What We’ve Been Reading—May

R. R. Reno

A friend recommended Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq. The French writer published a number of novels in the mid-twentieth century that depict characters in liminal situations, moments in which time is suspended, only to come to an end as anticipated events crash down upon them. The time outside of time in Balcony in the Forest is the months between the outset of World War II, when in September 1939 France declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland, and the Wehrmacht’s lightning strike through the Ardennes Forest in May 1940. The main character, French army lieutenant Grange, is given command of a concrete block house on a high, forested plateau in the Ardennes. Gracq evokes the magical atmosphere of silent trees dripping in the cold rain. Lt. Grange enters into a romance with a local woman, half-real, half-woodland faerie. He relishes the deep snows that cut off communication. The block house becomes a kind of paradise, a place where Grange and his small command simply live, free from life’s ordinary duties and demands. But with spring come the engines of war that roar in the distance. With extraordinary literary skill, Gracq conjures the impending doom that withholds its final blow—until the future can no longer be restrained from its inevitable invasion of the seemingly eternal present that the war without war has made possible. As a German tank closes upon the block house, Grange escapes and makes his way to the now abandoned village where his lover had lived. In the final paragraph of the novel, wounded, he has found her bed and lies upon it and sleeps. 

A wonderful novel, I read it as an allegory. We live under the illusion that we will never die. In doing so, we are not so foolish as to assert our immortality, but rather we are guided by an unconscious but powerful impulse to live without regard for our inevitable end. Gracq does not condemn that illusion. Balcony in the Forest suggests that he thinks it is to be relished. But he wishes us to know and see the forest idyll for what it is.

Virginia Aabram

Can one happily return to the world of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games? It seems tone-deaf to the novels’ messaging to say that I greedily jumped back into a story of child slaughter and dystopia, but that’s exactly what I did with Sunrise on the Reaping. Published in March, the book is the fifth installment in the series that became a worldwide sensation over a decade ago, and the second prequel after 2020’s Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

You probably know the premise: In a near-future, post-apocalyptic North America, the all-powerful Capitol forces twenty-four children from the outlying districts to fight to the death on live television in the annual “Hunger Games.” The series is a little like The Lord of the Rings in that they’re both foundational to their respective genres (fantasy and dystopian) but seldom understood by their imitators. The Hunger Games novels are nuanced, and each installment deepens the complexity. 

Sunrise on the Reaping provides the true story of Haymitch Abernathy, who mentors Katniss and Peeta through their Games in the first novel. Mentors are previous Hunger Games victors; Haymitch won his Games twenty-four years before the events of the first book. You think you know how—in Catching Fire, his Games are recounted in detail. But when the government has complete control over information, the truth is never what you think.

This latest installment is a gripping read and by far the most tragic. In no other Hunger Games book is the Capitol’s control more complete or more cruel. And yet, no other Hunger Games book is more haunted by the specters of another world. Building on themes introduced in Ballad, there are questions of the afterlife, musings on heaven, and the revelation of cultural rites that oppose the Capitol’s thorough (though ultimately self-worshiping) secularism.

I will not say that Sunrise is Christ-haunted, but it cracks a window to the “sweet old hereafter,” as heaven is described in the book. In a review of the first movie, Bishop Robert Barron connected Hunger Games to Rene Girard’s theory of scapegoating, the violent cycle that premised all human worship and myth, broken only by Christ’s sacrifice. With Sunrise, Collins adds an ingredient to her world that helps explain why the rebellion in the original trilogy succeeded: a sense of the transcendent. Just a touch, but enough for her protagonists to operate in a Christian moral framework. If she writes anything else in the Hunger Games world, I hope that she as an (alleged) Catholic will crystallize the conclusion of Girard’s scapegoat theory, summarized by Barron: “Either the Gospel, or we descend again into violence. Either the Gospel, or our own destruction.”

Mark Bauerlein

“Mirroring is part of our survival,” says Aimee Byrd in Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church. By “mirroring,” she means what we see, rightly or wrongly, when we gaze into another’s face. The process fails if either one wears a mask—that is, a countenance that conceals what is inside. For Byrd, the truth does not lie in seeing in others and finding in oneself all the human individuality we possess: The goal is to see Jesus in the faces of those around us, just as the disciples did before and after the Crucifixion. (Byrd has a powerful passage on Jesus turning his face toward Peter as Peter denied him after the arrest.) Indeed, the very destiny of our secular existence is “to be the face of Christ for one another.” The path is rocky, though—Byrd traces it through tales of her tumultuous life, confrontational passages from Scripture, disillusionment with different churches, and prose poetry of a confessional kind. It’s a writerly performance, idiosyncratic and ardent, promising readers an experience if they listen well: May you shed the veils the world sets upon you, so that we genuinely come face to face, and there surmise the invitation, the summons that follows from above.

Claire Giuntini

I wish I could say that I was amiably receptive when beginning Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, a fictionalized account of Helena of Constantinople’s quest to find the relics of the True Cross, but I anticipated being soured. As a friend once said, Waugh likes to crush your soul, and I don’t particularly enjoy having my soul crushed. Helena, his only historical novel, is full of Waugh’s characteristic hopelessness, but also didactic smugness. Waugh himself called the book didactic in the BBC interview with John Freeman appended to my copy. He also said it was his favorite work, though no one else’s. 

I despise didactic novels, and I despised the didactic elements in this novel, which I had suspected and resented from the start. It would be unfair of me, however, to say I disliked the book entirely. It was, of course, humorous, if often darkly. As a classics major, I enjoyed how he rendered ancient Roman culture and society understandable and relatable. His skill in fabulating aspects of Roman culture and effortlessly familiarizing them made it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction; a beneficial attribute for a novel, a hindering attribute for one interested in accuracy. 

Historicity, however, wasn’t Waugh’s goal. He said in the preface that he made up a great deal of the plot and details, mostly because he was writing a novel, which is an exercise of the imagination, but also because we don’t really know anything about Helena or the finding of the True Cross. His last introductory remark is that “[t]he story is just something to be read; in fact a legend.” Zoomers out there, what he means is, “this is fan fiction.” Don’t forget it’s “didactic” fan fiction. If that interests you, I recommend you read it. 

Isabel Hogben

The prettiest and most pretentious-seeming book I’ve ever owned is also the most practical. For the past month, I’ve been reading The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by the French Dominican priest A. G. Sertillanges.

Sertillanges’s prose is undeniably purple. A sample on the relationship between truth and goodness: “Climb up the Great Pyramid by those giant steps that so exactly represent the ascent of the true: if you go up by the northern edge, can you reach the summit without getting nearer and nearer to the southern edge?” 

But Sertillanges justifies his flamboyant style (you cannot finish a chapter without some extended metaphor on the “crystalline lens” or “eternal snows”) by his insistence on moral seriousness and practicality. By the “Great Pyramid,” a monument that leads to the same summit no matter how it is climbed, Sertillanges simply means this: The true and the good cannot be separated, and great scholars must be great men. And Sertillanges’s lyrical language does not just lead the reader to the capital-R Real (it is an intensely Catholic and Thomistic work) but instructs us in our daily, more mundane realities. He suggests walks and open air, advises that we ferociously protect a daily two hours of study, and warns against social “receptions” and “visits that give rise to fresh obligations” in the same pages where he waxes poetic about interior solitude and sacred vocation.

Finally, amid all of Sertillanges’s poetry and frank advice (“a thinker does not spend his time in the processes of digestion,” so eat plain food, he counsels) is a great lesson: The goal of the intellectual life is the same as the spiritual—to “lose oneself” in Truth. Sertillanges identifies the purpose of the intellect as selflessness: “Profound work consists in this: to let the truth sink into one, to be quietly submerged by it, to lose oneself in it, not to think that one is thinking nor that one exists, nor that anything in the world exists but truth itself.” Like the spiritual life, the intellectual life begins where we end.