Uncle Orson Reviews 1998

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My Favorites of 1998

David Farland, The Runelords: The Sum of All Men (TOR Fantasy, 1998, 479pp hc $25.95). I didn't read much fiction this year, but Farland's debut (actually the new pseudonym of a talented writer making a career move) was outstanding and would have found its way to this exalted list in any year. Plot summaries of fiction aren't worth much -- better to just say that I'm very fussy about the sf and fantasy I read, and this writer is as good as it gets.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot (HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1997, 632pp hc $30). I was never a disciple of Hofstadter's rambling, semi-philosophical Godel, Escher, Bach or Metamagical Themas. His books seem to star himself more than his ideas. And that is certainly true of this book as well -- but here it works, because what he's facing is the ultimate problem of language: translation. Providing the skeleton of the book is a slight poem written by a French poet of a past century, a little get-well ditty for a young girl. Because it's a poem, light in tone and tight in form, he and the other translators he enlisted for the project had to choose whether to concentrate on meaning or form -- and decide to what degree those concepts were separable.

Before long, the book is a masterful treatise on the whole problem of language, probably the most complex thing created within the human mind. Hofstadter, oddly enough, and despite his own experience with language, actually believes in the possibility of machine intelligence, but that delusion only mars one chapter of the book; the rest of it is a fascinating exploration of the way we communicate with each other, as well as a rediscovery of the virtually lost art of poetry. The memoirs within the book are perfectly appropriate, and really the only embarrassment for Hofstadter is the one thing that apparently none of his friends or editors could tell him: His own translations of the poem were, without exception, not only the worst, but also deteriorated as he tried strategy after strategy. At last all life was gone from them -- an inadvertent proof that excessive rewriting is fatal. But it hardly matters. The book is still fascinating and rewarding, and despite its length it is broken into digestible chunks. I suspect the book may be more interesting to those who speak more than one language and have wrestled with problems of interpretation, but I think it will still hold interest for monoglots.

Richard R. Hopkins, How Greek Philosophy Corrupted the Christian Concept of God (Horizon, 1998, 464pp hc). Written from a clearly Mormon point of view, this work never resorts to special pleading. Hopkins does an excellent job of letting early Christian writers and the Greek philosophers speak for themselves, and as he charts the transformation of Christianity from the simple literalness of the gospels to the convoluted paradox-loving hellenistic creeds, he rigorously keeps exclusively Mormon sources from functioning as "proofs" of anything. Instead, he explains the Mormon concept of God in a separate section -- and, by the way, does the best job I have ever seen of presenting that doctrine clearly and accurately. The question of whether Mormonism represents a return to the simple truths of early Christianity is a matter of personal faith; the question of how mainstream Christianity came to worship a god revealed more by Plato than by Jesus is definitively answered.

John C. Meagher, Shakespeare's Shakespeare: How the Plays Were Made (Continuum Publishing Company, 1997, 240pp hc $34.50). If you love Shakespeare as I do, but despair of the normal scholarly treatment of his work, this book is the perfect elixir. Meagher examines Shakespeare as a writer for the theatre, and shows in fascinating ways how the needs of the stage shaped what Shakespeare wrote. Though Meagher devotes hardly a word to the question of who "really" wrote Shakespeare, the answer by the end is obvious -- not one of the other candidates for the job is qualified, since of them all only Marlowe was a man of the theatre, and he was so tediously dead when the best works were being written. But that's a trivial issue, really, since only snobbery leads people to suspect that someone other than a mere practical actor had to have devised works of such depth. What matters here is that Shakespeare knew, and his audience knew, how the devices of the Elizabethan stage could introduce wonderful effects, and when you read how the doubling of parts (the same actor playing more than one part) gives new layers of meaning to the plays, it will come to you as a thunderclap. Instead of giving any of this away, though, I'll let you discover it for yourself. Yes, the book is expensive, but there are libraries ...

Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (Knopf/Borzoi, 1997, 434pp hc $30). One of our most misunderstood presidents, Adams's life is one of brilliant public service with a level of honor and selflessness that our current president could not possibly understand. It made me yearn for a statesman; they are in such short supply today. But Nagel is not creating a love-fest here. Adams botched his child-rearing to an astonishing degree, as his children paid for his public service by growing up virtually fatherless, and most of his political problems stemmed from his own inability to temper his convictions in order to accomplish his purposes. Good biographies are hard to write, but Nagel has found, for me at least, the right proportion of original material to include in the text, and judges and interprets in the open, so the reader can see how conclusions have been reached. I ended the book admiring both Adams himself and the writer who gave me this picture of him.

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