Though I am allergic to historical fiction, two “historical novels”—the quotation marks are needed because these books burst the usual boundaries—made a great impression on me this year: Adam Foulds’s “The Quickening Maze,” (Penguin/Viking), which did not get much attention in America, is a beautifully constructed fantasia that imagines the Romantic poet John Clare’s four years, in the eighteen-thirties, in Dr. Matthew Allen’s private asylum in Epping Forest, Essex. Foulds is a talented English poet, and the novel’s prose, especially its descriptions of nature, inhabits some of Clare’s own lyrical radiance and wonderment.
The English novelist David Mitchell is the opposite of Foulds, who is a lyrical miniaturist. Mitchell is a novelist of surplus, and “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (Random House) bursts with life and vital storytelling. His novel is a remarkable act of vivification. It tells the story of a Dutch clerk who is working for the Dutch East Indies Company at the end of the eighteenth century, and who is based on the secure island of Dejima, in the bay of Nagasaki. What Mitchell has in common with Foulds is his ability to inhabit—to inspirit, to use an old verb—an entire culture, with consummate skill. Both European and Japanese fictional worlds are absolutely alive.
Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella “03” (FSG)—again, somewhat neglected in America—was one of the most daring, and finally moving, narratives I read in 2010. It is a monologue by a bored and cynical French teen-ager who lives in a crummy French suburb—the book’s title is the fictional town’s departmental code—and who tells us about his love of the band the Cure, his boredom, his rebellion, and his unrequited love for a handicapped girl he sees at the bus stop. It reads like some combination of Thomas Bernhard and Albert Camus, full of passionate rebellion and disaffection, and written in very long, beautifully modulated sentences. There is more comedy and despair compressed in its hundred pages than many novels five times the length. I hugely recommend it.
Lydia Davis’s translation of “Madame Bovary” was one of the most important books of the year. Unlike Valtat or Foulds, Davis got lots of attention, but rarely of the right kind, because her translation was too often reflexively praised by people who were not familiar with Flaubert’s French, or wanly criticized (see Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books) by people who have possessive agendas. I read it alongside the original, and alongside three other English translations (by Eleanor Marx Aveling, Francis Steegmuller, and Geoffrey Wall) and I consistently admired Davis’s attempts to get as close as possible to a quality of hardness, or coldness, in Flaubert’s own prose. Davis was criticized for saying in an interview that she didn’t much care for “Madame Bovary,” but all good readers of Flaubert are always in two minds about him anyway, and her own contempt for Flaubert vitalized, as it were, a contempt in Flaubert’s own prose: the novel seemed suddenly Swiftian, less like a nineteenth-century humanist-realist masterpiece than an eighteenth-century piece of biting French satire and misanthropy.
Flaubert’s strict, elegant, rhythmic sentences come alive in Davis’s English. She does not flinch. Let me give you an example. After the aristocratic libertine, Rodolphe, first sees Emma, he goes home certain that he is going to get his way with her. Flaubert writes that as he walks home he mentally undresses her: “il revoyait Emma dans la salle, habille comme il l’avait vue, et il la déshabillait.” Literally, this means: “he saw Emma in the room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.” It is a simple and brutal sentence, and Flaubert’s English-language translators seem to shy away from its simplicity and its brutality. Geoffrey Wall’s recent Penguin version has: “he could see Emma there in the room, dressed just as he remembered, and in his head he stripped her clothes off.” But Wall adds extra words (like “just”), and his “stripped her clothes off” spoils a characteristic rhyme that Flaubert has, the repeated sound of “habille” and déshabillait” (“dressed”/ “undressed”). Davis has exactly and no more than is needed: “he saw Emma again in that room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.” Page by page—and I could give many examples—Davis’s new translation is full of such moments.
Richard Kearney’s “Anatheism: Returning to God after God” (Columbia University Press) is, on one level, a dense theologico-philosophical book, saturated in postmodern theologians and philosophers, like Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas. Kearney, who teaches philosophy at Boston College, studied with Ricoeur and Levinas in Paris, in the nineteen-seventies. But his book is also a heartfelt, pragmatic, and eminently realistic argument about how one might continue to think about—and even dedicate one’s life to—God after the “death” or “disappearance” of God over the last hundred years or so. Kearney doesn’t much care for the New Atheists, but he positively welcomes atheism—indeed, his definition of what he calls “anatheism,” is that it is belief after atheism has done its worst. Kearney wants to see what is left of God, in the time after God, and he does so superbly well.