The Moon and the Bonfires
by Cesare Pavese
(NYRB Classics)
$12.95
On August 27, 1950, in a dingy hotel room in Turin, the suicide-obsessed Italian writer Cesare Pavese swallowed 12 packets of sleeping pills and shuffled off this mortal coil for good, having just published The Moon and the Bonfires–a book critics would later laud as Pavese’s magnum opus.
None of this acclaim mattered one whit to Pavese, however, who once declared that “no one ever lacks a good reason for suicide”–a claim eerily borne out by Pavese’s own life. Twenty years earlier, Pavese (who had recently lost his mother, in addition to his father’s death several years earlier) had fallen in love with a teacher of mathematics in his home village of Santo Stefano Belbo–a woman with whom he was so entranced that he agreed to accept politically sensitive letters for her, letters promptly intercepted by Mussolini’s police. Pavese was tried and sent into exile in southern Italy; meanwhile, his beautiful math teacher married another man.
Although Pavese was eventually allowed to return to his home, the life he returned to bore little resemblance to the one he had left; without his beloved, Pavese was cast adrift. It’s a life echoed by the narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, who returns to his native village after traveling to America to make his fortune, only to find that the world he knows has been eradicated by years of war and political unrest.
Nothing about Pavese’s writing is overstated: His prose is elegant and painfully spare, detailing desolate hills and empty vineyards with the tender familiarity of those who have loved and lost. The Moon and the Bonfires is, despite Pavese’s dire end, a celebration of the staying powers of land, love, and life itself, ending in flames from which, phoenixlike, all may rise. KATE PREUSSER
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
(Pantheon) $25.95
“Most of my writing tends to be fantasy of a religious, drifting nature, ill-suited for worldly things or large publications,” Philip K. Dick wrote in a note accompanying his first short story submission. “All I can say to defend it is that people who read it are disturbed, and go off brooding, very puzzled and unhappy.” Dick began as a writer for the sci-fi pulps, churning out quickie entertainments that got rewritten by hack editors. Irked, he switched to quickie paperbacks instead, where he could put in all the ersatz symbolism and shaggy narratives we love him for. He never looked back, which is why more than half the stories in this solidly representative chronological collection were penned by 1954. Even his later short stories are more pointed than the novels: not a virtue in an author who thrived on entropy and echo.
But Dick’s formulaic short forms do highlight his place as a classic American gothic horror writer, merging the popular and literary in the ever-so-tellingly debased tradition of our first professional fiction scribbler, Charles Brockden Brown, then Edgar Allan Poe, and so on down to The Twilight Zone and Stephen King. Sure, Dick was haunted by questions of identity: What is human, what is Memorex, what is cosmic, and why can’t I seem to tell the difference? But one of those questions of identity was what is literature, what is schlock, why shouldn’t I make that guy’s hand fall off so he realizes he’s a robot, or throw in a time-travel loop for effect? Dick was always phoning it in a little bit–going for the gross-out, as Big Steve likes to put it. Maybe that’s part of how, posthumously, he manages to escape the box of utter respectability, just as in life he fought to escape the confines of the pulps. ERIC WEISBARD
The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s
by Dominique Lecourt
(Verso) $27
On this side of the Atlantic it was never a question as to whether Foucault and company would be allowed to get away with it. Man’s name would not be erased from the sand; we would not stop telling aggrandizing narratives about ourselves; uncoded flows would not be allowed to circulate freely; the sputtering of the text would not drown out its cogency. And Marxism, especially, would not be let out of the bag of its humiliating defeat, first under Stalin and subsequently under Reaganomics.
It was not always thus, at least in France. By the mid-1970s, the trio of Foucault, Deleuze, and Althusser achieved a kind of eminence that rivaled Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In their heydays, structuralism and poststructuralism fitted well with Marxist theorizing. Althusser had been able to redefine the Marxist topology of base and superstructure with categories borrowed from Lacan. Foucault had shown how bodies, not just politically conscious agents, are subjected to the effects of power. Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1972) and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) ushered in the age of bio-power. In 1981, the election of François Mitterrand created a euphoria that the Left had not experienced since 1968.
But the Left’s hope for an unblockage in political and intellectual life was to end badly. Dominique Lecourt’s book Mediocracy is the story of the hijacking of the structuralist/poststructuralist achievement by a group of repentant Marxists known as les Nouveaux Philosophes. Their prominence in French intellectual life is courtesy of the news media, hence the pun in the book’s title. The press found their accommodation to global corporate order congenial; that much is perfectly translatable in North American! The names of the New Philosophers–André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Luc Ferry–are less familiar than the ones they displaced, perhaps because TV and periodicals are their preferred venues. And perhaps because their message doesn’t need importing.
Barring the door to any form of state-sponsored evil is one hallmark of the New Philosophers. The domestic cultivation of piety and love is another. These warm-hearted penitents have made uplifting reading for the French public for 20 years. But by occupying the space where critical thinking should take place, they have done immeasurable damage to French philosophy, which prior to the 1980s had been so instrumental in shedding light into the dark world of corporate manipulations. JAMES LATTEIER
I, Me, Mine
by George Harrison
(Chronicle Books)
$24.95
In the quest for complete Beatles immersion, George Harrison’s autobiography I, Me, Mine is a minor grail. Originally published in 1980, in a fancy leatherbound edition that cost $300, the book is one of the more obscure artifacts of Beatles arcana, but essential because it’s part of the relatively tiny library of primary source material. Alongside John Lennon’s nonsense classics, Paul McCartney’s authorized biography, and the party line-ish (but perfect, perfect) Anthology book, I, Me, Mine is all we have in the way of first-hand prose from the four-headed Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll. Harrison’s death–a year ago already–lends the new edition a note of sanctity and pride of place on a bookshelf stuffed to bursting with Beatleography.
More importantly, I, Me, Mine offers a rare audience with the Beatle who always revealed the least. George’s silence came first from shyness, but was nurtured by a mounting contempt for the trappings of the band and its phenomenon. Unlike his bandmates, however, Harrison didn’t act out his neuroses publicly or pretend that everything was fine. He simply receded, while his guitar gently wept. What the book confirms, however, is the wicked sarcasm that lurked behind the plaintive Zen of the author’s celebrity, as Harrison runs down a deftly expurgated version of the impossible-to-imagine-but-impossible-to-stop-imagining life as a Beatle, before during, and after.
For all that, though, the memoir portion is slim. But as with everything related to the Beatles, you take all you can, and eat all you take. An 80-page series of monologues pieced together by the tireless Derek Taylor (who narrates Harrison’s charming ramble through memory), the recollections are frank, but not candid. The gentle language is laced with withering asides at the expense of the ego. The bulk of the book consists of reprinted lyrics for 80 songs, alongside brief introductions for each.
In the end, I, Me, Mine is not revelatory, just a visit, just a lot of little stories, told in a familiar voice. And you know the stories. And you always, always want to hear them again. SEAN NELSON