Light
in August by William Faulkner
I haven’t really read Faulkner since my college days,
but I recall this one as being a favorite, and I’d intended to reread it since
way back when Vintage reissued the Cormac McCarthy catalog (which I devoured)
in softcover prior to publication of his breakthrough “Border Trilogy”. For the past 25 years or so, we can safely
call McCarthy mainstream, but back in the days of Child of God and Blood
Meridian, the influence most cited for McCarthy was Faulkner.
As a southern gothic masterpiece, there is enough
cruelty, menace, and just plain creepiness in Light in August to justify the connection with early
McCarthy. Joe Christmas, who dominates
the novel, is one of the most remarkably drawn characters in American fiction,
a soul doomed from the start to a life of pain and darkness. As it builds,
the narrative pulls you along remarkably well, and it stays with you. I’d forgotten many of the details over the
years, so a second read was definitely rewarding.
Bruges-la-Morte
by Georges Rodenbach
Any reader with an interest in the
degenerate/symbolist literature of the fin-de-siecle
must hang their head in shame if they are not acquainted with this story of
degeneration and obsession. Hugues
Viane, a widower, has made a cult of his young, dead, wife. He obsesses over her relics for hours in the
rooms he has dedicated to her in his gloomy house before he passes into the
twilight of the Bruges night. He has
chosen this Belgian town for its pallor of death and stagnation, a congenial
atmosphere in which to pass the remainder of his mournful, empty life.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before he begins
to notice a phantasm of his wife working her way through the streets. She is a doppelganger to whom his obsession
transfers: he establishes her in a cozy
apartment in which he can spend the days and nights slobbering and fawning over
her, pawing her long blond tresses, the very image of those which he has
established in a glass reliquary in the shrine room of his own house. She soon tires of this creepy attention, and,
with loathing, begins to bleed him dry.
I won’t reveal any more, except to smack my lips at
the appropriately lurid denouement. Keep
the Dedalus edition on your shelf, as it’s worth a great deal of decadent
street cred. And reread it occasionally
for the delightful melodrama of it.
The
Bhagavad Gita
Finally, I’ve probably mentioned the impact the Bhagavad Gita had on my young mind - and
the rich worlds it opened - when I found
the Penguin edition, translated by Juan Mascaro, many years ago at a Las Cruces,
New Mexico library sale. Mascaro was
well versed in the Spanish mystics, and he brought that sensibility to his
translation of this text (as well as to Penguin’s edition of the Dhammapada). While there was much lyricism and beauty in
his rendering, I became suspicious as I got older of just how faithful his
translations were. In his introduction to the Gita, Mascaro aims for universalism, approaching the text in light
of what Huxley used to call the Perennial Philosophy.
The Gita is
a philosophical/religious discourse forming a portion of the much larger epic,
the Mahabharata. In 2008, Penguin
finally released a new translation by Laurie L. Patton, and while the
unfamiliar format is at first jarring, the translation appears to be much more
faithful to the text, fixing the translation firmly in context without
Mascaro’s universalism, and providing a useful introduction to the work.
As I’ve been reading Patton’s translation, it has
begun to grow on me, and I’m not sure I’d go back to Mascaro’s edition for any
reason other than sweet nostalgia.
