Bauerlein

With education heating up as an important political issue, it’s a good time to reread the great theorist of the twentieth century, John Dewey. A new edition of Democracy and Education is out, edited and with an introduction by Fordham professor Nicholas Tampio. Dewey’s wide learning and pragmatist conception of experience have made the book a foundation in the field ever since its appearance in 1916. Tampio says it “transformed twentieth-century philosophy and educational practice.” It is progressivism in its best expression, and Tampio’s notes and summaries provide reader-friendly context.

From May to August in 1525, between 70,000 and 100,000 people in Germany were killed, bringing to an end a popular uprising. Historian Lyndal Roper calls it a “giant trauma” at the center of the Reformation. Her five-hundred-page study is called Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. The participants took Reformation ideas, applied them to their actual lives, and became fighters, she says. They possessed a “revolutionary spirituality” that abhorred class exploitation as much as it did the power of Rome. The book is packed with footnotes and primary sources—Roper even tracked the paths of peasant armies on bicycle—but the prose is fluent and entertaining. It is a worthy study of a populist surge that may have a bearing on our own populist energies.

Finally, there is a fresh contribution to the long debate over (in very simple terms) whether the basis for just government is social contract (consent of the governed) or natural law (obedience to an objective order). The book is The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent, by Paul DeHart. It’s a dense study that ranges from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Hobbes to Rawls, while inserting topical matters such as voting and residency. DeHart’s thesis is that a conception of government as purely consensual—of human beings deciding all by themselves how they wish to organize—collapses into a contest of will and power. We need some authority beyond consent—a logical or metaphysical basis for our choices. Any scholars working in this area (Hadley Arkes is an endorser of the book) will want DeHart in their libraries.

Francis X. Maier 

Some years ago, a priest friend recommended the crime novels of C. J. Sansom. I’ve never had an interest in detective fiction, so I ignored him. Then I got the same advice from my wife. I still had no interest. But last summer I finally watched Shardlake, the Hulu/Disney+ adaptation of Sansom’s novel Dissolution. And I was hooked. I read all seven Shardlake novels in six weeks. Set in Tudor England just after Henry’s break with Rome, the series follows Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer with a keen mind, good heart, connections at the royal court—and a career-crippling disability (a humped back).

Sansom does a masterful job of capturing the political and religious tensions of the Reformation, and Shardlake is an immensely appealing character: a decent man in dangerous times who gets dragged, repeatedly and unwillingly, into the political entanglements and crimes of his day. A reforming ex-Catholic, Shardlake is a man who—with age and experience—has also lost confidence in the purity of the reform. Yet Sansom never lapses into a vulgar, modern demeaning of faith. Religion is a serious matter treated seriously, with an honest (if sometimes disputable) effort at historical accuracy throughout the series.

Sansom died last year before finishing his eighth novel in the Shardlake series. For anyone interested in great historical fiction, his death is a considerable loss.

Carter Skeel

With the early machinations of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reinvigorating public conversation about the nature of murky and unaccountable authority, I felt it was time to read some Kafka. Such subjects, when treated in novelistic form, risk succumbing to unartistic didacticism. Not so The Trial. 

While Kafka’s writing does the heavy lifting, I would be remiss not to credit my specific translation and copy of his novel—one of those flash-print-upon-purchase hatchet jobs peppered with typos and run-on sentences—for its role in augmenting the surreal and disorienting experience of reading The Trial. Like Josef K., I know not for what crime this serves as punishment.

Germán Saucedo

My friend and former professor, Hector Zagal, has written a few novels in the style of Agatha Christie set in Mexico City across different time periods. His latest book, El Vampiro del Virrey (The Vampire of the Viceroy), is a delightful mystery in which Sor Filotea del Niño Jesús, a brilliant but skeptical nun, attempts to uncover the truth behind a series of murders in viceregal Mexico. All the signs point to a murderous vampire. 

Although Zagal is an accomplished Aristotelian philosopher, I enjoy his novels most of all. The idea of a vampire in Mexico may seem silly given that most of the country is sunny, garlic-loving, and cheerful; the characters acknowledge as much. But Zagal makes it work. I hope that more of his work is soon translated into English and other languages. It deserves a wider audience.

Claire Giuntini

I’d always heard of Our Mutual Friend, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was about—thus I was completely unprepared for total enjoyment. People say Dickens used too many words, and that he did it for dough. There’s no denying that he used a lot of words, but I don’t think his intentions were merely pecuniary.

This is best displayed when Rev. Frank Milvey and his wife, two minor characters in a sprawling cast, are hastening to the bedside of a dying man. Time is of the essence, and the reader feels it acutely. But just as the couple is about to leave their home, they are delayed for a few minutes by an old woman, Mrs. Sprodgkin. You learn a lot about Mrs. Sprodgkin and her habit of delaying the Milveys. She gets about seven hundred words, and then is never mentioned again. 

Why did Dickens include such a wordy, useless diversion from the plot at an excruciatingly critical moment? He explains: “All of [this about Mrs. Sprodgkin] is here recorded to the honour of that good Christian pair, representatives of hundreds of other good Christian pairs as conscientious and as useful, who merge the smallness of their work in its greatness, and feel in no danger of losing dignity when they adapt themselves to incomprehensible humbugs.” 

After that summary, Rev. Milvey tells his traveling companions that he was “[d]etained at the last moment by one who had a claim upon me,” to which his wife remarks, “Oh yes, detained at the last moment. But as to the claim, Frank, I must say that I do think you are over-considerate sometimes, and allow that to be a little abused.” 

So it goes with Dickens. Perhaps he pays his very minor characters too much attention on occasion, but it’s because none of them are insignificant to him. It makes one think: How much more important to us should the minor characters in our own lives be!