Richard Cohen. - book review

Richard Cohen is a freelance book editor and writer.
His book on the history of swordplay will be published by Random
House in 2002.

I asked the priest in front of me in the bank line what book he'd recommend from his reading this year. His answer surprised me and sent me off to read The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos C. Markides (Doubleday, $22.95, 256 pp.). The book is a personal journey to the monasteries high in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus and is a mixture of travelogue, history, reflections, and conversations--many with Father Maximos, one of the monks from Mount Athos, the subject of a previous study by Markides, Riding with the Lion. Maximos makes an engaging spiritual Dr. Johnson, a source of humor as well as spiritual insight. At one juncture in their travels the author is on the point of learning the real nature of prayer, and pushes his mentor for an answer. Maximos pauses. "It's getting late," he says, and the next minute is off home, back down the mountain. Markides gets his insight, but much later, when his wily companion decides the time is right. This is a book I would normally have left untouched, but it is thoroughly engaging, always instructive, and not a little wise.

Less beguiling but just as thought-provoking (and maybe ideal reading when waiting one's turn at the bank) is The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (Scribner, $28, 569 pp.). This National Book Award winner encompasses the literary and scientific history of the disease, as well as charting the author's own battles, in sometimes greater detail than one needs, but always in an engrossing way. "I have never written on any subject about which so many people have so much to say," says Solomon, a regular New Yorker contributor, and he includes many personal stories besides his own. Acedia, lethargy of spirit, was once described by Dorothy Sayers as the worst of all sins, because it was the negation of all things. "The opposite of depression," writes Solomon, "is not happiness but vitality." Considering its subject, a remarkably addictive and invigorating history.

When lying in bed in the mornings, not depressed but happily lazy and only half awake, I used to daydream about famous moments in history, and insert myself into them--having a drink in a Parisian cafe as my friends stormed the Bastille, or plotting my last hours in the Alamo, or my days as page to Henry VIII. This may be one reason why I was delighted finally to catch up with Ann Wroe's wonderful study Pontius Pilate (Modern Library, $14.95, 412 pp.), first published in 1999. The book is not just a recreation of Pilate but a history of how we have seen him over two thousand years. "That strange amalgam of human struggling and human failing," as Wroe calls him, Pilate is difficult to write about because we know so little about him. Or so it has seemed till now; the marvel of this biography is that it brings the great skeptic to life with the skills of a novelist yet in a way that never makes one feel that the existing evidence is being strained, enabling us to get the feel of a man "actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea, feeling his shoes pinch, clicking his fingers for a slave, while clouds of lasting infamy gather overhead."

"This is the look of truth: Layered and elusive." The lines apply to all the books I have mentioned, but they actually appear in Anne Carson's latest book of poetry, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 146 pp.). The poems are about a failed marriage, one imagines Carson's own, although this is never explicitly stated. One might think that after recommending a study of depression, a series of twenty-nine free-verse poems on the pain and destructiveness of a relationship gone wrong is piling it a bit thick, but this is a glorious and enthralling book. A meditation on beauty (via the husband's) and truth (which so often he ignored), it spreads out to examine erotic memory, how to live with moral ambiguity, the nature of marriage. Throughout, John Keats plays a supporting role. As Carson, a professor of classics at McGill University in Montreal, writes, "some tangos pretend to be about women but look at this." This is not self-pity, but self-examination writ large.

Anne Carson and her husband separated (at least, in the physical sense) more than twenty years ago. Viktor Frankl, famously the author of Man's Search for Meaning, married Elly Schwindt, a woman half his age, in 1947. When Life Calls Out to Us, by Haddon Klingberg Jr. (Doubleday, $23.95, 368 pp.), is the story of that marriage, and also of how Frankl's writings came to be. The author is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, and his writing style does not sing; but the story he has to tell is so interesting that it doesn't matter. Frankl died in 1997, aged ninety-two. Twenty-two years before, he and his wife had an audience with Paul VI. As they were about to leave the room, the pope said to them, in German, "Please, pray for me." Frankl was astounded: "Imagine the pope asking a psychiatrist, coming from Vienna, Jewish, to pray for him!" Reading this fond biography, one can see why the pope asked.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group