A new unabridged translation of Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross is Tolstoyan in its breadth as it surveys a wide range of German society in the later pre-war years, through the framework of a leftist activist's desperate effort to avoid capture after his escape from a concentration camp.
The theme of someone alone in a great city reminds me of my youthful fascination with Knut Hamsum's Hunger whose hero struggles for survival in the face of dire poverty.
Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a very different portrait of a totalitarian society, Russia during the Great Terror, as seen largely through portraits of members of the ruling class and its security apparatus, including Stalin who makes several brief appearances.
Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo mixes the picaresque and the sordid, the near-comic with strains of desperation, as it follows a small group of men and women through adventures in high and low Nigerian settings.
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (recommended in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore) presents his early life, experiences during and after the Mexican War, and finally his increasing involvement and leadership during the Civil War. It is striking that his humanity comes through fully despite his oversight of the military slaughter of thousands of Confederate soldiers. The deliberate absence of maps in the version that I read, The Complete Annotated Edition, reminded me of various medieval works with their huge casts of characters, genealogies, and place names; while still often remaining fascinating reading.
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev is a picture of a remote society that seems almost like a parody of stereotypes of Russians. Even so, the conflicts that it illuminates are drawn powerfully enough that it usually remains compelling.
After being unable to get very far at all into Tristram Shandy, I listened to the whole thing on as an audio book during some very long automobile trips. And what a wonderful trip it was! And while some of author Laurence Sterne's setups fall flat, so many of them make it aloft that they keep this work mostly quite entertaining.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, includes much wonderful repartee and intimate reflections once it gets past the earlier portion that Boswell did not himself witness.
T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom becomes an adventure story at the highest pitch, as he describes his participation in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia gives the context and consequences of Lawrence's efforts. Lawrence's own later reporting of anonymous military life in The Mint is a frank look at the simple brutalities of barracks and parade ground.
Henry Green's Caught was recently republished in an unabridged edition that includes the wartime adultery that the original publisher, Leonard Woolf, omitted as harmful to the then ongoing war effort. The novel gains cohesion and thus more effect by these inclusions.
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri gives a vivid picture of Indian village life during the colonial period as well as the author's developing intellectual maturity after childhood.
Willa Cather's short novel A Lost Lady briefly illuminates the changes that come to a Midwestern town and some of the most eminent people in it in the late nineteenth century.
For the fancier of classical music, the extended dialogues between the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami in Absolutely on Music are quite stimulating, as they cover various personalities, recordings, and musical organizations. Charles Rosen's Arnold Schoenberg clarifies what might seem like a mechanical production of notes, but in fact was conceived as expressionistically as the visual arts of Schoenberg's friend Kandinsky.
For jazz fans, especially if they can read his transcriptions, Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz and The Swing Era are marvelous guides to a music that now seems inevitable but was continually evolving during the times under discussion.
Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is an extended series of anecdotes in verse that describe injuries and injustices that would end in court; they are derived from court cases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cumulative effect is somehow epic. His Holocaust, similarly structured, is more difficult reading.
I listened to the entire series of Phryne Fisher mysteries by Kerry Greenwood while commuting to and from my employment. The author infuses these lively books with humanism, feminism, left politics and sexual liberation while exploring unusual areas of Australian society.
For anyone birdwatching in the Great Basin, Fred A. Ryser, Jr.'s Birds of the Great Basin is an invaluable companion, replete with anecdote as well as the usual descriptive notes.
Jeremy Bernstein's Einstein provides a brief, well-written and comprehensible overview of Albert Einstein's life and contributions.
Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a beautifully written travelogue concerning Yugoslavia in the late 1930's. In addition to the descriptions of place, people and history, West tosses off the occasional profound reflection that gives further lift to this very lengthy performance. I think of it as resembling an extraordinary lengthy New Yorker article, perfectly paced, perfectly written.
The Russian writer Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov is a frequently humorous treatment of the title character, who cannot bring himself to do anything -- even getting out of bed is too much.
