“The Hebrew Bible: Samuel” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter makes the case that the Books of Samuel were originally one book, divided for pragmatic reasons—the maximum length of an ancient scroll. “No one knows with certainty when the main part of the original narrative was written, though there is good reason to place it, as a recurrent scholarly view does, quite close to David’s own time, in the first half of the tenth century B.C.E.” In his introduction, Alter posits, “The story of David is probably the greatest single narrative representation in Antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.” Next, Alter gives a pen portrait of Samuel, “The prophet Samuel may have God on his side, but he is also an implacable irascible man, and often a palpably self-interested one as well. His resistance to the establishment of the monarch may express a commitment to the noble ideal of the direct kingship of God over Israel, but it is also motivated by resentment that he must surrender authority, and the second of his two antimonarchic speeches is informed by belligerent self-defensiveness about his own career as national leader…. Samuel is invested with prophetic power by an act of God. But the writer understands that he is also a man, all too human, and that any kind of power, including spiritual power, can lead to abuse.”

In 1 Samuel 2, Alter begins by explicating the context of the poem within the larger narrative work, “Hannah’s psalm has been set into the story at a later stage in the editorial process than the original tale…. The reference to the anointed king at the end of the poem assumes the institution of the monarchy, not established until two generations after the moment when Hannah is said to have pronounced this prayer…. But the larger thematic assertion in the poem of God’s power to reverse fortunes, plunging the high to the depths and exalting the lowly, is a fitting introduction to the whole Saul-David history…. There is a sequence of body parts at the beginning of the first three versets of the poem, two literal and the middle one metaphorical: “my heart,” “my horn,” “my mouth.” The raising high of the horn is crucial to the thematic unfolding of the poem, which reiterates a pattern of vertical movement, elevation and descent, that manifests God’s power to reverse the fortunes of humankind.”

In 1 Samuel 6:14, Alter points out a thematic link between the main line of this book and a previous episode in the Torah, “the cows they offered up. One connection between the Ark Narrative, with its concern for sanctity, and the Samuel-Saul-David cycle, with its preoccupation with politics, is a kind of brooding sense of the cruel price exacted for dedication to the higher cause. The milch cows are burned on the improvised alter; Hannah and her son, Samuel, must be separated in his dedication to the sanctuary; and later both Saul and David will pay terrible costs in their personal lives for their adhesion to power.”

In this book, Alter makes the case that Samuel, the prophet, is stood up as a counterpoint to the institution of monarchy. In 1 Samuel 8:11, Alter relates an explicitly anti-monarchial speech, “Your sons he will take. Samuel’s speech is solidly constructed as a hammering piece of antimonarchic rhetoric. All the cherished possessions to be expropriated by the king are placed emphatically at the beginning of each clause…. The speech moves systematically from the expropriation of sons and daughters to land and produce to slaves and beasts of burden, ending with the climactic “you will become his slaves.”

In 1 Samuel 17:10, Alter highlights a translation choice that he makes that conflicts with the standard versions, “I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines. Nearly all the English versions render the verb here as “defied,” which is one end of the semantic range of the Hebrew heref. But the verb is transparently linked withe noun herpah—insult, disgrace, shame. By his taunting words, Goliath has laid an insult on Israel that only a victorious champion can “take away.””

Alter describes the two conflicting introductions of David into the narrative in 1 Samuel 17:55, “Whose son is the lad, Abner? It is at this point that the evident contradiction between the two stories of David’s debut is most striking. If David had been attending Saul in court as his personal music therapist, with Saul having explicitly sent a communication to Jesse regarding David’s entering his service, how could he, and Abner as well, now be ignorant of David’s identity? Efforts to harmonize the two stories in terms of the logic of later conventions of realism seem unconvincing…. The prevalent scholarly view that chapters 16 and 17 represent two different traditions about David’s beginnings is persuasive…. In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text…. Here, in the first, vertically oriented story, with its explicit instructions from God to man, David is emphatically elected by God, is associated with the spirit and with song, and gains entrée in the court of Saul by using song to master the spirit. In the second story, with its horizontal deployment in space, David makes his way into Saul’s presence through martial prowess, exhibiting shrewdness, calculation, and rhetorical skill.”

In 1 Samuel 27:2-3, Alter makes the supposition of historical accuracy based on the unflattering portrayal of David, “he crossed over … to Achish … king of Gath…. David stayed with Achish in Gath … each man with his household…. Why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David? The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated withe Philistines…. Now he comes with six hundred men under his command, a fighting unit that could be of great use to Achish, and essentially offers to become Achish’s vassal.”

In 2 Samuel 1:17, the narrative repeats the detail of David’s relationship with music, “And David sang this lament. We have been aware since 1 Samuel 16 of David’s gift as a lyre player and (presumably) as a singer. Only now do we hear him in action as a singer-poet. This grandly resonant lament, cast in archaic epic diction, marks a great moment of transition in the larger narrative, as the David-Saul story becomes the David story. It is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.”

Alter points out a notable instance of military description in 2 Samuel 10:9, “there was a battle line against him in front and behind…. Such attention to military detail is quite untypical of biblical narrative…. The point of such detail is surely to show Joab as a superbly competent and resolute field commander, just before the great pivotal episode in the next chapter in which Joab maintains the siege against Rabbath-Ammon while his commander in chief slumbers, and lusts, in Jerusalem.”

The appearance and significance of blood is a recurring motif in the Torah. Alter, in 2 Samuel 16:7, describes how blood has stained the spotless image of David as he ages. “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow. The blood that, according to the narrative itself, David has on his hands is that of Uriah the Hittite, and of the fighting men of Israel who perished at Rabbath-Ammon with Uriah. But the Benjaminite Shimei clearly believes what David himself, and the narrative with him, has taken pains to refute—that the blood of the house of Saul is on David’s hands: Abner, Ish-Bosheth, and perhaps even Saul and Jonathan (for David was collaborating with the Philistine Achish when they fell at Gilboa). Hence the phrase Shimei hurls at David in his next sentence, “all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king,” suggesting a conjunction of murder and usurpation.”

Alter often points out when the Hebrew wording adds significant meaning, style, or context. In 2 Samuel 18:28, “All is well. This is one word in Hebrew, shalom. That word is the last two syllables of Absalom’s name in Hebrew, ‘Avshalom, a link David will reinforce when he nervously asks, “Is it well [shalom] with the lad Absalom [‘Avshalom]?””

Alter returns to the theme of song in 2 Samuel 22:1, “And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song. It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or “song” (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book—compare Jacob’s Testament, Genesis 49, and the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32…. There is, of course, a persistent biblical notion of David the poet as well as of David the warrior-king, and the idea that he actually composed this poem, though unlikely, cannot be categorically dismissed…. The archaic character of the language makes the meaning of many terms conjectural. Even in the ancient period, some of the older locutions may already have been obscure to the scribes, who seem to have scrambled many phrases in transmission…. It should be noted that this same poem occurs in the Book of Psalms as Psalm 18 with a good many minor textual variants.”

Finally, Alter suggests the provenance of 2 Samuel 23:8, “These are the names of the warrior of David. This list of military heroes and their exploits is perhaps the strongest candidate of any passage in the Book of Samuel to be considered a text actually written in David’s lifetime. The language is crabbed, and the very abundance of textual difficulties, uncharacteristic for prose, reflects the great antiquity of the list. These fragmentary recollections of particular heroic exploits do not sound like the invention of any later writer but, on the contrary, like memories of remarkable martial acts familiar to the audience.”

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

Typically, this novel, by Rooney, focuses on a set of relationships between friends. Alice and Eileen have self-described disastrous lives, in their own unique ways, in which they commiserate and misunderstand one another by email exchanges, which Rooney intersperses amongst her chapters. “But this sense of the continuous present is no longer a feature of our lives. The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.”

All the while, both friends have an equally complicated relationship with their mutual friend, Simon. “Needless to say, the idea that Simon—who was already a grown man in his twenties when I was fifteen—is having regular sex with a woman six years my junior makes me want to crawl directly into my grave.” Felix, an Amazon warehouse worker and burgeoning love interest of Alice, adds to the knotty mix. “I fucking hate the place. But they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.” As always, for Rooney, it is quite the complicated web of relationships.

When the plot begins, Alice, a twice-successful novelist, has just come out of a mental hospital and moved to the Irish countryside, away from her friends in Dublin. She has met Felix on Tinder and their relationship teeters between confused, antagonistic, and passionate. “But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed.” And as usual, Rooney intersperses into her plot critiques of capitalist culture, which bubble up again and again. Alice whines, “Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.”

The critique of modernity is another through-line in Rooney’s novels. The email exchanges between the two female friends often alternate between banal relationship gossip and big philosophical conundrums, within the same email, “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day…. And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” Sometimes, Rooney’s critique of nihilism even touches on the conservative. “But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.” In the emails, there are also debates on aesthetics, relativism, and morality, “Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?” In some ways, this feels like Rooney’s most personal novel to date, “On one hand, I know the human body can be incredibly resilient. On the other, my sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist. What do you think?”

“Memoirs of a Revolutionist” by Peter Kropotkin

This is the autobiography of the anarchist Peter Kroptkin, from his birth in Moscow in 1842 through his life in exile in London in 1899, having survived and escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, as well as a two year prison stint in France for his revolutionary agitations. His anti-authoritarian leanings, if not his anarchism, began at a young age, “In 1859 or early in 1860, I began to edit my first revolutionary paper. At that age, what could I be but a constitutionalist?—and my paper advocated the necessity of a constitution for Russia.” At around this time, Kroptkin also refused to accept the honorific “Prince” before his name. Although he was admitted into the esteemed Corps of Pages by order of the Tsar himself, Kroptkin did not follow the typical career path, “That I should not enter a regiment of the Guard, and my life to parades and court balls, I had settled long before. My dream was to enter the university—to study, to live the student’s life. That meant, of course, to break entirely from my father, whose ambitions were quite different, and to rely for my living upon what I might earn by means of lessons…. My thoughts turned more and more toward Siberia.”

After serving with the Tsar’s army in Siberia, Kroptkin travelled for the first time to western Europe. He astutely sized up the differences in national characters, “Two days before I had left St Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in Middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers…. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward, further into Manchuria.”

By 1872, Kroptkin was a full-blown anarchist revolutionary. He was opposed to autocracy, but also to the centralizing tendencies of the communists and social-democrats. He refused to believe that infiltrating the government, even with good men, could produce a better life for the workingman. “The middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingman’s Association…. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits…. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement…. In 1871, the general council, supported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of the association towards electoral agitation. It set people thinking about the evils of any government, however democratic its origin. This was the spark of anarchism.”

Kroptkin explains his anarchist philosophy, “Nihilism is confused with terrorism…. The Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as ‘the conventional lies of civilized mankind’. Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason…. He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his fathers, and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic, a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion which they continually throw aside as useless ballast…. Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause.”

By 1875, Kroptkin had been arrested as a traitor to the Tsar and locked up in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress. He describes a peculiar encounter, “The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of Alexander II, who was inspecting the fortress, entered my cell, followed only by his aide-de-camp…. ‘How is it possible, Kroptkin, that you, a page de chambre, a sergeant of the corps of pages, should be mixed up in this business, and now be here in this horrible casemate?’ ‘Every one has his own opinions,’ was my reply…. Thoughts went whirling in my head. To play the part of Marquis Posa [from Verdi’s Don Carlos]? To tell the emperor through the grand duke of the desolation of Russia, the ruin of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of the officials, the terrible famines in prospect? To say that we wanted to help the peasants out of their desperate condition, to make them raise their heads—and by all this try to influence Alexander II? These thoughts followed one another in rapid succession, till at last I said to myself: ‘Never! Nonsense! They know all that. They are enemies of the nation, and such talk would not change them.’”

Kroptkin, having escaped from prison in Russia, was crisscrossing between Switzerland, France, and England, hounded by their respective security services and by Russian informers and infiltrators. Over the years, the split between the communists and anarchists had grown more distinct and hostile. “The conflict between the Marxists and the Bakunists was not a personal affair. It was the necessary conflict between the principles of federalism and those of centralization, the free Commune and the State’s paternal rule, the free action of the masses of the people and betterment of existing capitalist conditions through legislation—a conflict between the Latin spirit and the German Geist.”

Finally, Kroptkin summarizes his anarchist position and the long road ahead before the realization of his political dreams, “Long years of propaganda and a long succession of partial acts of revolt against authority, as well as a complete revision of the teachings now derived from history, would be required before men could perceive that they had been mistaken in attributing to their rulers and their laws what was derived in reality from their own sociable feelings and habits…. When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their sympathizers from the better educated classes, I soon realized that they valued their personal freedom even more than they valued their personal well-being…. For the very success of socialism the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual—of anarchism, in a word—had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production…. There is, in mankind, a nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated, which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion. Upon it all the progress of mankind is based…. Anarchism represents more than a mere mode of action and a mere conception of a free society…. It is part of a philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have been employed in sciences dealing with man. I saw that it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences.”

“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt

This novella has all of the wry sense of humor one can expect from DeWitt. The narrator, a seventeen-year-old girl named Marguerite, is delightfully biting. Much of the story revolves around tailoring—thus the book’s title. Speaking of her Maman, Marguerite reveals, “Linen she did not have made up in London; she took it to a Thai seamstress in Paris. She had in fact accommodated the woman’s desire to move to Paris from Bangkok; it is, after all, quite simple to make brief visits to Paris from Marrakech, whereas one cannot always go to Bangkok when one has had an idea for a frock, a redingote, a smoking.”

As to Marguerite’s home life with Maman, “It was her practice to spend Ramadan abroad…. The servants remained on full pay. They might stay in the riad in Marrakech or visit their families, as they pleased. It would be mauvais ton to be waited upon by persons who were fasting. It would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.” And her upbringing, “One must not expose adults to childish prattle. She insisted that I should learn bridge at the age of seven because one cannot always assume that a child can be kept out of sight.”

During the course of the novella it does not give too much away to reveal, “At the age of 20 months I had disappeared from the house of Bernard and Marie-Therese Dessanges, the guardians appointed in my parents’ wills should both parents die while I was a minor, and a great deal of money left for me, some 80 million euros… had disappeared.” Marguerite takes it all in stride, “It seemed to me that it would be mauvais ton to unleash the forces of the law on the Thai seamstress, or a young man working his way up through the ranks of a hotel in Geneva…. I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton…. I was conscious of a slighter anxiety. It would not be possible for quite some time, perhaps years, to go to the Thai seamstress—I would inevitably be followed, and whether or not this led to the apprehension of the fugitives it would certainly cause chagrins. Where was I to find a seamstress?”

After her kidnapping has become world news, it seems to surprise Marguerite that others do not comprehend her relationship to her Maman, “I accept that the woman in the early photographs with the infant was my biological mother. At the time of her death, I am told, I was 18 months old. It goes without saying, I could not have made an intelligent choice of guardian at 18 months. Maman gave me the chance, many chances to show I was not a mediocrity, and in this way I earned the right to participate in the life bought with this money by a person of distinction. If I had not done so, she would not have been ungenerous; she would have made provision in accordance with my capacity.” Finally, Marguerite comes to an epiphany, “I had hesitated to approach the Thai seamstress, but I now saw that I had been foolish…. Those who understand clothes might understand the importance of the relationship, but the investigators had shown themselves to be wholly oblivious to matters of taste.”