Curling up with a good book: Electric Eden

Full title: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
Author: Rob Young
Year published: 2010

Essential reading for anyone with an interest in music, history, the British Isles or actually just life itself. Two reviews of this fascinating journey into the "old weird Britain" as it were. The first is from Michel Farber in the Guardian and the second is from Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review.

In 1968, a beautiful young minstrel called Vashti Bunyan (right) forsook the city and set off on an 18-month journey along the leafy lanes of Albion, in a rickety cart pulled by her horse Bess, heading for a remote Scottish island where the Pied Piper himself had promised to set up a happy haven of artists, musicians and poets. No, this isn't a fable, it's the true story of one of Britain's less famous folk singers, chosen by Rob Young for the opening chapter of Electric Eden, his survey of British "visionary" music and, more broadly, Britain's love affair with the notion of a pastoral paradise. When Vashti reached the Pied Piper's island, Donovan had fled for LA, but Bunyan's bittersweet tale--replete with the noble hopelessness of her determination to live as if the 20th century never happened--is emblematic of a whole generation of youth who seemed keen to drop out of industrialised society and "get back to the garden".

The core of Young's book is the late 1960s and early 70s, when pop's aristocracy dressed in archaic raiment and a cornucopia of folk-rock groups had names such as Tintern Abbey, Oberon, Dulcimer, Parchment, Mr. Fox, Fotheringay, Fuschia and the Druids. But "Electric Eden" does an admirable job of tracing folk's origins back to the 19th century, when upper-class academics first sought to capture the exotic ballads of rural Britain in annotated form. In a 664-page exploration with plentiful side trips, Young casts his net over just about everyone in this country who ever revived or preserved the past: William Morris, morris dancers, Vaughn Williams, David Munrow's Early Music project, the makers of the movie "The Wicker Man," Cecil Sharp's English Folk Dance and Song Society, and so on.

It's a hugely ambitious undertaking that could be tackled from any number of angles. Young tries out quite a few, including quasi-fiction ("The battered Austin, its 50 years clearly legible in rust and mud flecks ..."), meditations on the theme of the four elements, and straight scholarly record. What keeps it consistently readable is the happy marriage between Young's incisive observation and his talent for a vivid phrase. He praises the "arachnoid fingerwork" of Nick Drake's guitar technique, speaks of "a tidal spray of cymbals", drumming that "patters like butterflies trapped in a balsa wood box". Contemplating the bucolic cover image of an album by Heron, he sums it up perfectly: "John Constable has become court photographer to the counterculture."

"Electric Eden" is by no means the first book to trace the modern reinvention of folk music. A farrago of essays called "The Electric Muse," originally published in 1975 to accompany a triple-LP set, was the standard text in its day, but several comprehensive studies have been published since the millennium. Britta Sweers's 2005 overview, "Electric Folk: The Changing Face of Traditional Music," features valuable interviews and is pitched at a reader with no prior knowledge (dutifully explaining who Bob Dylan is), but it shows its origins as a young German's university dissertation. Michael Brocken's "The British Folk Revival, 1944-2002," which focuses more on the mainstream and politics than Young's tome, would suit readers who wish to study the "movement" rather than have their tastes expanded.

In his coverage of leftwing balladeers such as Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Young does acknowledge British folk as a voice of anti-authoritarian protest but, as the 1960s advance, he dismisses them as irrelevances "holding their breath until the revolution came". In Young's account, the true revolution occurred inside drug-expanded heads, when disaffected youngsters went in search of their inner elf (or hobbit). An oversimplification of 60s/70s counterculture, but a crucial aspect of it, and Young explores it in juicy detail. The story gets especially rich when the sylvan nostalgia of British folkies blends into the worldwide hippy dream. The founders of Glastonbury festival wished to "stimulate the earth's nervous system with joy, appreciation and happiness so that our Mother planet would respond by breeding a happier, more balanced race of men". Or, as one Stonehenge camper put it: "We want to plant a garden of Eden where there will be guitars instead of guns and the sun will be our nuclear bomb." Young doesn't sneer, but allows the quixotic dignity of these doomed idealists to resonate in all its sadness.

In any case, Arcadian idealism, like John Barleycorn, dies only to be reborn, as "Electric Eden," with its wide historical scope, attests. The late-60s blossoming of Glastonbury was a revival of a Utopian project by Rutland Boughton, "communist, vegetarian and suffragette sympathiser", whose 1916 Glastonbury festival, supported by George Bernard Shaw, staged an Arthurian opera on a shoestring budget. ("The battlements of Camelot castle were delineated by four stout yeomen.") Young has a special fondness for madcap eccentrics, and Albion has always been well stocked with those. We meet the composer Peter Warlock during the second world war, riding his motorcycle naked and drunk through a sleepy Kent village, "indulging in threesomes with local girls", and "singing raucous sea shanties ... in an attempt to drown out the hymns being sung in the neighbouring chapel". Had time machines existed, Warlock might have hung around with magick enthusiast Graham Bond, whose quirks included performing exorcisms on Long John Baldry's cat.

Young's background is editing "The Wire," a magazine devoted to marginal music, so it's not surprising that he has scant regard for the more commercially successful folk-rock acts, such as Jethro Tull and the later incarnations of Steeleye Span. Cult figure Bill Fay (right), whose achingly compassionate social commentaries achieved sales so meagre that he was reduced to packing fish in Selfridges, is allotted several pages, while Ralph McTell's "Streets of London"--one of the most popular English folk records ever--is not even mentioned. This favouring of the obscure over the bestselling lends somewhat dubious support to the argument that folk had a brief heyday which was brought to an end by glam, punk and/or Thatcherism. If many of the acts that "flourished" during folk's glory years sold zilch, while other acts enjoyed brisk business after the genre was supposedly in terminal decline, does this mean that Young's generalisations are based purely on aesthetics? Are the stars of later decades--Billy Bragg, Clannad, the Pogues, Enya, et al--evidence of folk's perennial ability to adapt to new musical fashions, or did Young disqualify them as redundant postscripts to a closed canon? The absence of chart placings and cash registers from this narrative is artistically commendable but muddies the historical picture.

In the concluding chapters, Young offers lengthy profiles of Kate Bush, Talk Talk and David Sylvain–-fine musicians all, but a far cry from Fairport Convention. The book ends with avant-garde luminaries Coil, whose work is undeniably suffused with the paganism that attracted the folkies, but whose actual sound --lysergic, eerie electronica--is galaxies removed from folk. Young wants us to accept that his theme is not a specific genre but visionary musical landscapes in general. If so, various realms to which this book gives little or no attention (the misty peaks of prog rock, the fantasised Zion of Rastafarianism, the ecstasy-enhanced Eden of 90s rave) are glaring omissions.

Better to regard "Electric Eden" as what it is, at heart: the best of the currently available books on the modern British folk phenomenon. Despite its biases and digressions, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time. While unadventurous souls may feel Young takes them on a ramble too distant from the safety of their local CD store, I've already made several precious musical discoveries thanks to this book and I expect to make more. Just as there are unspoilt bits of British countryside hidden in the spaces between the motorways, there are musical pleasures hidden in the overgrown woods of an enchanted past.
The brilliant and largely forgotten critic Seymour Krim (1922-1989) grew up, as have so many American readers, worshiping those writers who captured what he called “the unofficial seamy side of American life.” The excitable Krim put it this way: “I dreamed Southern accents, Okies, bourbon-and-branchwater, Gloria Wandrous, jukejoints, Studs Lonigan, big trucks and speeding highways, Bigger Thomas, U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!”

Krim’s ecstatic catalog suggested a sense of the “old, weird America” that fed Greil Marcus’s essential 1997 book about American folk culture and music, "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes." (That book has since been issued under the title “The Old, Weird America.”) Mr. Marcus examined, through Dylan and the Band, as if in Imax wide-angle, “how old stories turn into new stories.”

The British rock critic Rob Young’s excellent new book, “Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music,” is a response of sorts to Mr. Marcus’s volume, and to Krim’s longing for a raw-boned alternative America. Mr. Young’s book, which is largely about England’s amped-up folk music during the late 1960s and early ’70s, is ardent and learned in its search for what the author calls “a speculative Other Britain.”

Mr. Young is a former editor of "The Wire," the eclectic British music magazine. He originally conceived “Electric Eden,” he says, as a group biography of artists including Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Pentangle, Vashti Bunyan and the Incredible String Band. Collectively, this music means a lot to him; it represents, he argues, “British folk-rock’s high-water mark.”

Gathering string for this project, he tripped into a sonic wormhole. His book becomes an insinuating meditation on how British music — and all British literature and art — “accumulates a powerful charge when it deals with a sense of something unrecoupable, a lost estate.”

England didn’t have a W.P.A. or a Leadbelly or a Jack Kerouac. It has no tradition of the open road, so urgent an injection into American culture. But Mr. Young, working his way through poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley; through William Morris’s novel “News From Nowhere” (1890) and “Paradise Lost”; through films up to and including "Withnail and I" among many other cultural artifacts, provides a sense of British music as “a primordial soup waiting for an electrical spark.”

That spark arrived from musicians who glanced back in order to rush forward. They intelligently plundered, Mr. Young writes, “pagan chant and Christian hymns; medieval, Tudor and Restoration secular sounds; the nature-worshiping verse of the revolutionary Romantics.” They developed, he says, “an occult communion with the British landscape.”

The resulting agrarian noise thrills Mr. Young. About an early record by the band Steeleye Span, he observes the way acoustic and amplified instruments “rub up against each other like a shedload of rusted, notched and pitted farm implements.”

Mr. Young charts the history of Britain’s folk movement, through the work of early song collectors like Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, and the songs (both original and traditional) of ruddy midcentury performers like Ewan MacColl. He is quite hilarious while dispatching effete, drawing-room folk singing. He quotes one critic lambasting the championing of “clodhopping bumpkin folderol” by, all too often, “prancing curate(s) in cricket flannels.”

The author is blissfully quotable. He calls Nick Drake (left) “a lost, inchoate genius that you sometimes wish you could grab by the shoulders and shake.” Talking about Fairport Convention’s talented drummer, Dave Mattacks, he doesn’t note just the “funky plod” of his attack. He writes: “In his hands, the beats fall with a heaviness that seems to gouge at the earth itself.”

These lines about the early years of the British psychedelic movement are so terrific that they contain the seeds of a sour, funny, lovely Philip Larkin-ish poem: “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a host of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games on the cliffs of Big Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment.”

Artists like Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pink Floyd are considered in this volume. But Mr. Young is more interested in the era’s crisscrossing undercurrents. He resurrects and contemplates the work of many lesser-known musicians, among them John Martyn, Mick Softley, Shirley Collins and Bill Fay.

The second half of “Electric Eden” grows, occasionally, mossy. There’s an awful lot of earnest talk about Druids and Stonehenge and Tarot cards. You may begin to hear the clotted chords of the Spinal Tap song “Break Like the Wind” welling up in the background.

“The sonic wizardry made heads smoke,” he writes, feebly, about an Incredible String Band album. “The pantheistic fusion flared like a bonfire of religions.” At this and other moments you suspect someone’s been having a cheeky reefer in the potting shed.

Mr. Young traces the way the current freak-folk movement has picked up on much of this music. (Ms. Bunyan sang on a 2004 Devendra Banhart album). He is less convincing when arguing for more recent performers, minor enthusiasms like Kate Bush, David Sylvian and the band Talk Talk. Are these really the finest he can come up with?

At its frequent best, though, “Electric Eden” is a lucid and patriotic guided tour, as vigorous as one of Heathcliff’s strolls across the moors. “Britain’s literature, poetry, art and music abounds in secret gardens, wonderlands, paradises lost, postponed or regained,” he writes, before announcing some of them: Avalon, Xanadu, Arden, Narnia, Elidor, Utopia.

“Electrification comes in many forms,” Mr. Young says. His book throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to download some of the music that’s filling his head.

Mr. Young’s book is a declaration: England is not just older than America. It’s weirder, too.

Curling up with a good book: Written Lives

Complete title: Written Lives
Author: Javier Marias (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Year published: 2007

I have a copy of this one tucked away in my closet, so a big thanks goes to the mighty Germantown library for not having to dig it out in order to enjoy it once again. The Spanish author Javier Marias explores the various peccadilloes, neuroses and overall odd behavior of some of literature's best known authors. You've heard it said that musicians are different? Well, authors take a back seat to no one. The review below was written by Alex Wenger and published on the Words Without Borders web site.

It is a small but unmistakable invitation to chaos in the prologue to his newly translated Written Lives when Javier Marias deadpans that he has made up "almost nothing" in the content of this book. Written Lives is a collection of biographies of canonical authors, and making up anything would constitute an act of mischief upon both the reader and literary history as a whole. In fact, the whole project reads like a gentle prank: to treat the greatest writers as if they were short story characters. Marias thankfully has a masterful touch, and his toying with the tradition has a purpose.

Most readers will be excited by the notion of William Faulkner and Henry James as short story characters, a well-founded faith. The stories are irresistible. James, we are told, was fussy as a guest, never forgiving Flaubert for his host's having received him in a work-shirt. But he found it the height of civilization when Guy de Maupassant greeted him for lunch in the company of a masked and otherwise naked woman. Is it true? The reader will certainly want it to be true. Indeed, the deliciousness of the stories—did Malcolm Lowry really break the neck of a friend's pet rabbit while petting it and then lug the corpse about with him for two days?—often threaten to appear impossibly fanciful. They suggest the work more of a confectioner than a gardener.

This doubt and the anxiety it produces seem central to Marias's project. At some point, a great writer becomes a necessary appurtenance to his own pages, and his absence creates a problem for his readers. Is there any more biographied personage than William Shakespeare, a man about whom almost nothing is known? So slender is our dossier on the man that we would throw it out entirely, deny attribution of authorship, and give him a new identity more easily documented, perhaps Sir Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe.

Larry McMurtry once wrote that the lives of writers are almost always more interesting than the works they produce—a useful, if bizarre, overstatement. Writers can become ultimate characters, in a way. It isn't that we compare Nabokov directly to Dolly Haze and judge the relative excitements of their stories. It is rather that Nabokov is all at once attendant with, subordinated to, and in possession of Lolita and all of the rest (Humbert, Kinbote, Pnin, Quilty, etc.), with the added benefit of being credited with a corporeal existence. That the author can be photographed makes this addition of a body only better.

Pictures play a major role in Written Lives. Each biography is preceded by a portrait of its subject, and the final chapter of the book is an essay on author photographs. In this essay, Marias describes the "perfect artist." A perfect artist is an artist who both has been photographed and has died. Marias chooses not to explain this perfection, but implied is the idea that in leaving behind an image after a death, a transfiguration is possible. Having sailed for Byzantium, the writer is rendered into his own bust and set alongside his creations, the artifice of eternity his reward. Without the image, the bust would be impossible—and the artist without a bust could hardly be perfect.

Perhaps oddly, then, it is a fixation on eternity or the eternal that most draws Marias's ire among his biography subjects. He admits in his prologue to having failed to generate affection for three men—James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Yukio Mishima. The self-seriousness of each man is highlighted and his dreams of posthumous celebrity ridiculed. None of these three biographies are much fun, coming across as mean-spirited and not a little puzzling. For what writer, let alone what great writer, has ever been utterly free of the sins of vanity and self-seriousness? Such invidious distinctions seem especially curious coming from a writer such as Marias, whose ambition and accomplishments make him a yearly candidate for the Nobel Prize. But these minor dissonances detract little from the overwhelming effervescence of the book. The past becomes all text and image, as has been said in one form or another by Derrida, DeLillo, and countless others. Marias offers us one of the sunniest upshots yet of that formulation without sacrificing intellectual depth. And we can all be grateful to him for the image of Isak Dinesen at a dinner party, casually menacing her boyfriend with a revolver.

Curling up with a good book: On China

Complete title: On China
Author: Henry Kissinger
Year published: 2011

Henry Kissinger is one of my all-time favorite statesmen. And not only because--like me--he loves soccer! Kissinger has been in the forefront of seismic world shifts over the last few decades, often times playing a vital role in creating and shaping a better future. In this book, he draws upon his extensive experience in diplomacy with the Chinese and offers his perspective on how this once sleepy, backwater country has grown into a world superpower--if not THE superpower. Interesting ready and lots to think about. The following review was written by Max Frankel, who covered Kissinger's historic trip to China in 1972 with president Richard Nixon, and was originally published in the New York Times on May 13.

Henry Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” as he approaches 88, he reflects on his remarkable run.

To the degree that Washington and Beijing now understand each other, it is in good measure because Kissinger has been assiduously translating for both sides, discerning meaning in everything from elliptical jokes to temper tantrums. At every juncture, he has been striving to find “strategic concepts” that could be made to prevail over a history of conflict, mutual grievance and fear. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, then secretary of state for Nixon and Gerald Ford, and since 1977 as a private interlocutor extraordinaire, Kissinger has been unwaveringly committed to surmounting what he considers the legitimate Chinese resentment of American interference in their internal affairs and Americans’ distaste for China’s brutal suppression of ethnic, religious and political dissent.

The surprise buried in his lumbering review of Sino-American relations is that the much ballyhooed Nixon-Kissinger journeys to China in 1971-72 turned out to have been the easy part. “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he writes. “It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” Both nations were exhausted from war (Vietnam, clashes on the Soviet border) and domestic strife (antiwar protests in Nixon’s case, the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s). Both were determined to resist Soviet advances and so could quickly agree to make common cause. The menace of Moscow took the leaders’ minds off confrontations in Vietnam and Taiwan and quelled their ritual denunciations, whether of international imperialism or Communism. They decided that the adversary of my adversary was my pal, and for more than a decade that was fruitfully that.

But that was a different time. China finally escaped from Mao Zedong’s mad doctrine of perpetual revolution and from the enfeebling nostrums of central planning; it became an industrial powerhouse. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed. And the United States, feeling supreme, began promoting democracy with missionary zeal even as it grew dangerously addicted to foreign oil, goods and credit. The radical shift in the balance of power turned China and the United States into mutually dependent economic giants, but it left them without an overarching strategic design of partnership.

It is to demonstrate the need for such a design that Kissinger reviews the ups and downs of Sino-American relations, reaching even into ancient Chinese history to define national characteristics. (He finds it apt that the Chinese like to play “wei qi,” or “go,” a protracted game of encirclement while we play chess, looking for control of the center and total victory.) Kissinger draws heavily on much recent scholarship and on notes of his trips to Beijing to celebrate the pragmatism of Mao’s successors. He says they are content to remain within their restored historic frontiers, willing to await a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, and most determined to continue their remarkable economic growth and to eradicate China’s still widespread poverty. He is less confident about America’s capacity to sustain a steady foreign policy, noting that “the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions” is a constant invitation to other nations to “hedge their bets” on us.

As students of Kissinger well know, he has long considered democracy to be a burden on statecraft — both the clamor of democracy within the United States and our agitations for democracy in other lands.

He recalls yet again his agonies in office in the 1970s, when he thought that American demonstrations during the Vietnam War could have misled Mao into believing that a “genuine world revolution” was at hand. He argues that the “destruction” of Nixon in the Watergate crisis, the withdrawal of Congressional support for Vietnam, new curbs on presidential war powers and the “hemorrhaging” of intelligence secrets all combined to undermine the quasi alliance with China, making America appear ineffectual against the Soviets. He is glad that Jimmy Carter did not let his human rights concerns upset relations with China and that Ronald Reagan’s cheerful personality overcame the “almost incomprehensible contradictions” of his dealings with Beijing even as he promoted the idea of an independent Taiwan.

The severest test of the quasi alliance, of course, was the brutal suppression of democratic strivings in Tiananmen Square in 1989. That violent crackdown also tested Kissinger’s tolerance for the assertion of American values in foreign relations.

Looking back, he believes everything depends on circumstances: “There are instances of violations of human rights so egregious,” he writes, “that it is impossible to conceive of benefit in a continuing relationship; for example, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the genocide in Rwanda. Since public pressure shades either into regime change or a kind of abdication, it is difficult to apply to countries with which a continuous relationship is important for American security. This is especially the case with China, so imbued with the memory of humiliating intervention by Western societies.”

And so Kissinger admires the way President George H. W. Bush, “with skill and elegance,” walked the “tightrope” of punishing China with sanctions after Tiananmen while simultaneously apologizing with private letters and special emissaries. President Bill Clinton tried applying pressure for a time, Kissinger notes, but was shown no gratitude when he wisely relented; the Chinese “did not view the removal of a unilateral threat as a concession, and they were extraordinarily touchy regarding any hint of intervention in their domestic affairs.” And President George W. Bush, despite his “freedom agenda,” earns Kissinger’s praise for overcoming “the historic ambivalence between America’s missionary and pragmatic approaches,” by means of “a sensible balance of strategic priorities.”

If America’s preference for democratic governance is made the main condition for progress on other issues with China, Kissinger concludes, “deadlock is inevitable.” Those who battle to spread American values deserve respect. “But foreign policy must define means as well as objectives, and if the means employed grow beyond the tolerance of the international framework or of a relationship considered essential for national security, a choice must be made.” That choice “cannot be fudged,” he insists, even as he attempts to protect his flanks with a fudge of his own: “The best outcome in the American debate would be to combine the two approaches: for the idealists to recognize that principles need to be implemented over time and hence must be occasionally adjusted to circumstance; and for the ‘realists’ to accept that values have their own reality and must be built into operational policies.”

Still, in the end, Kissinger votes for national security über alles. Scattered through his history are tributes to American values and commitments to human dignity, which may indeed sometimes drive our policies beyond calculations of the national interest. Exactly that happened, in fact, after “On China” went to press, when President Obama ventured into Libya. Kissinger was perhaps surprised when that humanitarian intervention and bid for regime change failed to evoke a Chinese veto at the United Nations. But in Asia now more than Europe, he argues, “sovereignty is considered paramount,” and any attempt “from the outside” to alter China’s domestic structure “is likely to involve vast unintended consequences.” Besides, as he used to insist while practicing realpolitik in Washington, the cause of peace is also a moral pursuit.

This central theme of Kissinger’s experience and counsel must be distilled from the sometimes ­meandering and largely familiar history he tells in “On China.” Only in its last pages does he discuss the essential question of future Sino-American relations: With no common enemy to bind them, what will keep the peace and promote collaboration and trust between the world’s major ­powers?

Kissinger addresses this question by looking to the past, a memorandum written by a senior official of the British Foreign Office, Eyre Crowe, in 1907. Crowe argued that it was in Germany’s interest to “build as powerful a navy as she can afford” and that this would itself lead to “objective” conflict with the British Empire, no matter what German diplomats said or did. There is today a “Crowe school of thought” in the United States, Kissinger observes, which sees China’s rise “as incompatible with America’s position in the Pacific” and therefore best met with pre-emptively hostile policies. He perceives growing anxieties in both societies and fears they are exacerbated by Americans who claim that democracy in China is a prerequisite for a trusting relationship. He warns that the implied next cold war would arrest progress in both nations and cause them to “analyze themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies” when in reality their main competition is more likely to be economic than military.

Indulging his habitual preference for diplomatic architecture, Kissinger insists that the common interests the two powers share should make possible a “co-evolution” to “a more comprehensive ­framework.” He envisions wise leaders creating a “Pacific community” comparable to the Atlantic community that America has achieved with Europe. All Asian nations would then participate in a system perceived as a joint endeavor rather than a contest of rival Chinese and American blocs. And leaders on both Pacific coasts would be obliged to “establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect,” making a shared world order “an expression of parallel national aspirations.”

That was indeed the mission of the very first Kissinger journey to Beijing. And while he does not quite say so, he invests his hopes in a concert of nations represented, of course, by multiple Kissingers.

Curling up with a good book: On Rare Birds

Author: Anita Albus
Year published: 2011

The German author Anita Albus has given us a real treasure--a book that looks beautiful while informing and stimulating at the same time. Albus relates the sad, poignant tales of extinct and disappearing birds, such as the passenger pigeon, the dodo and Spix's macaw. Not to sound hippy-dippy here or anything, but I think when we lose an animal species, we become less of a race as humans. It should be up to us--the most civilized, advanced and smartest of all the animals--to help preserve and take care of animals, not destroy them.

Here's a quick review written by Michael Kerrigan and originally published at Scotsman.com.

This is a bookseller's nightmare: where is so ebulliently uncategorisable a title to be shelved? Science, art, literature, history? Wherever it is, it's a reader's delight. It's also a joy for anyone who loves fine art, fine birds or both, bringing together plates from historic painters and engravers--and, a real revelation, from Albus herself. The visual and the verbal are equally important to this German artist--but then hers is a creativity for which everything interconnects; and for which, more specifically, a crisis in conservation is a crisis in human thought. She is among authors drawn to the work of the old natural scientists and their lack of drive to compartmentalise, to separate out the sciences from the humanities, or to develop a different sense of wonder. Albus quotes poet Paul Valéry: "The more I look at you, animal, the more I become man in spirit."

Curling up with a good book: The short stories of Haruki Murakami

Titles: The Elephant Vanishes/after the quake/Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Years published (English translations): 1993/2002/2006

Skillfully mixing the mundane with the mystical, the here-and-now with the out there, Haruki Murakami is one of our finest living authors. His style is instantly recognizable and his works are always a joy.

Murakami characters are forever ironing their shirts, or doing sit-ups, or listening to classic rock or jazz, or watching baseball. They hold jobs in publishing houses and department stores, making good, not great, money. The usual stuff. But nothing is never completely as it seems in a Murakami work. Because while you're sitting their listening to your Stones record, a giant talking frog could appear in your living room. Or a girlfriend could simply disappear. Or a stone could assert otherworldly powers on the person who finds it. His work is frequently eerie and at times unsettling. Also too, it can be very funny.

But a Murakami work is never abstruse--indeed legend has it that Murakami got the idea for his first novel while watching a baseball game and just gave it a try, simply to see if he could write a novel. The common man touch is ever-present. But Murakami's works are also very thought-provoking--they force you to look at things closely, differently, examining the most minute aspects of everything. Because the littlest thing could be very important.

The first collection here is "The Elephant Vanishes," comprising stories written between 1983 and 1990. Here is a review by Herbert Mitgang, originally published in the New York Times on March 28, 1993. Mitgang's main beef is that the stories aren't "Japanese" enough, whatever that means (the article is headlined "As Japanese as Burt Bacharach--why Burt Bacharach of all people. I can see the Times editors having a lengthy, passionate discussion on an American who was the closest to Murakami in terms of Japanese-ness. Ronald Reagan? Not nearly Japanese enough. Johnny Depp? Maybe too Japanese. Burt Bacharach. Aah, that one fits pretty good! Actually, the characters in one of the stories listen to some Burt Bacharach records, but I like my little digression and will thus keep it in.). Obviously Murakami is Japanese but he's spent a great amount of time in North America and Western Europe, so it would probably be unfair to expect him to temper his Western influences. Still a worthwhile review, though, and ultimately very favorable.

Few cultures excite or upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers, alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for some--Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them--a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of business--a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic espionage.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in "The Elephant Vanishes," his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the novels "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" and "A Wild Sheep Chase.") These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to foreigners-- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias. Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual reference to a "Tokyoite" signals that we aren't in America. His narrators-- young, urban, downwardly mobile-- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain "stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth." They read Len Deighton novels and "War and Peace," not Kobo Abe and "The Tale of Genji." Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost exclusively Western.

This is a Japan characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," for instance, a young man's search for a missing cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of parallel houses, a path "neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal." There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.

Similarly, in "A Window," another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to Burt Bacharach linger for years in the narrator's memory. "The weather was lovely that day," he recalls, "and over the railings of the building's verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance." Again, nothing happens. The wife and the teacher are "like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train," linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense of absence.

And in the haunting title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper, from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective and proportion.

In fact, all the stories in "The Elephant Vanishes" take place in parallel worlds not so much remote from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr. Murakami something to revel in.

In the story called "Sleep," for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to articulate the source of this strangeness. "Honestly," she observes, " 'strange' is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange."

Likewise, in "The Second Bakery Attack" a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in the car, even though "neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." One recalls the maxim given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in "A Window," who says to his student: "Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing."

Makeshift indeed. Yet even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray "like scales from a mermaid"; shotgun shells rustling "like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow"; melted ice working its way through a cocktail "like a tiny ocean current."

"After I gave up sleeping," the narrator of "Sleep" observes, "it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition." In this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of "The Elephant Vanishes," who continues, after the disappearance, "to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from that world." Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary, doesn't live there anymore.

It's as if a kind of social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, "people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function." The problem, as he notes in a story called "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," is that "no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another."

No metaphor could suit more exactly these stories in which animals--elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, even a tragically mistreated "little green monster"--figure so crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are "warm with life, hopelessly"-- and, I would add, wonderfully--"unstable."

"after the quake" (apparently, Murakami insists on lower casing the title, according to his fine translator Jay Rubin). The stories here were written in response to the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995 and are meant to be linked thematically. This is the shortest collection of the three--and my personal favorite. The usual themes--alienation, loneliness, despair--are there in spades. In addition, as translator Rubin says "the central characters in 'after the quake' live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on TV or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives. They are forced to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years."

A very good review, originally published in The Guardian on Oct. 19, 2000 and written by an impressed Alex Clark.

"The short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule," pronounces Junpei, a dedicated practitioner of the form who falters over a greater length, and if Haruki Murakami's beguiling collection is intended to be a corrective to that dismal piece of sooth-saying, it succeeds magnificently. But it does more than simply prove that fragments of fiction can conjure entire worlds of thought and feeling in the space of a few pages; by subtly linking each of these pieces to a central theme--that of fragmentation itself--it demonstrates that snatches of narrative might, in the end, be all that we can truthfully claim rights over.

In "Landscape with Flatiron", a painter haunted by the unlikely possibility of dying trapped in a fridge devotes himself to building bonfires with an obsessive craftsmanship that belies his assertion that their sole purpose is to "warm people's hearts". "Stepping back a few paces, he would examine in detail the form he had constructed, adjust some of the pieces, then circle around to the other side for another look, repeating the process several times." It's an obvious comment on Murakami's own writing technique, in which ideas are reiterated and refined until they seem to reach a moment of almost sublime self-effacement.

Each of these stories, as their collective title suggests, takes place in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, but because none of them is directly linked to it, they allow Murakami to examine its effects obliquely, from within his own infinitely nuanced metaphysical world.

If an earthquake is what happens beneath the ground, beyond our sight and immediate comprehension, then so too are our individual lives shaped by psychological and emotional tremors that we find hard to grasp, and subject to numerous unpredictable and violent aftershocks. In "UFO in Kushiro", a character whom we never view directly makes that connection almost instinctively; glued to the scenes of devastation on television for days after the quake, she rouses herself only to walk out on her husband, leaving him with the thought that "living with you is like living with a chunk of air".

To an extent, she's right: travelling to freezing Hokkaido because "cold or hot it was all the same to him", displaying next to no curiosity about the mysterious package a colleague has asked him to deliver, drinking coffee that is "more sign than substance", Komura shows little knowledge of or interest in his own interior landscape. Small wonder, then, that by the end of the story, impotence has been added to his list of worries.

If other characters are more preoccupied with delving beneath the surface, it doesn't always do them much good, because Murakami's point is that such a lack of fascination is systemic and endemic; only a massive shock might be able to dislodge it. A thyroid specialist in the throes of a sweaty menopause travels to Bangkok for a conference, and afterwards treats herself to a holiday in a luxury resort, where darkness impinges periodically on her insistent fantasies of what might have happened to an unnamed enemy from Kobe. An unsought meeting with a spirit doctor provides the possibility of release, but even then she seeks to neutralise the epiphanic with rational language. "If you put those feelings into words," counsels her discreet guide, "they will turn into lies."

Elsewhere, a confused young man experiences a similarly life-altering moment, realising that in the "ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing", lies something vital, that "these, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth".

But if the seismic, real-life event that provoked After the Quake smacks of portentousness, Murakami hasn't abandoned the inspired surrealism that marked out novels like A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as feats of inventive comic genius. Where else could you read of a giant frog persuading a mundane bank clerk to engage an evil subterranean worm in mortal combat, and take it seriously? Who else might allow their frog to quote Hemingway and Dostoevsky and to deliver sentences like "I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog"?

In the ruins of Kobe, as in the sarin gas attacks that he surveyed in his non-fiction work Underground , Murakami detects a "world devoid of light", a narrative arena where "meaning itself broke down". In these dazzlingly elegant stories, he restores some of the light and some of the meaning, arguing that the possibility of moments of optimism and connection is not something we should take for granted. Even Junpei, his pessimistic and passive short-story writer, dares to hope and plans a change of artistic direction: "I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end," he tells us, "who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love." In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'être, to our very great advantage.

"Blind Willow" closes out the Murakami book fair in fine fashion. It's a large collection, encompassing stories written between 1981 and 2005. And it's a uniformly excellent collection as well. In the introduction to the English-language edition, Murakami notes "I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.’ This elegant analogy serves to give the reader some idea of what awaits. As does this review, written by Terrence Rafferty and originally published in the New York Times on Sept. 17, 2006.

In the introduction to “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” Haruki Murakami writes that he considers this book “the first real short story collection” he has published abroad since “The Elephant Vanishes” in the early 1990’s. No, he hasn’t forgotten “After the Quake” (2002), his slim volume of short fiction inspired by the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but that, he says, “was more like a concept album.” So Murakami’s idea of a “real short story collection” is a true miscellany, a grab bag containing prizes of widely variable shape, size and value. Or something--to borrow his own frame of reference--more like one of those overstuffed, career-spanning CD box sets, in which finished, studio-polished work gets tumbled together with demos, alternate versions, remixes, B-sides and stray tracks from obscure tribute albums.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” doesn’t damage the book in the way it would a collection by, say, William Trevor or Alice Munro, because there’s a fair amount of randomness built right into Murakami’s method--a sense that anything can happen at any time, in the world or on the page, and that the best strategy is just to hang on and see what comes next. As one character in this volume, a female tightrope walker, tells another, a male story writer: “You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does. ... And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.” As a philosophy of life, this may sound a touch banal, but it is precisely the advice that Junpei-- whose art and whose life are both too tightly controlled--needs to hear. And it is also, you can’t help feeling, a bit of wisdom that has enabled Murakami himself to survive and, maybe, deepen as a writer over the two and a half decades of taking things in that this odd, bracing sampler represents.

The 24 stories here include a couple (“A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” and “New York Mining Disaster”) that were, the author says, among his very first attempts at the short form, and five he wrote only a year ago, which were published in Japan as an independent volume, “Strange Tales From Tokyo,” and which remain together at the end of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.” (In its original Japanese incarnation, you might say, the wonderful “Strange Tales From Tokyo” could be taken for a concept album; in the context of this larger collection, it’s more like the great climactic medley on “Abbey Road.”) The 19 stories that precede the final five, though, are arranged in a seemingly helter-skelter way: nonchronologically, and without any discernible intent to group them thematically or stylistically. Melancholy, more or less realistic stories like “Hunting Knife” and “Tony Takitani” bump up against goofy little fables like “Dabchick” and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes,” both of which feature rather unpleasant talking birds. Readers in search of a clear, linear progression--much less a solution to the mystery of Murakami’s art--get no help from the writer himself. They may even find themselves feeling like the Zen detective narrator of one of the “Strange Tales,” who wraps up an unsuccessful (and strikingly desultory) investigation with these words: “I imagine my search will continue — somewhere. A search for something that could very well be shaped like a door. Or maybe something closer to an umbrella, or a doughnut. Or an elephant. A search that, I hope, will take me where I’m likely to find it.”

That’s about as well defined as things get in MurakamiLand, where sudden dislocations of time and space are pretty much the norm, and a certain, let’s say, ontological indeterminacy hangs like a low cloud over everything lived or imagined or dreamed or remembered. “For a few seconds,” says the narrator of the title story, “I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see didn’t exist. Where the invisible did.” That place is the site of almost all Murakami’s fiction, from the sprawling novels “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “Kafka on the Shore” to the briefest stories in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”: a terrain that, it seems, even the author is loath to map too precisely. If anything, this new collection has been shaped to keep boundaries as fluid and indistinct as possible — to blur the lines of demarcation between early Murakami and late, between realism and fantasy, between high seriousness and low, slapstick whimsy. (And, for that matter, between stories and novels: two of the best pieces here, “Firefly” and “Man-Eating Cats,” are short stories that grew into the novels “Norwegian Wood” and “Sputnik Sweetheart.”)

There’s no reliable way to get your bearings in Murakami’s world, but if you were to put a gun--or even a reasonably sharp-tipped umbrella--to my head and demand that I name the central concern of this rigorously eccentric writer’s work, I’d say that it is the stubborn elusiveness of the self, the eel-like slipperiness of identity. His stories and novels are full of people, usually young, who feel, as he writes of one character here, as if “his being, his very self, was going to melt away”; or who ask themselves, as another, in a different story, does, “So where is the real me?” and settle, uneasily, for a “fragile, provisional me.” In the most moving stories in this collection--“Chance Traveler” and “Hanalei Bay” are good examples--the point to which the intricate circuitry of Murakami’s narrative ultimately leads is some spark of connection between a past self and the more complex, more confusingly wired version we all seem to end up with. Sometimes the search for that elusive connection is explicit, as it is in the lovely story “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” which, like much of its author’s fiction, is about solitude and the deceptive rigors of youth. That story is set in the period of Murakami’s own coming-of-age, the 60’s, when, he writes, “everything was simple and direct” --unlike the present time, when “if you try to grasp the reality of anything, there’s always a whole slew of convoluted extras that come with it.”

He isn’t always so blunt, but it’s apparent in everything he writes that the project of both his work and his life is the quest for a continuity of self, for a thread that, pulled taut, could put all those “convoluted extras,” along with everything that really matters, on a straight line: a bullet train named Murakami. What he has to guide him is nothing more (or less) than the sound of his own voice, which tells him, and his readers, approximately who he is, for the moment. And over the years he has developed and sustained a remarkably distinctive narrative tone: calm, wry, intimate, gently interrogative. In this English-language volume, he depends, as always, on the kindness of translators, and Philip Gabriel (14 stories) and Jay Rubin (10) serve him expertly here; the tales in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking, quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual accommodations we make do with on the road. These are just 24 of the places where, one time or another, he thought he might find it.

Curling up with a good book: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

Complete title: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories
Author: Gao Xingjian

Less is more apparently. This book of short stories is a real quick read--I finished it in a couple of hours--but very impressive. Like "Seinfeld"--famously a show about nothing--not much really happens. It's all about imagery and conjuring up emotions. Also too, there is a strong sense of melancholy that pervades the work. Julia Lovell's review, originally published in the Guardian on May 15, 2004, indicates that Gao's full-length novels might not be the best starting point, so I'm very glad that I made my acquaintance with "Buying."

"Soul Mountain" and "One Man's Bible," the two novels for which he was awarded the 2000 Nobel literature prize, defined Gao Xingjian as a writer with three signature themes. The first was his libido; the second was the individual (and his libido) suffering under communism. Both books starred a strongly autobiographical, middle-aged protagonist working through the traumas of political persecution and exile by "merging" with almost every woman he met.

So far, so dull. Mid-life crises--even those induced by communism--tend to be interesting mainly to their sufferers, and Gao's sprawling, self-indulgent take on the horrors of political oppression lacked the wry discipline that, for example, Solzhenitsyn and Kundera have brought to similar subject matter. Gao's fascination with himself had the additional unfortunate consequence of sidelining his third, and most interesting concern as a novelist. Like many serious Chinese authors of the past 100 years--a century in which writers began systematically reading, worshipping, sometimes imitating modern western literature--he has spent his career searching for a literary language and form that manage to be both modern and Chinese; in other words, a voice that is more than a rehash of western modernism.

Gao has tried to achieve this by combining the structural looseness of traditional Chinese literature - weak on plot, strong on emotive imagery--with a western-style fixation on subjectivity and alienation. The novels that resulted, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible, caught the worst of both eastern and western literary worlds--rambling, self-obsessed and over-theorised-- and forgot the key lesson Ezra Pound, the high priest of Anglo-American modernism, drew from classical Chinese literature: show, don't tell.

The short stories collected in Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather are a far better showcase of Gao's literary talents. Shrink Gao's fiction from 500 to 10 pages, take out the pseudo-philosophical self-obsession, and the reader starts to see glimmerings of a very Chinese narrative discipline, of an author who can communicate depths of feeling through snatches of conversation and single, well-chosen images.

The best--and, not coincidentally, the shortest--stories are the first three. In "The Temple", a recently married couple decide on impulse to spend a day of their honeymoon in a "quiet old town in the valley". A local recommends the nearest thing the town has to a tourist attraction: a ruined old temple to the west. There, the couple encounter a local taking his cousin's child out to catch grasshoppers. In the few words exchanged between the three adults, Gao suggests the simple hospitality of strangers, a family tragedy, the devastation of a moment's tactlessness.

The two speakers of "In the Park"-- a dialogue interrupted only by present-tense descriptions of scenery and incidental action--are childhood sweethearts separated by political events. Now approaching middle age, they reunite for a brief, chance rendezvous before returning to their unsatisfactory spouses. The shared bitterness of frustrated romance hangs, barely spoken, over their meeting, intensified by the drab palette of their surroundings: the "wan yellow light" of the streetlamps, the "grey and indistinct" night sky in which even the stars are hazy.

In "Cramp", a nocturnal swimmer at an unspecified seaside resort is stricken by cramp, almost drowns, then battles the tide back to land. Invigorated by his brush with mortality, he returns to his hotel "in a hurry to tell people he's just escaped death". Finding no one interested, he goes back to the beach, where he observes three other visitors, two boys and a girl. While the boys gallop off into the sea, the girl remains on the sand, "supporting herself on crutches", the swimmer suddenly notices. With few plot details to distract him, Gao concentrates on emotional contrasts, the swimmer's reckless vitality a foil to the wistful solitude of the crippled girl.

The remaining three stories rarely recapture the authorial self-restraint that made the earlier pieces appealing. "The Accident" is a slice-of-life account of a fatal bicycle accident that turns into a heavy-handed literary sermon on the workings of fate, and the relationship between life's raw material and artistic creation.

The story of the title, "Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather", is intriguingly framed as a self-delusory nostalgia trip, but collapses into Gao's ponderous version of western modernism-by-numbers: surreal juxtapositions of time and place, stream of consciousness, a fragmented narrative voice locked into tediously self-analytical conversation with itself. "Do you have an inner world? I hope so. It's only there that you can really be yourself." The final story, "In an Instant", is a formal experiment in simultaneity that runs through a checklist of modernist devices--narrative cuts and leaps, bizarre images, Beckettian clowns--as mechanically as an English undergraduate's revision primer.

At its worst, Gao's short fiction sums up everything that is wrong with his absorption of western influences: unoriginal, ill-digested, over-philosophised. But at its best, it achieves the understated, expressive concision that defines China's singular contribution to modern literature.

Curling up with a good book: The German Genius

Complete title: The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century
Author: Peter Watson

Here's is Brian Ladd's review, originally published in the New York Times on July 16, 2010. I apparently thought more of it than Ladd did, although I did find the author's habit of long lists of names a bit frustrating (and normally I like to read long lists of names!)

By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans. Their philosophy was more profound--to a fault. So was their music. Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their soldiers were unmatched.

Did this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers. Richard Wagner's English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Many Germans were happy to agree.

After world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Thomas Mann (left), for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity.

Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.”

It is, of course, the Nazis who have made it hard for us to appreciate what Peter Watson calls “the German genius.” Goebbels spoiled the brand when he marketed Hitler as the apotheosis of German culture. Too many Germans and (for opposite reasons) plenty of foreigners readily agreed with Goebbels. Watson, a British journalist and the author of several books of cultural history, would like us to leave the Nazis aside and appreciate that our modern world--at least the world of ideas-- is largely a German creation. But as he might have learned from his fictional fellow Englishman Basil Fawlty, it is futile to insist that we “don’t mention the war!”

“The German Genius” is a lengthy compilation of essential German contributions to philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural and social science and the arts since 1750. Watson enshrines a vast pantheon of creative thinkers, not dwelling very long on any of them. Perhaps the single most important figure is Immanuel Kant, who explored the limits of Enlightenment rationality without handing any authority back to revealed religion. Ever since, Watson argues, the Germans have led the way in plumbing the depths of the human mind and body in search of truth and meaning.

Watson reminds us that the age of Kant produced (among much else) Haydn’s symphonies, Goethe's poetry, Herder’s discovery of national history and Winckel­mann’s archaeology of ancient art — the last in particular ushering in what Watson, in his subtitle, calls the “third renaissance” (after those of the 12th and 15th centuries). Long before Darwin, Germans showed that the natural world was a place of restless change. So, too, was human society: we owe them our sense of history. German Romanticism and German erudition placed truth and creativity firmly inside the human mind. Later, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud sought meaning in a world in flux, while lesser lights concocted their racial theories out of a fatal mixture of biology and philology.

“The German Genius” is a great baggy monster of a book, mixing passionate advocacy with biographical trivia amid compressed summaries of some exceedingly difficult ideas. The range of subjects is impressive, from painters to physicists, and includes important names most of us may recognize only from science class, and then only as units of measurement: Hertz, Mach, Röntgen. (Before Hitler, Nobel Prize ceremonies were in large part a German affair.)

In some ways this is also a very German book: long, earnest, plodding. Yet it is not really up to the exacting standards of German scholarship (or of English narrative sparkle), relying, as it does, largely on other scholars’ accounts of the great thinkers in question, and quoting the secondary sources far more than the original works of “genius.” Too often Watson urges us to revere people or books “now recognized,” “widely viewed” or “generally regarded” as brilliant. Readers may grow weary of being told what to think.

In effect, Watson has given us a kind of Dictionary of German Biography, along with a great deal of name-dropping. There were many German geniuses. But what was “the German genius”? To understand what was special about Germany, we need to know more than Watson tells us about the world that produced these thinkers. He does offer some valuable hints, insisting, for example, on the importance of the 17th- and 18th-century religious revival known as Pietism, which urged believers to devote themselves to improving life on earth. Certainly he is right to emphasize Germany’s Protestant heritage (and the many preachers’ sons who populate his pages), but secularized Protestantism shaped other lands as well-- notably Britain, where Catholics and Jews played smaller roles than in Germany.

More helpful is his emphasis on the role of universities in creating new knowledge and a new class defined by education. At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science--at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research “a rival form of authority in the world.” The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is “Bildung”). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this “secular form of Pietism,” turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation--and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics.

This is modern subjective individuality, as expounded by philosophers like Martin Heidegger (right). Even if Heidegger hadn’t been a Nazi, we would still face the question of whether Hitler was the nemesis or the culmination of German genius. Just as Mann had to acknowledge Goebbels as his bastard child, Watson knows that Germany cannot disown the Nazis. He borrows many different and contradictory theories of the German catastrophe, variously suggesting that the educated middle class was too weak to stop Hitler, that it abdicated its responsibility to do so and that its antipolitical ideals taught a nation to welcome a charlatan’s promises of a redemptive community.

Yet no history of ideas can explain the tragedy of German genius. Hitler may have fancied himself a great thinker, but his success came from his brilliance as a political tactician in a troubled time. Intellectuals admired (or feared) him for his ability to seduce millions of voters who knew nothing of Kant or Heidegger. Watson gives us a compilation of German ideas; a history of the German genius would be a different and dicier matter.

Watson’s chapters on the anguish of postwar German intellectuals remind us that he is a world away from the ­mystical nonsense of his countryman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Nonetheless, his attempt to exalt a national character suggests that he is offering something not altogether different for our chastened time.

James Buchan's account published in the Guardian some three months later is more forgiving.

For a while in the 1980s, I used to spend my Sundays in the Old Cemetery in the town of Bonn in the Rhineland. Wandering amid the provincial tombs, I was forever coming across some stupendous intellectual celebrity. Here were Beethoven's mother and Schiller's wife; Clara and Robert Schumann; August Wilhelm Schlegel; Mathilde Wesendonck, for whom Wagner wrote his most beautiful music; FWA Argelander, who mapped three hundred thousand stars. These Sunday excursions were for me an exercise in mental recuperation. Bored by the Third Reich and its uptight little successor republics in West and East Germany, I sought an afternoon's peace in an older and, as I thought, more German Germany.

Peter Watson's colossal encyclopaedia, The German Genius, might have been written for me, but not only for me. A journalist of heroic industry, Watson is frustrated by the British ignorance of Germany, or rather by an expertise devoted exclusively to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. Watson wonders not just why the nation of thinkers and poets came to grief between 1933 and 1945 but also how it put itself together again and, in 1989, recreated most of the Wilhelmine state without plunging Europe into war or even breaking sweat.

Watson has not simply written a survey of the German intellect from Goethe to Botho Strauss – nothing so dilettantist. In the course of nearly 1,000 pages, he covers German idealism, porcelain, the symphony, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, telegraphy, homeopathy, strategy, Sanskrit, colour theory, the Nazarenes, universities, Hegel, jurisprudence, the conservation of energy, the Biedermayer, entropy, fractals, dyestuffs, the PhD, heroin, automobiles, the unconscious, the cannon, the Altar of Pergamon, sociology, militarism, the waltz, anti-semitism, continental drift, quantum theory and serial music.

His approach is purely biographical, which may sacrifice depth but makes for clarity. Watson is better at the end than at the beginning, more at home with Georg Simmel than Immanuel Kant. He is never not good company, and two mannerisms irritate because there might have been none. The first is a phrase to describe the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung as coming "between doubt and Darwin", which doesn't mean enough for one use let alone 20. The other is the word "raft" as a noun of multitude (50 uses). Umlauts are sometimes accorded and sometimes withheld, without system, like honours in some petty German dukedom.

So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's "Die Lieden des jungen Werthers" could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Electrodynamik bewegter Korper." in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German. The efficiency is for all to see. When I lived in West Germany, the Bundeswehr or federal army used to pretend to be a slovenly rabble, but nobody was taken in. When the Greens came into parliament in 1983, their wild costumes and warring ideologies could not disguise the most punctilious office habits. As for German self-consciousness, a British brigadier in Bielefeld once put it to me, in his staff-college drawl: "Vey do make wather a meal of being German, don't vey?"

Watson derives the German genius from deep springs. Germanness as a notion long predated an all-German state. German protestantism, high literacy, well organised universities and a Jewish citizenry devoted to German high culture all played their role. How all that ended in Hitler is one of the questions of historiography. Watson devotes many pages to German soul-searching over the Third Reich, and the "treason" of a cultured middle class in voting him in and turning against the Jews and the west. When the German state finally arrived in the late 19th century, it was late and military and profoundly demoralising to that class. For what it is worth, I never thought the Third Reich either inevitable or particularly surprising.

For Germany's postwar success, Watson rounds up the usual philosophical suspects, including the famous Unfähigkeit zu trauern, or "inability to mourn". He argues (rightly, I am sure) that in western Germany the student revolt of 1968 was a sort of re-Germanisation of the state created by the western allies and the beginning of a reckoning with Hitler and the Holocaust.

The long detour of the '68ers from street demonstration to terror or its fringes and finally, after 1983, constitutional government is given its due. Here the biographical treatment works well: the life of a man such as Joschka Fischer is exemplary. What Watson ignores is the unrelenting Soviet campaign to destablise West Germany and, in 1983, to provoke a civil war over American nuclear weapons in the country. To make up, there are admirable chapters on how German refugees from Hitler revolutionised intellectual life in the US and Britain.

For Watson, it appears that the "fourth generation" of postwar Germans is coming out from the shadow of the Third Reich. Though he does not say so, a haunted country grown prosperous from the export of precision machine tools may have a brighter future than Britain, for all its clear conscience and financial wizardry.

Book review: Apollo's Angels

Not knowing anything at all about ballet--my only previous experience being a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at my local performing arts center--I dove into Jennifer Homans' book with great relish. My co-workers scoffed but I enjoyed every single page. Homans is a very rare bird--she's both a ballet dancer and a historian. What she does best is put the art form in a historical context. Along the way, we meet a fascinating cast of characters, from Louis the XIV through to the modern stars of dance like Nureyev. Homans' excellent writing never wavers and the stories are lively, engaging and fascinating. Homans is pessimistic about the future of her passion and it's hard to disagree that--at least in the U.S.--it seems the art form has gone the way of other events that used to be big, like horse racing and track meets. But if ballet is indeed on its way out, Homans' work has given it the sendoff it deserves. Below is the review from the New York Times, which named "Apollo's Angels" one of the top ten books of last year.

It has never been done, what Jennifer Homans has done in “Apollo’s Angels.” She has written the only truly definitive history of the most impossibly fantastic art form, ballet, this most refined, most exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette,” this “science of behavior toward others,” as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is ­really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner — but heaven is closer. She has taken this world where wilis, virgins, sylphs, sleeping princesses, the “women in white” embody the eternal — the eternally unattainable — and set it into the fabric of world history, and we see, miraculously, their pale tulle and satin pointes peeking out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the ­stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.

Homans’ accomplishment is akin to setting the most delicate and beautiful of all the imperial Fabergé eggs into a fissure high on Mount Rushmore and tracking its unlikely survival. And the question of ballet’s survival lies at the core of Homans’s moving story. “Ballets,” Théophile Gau­tier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”

The tale of the tutu is indeed the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy who have worked ludicrously hard to formulate, shape and perfect the highest form of the human physique, and the result is a glorious paradox: the manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!

Ballet is the body divined, and it is not by chance that all the work started at the royal court in France in the mid-16th century. Homans begins with what has long been considered the first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” which had its premiere in 1581. It was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests — elevated stages did not yet exist — in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon, and told an allegory of “the enchantress Circe vanquished by the powerful gods Minerva and Jupiter,” ending with Circe presenting her magic wand to the king himself before a ballet of naiads, dryads, princesses and a queen. The purpose of the ballet was nothing short of elevating man, “to raise him up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God.” So the bar was set for this new art — and it couldn’t have been higher; ballet is about Highness — and the angels of Homans’s title take their first flight. Ballet became so revered in France that by 1636 the Abbé Mersenne, a contemporary of Descartes and Pascal, referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master.”

Thus ballet was born as the dance of kings. Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles, being particularly fond of portraying the Sun and Apollo, god of music and poetry. His son, Louis XIV, made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied with his ballet teacher, Pierre Beauchamps, daily, for more than 20 years. The dancing master in Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” declares that “all the misfortunes of mankind, all the disasters of which history is full, the bungling of politicians and the mistakes of great generals, all come through not learning to dance.” Where, I ask you, is Obama’s Beauchamps?

It was Beauchamps who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art,” and they remain to this day the beautiful base of outwardly rotated feet and legs from which classical ballet rises and expands centrifugally. Homans documents this passionate path with impressive grace — she was herself a professional ballet dancer and is now the dance critic for The New Republic — across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and finally, here, to America, where it reached its apogee in the last half of the century.

The stops along the way often provide great charm. It was the enchanting French ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century who introduced the novel idea, with her revealing drapery and sensual movement (she was much admired by Voltaire and Montesquieu), that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings. The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. “Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose — or descended — to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem,” as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs.

It was the magnificent French dancer Auguste Vestris, a favorite of Marie Antoinette’s, who “pried the feet open” to 180 degrees (Louis XIV had maintained a dignified 90), and they have remained there ever since. He also insisted on fully pointed feet, and thus soft, flat ballet shoes with ribbons wrapped around the ankles were born. A teacher of mammoth energy and passion, he gave lessons lasting three hours that would include “48 pliés followed by 128 grand battements, 96 petits battements glissé, 128 ronds de jambes sur terre and 128 en l’air.” Any dancers reading this are now rolling their eyes in empathic agony, but ballet, like prayer, is ritual repetition: the more you do, the closer you get to perfection, to God. (Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hours-to-genius rule is a mere drop in the rosin box for a ballet dancer.) Vestris also forbade any “provincial insecure shuffling of the feet.”

The French ballet master Charles-Louis Didelot, in “Psyché et l’Amour” (1809), kept “provincial” shuffling to a minimum, and his most famous ballet literally took flight not with angels but with 50 live white doves “outfitted in mini­corsets and attached to wires,” carrying the chariot of Venus to the heavens. What delightful imaginings are those of dancers, ever searching to soar — though one does worry about those corseted doves.

Marie Taglioni (left), the first ballerina still generally recognized, was born in Stockholm in 1804 into a dynasty of Italian dancers, and her rise to immortal fame is fascinating not least because she was one ugly duckling. According to Homans, she was “poorly proportioned, with a bent posture and skinny legs,” though she came to symbolize not only exquisite feminine beauty but the best kind, the kind you can’t have. How this determined young woman overcame these apparently extreme deficiencies and danced her way into history is a mesmerizing tale of body and soul outwitting gravity and that somewhat more horizontal pull: the male gaze.

She made her debut as ballet’s iconic sylph in “La Sylphide” in 1832, a super­natural creature who was “strong but frail, sexually alluring but chaste, in love but fiercely independent.” Inspired by Taglioni, Chateaubriand called the sylphide a “masterpiece” of a woman and was driven, Homans says, into “frenzied states of uncontrolled imagination and desire.” Not bad for a “famously ugly” woman.

Taglioni’s success reached far beyond the stage, and she became “a force of anarchy and dissolution,” Homans writes, “a woman’s dancer” (in Gautier’s words). “Decent” women “had to settle for a subdued and controlled life, but underneath they were desperate to ‘abandon their soft and calm existence’ for ‘storms of passion’ and ‘dangerous emotions.’ Taglioni lived what they could only dream: a . . . fully expressed life.” And you wonder why little girls want to dance? They intuit that inside a corseted tutu lies untold freedom.

August Bournonville, an almost exact contemporary of Taglioni and a friend of Kierkegaard, was born in Denmark, but he traveled throughout Europe, studied with Vestris in Paris and even fought a duel to defend his teacher’s honor. He came home from his sojourn to direct the Royal Danish Ballet for 47 years, creating some 50 ballets, though only a handful remain. In his emphasis on precise, unsentimental footwork, free of passion and angst, he added to the lexicon of ballet as few others have.

“Excelsior,” the most successful Italian ballet in history (that you have probably never heard of), claims its place in Homans’s narrative for less than artistic reasons: it has yet to be surpassed in sheer spectacular display and bad taste. Choreographed by Luigi Manzotti in 1881, it offered a cast of “more than 500, including 12 horses, 2 cows and an elephant.” The lead roles were Light, Darkness and Civilization (the ballerina), and they were joined by Invention, Harmony, Fame, Strength, Glory, Industry and Science. This extravaganza ended with Light banishing Darkness and communing in a “warm embrace” with Civilization.

“Excelsior” had 100 performances in Milan at La Scala, and then in virtually every other city across Italy before it zoomed around the world: South America, the United States, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. By 1931, the ballet had incorporated the “progress” of Fascism.

But as Homans points out so lucidly, while “Excelsior” was, well, ridiculous, it had an amazing side effect: it produced hundreds of performers who traveled abroad staging, dancing and teaching, spreading the seeds of ballet like dandelion florets. Among them were the illustrious Italian teacher Enrico Cecchetti, who staged Manzotti’s ballet in St. Petersburg, and Carlotta Brianza and Pierina Legnani, who became the first Princess Aurora and Odette/Odile, respectively, for the great Russian ballets of Marius Petipa, “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake.”

While Manzotti spawned an international dynastic dancing family, all ballet dancers since the mid-19th century are the progeny of Petipa. Like Sallé, Vestris and Taglioni, Petipa was from a long line of dancers. Born in Marseille, he studied with Vestris in Paris, traveled widely and, like Bournonville, fought a duel, in Madrid with a French marquis, though Petipa’s was not over the honor of his art but over the apparent dishonor of a young lady. Petipa shot off the marquis’s jaw and ­jetéd away unscathed. It is comforting to know that two of the three great choreographers in ballet history — we will get to George Balanchine soon — were winning duelers, willing to risk their bodies for honor, as all dancers do.

Yes, only three men of such genius to add to and permanently change the language itself in all 400 years, so rare is the great dance maker. It would be as if all classical music had only Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, no Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Schubert or Chopin, or all literature had only Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy, no Dante, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Thomas Mann or Elmore Leonard.

Petipa (right) arrived in St. Petersburg in 1847 and lived there for more than 50 years, dying in 1910 at the age of 92. He had two Russian ballerina wives, nine children, and never learned to speak Russian, though he became an eager and respected member of the czar’s court. Interestingly, he produced his masterworks, the cornerstones of the art, the Latin of all classical ballet — “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake” (he also rechoreographed “Giselle” in the form we know it today) — in an astonishing late flowering after the age of 70!

This outpouring — some done with the significant help of the ballet master Lev Ivanov — was attributable, in part, to Tchaikovsky, “the first composer of real stature to see ballet as a substantial art,” Homans writes. “Petipa became a great choreographer because of Tchaikovsky, and he knew it.” She evokes the sweetness of their close collaboration: Tchaikovsky would visit Petipa’s house and play his new composition on the piano “while Petipa shifted his papier-mâché figurines around a large round table.”

By 1903 Petipa was forced to retire, and the Imperial Theaters were floundering. But within only six years Serge Diaghilev brought Russian ballet back to Paris, the place of its birth — his company, the Ballets Russes, never danced in Russia — and unleashed a frenzy of modernist creativity the results of which were widespread and groundbreaking. Never before had so many artists of note been pulled together by one man, whose edict was “Astonish me!” His grand experiment lasted only 20 years, but its legacy is vast — perhaps most notable for two artists whom he helped usher out of Russia: Stravinsky and Balanchine. Working together and separately, they would become two of the great artists of Time, their shared subject.

Homans provides good overviews of the major players of the 20th century. British ballet, led by the formidable Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Margot Fonteyn, had its culmination in the ­Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership in the 1960s, though it produced its best — and certainly most enduring — gift to ballet in Michael Powell’s 1948 cinematic masterpiece, “The Red Shoes.” “During the war we were all told to go out and die for freedom and democracy,” Powell said. “After the war ‘The Red Shoes’ told them to die for art.” And why not?

Homans does justice — and then some — to the propaganda dram-balets under Soviet Communism and their extraordinary dancers: Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya — “a fierce and undying swan” — Vladimir Vasiliev, Natalia Makarova, Nureyev and Baryshnikov. While calling ballet “Britain’s finest cultural hour,” Homans states that “the Bolshoi’s rise signaled a sharp decline for the art of dance.” About its signature ballet, “Spartacus,” she writes, “Even at its most thrilling (Vasiliev), it was quite clearly a degraded form of art.” But ballet was an important national symbol, even if Nikita Khrushchev complained that he had seen so many “Swan Lakes” that his dreams were laden with “white tutus and tanks all mixed up together.”

The British Antony Tudor (William Cook) and the American Jerome Robbins (Jerome Rabinowitz) each get an in-depth assessment; together they form the angst-driven sadists — onstage and off — of 20th-century ballet, and each created a few classic ballets. Tudor, choreographer of “Pillar of Fire,” “Lilac Garden” and “Dark Elegies,” liked his performances to be “executed in cold blood.” “Breaking down a person isn’t hard,” he explained, but then “you’re terribly tempted to lay them flat and walk on them.”

Robbins is the undeniable King of Broadway, with works like “West Side Story,” “On the Town” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” but his ballets, his second language, never quite reached the same apoth­eosis. He was top second-rate (“Dances at a Gathering,” “The Cage,” “Afternoon of a Faun”), and Homans is unafraid to say so. His torture of his dancers and others — he named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities — was matched only by his well-earned self-hatred. His parents owned a kosher deli on East 97th Street in New York, and he admitted to a strong desire “to become an American and by American I mean WASP American.” He wrote in his diary that he thought his fascination with ballet “has something to do with ‘civilizationing’ of my Jewishness. . . . The language of court and Christianity.”

And it is with “court and Christianity” that Homans arrives in the end. When she finally reaches the story of Georgi Balanchivadze, her book takes flight. She lets go of the professorial traces and dutiful descriptions that have occasionally punctuated previous pages — an editor should have fixed the multiple repetitions of “as we have seen” — and comes into her own with absolute authority. Her writing becomes inspired. Balanchine had that effect on people, and Homans was a student at his School of American Ballet (the “West Point of dance,” as his co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein, called it). Moreover, it actually feels as if she wrote the book in order to get to Balanchine, the one she loves, to put him in his deepest context, and to present him as the pinnacle of the towering pyramid of dance that she has built for him, for us. There he is, the undisputed “Yahweh” of all dance history, the Apollo of her title, accompanied by his beloved muses, his dancers, his angels, leading his chariot, no corseted doves in sight.

“His ballets are the jewel in the crown of 20th-century dance,” Homans writes. “Their depth and scope far surpass those of the dances made by Robbins, Tudor, Ashton or any of the Soviets. . . . Few doubted that Balanchine towered over them all.”

While it took a Frenchman, Petipa, to make ballet Russian, it took a Russian, Balanchine, to make it American — the most unlikely transposition the art form has ever experienced. “Classical ballet was everything America was against,” Homans explains. “It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high — and hierarchical — elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism,” designed “to promote and glorify kings and czars.” Whose divine right would it promote in the land of the equal, the free, the duly (and unduly) elected? But as Balan­chine was fond of saying in the face of the impossible, or highly inadvisable, “Nevertheless. . . .” And he proceeded to give American dancers an aristocracy all their own.

The story of Balanchine (left) has been told before and at greater length, but never better. Homans’s account is the best that exists — for both the novice and those in the know. The opening of the School of American Ballet in 1933, the short-lived companies, the work on Broadway, in Hollywood, and then in 1948 the birth of the New York City Ballet, the incubator for him and his dancers, where he produced his greatest work. She gives us terrific appraisals of “Apollo,” “Serenade,” “La Valse,” “Lie­beslieder Walzer,” “Agon” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”

Homans even risks some close truths when she points out the reasons for the “unusual physical luminosity” of his dancers, who had “more dimension, more depth, more range” than other dancers. “Foremost among them was love,” she writes. “Not love for dancing, although that was part of it, but Balanchine’s love.” The fuel his dancers ran on was not the cottage cheese, muffins and Tab they consumed but the sheer adrenaline of love, that immeasurable, magical component that takes a body beyond itself.

Unlike Tudor and Robbins, Balanchine (right) “was not interested in ordinary people or real social situations,” Homans says. “Rather, for him ballet was an art of angels, of idealized and elevated human figures, beautiful, chivalric and above all strictly formal.” Balanchine brought the art full circle back to Louis XIV.

“Ballet is woman,” Balanchine proclaimed, and he elaborated in a letter to Jackie Kennedy in 1961: “Man takes care of the material things and woman takes care of the soul. Woman is the world and man lives in it.” Among his multiple images and portraits of women, one dominated: “a man and a woman who come together but cannot stay together,” Homans writes, “dances that show the man alone, or abandoned by a woman who is too independent, too powerful, too goddess-like to give him the solace he needs.” Balanchine said his biography was in the ballets — and Taglioni’s anarchist sylph reigns on.

“Balanchine’s legacy was immense,” Homans concludes. “He had given the world the greatest oeuvre in the history of dance and made classical ballet a pre-­eminently modernist and 20th-century art.” But “over the past two decades,” she writes, it “has come to resemble a dying language,” and thus she announces the awful truth. Ballet is such an ethereal, such a deeply moral exercise that it would appear to have less and less of a place in our current technology-driven world: there are no bytes for ­ballet.

But ballet always seems to be ending; it has been finished, in fact, many times. The ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre saw it sliding into “empty and meaningless virtuosity” by the late 18th century, and Bournonville despaired for his art when he saw the “disgusting cancan” showing its garters in Paris theaters. And in 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of “the catastrophe of the death of Diaghilev. The sorrow of it that Zelda felt, as did many others, who seemed to feel also that the ballet was ended.”

Now, it would appear ballet is ending yet again. But this time, Homans thinks, it really is the end. “In the years following Balanchine’s death,” she writes, “his angels fell, one by one, from their heights.” Her explanation is, sadly, convincing: “Contemporary choreography veers aimlessly from unimaginative imitation to strident innovation,” while “today’s artists . . . have been curiously unable to rise to the challenge of their legacy. They seem crushed and confused by its iconoclasm and grandeur.” Terpsichore, like Victoria Page, has put on the red shoes and danced her last, no longer willing to “die for art,” so her art dies.

“At N.Y.C.B.,” Homans writes of Balanchine and Robbins’s old home, “the understandable desire to preserve its masters’ legacy has led instead to a stifling orthodoxy,” and she reports with restrained outrage of “a small but telling departure” from its former grace. “The New York State Theater, named for the people it served, was recently rechristened: it is now the David H. Koch Theater, for the millionaire whose ego and resources substitute for the public good.” In a wickedly ironic footnote, bedbugs have also recently taken up residence with Koch in Balanchine’s theater.

The Fabergé egg has fallen. Today’s ballerinas use Twitter, securing the fall of the fourth wall, and even Darren Aronofsky’s new ballet film, “Black Swan,” presents, uncannily, a haunting final image of a white tutu oozing blood. So what is one to do now, having seen, having known, a thing of such beauty that is facing imminent extinction? Jennifer Homans has put her mourning into action and has written its history, an eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art. It is, alas, a eulogy.