Two Book Reports and a Miracle

I.

Atop the table at my bedside lies a copy of Henry VIII, by the inestimable Irish novelist and critic Francis Hackett. I came by this book by way of my sister, who buried me under a tidal wave of books about Henry and Catherine and Anne Boleyn and the rest of the gang upon hearing that I’d become enraptured by the long story of England. That’s a whole thing, but I’m not doing that subject today; just wanted to say that Hackett writes beautiful prose that’s nearly as dense in imagery as any poem. You can pick a passage almost at random and be guaranteed a sentence like this one describing the end of one Lord Buckingham, victim of Henry’s political machinations in the spring of 1521:

“Buckingham knew as little of the surrounding climate as one of those French vegetables which grow under a glass bell. But Henry was the surrounding climate: at this instant loaded and mad with electricity, only needing Buckingham to proffer one sharp point to splinter and destroy him. With the suddenness of a nature long surcharged, Henry summoned Buckingham, who cantered up to London without apprehension. He could only sit down unexpectedly, and ask for a cup of wine, when he was ordered to the Tower to await trial. The witnesses were already in the Tower, and men with heavy jaws and thick hands were pressing the juice of evidence out of them, drop by drop.”

I mean, come on. The images shimmer and change, but the smell of produce drifts throughout, from the glass bell in the first sentence to the cup of wine in the penultimate one, culminating in a grim visual metaphor to describe the mechanism of justice in the Tudor Age.¹ Every paragraph of Hackett’s is like a little sonnet, with a lengthy, wending setup leading to provinces as-yet unknown before stopping you short with a fist to the nose:

… a tremor ran through every nation, spitting its electricity in each casual contact, shooting its signals, creating its marvelous illusion of the inevitable, and drawing to its bloodbath every land from Stockholm to Peru where a handful of Spaniards, penning the helpless into their sheepfold and undaunted by the example of Selim, would kill, until their arms would fall, a ten thousand of the mild, the bleating, the unbelieving innocent, to whom they were about to introduce the Jesus of Love.

It’s a lot. It’s written in small batches, however—a page or two each, separated by Roman numerals. Each one is like an expensive chocolate, and as long as you only eat one or two each night before bed you won’t get pimples.

II.

Atop the table at my bedside stands an orchid in a white ceramic pot perforated with oval holes an inch long in the shape of watermelon seeds. Every time I put water in this pot it runs out of the holes and all over the table, dampening the covers of Francis Hackett’s magisterial Henry VIII and a Dover Dual Language edition of Deutsche Geschichten von Verbrechern und Bösem vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (German Stories of Crime and Evil from the 18th Century to the Present). The plant appears healthy, with dark green leaves free of wound, as well as a couple of prominent shoots that look like they could produce flowers one day soon. It certainly appears healthier than the two orchids downstairs on my desk, lazy little floppy-leaved wastrels, mini versions of the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, begging for meat, all slumped over the sides of their pots, incapable of unfurling so much as a brown twig.

And yet, they’re the ones that get the water.

Upstairs Orchid just sits and grows actively, robustly in her heap of wood bark chips, absorbing moisture from the air I suppose. Or maybe she buys it from one of the cats while I’m not here. I can just picture her shotgunning tiny cans of sparkling water.

III.

Atop the table at my bedside lies a Dover Dual Language edition of Deutsche Geschichten von Verbrechern und Bösem vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (German Stories of Crime and Evil from the 18th Century to the Present). This is one of those books for language learners, with the translation alongside the text. One thing you discover as soon as you start to be able to read actual prose in your target language, is that different styles are almost like different dialects; you kinda have to learn each one. Newspapers are not very adventurous in the rhythm of the language or the vocabulary, but they have qualities of their own which prevent the language from being exported, say, to conversation. Reddit posts, on the other hand, are almost entirely conversational, and require a deep fund of slang and casual syntax, not to mention a healthy appreciation of sarcasm and an ability to decode wordplay in a language that barely makes sense in the lab.

I bought this book in Columbus, Ohio, a fact which in itself is highly unusual because the only time I ever think about Columbus is, well, never. And yet, there I was, in what is admittedly a very cool bookshop—The Book Loft—in the Germantown neighborhood of Columbus. I didn’t plan any of that, mind; I didn’t invent Columbus, and if I had I wouldn’t have put it in the middle of Ohio.

This bookshop, the Book Loft, is like the warren of some book-hoarding animal. Consisting of maybe a dozen tiny rooms connected by winding, narrow hallways often themselves lined with books, this place which damn well should be called the Book Burrow, is rather a lot of fun to simply walk through. The books are just gravy.

Now, I swear to Gott I didn’t choose to buy German books at this store simply because we were in Germantown. They just a had a lot of them, so I felt compelled to relieve them of a couple—the aforementioned Geschichten, on the grounds that crime and evil are motivating topics for a struggling reader, and a volume of Franz Kafka stories.

I also didn’t make shopkeeper greet me in German. He just saw the books. I’m an addict; I’m not a monster.

Anyway, I’ve taken a few stabs at Geschichten but 18th century German resists reading as much as any German text, but while wearing a powdered wig. The past is a foreign land, they say, and time or space: pick one, I should have said to myself. Well, after struggling through August Meißner and Friedrich Schiller I decided to fast forward to Iris Klockmann, whose 2015 Der Kuss des Todes tells the story of an affair between a married man and a trans woman in Venice in 1640. It’s a strikingly beautiful piece of writing in a language supposedly incapable of anything other than bills of lading and orders to fire at will.

Da stehst du vor mir, mit einem Ausdruck in den dunklen Augen, den ich nicht zu deuten vermag. Über deinem Gesicht liegen Schatten, und ich kann dem Drang, dich zu berühren, kaum widerstehen.

There you stand before me, with an expression in your dark eyes, that I cannot interpret. Across your face lies a shadow, and I can hardly resist the urge to touch you.

Is something lost in translation? Yes, something definitely is; probably far more than I am sensitive to. Does this passage have the lyricism of Italian? Of course not. But there’s a moody music in a phrase like “in den dunklen Augen.” It takes a little effort perhaps to hear it, but it’s rewarding when you finally do. The specificity of German is easy enough to understand, but the range of expression in the hands of a good writer is far greater than one would expect from a language with a nominally small vocabulary. It’s wonderful to get to see it even from my distant, rickety perch. If I haven’t done so lately I encourage you all to learn a language. I can’t think of a better way to spend time on this Earth, and there are so many to learn. Free gifts, just lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up.

1. Something to bear in mind next time you get jury duty.