Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

With reflections on Casey Cep’s introduction and Faulkner’s racial legacy

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like tumbling down a well into someone else’s madness—brilliant, disorienting, and claustrophobic. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel is widely considered a masterwork of literary modernism, and it earns that title with its shattered chronology, fractured voices, and poetic density. Faulkner demands that the reader abandon logic and surrender to rhythm, memory, and emotion. I admire the brilliance of what he accomplished. But as the father of two Black sons, I found reading this book almost unbearable.

My edition included a powerful introduction by New Yorker critic Casey Cep. She writes:

“Faulkner loved Mississippi in the way that only someone who has given his whole life to a place can love it—without irony, without detachment, and without apology. That love gives his novels their power and also their poison.”

That passage stayed with me more than anything in the novel itself. Because Faulkner’s love for Mississippi is everywhere in this book—not just its trees and rivers, but its hierarchies, its violence, its unspoken rules. He does not celebrate racism, but he lives inside it, unchallenged. The Black characters in The Sound and the Fury—Dilsey most of all—are relegated to the edges, mute supports for the crumbling white Compson family. Faulkner offers them no interiority, no freedom, no choice. And yet he mourns the Compsons like a tragic fall from grace.

What grace?

Faulkner once said, “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Later, he tried to walk that back, but the damage was done. That loyalty—to a world built on subjugation—makes it impossible for me to embrace him, no matter how intricate his prose or how inventive his narrative structure.

There are moments of undeniable power. Benjy’s disordered narration captures the chaos of loss with brutal immediacy. Quentin’s suicide unspools in a voice haunted by honor and failure. Jason, the bitter misogynist and racist, is Faulkner’s clearest indictment of the postbellum Southern man—mean, empty, desperate. And Dilsey, the Black servant, is portrayed with dignity, even if she is denied agency.

But dignity is not justice.

Reading Faulkner, I could never shake the feeling that I was inside a eulogy for a world I would never want my sons to live in. A world where their safety, their futures, and their very humanity would be conditional—if acknowledged at all.

I’m glad I read The Sound and the Fury. I understand why it is studied and revered. But Faulkner’s genius walks hand in hand with his blind spots. As Casey Cep notes, his love for Mississippi was both his strength and his undoing. For me, that’s too steep a price.

Brilliance, when rooted in a poisoned soil, can still grow thorns.

My Books of 2025: A Baker's Dozen of Fiction. Half by Nobel Laureates

 

The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story. 

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, a Review

 

Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place is a short book that carries the moral weight of a much larger one. It is nominally about her father—an unremarkable café-grocer in rural Normandy—but in truth it is about class, shame, memory, and the price of social mobility. Ernaux, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature for turning her own life into a tool of social analysis, already has her method fully formed here: she strips language down until it is almost clinical, refusing lyricism, nostalgia, or sentimental rescue.

The book begins with her father’s death and then works backward, reconstructing the man he was and the world that shaped him. He came from the French peasantry, left school early, and spent his life clawing his way into a fragile petit-bourgeois respectability. He was proud, suspicious of refinement, quick to anger, and deeply anxious about not belonging. Ernaux refuses to romanticize him. He was not a noble worker or a tragic hero. He was simply a man whose entire emotional life was structured by class hierarchy.

What makes A Man’s Place so unsettling is that Ernaux includes herself in the indictment. Through education, books, and speech, she escaped the world her father inhabited. But escape came with betrayal. Every new word she learned widened the distance between them. Every gesture of middle-class ease was a silent rebuke to his roughness. She describes how he became self-conscious around her, afraid of saying the wrong thing, aware that he was being measured by standards he did not choose. This is not a story of generational conflict in the abstract; it is the lived experience of social mobility as emotional violence.

Ernaux’s style is a lovely instrument for this subject. The prose is flat, precise, almost bureaucratic. That is not a lack of feeling—it is an ethical decision. She refuses to decorate her father’s life with the kinds of language that would falsify it. His world was not poetic; it was practical, anxious, and constrained. By writing this way, she honors his reality while also exposing its limits.

The book also quietly dismantles the idea that personal identity can ever be separated from social structure. Her father’s masculinity, pride, and emotional reticence were not personality quirks; they were survival strategies in a world that punished weakness and ignorance. Ernaux shows how deeply those strategies shaped her childhood—and how impossible it was for him to adapt when she moved into a different class universe.

There is no reconciliation at the end of A Man’s Place. Ernaux does not claim to have healed the rift between herself and her father. Instead, she offers something more honest: understanding without absolution. She sees him clearly, and she sees herself clearly too—as someone who benefited from the very systems that made his life small.

In less than a hundred pages, Ernaux achieves something rare: a portrait of a man that is neither sentimental nor cruel, and a memoir that refuses to flatter its author. A Man’s Place is not about loving your parents despite their flaws. It is about recognizing how history, class, and language decide what kinds of lives are possible—and what kinds of love those lives can sustain.

Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris

The Pierre and Marie Curie Museum—tucked quietly into the old Radium Institute on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris—is one of the most understated but important scientific museums in the city. It occupies the preserved laboratory spaces where Marie Curie, her daughter Irène, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot carried out groundbreaking research in radioactivity from the 1890s through the 1930s. The museum is small, reflective, and resolutely authentic: nothing is dramatized, nothing staged. You stand in rooms where the Nobel Prizes were earned.

At the heart of the museum is Marie Curie’s office and laboratory, preserved almost exactly as they were at the time of her death in 1934. Wooden benches, glassware, electrometers, notebooks, and early radiation-measurement devices remain in their original positions. Unlike her early work in the makeshift shed on the Rue Lhomond, the Radium Institute was built specifically for her—funded by French, international, and American donors—to allow research into the medical and scientific potential of radium. It became one of the great centers of early 20th-century physics and chemistry.

The museum emphasizes both the scientific history and the human story. Panels describe Pierre and Marie’s partnership, Pierre’s accidental death in 1906, and Marie’s tireless continuation of their shared research. Other exhibits trace the later achievements of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, whose discovery of artificial radioactivity earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize—reinforcing the sense that this building housed not just a laboratory but a dynasty of scientific innovation.

For a visitor returning multiple times, especially after reading Dava Sobel’s biography, the museum gains emotional weight. Sobel’s portrait of Marie Curie—the discipline, the grief, the stubborn moral clarity—comes alive in the physical space. The rooms feel modest for the scale of the discoveries made there, and the lingering sense of danger from early radiation work is unmistakable.

The museum is quiet, intimate, and deeply respectful—a rare place where the history of science still inhabits its original walls.

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel

 

In The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel presents the life of one of the most compelling figures in the history of science. Marie Curie combined relentless curiosity, monumental discovery, and personal sacrifice in a life marked by deep sadness. This book is a brilliant portrait of a scientist whose work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the physical world whose story still inspires more than a century later.

At first glance, Marie Curie’s life might seem like well-trodden territory. She is one of the most famous scientists of all time — the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only person to win two Nobels in two different sciences (physics and chemistry), and a pioneer whose research on radioactivity altered the course of modern physics and medicine. 

Sobel’s approach is not that of a biographer merely listing accomplishments. Instead, she focuses on the elements — literal and metaphorical — that defined Curie’s life and character: her scientific discoveries, her intellectual resilience, her personal losses, and the historical forces that shaped her path.

Sobel’s narrative opens with Curie’s early life as Maria Skłodowska in Russian-occupied Warsaw, a childhood marked by both hardship and defiance. Her determination to pursue education — in an era and a country where women were excluded from universities — set the tone for the rest of her life. Sobel excels at highlighting the decisions that propelled Curie forward: her clandestine schooling in Poland’s “Flying University,” her move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, and the single-minded focus that carried her through poverty and isolation to academic success.

The heart of the book, of course, is Curie’s collaboration with her husband, Pierre, and their groundbreaking work on radioactivity. Sobel recreates the grim physical conditions of their laboratory — damp, unheated, and barely adequate — as they processed tons of pitchblende in search of new elements. From this laborious, back-breaking work came polonium and radium, discoveries that transformed physics and chemistry and ushered in a new understanding of atomic structure. Sobel’s descriptions of their scientific process are clear and engaging, balancing technical accuracy with narrative flow.

But The Elements of Marie Curie is not just about scientific triumph. Sobel also delves into the intense personal cost of Curie’s work. Pierre’s sudden death in 1906 left Marie a widow with two young daughters and a research program to sustain. Rather than retreat, she stepped into his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the university’s first female professor, and carried on their work alone. Sobel portrays this period with particular sensitivity, capturing both Curie’s grief and her resolve. Sobel shows Curie not as a mythic icon, but as a human being, enduring profound loss while pursuing the deepest questions of nature.

The book also explores Curie’s fraught relationship with fame and recognition. Sobel presents the sexism and xenophobia that dogged Curie throughout her career. She recounts the vicious press campaigns that followed her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the scandals that nearly derailed her career and overshadowed her second Nobel Prize. Yet even in the face of public humiliation, Curie refused to compromise her dedication to science in circumstances that would have crushed most people.

Sobel is particularly vivid on Curie’s war year, later years, and legacy. During World War I, she personally outfitted and drove mobile X-ray units to the front, saving countless lives and advancing medical technology. She also trained a generation of scientists: including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize herself. Marie and Irene are the only mother and daughter to win the Nobel Prize.  (Six father-son pairs have earned the Nobel Prize, most famously William Henry Bragg (father) and William Lawrence Bragg (son) who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics together.)

What makes The Elements of Marie Curie stand out is its balance of science and storytelling. Sobel writes with clarity and elegance, never oversimplifying Curie’s work but always anchoring it in the human experience behind the science. The book is as much about persistence, courage, and identity as it is about radiation and elements. By the final pages, readers feel they know not only what Marie Curie discovered, but who she was in all of her complexity: a scientist, a mother, a widow, a patriot, and a pioneer. As Sobel said, “A scientist in the laboratory is not only a technician, but also a child confronted by natural phenomena more enchanting than any fairy tale.”

The Elements of Marie Curie is both a thorough introduction for those learning about Marie Curie for the first time and a portrait with a unique perspective for those already familiar with her legacy. Sobel weaves the story of the discovery of the structure of the atom into her narrative of Curie's life, which show just how rapidly the understanding of the atom and matter changed during Curie's lifetime, propelled in part by her discoveries.

On mark of Marie Curie's stature in the science community is that she was the only woman to attend all of the Solvay Conferences from their inception in 1911 to the conference in 1933 the year before her death.  In fact, only Paul Langevin also attended all of the conferences.  Other attendees included de Broglie, Einstein, Planck, Rutheford and other luminaries in the world of physics. Curie said of the conferences, “I take such great pleasure in speaking of new things with all these lovers of physics.” 

I loved the book. I have read several accounts of Marie Curie's life including a middle-school level biography in French. Each time I read about Curie I learn something new about her life. With Sobel's book, I felt most vividly how Marie Curie's life influenced the times she lived through.  

August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 is the first volume of his The Red Wheel cycle of novels an epic attempt to explain how Russia slid into the twin catastrophes of war and revolution. Where In the First Circle plunges us into Stalin’s infernal machinery, August 1914 takes the reader back to the slaughter of World War I, when Russia’s failures on the battlefield helped set the stage for Bolshevism. The novel is not only a historical narrative but also a philosophical inquiry into responsibility, fate, and the choice to serve when the nation is in peril.

A Novel of History and Conscience

At its core, August 1914 is a work of historical fiction that dramatizes the disastrous Russian campaign against Germany at the Battle of Tannenberg. Solzhenitsyn follows generals, ministers, and foot soldiers alike, weaving together their perspectives into a portrait of a society ill-prepared for war. The novel does not simply reconstruct events; it interrogates them. Why did Russia, a nation of immense size and resources, crumble so quickly? How did the incompetence of leaders and the blindness of institutions.

Solzhenitsyn’s method is almost documentary. He inserts archival material, official memos, and real speeches into his narrative, refusing to let the reader forget that these characters were not mere inventions but participants in a real historical collapse. The result is a hybrid form—part novel, part chronicle—that demands the reader confront history not as distant fact but as lived human tragedy.

The Figure of General Samsonov

One of the most haunting figures in August 1914 is General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army. Samsonov is portrayed with compassion, not as a villain but as a man crushed by the weight of command, undone by poor communications, a divided staff, and his own hesitations. His tragic suicide after the defeat becomes emblematic of Russia’s humiliation.

Through Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn explores the tension between personal responsibility and systemic failure. Was Samsonov a poor general, or was he doomed by a larger structure of incompetence and corruption? Solzhenitsyn leaves the question open but insists that individuals matter—that decisions, mistakes, and moral weaknesses ripple outward into history.

The Theme of National Blindness

Just as In the First Circle exposes how Stalin’s Soviet Union normalized terror, August 1914 shows how Tsarist Russia normalized complacency. Bureaucrats ignored warnings, generals distrusted one another, and ministers jockeyed for power while soldiers starved at the front. The blindness was not merely strategic but moral: leaders refused to acknowledge the rot at the heart of their system.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that the seeds of 1917 were already present in 1914. The Revolution did not come from nowhere; it germinated in the failures of war, in the gap between the Russian people’s sacrifices and the state’s corruption. August 1914 is thus not only about a battle but about the unraveling of legitimacy.

Style and Structure

The novel is sprawling and demanding. Solzhenitsyn shifts rapidly from the trenches to the salons of St. Petersburg, from the thoughts of peasants to the intrigues of ministers. At times, the sheer detail can overwhelm; he includes staff orders, reports, and digressions that feel closer to history than fiction. Yet the density is deliberate. Solzhenitsyn is building an argument: history is not shaped by a few grand figures alone but by a swarm of documents, conversations, and decisions, each carrying its weight.

Amid this density, however, moments of piercing clarity emerge. A soldier’s death in a muddy field, a general’s paralyzing doubt, a politician’s cynical calculation—these scenes crystallize the human cost of institutional failure. Solzhenitsyn writes with the authority of someone who has lived through national disaster, and he insists that history must be understood not only through archives but through moral imagination.

Solzhenitsyn’s Vision

Although set decades before Stalin, August 1914 belongs to the same moral universe as In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. All share the conviction that falsehood and cowardice corrode societies from within. The First World War becomes, in Solzhenitsyn’s vision, a kind of prelude to the greater horrors of the twentieth century. The blindness of 1914 paved the way for the brutality of 1917 and beyond.

What unites Solzhenitsyn’s works is the belief that truth, however painful, must be faced. Just as he stripped the illusions from the Soviet present, here he strips the myths from the Russian past. August 1914 refuses the easy consolations of patriotism or nostalgia. It shows instead a society collapsing under its own deceptions.

August 1914 is dense, sprawling, and often closer to a historical investigation than to traditional fiction. Solzhenitsyn compels the reader to see history as lived tragedy and to recognize how human weakness, bureaucratic inertia, and moral blindness can shape the destiny of nations.

If In the First Circle is a descent into Hell, August 1914 is the map of the road that led there. Both works are united by a single purpose: to bear witness, to insist on truth, and to remind us that history is not fate but the accumulation of choices. In confronting the disaster of 1914, Solzhenitsyn demands that we confront the disasters we inherit—and the ones we may yet create.

Appendix One: A Personal Turning Point

I first read August 1914 in 2006. At the time, I was long removed from my earlier service in the U.S. Army during the 1970s and 80s, nearly a quarter century gone. Yet in Solzhenitsyn’s Vorotyntsev, the thoughtful officer who searches for truth amid confusion, I found something that spoke directly to my own life. Vorotyntsev embodied courage not as bravado, but as clarity—the ability to see through illusions, to recognize responsibility, and to act even when the path was uncertain.

That encounter with the novel stayed with me. The following year, at the age of 54, I re-enlisted in the Army. In 2009, I deployed to Iraq for a year. Many people thought such a choice was reckless, even impossible after so many years away. But Solzhenitsyn had shown me in August 1914 that history, whether of nations or individuals, is not fate. It is made by choices, by the willingness to take responsibility, and by the courage to step forward even when the odds are long.

Vorotyntsev helped me believe that it was not too late, that a return to service was not only possible but meaningful. In that sense, August 1914 was not just a novel I read; it was a turning point, a book that helped set the course of my life in a new direction. Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, it insists on truth, responsibility, and action. For me, it became more than literature—it became a call answered in the real world.

Appendix Two:  My Family in August 1914

The date that is the title of Solzhenitsyn's book has huge significance in the history of my family.  In that month my paternal grandfather, Hyman Gussman, began a year-long escape from service and certain death in the Russian army.  The story of his escape is here.

Review of In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sharpens the vast world of his Gulag Archipelago into the story of one vile aspect of a horrible system. The title refers to the First Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: the outer ring of damnation where virtuous pagans reside. They are spared the flames and the grotesque punishments of deeper circles, but they are still in eternal Hell—and there is no hope of leaving it. Solzhenitsyn takes that metaphor shows it is the reality of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system, showing how intellectual prisoners, though treated better than the starving multitudes in labor camps, still inhabit an eternal inferno.

The First Circle as Metaphor

The sharashka—the special prison where engineers, linguists, and scientists work for the Soviet state—stands in for Dante’s First Circle. The inmates are granted privileges: they have beds, books, and food, and they are spared the freezing forests and death quotas of Kolyma or Vorkuta. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this is still Hell. They cannot see their families, their lives are suspended indefinitely, and they are harnessed to serve the same tyrannical system that destroyed them.

Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor is glaringly accurate when prisoners face the prospect of being transferred out of the sharashka into the “real” Gulag. Instead of relief, they feel terror—but also a strange certainty. In the harsher camps, stripped of privileges, there is no illusion: one knows beyond doubt that he is in Hell. In the First Circle, by contrast, the comforts deceive; they risk lulling the prisoner into thinking survival is enough. Solzhenitsyn exposes the cruelty of a system that even in its “mercies” is an instrument of damnation.

Humor and Torment

The inmates of the first circle can be very funny. Solzhenitsyn does not present unrelieved misery; he shows how men, even in bondage, share laughter as a means of survival. The dialogues among prisoners sparkle with irony and wit. They mock the absurdities of bureaucrats, trade jokes about Stalinist slogans, and puncture the pomposity of the officials who guard them. The gallows humor is often bitter, but it underscores how the human spirit resists even in chains.

At the same time, the novel is suffused with torment. The small humiliations—the inability to visit a wife, the forced participation in projects that strengthen the secret police, the betrayal of colleagues—create a steady rhythm of despair. Solzhenitsyn captures not only physical imprisonment but also moral torment. Many prisoners wrestle with the temptation to collaborate, to use their talents to build the machinery of repression. The novel insists that the Gulag was not just a site of suffering but also a test of conscience, where the stakes were one’s soul as much as one’s body.

The Portrait of Stalin’s Soviet Union

Beyond the prison walls, Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of Soviet life under Stalin. The novel opens with an NKVD officer wrestling with whether to denounce a diplomat who confided doubts about the regime. That single act of conscience—or cowardice—carries life-or-death consequences. The arbitrariness of power, the climate of fear, and the suffocating surveillance of everyday life are all laid bare. The state is shown not as a distant apparatus but as an intimate presence in every household, every phone call, every whisper among friends.

What makes In the First Circle throb with pain is that it reveals how a society can normalize terror. Families live under the constant threat of arrest; neighbors inform on one another; bureaucrats follow orders without question. The prison is only the most visible symbol of a larger cage enclosing the entire nation. Solzhenitsyn’s mastery is in showing the continuum of oppression—from the First Circle to the labor camps to the ordinary citizen’s apartment block—each a cog in Stalin’s vast machinery of repression and death.

The End of Illusion

The novel’s conclusion brings the metaphor full circle. When some of the First Circle prisoners are slated to leave the sharashka, they realize with bitter clarity what awaits them: the true Gulag. Their dread is mingled with certainty. They will no longer be cushioned by privileges; they will no longer risk mistaking survival for freedom. In the harsher camps, the truth of Hell will be undeniable. Solzhenitsyn drives home the paradox: the First Circle is in some ways the best place in Hell, but because it is still Hell, its false mercies are the cruelest torment of all.

In the First Circle is a novel of moral witness. Solzhenitsyn fuses humor and torment, narrative sweep and personal testimony, to create a vision of Stalin’s Soviet Union as an infernal landscape. The metaphor of the First Circle resonates because it captures the essential cruelty of the regime: even its kindnesses were poisoned, even its privileges a form of damnation. To read this novel is to descend into Hell—but with eyes opened by a writer who refused to let truth be extinguished.

In the end, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that there is no such thing as a humane Hell. The First Circle may offer bread, books, and laughter, but it is still eternal confinement, a parody of life under a system that devoured its own people. That is why In the First Circle is a clear, sad, and piercing indictment of totalitarianism. Like his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this novel illustrates what Gulag Archipelago documents.

-----

I read this novel shortly after re-reading Purgatorio by Dante.  In this second book of the Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil is sent back to the First Circle of Hell without a word, after guiding Dante through Hell and up Mount Purgatory.  It is a cruel fate and a betrayal. 

 

The Remains of the Day – Two Readings, Two Shadows

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

 Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about a butler looking back on his life. Its prose is measured, elegant, and deceptively calm—much like Stevens himself, the narrator whose voice guides us through decades of service at Darlington Hall. On my first reading a decade ago, I was delighted with the irony of Stevens’s life: his unwavering devotion to a flawed master, his refusal to acknowledge love when it stood before him, his self-delusion disguised as dignity. The book struck me as quietly comic and deeply human. Ishiguro’s sentences glided, and Stevens’s missteps felt both tragic and oddly endearing.

When I returned to the book recently, however, I found it much darker. In the intervening years I have visited ten Nazi death camps in Poland, Germany, France, and Czechia. That experience pressed new weight onto Ishiguro’s novel, which is, among other things, a story about collaboration, denial, and the moral cost of misplaced loyalty. What once seemed like a sad but somewhat abstract tale of professional blindness now read as a chilling study in the ordinary mechanisms of evil.

Lord Darlington’s Shadow

On the earlier reading, Lord Darlington registered to me mainly as an aristocrat duped by history, a man too naïve to see through German diplomacy in the 1930s. His Nazi sympathies were embarrassing, even foolish, but I read them with a degree of detachment. This time, they chilled me. Darlington did not simply invite Herr von Ribbentrop for tea; he opened his estate to treasonous meetings where appeasement and collaboration were dressed in the garb of “gentlemanly understanding.” Knowing, now, what Auschwitz looks like, or Majdanek, or Ravensbrück, I could not skim past these episodes. They stood out like black stains across the otherwise polished wood of Ishiguro’s setting.

Ishiguro is too subtle to sermonize. Instead, he lets the horror seep through by contrast. The novel’s silences—its evasions, its unspoken acknowledgments—become thunderous. Darlington’s name, disgraced after the war, is defended by Stevens with painful loyalty, and each defense now reads like complicity. “Lord Darlington was a gentleman of great moral stature,” Stevens insists, and one feels the lie tightening like a noose.

The Choices Stevens Made

This darker emphasis recast Stevens for me as well. Before, I pitied him primarily for his personal failures: his inability to accept Miss Kenton’s affection, his cold dismissal of his father’s dying hours, his blindness to the possibility of a life beyond service. Those ironies still sting, but now they seem less like the gentle sadness of a missed romance and more like evidence of a man who gave away his humanity to serve a cause unworthy of him. Stevens’s professional pride, his endless rationalizations about “dignity,” become mechanisms of denial.

One moment that haunts me is Stevens’s absence at his father’s deathbed. He tells himself that duty requires him to attend to Lord Darlington’s important guests. Those guests, we later understand, include Nazi envoys. His choice is not only between filial love and professional duty; it is between human compassion and participation, however indirect, in the machinery of evil. On my first reading, I saw this as tragic misjudgment. Now it looks like moral blindness of the gravest kind.

The Machinery of Rationalization

Stevens’s narration, with its pauses and hedged justifications, is itself a case study in self-deception. Ishiguro crafts a voice that reveals by what it hides. Stevens insists, for instance, that “it is not my place” to question Lord Darlington’s political views, and in that deferential phrase lies the whole tragedy: the abdication of moral responsibility under cover of professionalism. He repeatedly reframes his life’s choices as minor sacrifices for the sake of dignity, yet the cumulative effect is devastating. The more he rationalizes, the more hollow his life becomes.

This rationalization felt poignant before; now it feels terrifyingly familiar. The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is full of men and women who “just did their jobs,” who persuaded themselves that loyalty excused silence. Stevens, in his small way, becomes their mirror.

Beauty and Darkness

And yet, the book remains beautiful. Ishiguro’s prose is spare, controlled, almost like chamber music. The road trip frame, with Stevens driving through the English countryside, provides moments of pastoral calm that contrast with the storms beneath the surface. The understated style amplifies the darkness because it refuses melodrama. By the time Stevens realizes—too late—that he has given his life to a cause both ignoble and loveless, the quietness of the revelation is more devastating than any outburst could be.

The irony that first delighted me is still there, but now it feels less like a gentle smile and more like a knife’s edge. Stevens is both comic and tragic, both absurd and horrifying. Ishiguro allows us to see how an ordinary man, clinging to ideals of service and dignity, can waste his life in the service of betrayal.

Reading The Remains of the Day twice, ten years apart, shows how literature deepens with us. The book I first encountered was about lost love and misguided loyalty. The book I read now, after walking through Auschwitz and Dachau, is about moral blindness, the banality of evil, and the human cost of devotion to the wrong master. Both readings are true; the difference is in the shadow that history casts.

Ishiguro’s genius lies in writing a novel supple enough to contain both. Stevens remains one of the great unreliable narrators of modern fiction, and The Remains of the Day remains, for me, a masterpiece that only grows darker—and more necessary—with time.

Also, The Movie

A postscript: I have not and will not see the movie version of The Remains of the Day.  My habit is not to see movie versions of novels I love. But in this case, I heard Ishiguro speak at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2015.  He was talking about his just-released book (my second favorite of  his novels) The Buried Giant. As soon as the host asked for questions, everyone wanted to talk about The Remains of the Day. 

One of the first questions was about the movie. In answering the questions, Ishiguro talked about being a young novelist and all the excitement of having his novel made into a movie.  He said, "I would not have chosen Anthony Hopkins as Stevens."  

The man who could play a convincing Hannibal Lecter, Odin, Nixon and C.S. Lewis could not also be the sort of shallow martinet that is Stevens.  

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

I grew up near the sea, several miles from the Atlantic Ocean north of Boston.  While the sea was always near, it was also remote for me. Our family went to the beach once or twice a year. I did not learn to swim until I was 59 years old.  Until I retired, the ocean was something I flew over.

Then a friend told me that the movie Master and Commander was based on a series of 21 novels.  I started reading them and was hooked. I read them all.  I am slowly re-reading the whole series on the Kindle when I travel.  

Then we moved to Panama for a year.  The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I rode along canal or the Pacific shore almost every day.  

In Panama I met Roger who retired at 51 and spent 21 years sailing around the world on a sailboat.  Roger loves the Master and Commander series, but his favorite sea novel is the Old Man and the Sea. I had never read it, but I had a copy with me. I read it and loved it.   

The old mariner goes far out to sea, alone. In his 80s he is still strong enough to fight the great fish day and night, a fish so big he can't get it in the boat. A fish torn apart and eaten by sharks so he returns with only a skeleton. But everyone knew he caught a great fish. 

------

Only once did I go fishing on the ocean. I was seven years old. A neighbor who had a boat took me.  We fished form mackerel by dropping lines with a half-dozen hooks wrapped in orange tape.  I cleaned dozens of fish.  We took a couple barrels of fish back to Stoneham and cooked fish on a grill.  To this day I love mackerel.

My oldest daughter Lauren became obsessed with fishing when she was 11 and 12 years old. I would take her to a farm pond to catch carp which we always threw back.  

 

New Friend, New List of Favorite Books

Joseph Brodsky around 1970. 

A new friend here in Panama, a cyclist, Yogi, and round-the-world-sailor named Roger, asked me for a list of books I would recommend. He is an avid reader and looking for new books he has not read.  

Roger has read all the greats of 19th Century Russian literature. Today I found out why.  Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970.  He took a
semester of creative writing with Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigre poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.  Roger won the Russian lit. professor lottery! 

I have a few books with me in Panama. Two are Blindness, the terrifying dystopian novel by Jose Saramago, and Tribe by the journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger. Both are excellent, so I gave them to Roger. 

Now the list. 

1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro are my favorites. I have read everything Ishiguro has written, most recently Klara and the Sun and seen his movie Living.  His writing is brilliant. These two books are my favorite.

2. Hannah Arendt. Philosopher and historian and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1906, a German Jew, she earned a PhD at Heidelberg in 1929 and fled Germany in 1933 just after the Nazi takeover.  She lived in France until WorldWar II began, then escaped to America in 1941. In 1951 She published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her best-known work defining the new tyranny of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  I have read all of her books. I most admire On Revolution a book that shows why nearly all revolutions devolve into tyranny, but America did not.  I love The Human Condition for explaining living in our world.  I am such a devoted fan, I am in a weekly reading group and go to Hannah Arendt Conferences.

3. George Orwell. I have read and re-read Orwell's novels.  A decade ago I read the 1200-page volume of his collected essays, finding endless entertainment.  His essay on brewing tea shows the utter snob that still lingered inside the Democratic Socialist writer. There is no better book explaining the rise of Stalin than Animal Farm.  A decade ago, I became convinced that 1984 was not prophetic after all, until I read about life in Communist China.     

4. Mark Helprin. I have been a devoted fan of Mark Helprin since read his novel Winters Tale in 1983.  I have since read every one of his novels, most recently The Ocean and the Stars.  His Paris in the Present Tense gave me a new and lovely view of my favorite city.  I plan to read Winters Tale for the third time this year.

5. - 12.  I love big books in which one author writes the entire history of humanity as in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  

Or of recorded human history as in Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris or another view Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. 

Or a history of American from the view of those without power, These Truths by Jill Lepore. 

Another delightful view of the past 500 years Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.  

I recently read Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montifiore. I plan to read his The World: A Family History of Humanity.  But I also want to read his Jerusalem.

An aside on these books is that I believe recent histories are the best. The old histories did not have access to all the new data. That perspective here.

And another aside! If you read books in translation, read the newest translation available.  The latest translation will be clearest and will correct the mistakes of predecessors.  If you read Scriptures in translation, read a translation by one person.  A committee compromises. One person may be wrong, but they won't be tepid. 

Back to the list.  

13. (for the unluckiest author on this list)  The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Son of a German father and French mother from territory between the countries. Enlists in the German Army at 17 in 1941. Spends the entire war in Russia. Returns home. Home is now in France. He serves in the French Foreign Legion to avoid prison. A soldier under any flag can be a good soldier.  

14. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli I re-read it for the tenth time last year, every Presidential election year since 1980.  I will read it again in 2028. Machiavelli's advice remains brilliant, relevant and chilling 500 years after he wrote it.  

15. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  A 2006 novel that imagines Russia in 2028 as a restored Tsarist empire, complete with Oprichniks, the assassins of Ivan the Terrible. It is a crazy, funny novel, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed it has a dark, prophetic side. 

16. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr. shows us the world after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange kills 95% of the population.  A Catholic monastery in the ruins of Utah preserves books after the survivors of the nuclear war burn books and scientists. The irony in this book is amazing.

17. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.  In a nine-month trip beginning in1830, Tocqueville found the heart of American democracy and wrote a book that became the central description of America for the world--including every political scientist in America.  He said in the 1830s that the 20th Century would be defined by the conflict between Russian and America.

18. C.S. Lewis. I have read all of the 39 books he wrote in his lifetime, plus posthumous collections. His novel Till We Have Faces is so good it is one of the books I read aloud to my daughters. The central characters look at the same thing at the same time and see two entirely different things.  So much of the book looks at perception and reality in ways I have not read anywhere else. His book The Four Loves gave me a frame for seeing the different ways people express love...and reject love. 

19. Vasily Grossman. Since Roger has read about and is very interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, my first recommendation is Life and Fate the novel of the Battle of Stalingrad and it's second volume titled Stalingrad. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who arrived the first day of the battle and reported then entire terrible fight.

20. Leo Tolstoy. Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. No book affected my view of life, death and eternity more than this one. I just re-read War and Peace, but Ivan Ilych is for me the best thing Tolstoy wrote.  

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

 Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to come.  The car in the middle lane doesn't move when the light turns green. The driver is blind.  I was surprised and then laughed asking myself, 'Why is a blind man in the driver's seat?' 

He has gone suddenly blind.  A weird white blindness. He cannot see anything except bright whiteness.  Pedestrians and other drivers help him from the car.  One drives the afflicted man home--then steals his car. His later retribution for his theft is horrible and final. We get the feeling of the terrible events to come from the first case of blindness.  

Very soon the personal tragedy becomes a wider and wider apocalypse of white blindness.  The first victim and many others are sent to an abandoned mental hospital. At that point, the story becomes The Lord of the Flies with adults.  Adults can try to impose order and care for each other, but when that fails, adults can be far more horrible than the worst children. In addition to theft, beatings and murder, rape adds another dimension of terror. 

The novel is gripping from first page to last.  I really wanted to know what would happen to the central characters as they and the world descended further and further into chaos.  In Blindness Jose Saramago shows us what life would be like with the whole world going blind. There's no water. No one cleans. Civilization breaks down. Tribes are all that is left. 

In the military, one of the expressions used to indicate a soldier is in very deep trouble is, "You are in a world of shit." The world of Blindness really is a "world of shit." Confined blind people shit in hallways. Walking means stepping in shit. Released from confinement blind people wander the streets of the city, and the streets and buildings become latrines.  

With everyone going blind no one can deliver food--or anything else.  Saramago writes vividly about this world of terror and filth. 

I will stop here. Endings should be experienced.  If you read dystopian books, I could not recommend this book more highly. 

My favorite dystopian novel is the post-nuclear-holocaust story A Canticle for Liebowitz. Blindness is just as brilliant, just as surprising, just as terrifying.

Blindness was one of the seventeen novels published by Saramago, a total of more than thirty books including poetry essays, diaries and children's books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998 for his work.