And yet essays by Christopher Hitchens

Abstract

navigated the flux of his inner life, which included everything—observations, emotions , places visited, conversations overheard , texts old and new, and experiences personal and shared—that came together to form the man who gave his name to an age. One hopes Young Tom is just the first installment of what promises to be the definitive life. Eliot may never have so understanding a biographer. Bernard F. Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University Christopher Hitchens. and yet . . . essays. New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 339 pages. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 from cancer, long before publication of four dozen of his previously uncollected essays, all commissioned by some blue-ribbon sources. The lowercase title with open punctuation of this posthumous collection signifies Hitchens’s ability to qualify his polemical arguments, virtually as if he were thinking a new idea on the instant, with utmost celerity and clarity. Devastatingly ironic, vitally analytical, the essays (many of which are book-review articles) create an anthology of pugnacious or mocking rhetorical punishment for assorted subjects: national and international politics, national security, the American Deep South (“where all politics is yokel”), NASCAR events (where God is popularly regarded as “a Republican, with a good chance of being white”), Thanksgiving (of which he approved), Christmas (which he detested), the Fox network, etc. His venom is always potent (especially against the Clintons, Saddam Hussein, and Hezbollah), but history has already come to mock several of his arguments—none so much, perhaps, as his virtually hysterical championing of the second Gulf War, a crime that is most responsible for the current chaos in the Middle East. To his credit, he did not refrain from self-criticism or self-satire—as his Vanity Fair essays on physical self-improvement show with deadly, hilarious efficacy. His piece on the agonies of Brazilian waxing should be compulsory entertainment for the most serious essayists, while his descriptions of his own ugly physical attributes show that his malice did not spare even himself. But politics were his bedrock, as displayed in splendid essays on Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somalian survivor of genital mutilation and civil war), Gertrude Bell (who created the map of Iraq), Rosa Luxemburg (the “most brilliant of Marxist intellectuals ”), Oriana Fallaci’s incomparable art of the interview, Chesterton’s reactionary sensibility , Arthur Schlesinger’s role as courtier -apologist, Erdoğan’s “xenophobic demagoguery ” (alas, he makes no comparable comment on Netanyahu’s), and Obama’s cool-cat quality (until disenchantment sets in). Politics also supplied a crucial layer in his literary criticism of Forster, Rushdie , Naipaul, Paul Scott, and Ian Fleming, but Hitchens remained a superior stylist, demonstrating a rare literary sensitivity to Joan Didion’s “blues” and Charles Dickens’s “inner child.” An intellectual omnivore (like Clive James), Hitchens almost matched Orwell in intellectual integrity and independence, while also coming as close as anybody has (to quote his own words on Edmund Wilson) to making “the labour of criticism into an art.” Keith Garebian Mississauga, Ontario Krisztián Nyáry. Merész magyarok, 30 emberi történet. Budapest. Corvina. 2015. 278 pages. Merész magyarok (Bold Hungarians) is Krisztián Nyáry’s second collection of sketches and short essays within two years. It Eugene Vodolazkin Laurus Trans. Lisa Hayden Oneworld Fifteenth-century Europe serves as the vast stage for a roving Russian healer who leaves his village on a journey of repentance, turmoil, and growth toward Jerusalem. Vodolazkin’s expertise in the medieval world rounds out this tale that defies the restrictions of this longago time and place in its treatment of universal human pains and regrets. Ivan Vladislavić The Folly Archipelago Books A mysterious interloper with big plans disrupts the quiet, restrained domestic life of Mr. and Mrs. Malgas in the suburbs of South Africa. The unsettling yet compelling nature of their new neighbor draws the characters into his proposals. Mr. and Mrs. Malgas begin to abandon their unquestioning complacency, a process that could be dangerous or revitalizing. Vladislavić skillfully crafts characters and an intriguing plot in what seems like an ordinary, bland world. Nota Bene WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 109 ...