Good News: The End is Nigh

*** I watched the CNN/YouTube Democratic Party presidential candidates debate the other week, and then I followed some of the post-debate coverage of the event, and I even tried to read a Rex Murphy column about it in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Having invoked the Canadian national icon, O' Murphy of Newfoundland, complete with his winning authentic accent, I have to admit, as a big fat aside, that I've never been able to read a Rex Murphy column or listen to a Rex Murphy TV commentary all the... 
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Heartless in Gaza

* * * A leftist friend phoned me one evening last week. "Is the world going to end?" she wanted to know. Fortunately, it's possible to know what's on the mind of your friends without having to ask for all the details. Like me, she'd seen the Internet reports and pictures of the Hamas and Fatah factions in Gaza shooting it out. What she wanted to know was, Would the Palestinian civil war and deadly split between Hamas in Gaza, and Fatah in the West Bank likely lead to a regional... 
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Some Enchanted Evening… in Aleppo?

*** John Borneman, Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (Princeton, 231 p., 2007) Princeton anthropologist John Borneman says at the outset of his account of a several month sojourn in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, “I suppose I went to Syria for enchantment, reenchantment or some kind of magic unavailable to me in America.” He cheerfully confesses to following in the footsteps of such “Orientalists” as Flaubert, Burton, von Humboldt and T.E. Lawrence. After... 
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Letter from Europe: Ooh-la-la Land

  ***   BERLIN—No, that big whooshing sound you may have heard a couple of weeks ago coming from the direction of France was not the collapse of a giant souffle. Rather, it was a collective national sigh of relief released by the record turn-out (some 85 per cent) of French voters after the April 22, 2007 first round of the French presidential election. The French electorate sighed with relief because it managed to avoid the embarrassing debacle that occurred five years ago in the last... 
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Letter from Europe: Knocking on Heaven’s Door

*** BERLIN—Easter is still a big deal in Europe. Unlike the mere long weekend observed in North America, in Germany the Easter holiday that falls during the first weeks of April stretches into a two-week early spring sabbattical that runs to mid-month: the schools close; those who are able to, get out of town for a few days; and the work pace agreeably slows, especially when, as this year, the temperatures reach the 20s. If you’re of a mind to indulge in an appropriately theological long weekend,... 
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Letter from Europe: Bomb Scare

*** BERLIN—As a child of the Nuclear Age, I arrive replete with memories of crawling under our wooden school desks during futile A-Bomb fire drills, and flipping through the pages of Popular Mechanics magazine to gaze at do-it-yourself blueprints for equally futile A-Bomb shelters. I was “just a gleam” in my father’s eye—that’s a phrase he liked to use while recounting the legend of my impending birth in Chicago—when the scientists in a lab under Alonzo Stagg Field at the University of... 
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Reading, Writing, Shelving

. Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (Knopf Canada, 2006) John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel (St. Martin’s, 2006) Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins, 2006) Here are three recent books about the literary basics: writing, reading, and shelving. But before saying a word about them, let me dispense with the verdict: John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter... 
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The Gods That Failed

1. I’m hardly the first one to have spotted the new intellectual mini-trend advocating atheism. It’s inspired a profusion of books, reviews, newspaper columns, blog comments, and websites discussing and debating the rejection of theism. More important, increasing numbers of scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals, perhaps disturbed by the consequences of Christian and Islamic fundamentalist religious beliefs in the turbulent first decade of the new millennium (the “noughty 2000s,”... 
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Forgotten Scenes

It’s funny the way books fall into our hands. I was lazily reading an issue of the Times Literary Supplement one afternoon last summer when I ran into a longish article about a mid-20th century British novelist I’d never heard of named William Cooper. The thing that slowed me enough to read the opening paragraphs of D.J. Taylor’s biographical “reappraisal” of Cooper (”Behind the Scenes,” TLS, June 9, 2006) was an arresting photograph of the long-neglected, nearly-forgotten... 
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Apples and Oranges

Is it possible to compare literary apples and oranges? That is, can we meaningfully measure a novel against a work of non-fiction, a volume of poetry, a screenplay? I think so. Recently, at the readers’ group that I’m a member of, we were talking about John Banville’s The Sea (Knopf, 2005), winner of last year’s Booker Prize, which we had just read. We gave it mixed reviews, which means that we didn’t much like it, despite the book’s prestigious honours, the undeniable pleasures of Banville’s... 
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