Reading Roundup, May 2025
May. 25th, 2025 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI’m calling this month a bit early so that I enjoy the rest of my holiday reading without rushing to finish in the next week. :) I really enjoyed this month, especially the first two—and that’s another reason for this going up now! After two great books in a row, it’s a bit difficult to want to follow them with something which simply won’t be as good (to me), as much to my tastes. Do you ever feel that way after reading something? I need a sort of come-down to adjust back to books that aren’t nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.
The Temple, by Stephen Spender
This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.
The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.
In Germany he meets Ernst’s circle of gay friends: Joaquim and his partner Willy, primarily, but also the looser group of party-goers and trade boys they are connected to. Paul loses his virginity on a holiday with Ernst, suffers the social politicking of Ernst’s overbearing mother Hanny, and ends his summer on a long walk down the Rhine with Joaquim and Joaquim’s new partner, Heinrich.
When he revisits the country in winter 1932, much has changed. Nazism is everywhere: Willy’s fiancée is a “Nazi girl guide,” Nazis and communists are murdering one another in street gangs, and Heinrich has become a uniformed Nazi. The awkward political allusions of 1929 become sharper in retrospect.
Three characters are Jewish: Paul, Ernst, and Joaquim. In 1929, this Jewishness is ancestral—nothing closer than the grandparents’ generation, and largely disowned by the characters. By 1932, none of them deny that Jewishness any longer. One of the most powerful passages in the book comes from an exchange between Paul and Ernst on this topic. Ernst says:
Ninety years later, this still feels accurate, at least for some parts of the Jewish experience. And this is what gives The Temple its unique merit, I think, in all the writings of Isherwood and Auden and Spender and others of their generation. The earliest stories of Interwar Germany, as a refuge for gay British expats, were necessarily circumspect on the issue of the authors’ homosexuality—as is stated in Spender’s introduction to this book, his editor in 1933 England said the novel was unpublishable and pornographic. Britain’s censorship made no space for these authors to state plainly what appeal Germany held for them. A contemporaneous novel might have vitality that a retrospective one lacks, but that vitality is only half-honest. Now, Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind, written decades later, is honest, and honestly impacted by the rise of Nazism—but he is not Jewish. Spender, both queer and Jewish, contronts the Nazi movement in his own way, and it’s a perspective that I am glad to get. When we see Paul tell a Nazi-sympathizing shop proprietor that he, Paul, is Jewish by any definition the proprietor might use, or we see Paul and Ernst discuss the future for German Jews, it comes with a personal weight. These are conversations that non-Jews simply would not be having.
Finally, I must sing the praises of the character of Ernst Stockmann, as Spender will not do it for me. Ernst is plainly enamored of Paul, who doesn’t return his affection. Ernst’s “deadness” makes him unattractive—a cocktail mixture of his subordination to his domineering and disapproving mother, his lack of personal creative endeavor, and his burning desire to be liked by his friends (who are rather judgmental of him). I empathize deeply with his particular brand of social awkwardness, and then even more with the position he is in as a German Jew. More than others, he is identified with his Jewishness (and especially so by the Germans in the novel), which contributes to his alienation—he is often at the periphery of his social groups. And his crush on Paul is very genuine, with Paul even remarking on its similarities to Paul’s doomed crush on a university peer at the start of the book. By the time that Ernst is admitting his adolescent masturbatory fantasies (Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain), I was thoroughly in love with him.
I don’t begrudge Paul’s inability to love Ernst. The pressure of feeling loved for the idea of oneself is unpleasant, and Ernst does admire Paul’s artistic work in a way that can border on idolatry. But I wonder at Paul’s narrowness, the limited interest of his perspective, when Ernst is yet written so compellingly, in my estimation. It feels contradictory that Spender could spare so little love for the character and still not squash the interesting complexity of him—a boring, unlikeable Ernst would have been able to fill the narrative role. But Ernst is not that, he is full of life and humanity. I want to bundle Ernst off to a different book and give him a more appreciative companion, especially as we later see during the 1932 return to Hamburg that so much of Ernst’s apparent disingenuousness is actually the manifestation of his oppressive family atmosphere.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is night-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.
Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)
The students at fictional Hampden College commit a murder of one of their own friend group (not a spoiler—this is in the prologue). We learn the circumstances of their friendship, the rationale for the murder, and the events which follow it.
As any good school novel would, this story spans the academic year. Our narrator Richard is a transfer student whose two years of Green study land him, after some finagling, in the exclusive group of Classics majors. The other students are Bunny, of archetypal New England Protestant stock, and the twins Charles and Camilla, orphans from a good Virginian family, and Francis, an old-money Bostonian whose addict mother is supported by a wealthy father. The most mysterious of the lot is self-serious Henry, the only midwesterner, whose family’s new-money fortune comes from real estate.
In listing these characters, I play up the most common criticism of the novel: that all of our leads are assholes, unlikeable people, and so the book itself is no good. I agree that this is not the novel for a reader seeking an easy, amiable connection with its characters. But I think that criticism betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the core genre at stake here. This is a liberal arts college in New England; of course its student body will have rich assholes. What else could you expect?
The characters all bring something faintly mystical to the story. Ominous twins; men out of time dressed all in black; the elusive and unspoken standards conferred by wealth or status. Richard, narrating, is none of these things—he is from a lower middle class Californian family. His ability to fake them is one of the early stakes of the story. But we go on, building always towards that murder, and everyone’s vices make them a little younger or more human, and the class-consciousness becomes a little less central, and I eventually found myself not even truly thinking of these characters as assholes. I liked them—and when I disliked them, I was interested in that dislike. This was so fundamentally an American novel, in the way that a book about generational wealth at Oxbridge would be fundamentally English, and I love it for that. Tartt recognizes the systems of privilege which exist in the US and what makes (this version of) American wealth and class unique and compelling, and so I love how this story is told.
I can offer other points of critique, though, even if I ended up disagreeing with the one I’ve seen most often. For one, the book is too long by half. It is challenging to criticize length when the prose is good, because there isn’t any prose that I would want to lose, but the book I own exceeds 500 pages. Routinely, I would note the page number of a stopping point and wonder how the hell we could fill another 300/250/200 pages. There isn’t a satisfactory answer; this easily might have been a 300 page book and covered the same plot. I don’t regret the time reading it, but I’m keenly aware that this is a big ask of readers.
My second wish is simply that the story was more queer. One character is textually gay, of the main cast, and another engages in some gay sex (but seems to reject a queer identity). Meanwhile, there are many straight couples (of varying commitment), and Richard can’t narrate Camilla without declarations of his attraction to her. Don’t take the idea that I’m calling the book shallow or sexist in its treatment of women. I’m not, and besides, Richard’s inability to see Camilla as a whole person is a key and intentional part of his characterization. Rather, as the book clearly has no fear of homosexuality, I wanted more of it, from more characters, and I wished that heterosexual jealousies were not given as much page time. Tartt created her cast of mainly male characters with intricately blurred lines of romantic and platonic attraction, so why not openly go there with some of the other men?
Ultimately, I consider these small quibbles. They did not materially detract from my enjoyment. I appreciate that I am the core audience for a book like this: like Tartt, I’m an alumnus of the American liberal arts system and I now teach at one of these colleges. I have lived in New England and know its culture; I have lived as well in the midwest and in California to understand those necessary contrasts. I love this world, for all of its idiosyncrasies and failings. And I appreciate as well the fantasy of it as presented in The Secret History, how the real-world manifestations are different, how well Tartt captures the unglamorous sides of this college life even as the linoleum is forgotten by fans in favor of the dusty old libraries.
But I think, really, that the magic of the novel lives in its characters. It's their imagination which allows college to be a place of daytime suiting and nighttime bathrobes and all-hours visiting of your friends’ rooms. Lurking beside them in the narrative, their college peers demonstrate the elaborate construction that the Classics group has chosen. Tartt knows that this is a version of playing pretend, and she wants the reader to see it—but the characters will also convince you of how alluring the pretend world can be. They have to believe it in order to commit the murder.
The Bacchae, by Euripedes
When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.
The Bacchae is a short tragic play about the fate of Pentheus, king of Thebes, It is the downfall of the city of Thebes, and of its dynastic family, represented by three generations: Cadmus, grandfather, old fool; Agave, mother, driven mad; Penthus, son and king, prideful. Dionysus, the god, is Penthus’ cousin—but the family doesn’t believe in his divinity when he returns to his birth city as an adult. Dionysus drives the Theban women into a frenzy as his maenads, and Pentheus’ anger and rejection of him set him towards the path of his destruction. It is a brutal, grotesque story, and the violence seems to shock even its own characters.
I followed The Secret History with this for the obvious referential connection, as those characters seek to recreate Bacchic ritual madness, and the ends are just as bloody. Unintentionally, though, this opened up my perspective on the Greek references in Victorian and Edwardian literature, where classical figures are sometimes a subtle hint at queerness, but other times a much more violent, frightening form of temptation, as characters awaken to desires beyond good English norms.
This definitely exists in another form in The Bacchae. Pentheus is tormented by the sexual liberation he imagines among the maenads and by the beauty of Dionysus. He is persuaded to crossdress in order to observe those maenads—a humiliation designed by Dionysus. Reading this, I can see the influence: the way that Dionysus can be read through the lens of sexuality and sexual temptation, but also how the giving in to that temptation might be seen as the reason for Pentheus’ brutal murder. I think the main reason for his death is his pride and the way it leads him to spurn a god, but the sexuality is there, and it cannot be separated from the risk, the fear, and the indulgence that Dionysus represents for humans. It reminded me of those early 20th century horror stories where there is Something out there in Nature, and half the time that Something is represented by an attractive, elusive man.
The Temple, by Stephen Spender
This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.
The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.
In Germany he meets Ernst’s circle of gay friends: Joaquim and his partner Willy, primarily, but also the looser group of party-goers and trade boys they are connected to. Paul loses his virginity on a holiday with Ernst, suffers the social politicking of Ernst’s overbearing mother Hanny, and ends his summer on a long walk down the Rhine with Joaquim and Joaquim’s new partner, Heinrich.
When he revisits the country in winter 1932, much has changed. Nazism is everywhere: Willy’s fiancée is a “Nazi girl guide,” Nazis and communists are murdering one another in street gangs, and Heinrich has become a uniformed Nazi. The awkward political allusions of 1929 become sharper in retrospect.
Three characters are Jewish: Paul, Ernst, and Joaquim. In 1929, this Jewishness is ancestral—nothing closer than the grandparents’ generation, and largely disowned by the characters. By 1932, none of them deny that Jewishness any longer. One of the most powerful passages in the book comes from an exchange between Paul and Ernst on this topic. Ernst says:
“I think there are two ways of being Jewish. One way is the result of the things your gentile neighbors do to you. Another way is the distinction you make between yourself and your gentile neighbors.”
Ninety years later, this still feels accurate, at least for some parts of the Jewish experience. And this is what gives The Temple its unique merit, I think, in all the writings of Isherwood and Auden and Spender and others of their generation. The earliest stories of Interwar Germany, as a refuge for gay British expats, were necessarily circumspect on the issue of the authors’ homosexuality—as is stated in Spender’s introduction to this book, his editor in 1933 England said the novel was unpublishable and pornographic. Britain’s censorship made no space for these authors to state plainly what appeal Germany held for them. A contemporaneous novel might have vitality that a retrospective one lacks, but that vitality is only half-honest. Now, Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind, written decades later, is honest, and honestly impacted by the rise of Nazism—but he is not Jewish. Spender, both queer and Jewish, contronts the Nazi movement in his own way, and it’s a perspective that I am glad to get. When we see Paul tell a Nazi-sympathizing shop proprietor that he, Paul, is Jewish by any definition the proprietor might use, or we see Paul and Ernst discuss the future for German Jews, it comes with a personal weight. These are conversations that non-Jews simply would not be having.
Finally, I must sing the praises of the character of Ernst Stockmann, as Spender will not do it for me. Ernst is plainly enamored of Paul, who doesn’t return his affection. Ernst’s “deadness” makes him unattractive—a cocktail mixture of his subordination to his domineering and disapproving mother, his lack of personal creative endeavor, and his burning desire to be liked by his friends (who are rather judgmental of him). I empathize deeply with his particular brand of social awkwardness, and then even more with the position he is in as a German Jew. More than others, he is identified with his Jewishness (and especially so by the Germans in the novel), which contributes to his alienation—he is often at the periphery of his social groups. And his crush on Paul is very genuine, with Paul even remarking on its similarities to Paul’s doomed crush on a university peer at the start of the book. By the time that Ernst is admitting his adolescent masturbatory fantasies (Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain), I was thoroughly in love with him.
I don’t begrudge Paul’s inability to love Ernst. The pressure of feeling loved for the idea of oneself is unpleasant, and Ernst does admire Paul’s artistic work in a way that can border on idolatry. But I wonder at Paul’s narrowness, the limited interest of his perspective, when Ernst is yet written so compellingly, in my estimation. It feels contradictory that Spender could spare so little love for the character and still not squash the interesting complexity of him—a boring, unlikeable Ernst would have been able to fill the narrative role. But Ernst is not that, he is full of life and humanity. I want to bundle Ernst off to a different book and give him a more appreciative companion, especially as we later see during the 1932 return to Hamburg that so much of Ernst’s apparent disingenuousness is actually the manifestation of his oppressive family atmosphere.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is night-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.
Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)
The students at fictional Hampden College commit a murder of one of their own friend group (not a spoiler—this is in the prologue). We learn the circumstances of their friendship, the rationale for the murder, and the events which follow it.
As any good school novel would, this story spans the academic year. Our narrator Richard is a transfer student whose two years of Green study land him, after some finagling, in the exclusive group of Classics majors. The other students are Bunny, of archetypal New England Protestant stock, and the twins Charles and Camilla, orphans from a good Virginian family, and Francis, an old-money Bostonian whose addict mother is supported by a wealthy father. The most mysterious of the lot is self-serious Henry, the only midwesterner, whose family’s new-money fortune comes from real estate.
In listing these characters, I play up the most common criticism of the novel: that all of our leads are assholes, unlikeable people, and so the book itself is no good. I agree that this is not the novel for a reader seeking an easy, amiable connection with its characters. But I think that criticism betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the core genre at stake here. This is a liberal arts college in New England; of course its student body will have rich assholes. What else could you expect?
The characters all bring something faintly mystical to the story. Ominous twins; men out of time dressed all in black; the elusive and unspoken standards conferred by wealth or status. Richard, narrating, is none of these things—he is from a lower middle class Californian family. His ability to fake them is one of the early stakes of the story. But we go on, building always towards that murder, and everyone’s vices make them a little younger or more human, and the class-consciousness becomes a little less central, and I eventually found myself not even truly thinking of these characters as assholes. I liked them—and when I disliked them, I was interested in that dislike. This was so fundamentally an American novel, in the way that a book about generational wealth at Oxbridge would be fundamentally English, and I love it for that. Tartt recognizes the systems of privilege which exist in the US and what makes (this version of) American wealth and class unique and compelling, and so I love how this story is told.
I can offer other points of critique, though, even if I ended up disagreeing with the one I’ve seen most often. For one, the book is too long by half. It is challenging to criticize length when the prose is good, because there isn’t any prose that I would want to lose, but the book I own exceeds 500 pages. Routinely, I would note the page number of a stopping point and wonder how the hell we could fill another 300/250/200 pages. There isn’t a satisfactory answer; this easily might have been a 300 page book and covered the same plot. I don’t regret the time reading it, but I’m keenly aware that this is a big ask of readers.
My second wish is simply that the story was more queer. One character is textually gay, of the main cast, and another engages in some gay sex (but seems to reject a queer identity). Meanwhile, there are many straight couples (of varying commitment), and Richard can’t narrate Camilla without declarations of his attraction to her. Don’t take the idea that I’m calling the book shallow or sexist in its treatment of women. I’m not, and besides, Richard’s inability to see Camilla as a whole person is a key and intentional part of his characterization. Rather, as the book clearly has no fear of homosexuality, I wanted more of it, from more characters, and I wished that heterosexual jealousies were not given as much page time. Tartt created her cast of mainly male characters with intricately blurred lines of romantic and platonic attraction, so why not openly go there with some of the other men?
Ultimately, I consider these small quibbles. They did not materially detract from my enjoyment. I appreciate that I am the core audience for a book like this: like Tartt, I’m an alumnus of the American liberal arts system and I now teach at one of these colleges. I have lived in New England and know its culture; I have lived as well in the midwest and in California to understand those necessary contrasts. I love this world, for all of its idiosyncrasies and failings. And I appreciate as well the fantasy of it as presented in The Secret History, how the real-world manifestations are different, how well Tartt captures the unglamorous sides of this college life even as the linoleum is forgotten by fans in favor of the dusty old libraries.
But I think, really, that the magic of the novel lives in its characters. It's their imagination which allows college to be a place of daytime suiting and nighttime bathrobes and all-hours visiting of your friends’ rooms. Lurking beside them in the narrative, their college peers demonstrate the elaborate construction that the Classics group has chosen. Tartt knows that this is a version of playing pretend, and she wants the reader to see it—but the characters will also convince you of how alluring the pretend world can be. They have to believe it in order to commit the murder.
The Bacchae, by Euripedes
When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.
The Bacchae is a short tragic play about the fate of Pentheus, king of Thebes, It is the downfall of the city of Thebes, and of its dynastic family, represented by three generations: Cadmus, grandfather, old fool; Agave, mother, driven mad; Penthus, son and king, prideful. Dionysus, the god, is Penthus’ cousin—but the family doesn’t believe in his divinity when he returns to his birth city as an adult. Dionysus drives the Theban women into a frenzy as his maenads, and Pentheus’ anger and rejection of him set him towards the path of his destruction. It is a brutal, grotesque story, and the violence seems to shock even its own characters.
I followed The Secret History with this for the obvious referential connection, as those characters seek to recreate Bacchic ritual madness, and the ends are just as bloody. Unintentionally, though, this opened up my perspective on the Greek references in Victorian and Edwardian literature, where classical figures are sometimes a subtle hint at queerness, but other times a much more violent, frightening form of temptation, as characters awaken to desires beyond good English norms.
This definitely exists in another form in The Bacchae. Pentheus is tormented by the sexual liberation he imagines among the maenads and by the beauty of Dionysus. He is persuaded to crossdress in order to observe those maenads—a humiliation designed by Dionysus. Reading this, I can see the influence: the way that Dionysus can be read through the lens of sexuality and sexual temptation, but also how the giving in to that temptation might be seen as the reason for Pentheus’ brutal murder. I think the main reason for his death is his pride and the way it leads him to spurn a god, but the sexuality is there, and it cannot be separated from the risk, the fear, and the indulgence that Dionysus represents for humans. It reminded me of those early 20th century horror stories where there is Something out there in Nature, and half the time that Something is represented by an attractive, elusive man.
