What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World by Robert Hass

Abstract

Amélie Nothomb Life Form Alison Anderson, tr. Europa When a successful, well-known French author engages in a prolonged correspondence with a troubled American fan, both of their identities are brought into question. Life Form is a probing exploration of the meaning of friendship and human connection. Amélie Nothomb skillfully constructs an absorbing maze of psychological entanglement and escape. Fumi Nakamura Enma the Immortal Neil Nadelman, tr. Vertical A young samurai’s life is saved by a tattoo artist who leaves him with a strange Sanskrit character permanently inscribed on his palm. Enma the Immortal is a tale of mystery and fantasy that begins in the last years of the Edo period and makes its way darkly toward Hiroshima. Nota Bene ers, artists, writers, and celebrants modify them. “Radical Winter” is the long or even endless winter of the north and far south, and the essay of that title features the expeditions to reach the North and South Poles through the memoirs of the participants . In many ways, the most interesting essay focuses on the recuperative or restorative themes that emerge through winter celebrations , especially Christmas and the carols, fiction, poetry, music, and commercialism that cluster around that holiday. Gopnik almost rescues my interest in Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” in this chapter. Skating, sledding , and especially ice hockey— Gopnik is Canadian—are featured in “Recreational Winter.” In each essay, defining the perspective is primary, with a background leading up to selected examples of that perspective. Extension is geographic rather than chronological , as Gopnik distinguishes among European, British, and North American versions of the same perspective. An academic reader may miss the page-by-page footnoting or endnoting . More importantly, such a reader may want more examples, a more detailed history of the development of each perspective on winter—particularly those examples that would suggest the extent to which the perspectiveenteredpopularculture .Butthose concessions to a general readership, as well as slim references to secondary sources in the body of the book, make for an unencumbered enjoyment of the flow of ideas and themes. This academic reviewer regrets only the inability to credit Gopnik for those ideas and connections that are his alone. Except, that is, in “Recreational Winter,” where the author-as-fan— and fan-as-fanatic—perhaps too lovingly dissects and theorizes Canada’s national sport. In so doing, he loses the context of the winter environment present in his other essays. Gopnik concludes by focusing on the progressive distancing of winter in our time. Controlled indoor environments and global warming mark a retreat of winter as a significant experience for many. It is remembered in the paintings, literature, and movies for what it was—in Citizen Kane or in Nick Carraway’s memories in The Great Gatsby. We are undergoing what he calls a “numbing of feeling” toward winter, an interesting choice of words for any reader who’s spent time in subzero weather. Regardless, Winter deserves a place in that short shelf of works that successfully stimulate a desire to renew our attenuated relationship with the natural environment. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Robert Hass. What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World. New York. Ecco/HarperCollins. 2012. isbn 9780061923920 The nouns in the subtitle of Robert Hass’s new book are abstract enough to cover the wide variety of its topics, but they barely suggest the range of allusion, the depth of some of the readings, the consistent eloquence and easy confidence of the style, and the author’s ability to blend personal and critical viewpoints. For example, the first essay, on Wallace Stevens, is not just a reading of a poem but a history of the reader ’s relationship with that poem from may–june 2013 • 73 reviews his first encounter with it at the age of nineteen through his response, twenty-five years later, as a mature poet and master technician. This concentration on the physical and psychological circumstances of the moment, which may be indebted to the type of prayer called “composition of place” in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, informs much of the book. The attention to detail allows Hass to fix on moments...