Saturday Links
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Cormac McCarthy’s literary sources, on visiting Montenegro, the annual “First Things” poetry reading, and more.
Good morning! My wife and I are in Asheville this weekend, helping our son and his church dig out from Hurricane Helene. We won’t be back until early next week, so there will not be a Monday edition of this email next week.
I am writing this on Thursday, and it was just announced that the South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here’s the Associated Press with the news:
South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for a poetic and unsettling body of work that the Nobel committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
A slow-burning international literary star who has won multiple awards in South Korea and Europe, Han is the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She was awarded for books, including “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts,” that explore the pain of being human and the scars of Korea’s turbulent history.
The word “trauma” makes my skin crawl, but that’s not to say that Kang doesn’t deserve the award. I have never read her and so have no opinion of it. If you have read her work, let us know what you think of it in the comments.
My colleague and friend Michael Crews has published an expanded edition of his excellent Books Are Made out of Books—a study of Cormac McCarthy’s literary sources. Here’s LitHub with an excerpt:
One thing we learn from a study of influence is that critics do not approach reading in the same way that an artist does, or at least not in the way the artist Cormac McCarthy does. For instance, Rick Wallach, in an essay exploring kinships between Blood Meridian and Beowulf, discusses how both works depict martial codes. As a critic, he is interested in particular in how Beowulf gives rise to ideas in McCarthy’s novel. However, looking at the references to the poem in McCarthy’s notes, we find nothing about martial codes, no notes-to-self about exposing the “contagion of systematized violence” in Beowulf.
Michael provides the notes and quotations on Beowulf that appear in a draft of McCarthy’s Sutree. “What McCarthy finds in both the epic poem and the medieval legend,” Michael remarks, is not martial codes but “a tense, gothic mood that he aims to duplicate.” If you’re a McCarthy fan, you’ll want to buy Books Are Made out of Books.
Michial Farmer writes about unpacking his library (again) at the Front Porch Republic:
Most recently, my wife and I have moved from a townhouse in a suburb of Atlanta to a single-family house in another suburb of Atlanta. The move was particularly unpleasant, partly because we owned that townhouse and had to go through the process of staging and selling it; partly because of the gap between when we had to move out of the townhouse and when we could move into the new house; and partly because we have accumulated even more stuff.
Part of the reason we wanted to move is so we could have a dedicated library, which will take up about half of the finished basement at our new house. I left higher education in 2019, and when I did, my wife and I sold off about a third of our massive collection of books. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten rid of a sizable number of books, and I wish I hadn’t done it. I suppose it was a gesture toward the new life I imagined I’d be starting; we didn’t need all those books, I told myself, not realizing that my identity as a book collector had already been formed and that there was no changing it at age 37.
Speaking of the Front Porch Republic, they are organizing their next conference and are asking for topic suggestions. If you’re a fan of the localist publication and have an idea you’d like to share, you can fill out a form on their website.
Poem: A.E. Stallings, “The Plum Tree”
Peter Hitchens writes about apple trees and Jesus Christ in The Lamp: “I am not sure what scriptural warrant there is for the apple tree as a symbol of Christ, but it is hard to question its rightness when you encounter it in music or art. Another striking example of this idea is not far from where I live, in the riverside village of Iffley, swallowed but not yet digested by the ever-expanding city of Oxford. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Iffley contains many ancient splendors, to be described perhaps another time. But it recently acquired that rare thing, a modern stained-glass window of great loveliness. The painter Roger Wagner learned the art of stained glass to complete this project. It shows the figure of Christ hanging from a tree, on the top of a green hill far away, but a tree which has exploded into a joyous cloud of apple blossom, and from whose roots flows a river of blessings, filled with fish, on whose banks seven sheep and one lamb graze. I suppose some people may not like it, on doctrinal grounds, but I have several times stood for long minutes in front of it, compelled into thought, as the clear north light pours through it.”
In praise of Southern emporiums: “You know, those dusty, Havisham-style retailers that showcase the bizarre, the oddball, the cast-offs. You pass racks of creepy bric-a-brac; broken mirrors in baroque frames; a Magic 8 Ball next to a tattered pin-up magazine and a frog floating in a jar. They’re not antique stores, exactly, but offer a selection more curated than a flea market . . . a real trove of nostalgic ephemera. They are Southern Gothic in physical form.”
In praise of Montenegro: “How to describe this astonishing landscape? It’s like Utah hooked up with Iceland, somewhere in Sicily and brought a friend from Dartmoor. Burnt brown plains rise to savage heights, the road snakes into the smoky mega-distance, and you wonder how a nation as tiny as Montenegro can encompass such grandeur. And then you happen upon a kind of Balkan Stonehenge. Pale white stony blocks arrayed on a numinous hilltop, with the Accursed Mountains behind, and the blue remembered hills in front. It is magnificent frozen theater.”
Clare McHugh reviews Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue in Commentary:
Promptly after she was appointed ambassador to France in 1993 by grateful former protégé President Bill Clinton, Pamela Harriman was the subject of not one, but two censorious biographies. The gist of both: The grande dame of the Democratic Party had—heaven forfend—a past. She married her first husband at age 19 to get ahead, her second to establish a foothold in America, and her third (and final) to guarantee herself fabulous wealth and influence. Along the way, she had affairs with (this is just a sampling) Edward R. Murrow, Jock Whitney, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and Élie de Rothschild.
Thirty years have passed—an excellent cooling-off period—and a new life of Harriman has been published, free of the disdainful spirit of both previous efforts. It’s a pleasure to turn to Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Sonia Purnell, author previously of a stellar biography of Harriman’s first mother-in-law, Clementine Churchill, traces Harriman’s evolution as a power player without skimping on juicy details. Casting Harriman as neither villain nor victim, Purnell proposes that for a jolly, pudgy, uneducated teenage daughter of a cash-poor English baron to ascend as Pamela did is nothing short of astounding—and evidence of a steel will, a keen intelligence, and unflagging ambition. It goes without saying that a man with similar traits would be celebrated.
The speaker at First Things’s annual Erasmus Lecture is the novelist Paul Kingsworth (at least, I think of him as a novelist, though he has written far more than just novels). If you haven’t signed up, there is still time.
We run a poetry reading the night before the lecture. This year’s guest is the prolific and talented Adam Kirsch. Kirsch, too, has written far more than just poetry, but the night will be devoted to his poetry alone (though if you haven’t read his latest work of nonfiction, On Settler Colonialism, you should). The poetry reading is free and open to the public, but space is limited. If you’re in New York on October 27, consider coming. I would love to meet any Prufrock subscribers.
Forthcoming: C. Marina Marchese, The World Atlas of Honey (California, October 15): “A beautifully illustrated global survey of the flavor of honey, The World Atlas of Honey includes profiles of more than eighty countries and the botanical sources of honey found in each. With text, illustrations, and photos, honey expert C. Marina Marchese takes readers through the global history of honey production from the earliest beekeepers to today’s harvests.”
Definitely acquiring Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. Thanks for the tip. I hope all is going well in Asheville.
I hope all goes well in Asheville.