A Year in Reading: Edwin Frank

3 days ago 1

The book that held my attention through most of the year, that I went back to again and again—perforce, it is a very long book—was Volume 1 of Capital, the only volume of his magnum opus that Karl Marx saw into print. It is a long book and an essentially unclassifiable book: a study in political economy; a documentary account of the lives of workers, the workings of industry, and the secreted wealth of the bourgeoisie; a work of history; a polemic; a parody of philosophy and a contribution to philosophy; crenellated castle, gargoyled cathedral, Piranesian prison, hell-scape out of Brueghel; an open tap spewing beer, a factory gushing fire. In the aftermath of finishing a book of my own about the novel in the twentieth century, Capital especially fascinated me as an attempt to imagine what it would be to see its own time whole, and the recognition embedded in its pages that that can only come from imagining a time beyond, in which the inevitabilities of the moment, the given shape of reality, are revealed as at the same time an apparition, sheer contingency. The book seemed, in my perspective, to span both the novels of the nineteenth century and those of the last century, and it is certainly true that the kind of book it is, what it says about what a book can be and all that has to enter between its covers to constitute a true book in our times—how in other words it reshapes our idea of a book—is as interesting as the theories it propounds. Trying to imagine the world humanity has made—the only world we will ever have–from ground up whole, it opens a vertiginous prospect, which it surveys with determination and desperation and courage that is scary—breathtaking—in its own right. Where in the avalanche of the moment does one stake a claim and take a stand?

Michael Longley‘s latest slim collection of poems, The Slain Birds, is as serious, precise, felt, and beautiful as the books that have gone before. Peter Gizzi‘s Fierce Elegy is wiry and quickfingered, delicate, brawny and brooding—like the great guitar solos of classic rock and roll. Poetry is where lost causes go to live. May I say, if not disinterestedly, that Inverno, Cynthia Zarin‘s first novel, is also electric? The book I simply enjoyed most is a relatively little known novel by Trollope, Is He Popenjoy? An inheritance and a title are at issue, and throughout Trollope is in his best satirical and sympathetic vein. Humanity, you are left to hope, may actually exist.