The link below is to a book review of ‘Biblical Leadership: Theology for the Everyday Leader,’ edited by Benjamin Forrest and Chet Roden.
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Essential Jonathan Edwards,’ by Owen Strachan and Douglas A. Sweeney.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/review/edwards/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Some Trick,’ by Helen DeWitt.
For more visit:
https://longreads.com/2018/07/09/getting-tricked-by-helen-dewitt/
A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It is widely known how terrible things are in North Korea, but this account of someone who managed to get out of North Korea is a revelation. All of the horror that we may think is North Korea, it is nothing contrasted with the reality portrayed in this biographical account. It is heartbreaking, sad, horrific … and many, many, many more graphic adjectives of unpleasantness. Those poor people – how blessed we are to not suffer what they suffer day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade… so very sad.
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Gospel Comes with a House Key,’ by Rosaria Butterfield.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-the-gospel-comes-with-a-house-key-by-rosaria-butterfield/
Sarah Gleeson-White, University of Sydney
In our series, Guide to the classics, experts explain key works of literature.
To hear William Faulkner tell it, to write As I Lay Dying he “took this family and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer – flood and fire, that’s all”. That’s all. And yet his 1930 tour de force, which he began the day after Wall Street crashed on October 24 1929, remains one of the most perplexing novels of the modernist canon.
As I Lay Dying is the third novel Faulkner set in his imagined Yoknapatawpha County, which is based on north-eastern Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. To some extent, the novel’s raw story is indeed simple. It narrates the cursed 10-day journey of the poor white Bundren family from their hill-country farm to the county seat of Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother, in accordance with her wishes.
The novel is pervaded by the sweat, hunger and poverty that characterised the Depression-era South – and indeed much of the nation at this time. It also conjures the dialect, customs, characters and landscape of rural Mississippi as it deploys the region’s vernacular narrative forms such as the tall tale. We know, for instance, that Faulkner read and loved George Washington Harris’s 1867 collection of humorous tales concerning Sut Lovingood, that dialect-speaking “nat’ral born durn’d fool” whose influence we can trace forward to Anse, the Bundren patriarch.
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When Cash, the oldest of the five Bundren children, breaks his leg in the disastrous river crossing, Anse decides to pour concrete over the damaged leg to form a cast. “Why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest saw mill and stick your leg in the saw?” the local doctor asks Cash in stunned amazement. “That would have cured it. Then you could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole family.”
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of As I Lay Dying – and this is a feature that has caught the attention of so many readers and critics – is the frequent mismatch between character and speech. That is to say, the language – the diction, syntax and register – of the monologues is often incommensurate with the character who is doing the speaking or thinking.
Take, for example, eight-year-old Vardaman’s first monologue, in which he describes his brother Jewel’s horse:
It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components – snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve – legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none.
These are surely not the words and thoughts of an uneducated farm boy. What is Faulkner up to here? Early critics faulted him for this apparent rupture in voice and character. They simply could not abide that his poor whites did not sound like poor whites. Had he, they wondered, simply made a mistake?
I would suggest that it is this very problem of narrative, language and representation – how to represent the interior life of someone like Vardaman? – that Faulkner is interested in, not only in As I Lay Dying but in so much of his fiction.
As the scholar Dorothy Hale has argued, Faulkner endeavoured to find ways to represent the private self – that is, a self radically removed from a public self bound by convention and common sense. So, because in Faulkner’s universe the deeply private self looks and sounds radically different from the public self, Vardaman can then talk or think about “the dark … resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components” – this is how his deeply private self just might style it.
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The family finally reaches Jefferson towards the end of the novel, ostensibly to bury Addie but in reality – or additionally – to fulfil their respective desires: for Anse, the procurement of a new set of teeth; for Addie and Anse’s daughter, Dewey Dell, an abortion; for the youngest child, Vardaman, a toy train.
It is at this point that modernity irrupts into the story. There in Jefferson the family encounters advertising billboards, telephone lines, a courthouse clock, automobiles, a graphophone (precursor to the record player), a train, electric lights, drugstores and imported bananas. While the Bundrens negotiate their “little postage stamp of native soil”, as Faulkner once described Yoknapatawpha, “with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress”, the world they now experience is characterised by speed.
Indeed, there was nothing faster than electricity or the transactions that the telephone now enabled. Medical practitioners came to blame the accelerated motion of modern life for the reported increase in nervous illnesses, something that may well account for the breakdown of Darl Bundren – the second of the five children – at the end of the novel.
Darl, the wretched victim of modernity, is unable to seclude from the public domain his deepest, most private self, something signalled by the increased fragmentation of his monologues over the course of the novel. And so the family has him committed to an asylum in Jackson. Intriguingly, we read right near the end of the novel, “Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war.” Are Darl’s symptoms perhaps those of the returned WWI soldier, what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder?
Like Darl, the narrative also breaks down. Indeed, Darl’s trauma seems embodied in the very manner of the novel’s fractured, fragmented telling.
To begin with, As I Lay Dying is collaboratively narrated – by no less than 15 different narrators – across no less than 59 interior monologues. Events are also narrated out of order. Addie’s sole monologue, which appears about halfway through the narrative, actually occurs after her death, and so she would seem to speak from the afterlife. And Darl sometimes tells of events that have not yet occurred or that he cannot possibly know about – for example, his narration of Addie’s death.
What is particularly breathtaking about Faulkner’s novel is the way it fuses – somehow – regional forms (such as the tall tale) and at times really quite startling techniques we might more readily associate with an experimental modernism.
And it does so as it narrates the anguished emergence of a family of poor whites into a thoroughly modern nation, described most hauntingly through Darl’s fate:
Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.
Sarah Gleeson-White, Associate Professor in American Literature, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Rebecca Hausler, The University of Queensland and Tomoko Aoyama, The University of Queensland
In our series, Guide to the classics, experts explain key works of literature.
Celebrating its millennial anniversary in 2008, The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) is a masterpiece of Japanese literature. Completed in the early 11th century, Murasaki Shikibu’s elegant and enchanting prose spans 54 chapters, features some 400 characters and contains almost 800 separate poems. Many consider it to be the world’s first novel, predating most European texts by several hundred years.
Murasaki Shikibu transformed her experiences of courtier life into an intricate narrative fusing fiction, history and poetry. This blending of forms defies simple categorisation under any one genre, though the striking interior life of its characters has led many to term it a psychological novel with prose that feels distinctively modern.
Captivating readers across the English-speaking world from the early 20th century onwards, she has often been compared to canonical artists such as Marcel Proust or Jane Austen for her ability to convey the splendour in the ordinary to her audience.
Consider this passage where a remorseful Genji seeks redemption from his deceased father for his misdeeds against him:
Coming to the grave, Genji almost thought he could see his father before him. Power and position were nothing once a man was gone. He wept and silently told his story, but there came no answer, no judgment upon it. (Chapter 12)
This beautifully captures both the infinite tragedy of losing a loved one, and the abyss of guilt that such unresolved conflicts inevitably impart on us. These words are just as poignant today as they would have been 1,000 years ago.
The author served Empress Shōshi in the Imperial court of Heian (794-1185), situated in modern-day Kyoto. Courtiers were often referred to only by rank, and women were usually known only in relation to their husbands, sons or fathers. Due to such customs her actual name is unknown. Thus Murasaki Shikibu was likely gifted this moniker by her readers; “Murasaki” after the story’s heroine, and “Shikibu” referring to her father’s ministerial position within the court.
Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar of Chinese classic literature. Despite Chinese being a masculine genre of writing, he nourished his daughter’s keen interest and special talent for it, as well as the more traditionally Japanese feminine writing styles of waka, essays, diary and letters (kana).
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Why you should read China’s vast, 18th century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber
The Tale of Genji weaves a vivid depiction of aristocratic life in Heian Japan, which centres on the amorous exploits and political gameplay of the nobility. The titular “Shining” Genji is devastatingly handsome, with smooth-as-silk charisma, and a litany of musical, literary and academic skills that “to recount all his virtues would, I fear, give rise to a suspicion that I distort the truth” (Chapter 1).
Throughout the tale, however, he is revealed as an enigmatic but ultimately flawed hero. Rising to the rank of Honorary Retired Emperor (despite never actually reigning), the story of Genji’s success is a multigenerational saga filled with passion, deceit, jealousy, great rivalries and also great intimacies.
Potential readers should be forewarned, however, that many of Genji’s amorous conquests are likely to raise an eyebrow with contemporary audiences. Genji kidnaps and grooms a ten-year-old child bride, before fathering a secret love-child with his stepmother, all the while insistently pursuing a plethora of women in various extramarital affairs.
In a post-#metoo world, it is perhaps difficult to see Genji’s actions as anything but deplorable; however, by Heian standards Genji is lauded as a venerable hero. Controversial themes, including rape, have been condemned by contemporary readings. But the text allows and even encourages many different readings (for example in feminist and parodic fashions), presenting a challenge for contemporary readers and translators alike.
The original Genji text in Japanese poses a number of issues for modern-day readers. Characters were rarely assigned proper names, with designations implied by way of their titles, honorific language, or even the verb form used. The writing also relies heavily on the reader’s pre-existing understanding of courtier life, poetry and history, which is often beyond the contemporary recreational reader.
The first complete English translation was published between 1925 and 1933 by esteemed orientalist scholar and translator Arthur Waley (who translated many other Chinese and Japanese texts such as Monkey and The Pillow Book). Waley’s translation prompted strong reactions from Japanese authors such as Akiko Yosano and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Both subsequently completed multiple translations of the work into contemporary Japanese (Yosano’s last translation was in 1939, with Tanazaki’s editions spanning 1939-1965).
There have been a number of recent translations in English, modern Japanese and several other European and Asian languages. Royall Tyler’s 2003 translation provides substantial footnotes, endnotes, illustrations and maps, which offer thorough explanations of the nuances of the text. This makes it suitable for novices as well as the academic reader.
The attention The Tale of Genji has received from translators in recent years speaks not only to the challenges in its translation but also to the beauty and importance of the work itself.
Read more:
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The Tale of Genji is steeped in exquisite images of nature and heavily laden with tanka-style poetry. Descriptions of autumn leaves, the wailing of insects, or the subtle light of the moon work to heighten the complex and nuanced emotions of Murasaki Shikibu’s elegant characters as they traverse the difficult landscape of love, sex and the politics of court life. Such poetic language played a very important role in the communications and rituals of Heian courtier society.
The term mono no aware is often used when discussing The Tale of Genji. This somewhat untranslatable phrase portrays the beautiful yet tragic fleetingness of life. It has deep connections to Buddhist philosophies, emphasising the impermanence of things.
The Japanese celebration of the falling of the cherry blossoms is a good example of mono no aware. Murasaki’s poignant references to the natural world saturate the text and help us reflect on the illusory and sometimes unexplainable nature of life, love and loss.
As a counterbalance to such exquisite imagery, Genji also explores dark and divisive elements. Apart from familial sex, polygyny and sexualisation of children, it includes several key scenes of women experiencing spirit possession or mono no ke. These scenes depict women acting in strange and unpredictable fashions, and suggest that possession actually caused women to become ill and die.
These examples are just a taste of the vast subject matter and textual richness that The Tale of Genji offers readers. Adaptations, parodies and sequels have seen the tale reimagined into film, noh theatre, opera, manga and art. Genji is still very much alive.
Rebecca Hausler, PHD Candidate and Researcher in Japanese Studies, School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland and Tomoko Aoyama, Associate Professor of Japanese, The University of Queensland
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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