As a reminder of how deep we are into this century, more than a few of the authors of these noted books — Denis Johnson, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Hilary Mantel — have already shuffled off this mortal coil. Roberto Bolaño, whose The Savage Detectives and 2666 placed at numbers 38 and 6, respectively, was already dead when both of those novels first appeared in English translation.
Some selections may cause despair over the health of literature itself: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, for instance, whose rapturous reception critic James Wood once memorably described as “further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
But then, everyone will have their objections, which is the point behind these lists as much as behind literary prizes like the Nobel, works by whose laureates from Toni Morrison to Han Kang have placed among the top 100. I note the omission of Saul Bellow and J. M. Coetzee, whose Ravelstein and Elizabeth Costello would’ve easily made my ballot were I luminary enough to vote. In any case, these standings are hardly likely to look much the same in a few decades’ time. Imagine a list of the best books of the twentieth century composed in 1924, when even The Great Gatsby hadn’t come out — or indeed, a list of the best books of the nineteenth century from 1824, thirteen years before the publication of the first novel by a certain promising young scribbler named Dickens.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1920, a few short years after Tolkien returned from World War I, he began an endearing family Christmas tradition that would continue for the next 23 years. After the birth of his firstborn son, John, Tolkien began to write his four children letters from Father Christmas. These North Pole tales chiefly concern Father Christmas’ struggles against the north’s bat-riding goblins, as well as the mischievous hijinks of his helper, North Polar Bear. An adept illustrator whose original drawings accompanied many of his writings (see his book cover designs for Lord of the Rings), Tolkien included with many of his Christmas letters a set of charming pictures.
The many letters were eventually collected in a beautiful volume called Letters From Father Christmas. Thanks to the good work of Letters of Note, we bring to you a sample letter from 1925:
Cliff House
Top of the World
Near the North Pole
Xmas 1925
My dear boys,
I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both. It all happened like this: one very windy day last November my hood blew off and went and stuck on the top of the North Pole. I told him not to, but the N.P.Bear climbed up to the thin top to get it down — and he did. The pole broke in the middle and fell on the roof of my house, and the N.P.Bear fell through the hole it made into the dining room with my hood over his nose, and all the snow fell off the roof into the house and melted and put out all the fires and ran down into the cellars where I was collecting this year’s presents, and the N.P.Bear’s leg got broken. He is well again now, but I was so cross with him that he says he won’t try to help me again. I expect his temper is hurt, and will be mended by next Christmas. I send you a picture of the accident, and of my new house on the cliffs above the N.P. (with beautiful cellars in the cliffs). If John can’t read my old shaky writing (1925 years old) he must get his father to. When is Michael going to learn to read, and write his own letters to me? Lots of love to you both and Christopher, whose name is rather like mine.
As Christmastime approaches, few novelists come to mind as readily as Charles Dickens. This owes mainly, of course, to A Christmas Carol, and even more so to its many adaptations, most of which draw inspiration from not just its text but also its illustrations. That 1843 novella was just the first of five books he wrote with the holiday as a theme, a series that also includes The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, andThe Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Each “included drawings he worked on with illustrators,” writes BBC News’ Tim Stokes, though “none of them displays quite the iconic merriment of his initial Christmas creation.”
“Anyone looking at the illustrations to the Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and expecting similar images to Mr Fezziwig’s Ball is going to be disappointed,” Stokes quotes independent scholar Dr. Michael John Goodman as saying.
Primarily concerned less with Christmas as a holiday and more “with the spirit of Christmas and its ideals of selflessness and forgiveness, as well as being a voice for the poor and the needy,” Dickens “had to create some very dark scenarios to give this message power and resonance, and these can be seen in the illustrations.”
Goodman’s name may sound familiar to dedicated Open Culture readers, since we’ve previously featured his online Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, whose digitized art collection has been growing ever since. It now contains over 2,100 illustrations, including not just A Christmas Carolandallitssuccessors, but all of Dickens’ books from his early collection of observational pieces Sketches by Boz to his final, incomplete novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And those are just the originals: every true Dickens enthusiast sooner or later gets into the differences between the waves of editions that have been published over the better part of two centuries.
The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery has entire sections dedicated to the posthumous “Household Edition,” which have even more art than the originals; the later “Library Edition,” from 1910, featuring the work of esteemed and prolific illustrator Harry Furniss; and even the 1912 “Pears Edition” of the Christmas books, put out by the eponymous soap company in celebration of the centenary of Dickens’ birth. But none of them quite matched the lavishness of that first Christmas Carol, on which Dickens had decided to go all out: as Goodman writes, “it would have eight illustrations, four of which would be in color, and it would have gilt edges and colored endpapers.” Alas, this extravagance “left Dickens with very little profit” — and with an unusually pragmatic but nevertheless unforgettable Christmas lesson about keeping costs down. Enter the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven(1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled before and after its publication to make a living from his writing.
Poe was one of the first American writers to do so without independent means. His work largely met with mixed reviews and he was fired from job after job, partly because of his drinking. After his death, however, Poe’s influence dominated emerging modernist movements like that of the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire (who called Poe his “twin soul”) and his symbolist disciple Stéphane Mallarmé.
Mallarmé would write of Poe, “His century appalled at never having heard / That in this voice triumphant death had sung its hymn.” To bring that hymn of death, the raven’s cry of “Nevermore,” to French readers, he made a translation of The Raven, Le Corbeau, in 1875 at age 33.
Poe also had a tremendous influence on the visual arts in France. Illustrating the text was none other than Édouard Manet, the painter credited with the genesis of impressionism. The resulting engravings, rendered in dark, heavy smudges, give us the poem’s unnamed, bereaved speaker as the young Mallarmé, unmistakable with his pushbroom mustache.
The book also illustrates the reciprocal relationship between Poe and French art and literature. Chris Semtner, curator of a Richmond, Virginia exhibit on this mutual influence, remarks that Poe “read Voltaire among other French authors”—such as Alexandre Dumas—“in college” and found them highly influential. Likewise, Poe left his mark not only on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Manet, but also Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse.
Even the least religious among us speak, at least on occasion, of the circles of hell. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking of where the concept originated: Dante’s Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. We each imagine the circles in our own way — usually filling them with sinners and punishments inspired by our own distastes — but some of Dante’s earlier readers did so with a seriousness and precision that may now seem extreme. “The first cosmographer of Dante’s universe was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti,” writes the Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, who “concluded that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep.” A young Galileo suggested that “the Inferno’s vaulted ceiling was supported by the same physical principles as Brunelleschi’s dome.”
In 1855, the aristocrat sculptor-politician-Dante scholar Michelangelo Caetani published his own precise artistic renderings of not just the Inferno, but also the Purgatorio and Paradiso, in La materia della Divina commedia di Dante Alighieri dichiarata in VI tavole, or The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates.
“The first plate offers an overview of Dante’s cosmography, leading from the lowest circle of the Inferno up through the nine heavenly spheres to Empyrean, the highest level of Paradise and the dwelling place of God,” writes Dukes. “The Inferno is visualized with a cutaway style,” its circles “like geological layers”; terraced like a wedding cake, “Purgatory is rendered at eye level, from the perspective of some lucky soul sailing by this island-mountain.”
In Paradise, “the Inferno and Purgatory are now small blips on the page, worlds left behind, encircled by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and the other heavenly spheres.” At the very top is “the candida rosa, an amphitheater structure reserved for the souls of heaven” where “Dante leaves behind Beatrice, his true love and guide, to come face-to-face with God and the Trinity.” You can examine these and other illustrations at the Public Domain Review or Cornell University Library’s digital collections, which adds that they come from “a second version of this work produced by Caetani using the then-novel technology of chromolithography” in 1872, “produced in a somewhat smaller format by the monks at Monte Cassino” — a crew who could surely be trusted to believe in the job.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print inTornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.
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114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weakened constitution could handle. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s final days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.
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One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)
Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it.
It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unremarked is his characterization of the Italian opposition movement’s unlikely coalitions. The Resistance included Communists who “exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property,” and leaders like Eco’s childhood hero Franchi, “so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a specific feature of an Italian resistance, one not observable across the number of nations that have resisted totalitarian governments. As for the seeming total lack of common interest between these parties, Eco simply says, “Who cares?… Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.”
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