The Washington Post, by Michael Dirda

THE CREATORS

By Daniel J. Boorstin Random House. 811 pp. $30

BY "THE CREATORS" Daniel J. Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, means those artists who have "enlarged, embellished, enhanced and filigreed our experience." As in The Discoverers, his earlier book about "man's search to know the world and himself," Boorstin ranges from the dawn of man to the present, here touching on the Lascaux cave paintings, the building of the Pantheon, the masterworks of major writers (Dante, Chaucer and Cervantes, Shakespeare, Proust and Joyce), the achievements of Renaissance painters and sculptors, the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Stravinsky, the early years of photography, the birth of motion pictures.

An impressive package, right? It's meant to be. The Creators is already on the best-seller lists, and almost nothing a reviewer says about it will make much difference to the book's successful marketing. A one-time University of Chicago professor, Boorstin has become a publishing juggernaut, the heir to Barbara Tuchman as our most popular intellectual historian.

Yet, as a book for the common reader, far too much about The Creators is either misconceived or just plain wrong. Let me count the ways, or at least some of them.

To begin with, "What is the use," as Alice famously observed, "of a book without pictures or conversations?" Somewhere between a quarter and a third of The Creators is devoted to visual artists -- architects, sculptors, painters, photographers, etc. But, except for a half-dozen decorative chapter illustrations (all unidentified), the book has no pictures, diagrams or photographs. If you haven't studied Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon" lately or don't already know what Justinian's Great Church (aka Hagia Sophia) and Brunelleschi's dome for Florence's Duomo look like, you won't get much out of reading Boorstin's descriptions of them. Sometimes a good word is worth a thousand pictures, but sentences like this one, describing the ancient Greek Doric style, really won't do: "The rectangular stone temple was surrounded by columns, each topped by its echinus and abacus, and all enclosed by an architrave with a plain lintel, surmounted by a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, and roofed by a gently inclined pediment." Is a line drawing, with some pointer arrows, too much to ask for?

Boorstin organizes his survey into catch-all categories (e.g. "The Power of Stone," "Composing for the Community") and then devotes his chapters, loosely chronological, to individual artists. Each chapter conforms to a standard template: A page or two to highlight the figure's particular significance, a biographical account unduly emphasizing personal eccentricities and sexual peccadilloes, a standard anecdote or quotation (e.g. Giotto drawing freehand a perfect circle, Gibbon's quote about the emperor Gordian's books and concubines being for use not just ostentation), and then comments, usually minimal and conventional, on the actual artworks. The form is essentially that of an encyclopedia entry, but not always quite as interesting or reliable, as we shall see.

Boorstin's sentences, though clear and even on rare occasions witty, generally convey all the fire of a man who has spent too much time on committees. A few faint sparks do fly when the former librarian considers various autobiographical writers, especially the "insane" Rousseau or those artists "bred on the Left Banks of the world" who "identify genius with instability, or even madness." At its worst Boorstin's prose falls into a portentousness that even Andre Malraux would find hard to match: "Besides the Mystery of Time, with its staccatos and its continuities, there is the Mystery of Woman." Speaking of women, few of whom appear in these pages, it is astonishing that late in the 20th century a scholar can refer to the authors of The Mysteries of Udolpho and Frankenstein simply as Mrs. Radcliffe and Mrs. Shelley; Boorstin never mentions their first names (Ann and Mary).

Readers of an owlish bent will remark that The Creators eschews notes, ostensibly to make the book look more inviting. Boorstin makes no secret of his debts to other scholars, however, and on occasion will attribute a quote. But generally he leaves cloudy exactly how well he knows the texts or works he discusses, or whether the opinions he expresses are his own or another's. For instance, Boorstin critiques, in laborious detail, Goethe's theories about nature, alluding to their exposition in "fourteen volumes of scientific writing." Has Boorstin read these books or is he relying on someone else's scholarship? There's no way to know. Moreover, wouldn't it have been better for readers to have learned more about the Goethe that matters, the major lyric poet and the author of Elective Affinities -- one of the three or four best German novels and a book Boorstin passes over in a sentence?

For the chief problem with The Creators lies in the superficiality of its approach to art. Boorstin delivers the received opinion on most works, makes enough mistakes to suggest that he has not read the literary texts recently or attentively, misquotes frequently, cites passages that do not support what he claims, tosses in sexual speculations far too often, and generally carries on like a man more interested in gossiping about colorful lives than in conveying the richness of a poem, painting or piece of music. Most peculiarly, for a man who has supposedly lived with these masterpieces, few connections are made between or among them; yet how can Boorstin fail to see, for instance, that T.S. Eliot's views on tradition are echoed in quotations he himself offers from Proust and Picasso? Perhaps as a historian Boorstin is more comfortable with matters of fact than with questions of appreciation, for there remains something cold, unloving and sometimes even derisive in much of his writing about art and its practitioners.

MISTAKES? The Creators is pockmarked with distracting errors of spelling and fact that reveal at the least lack of attention on the part of the author and his editors. They include mistakes in dates, titles, quotations, English usage, descriptions, names, foreign words, references, and acknowledgements. It would be tedious to list a lot of them, so here's just one of each kind. G.H. Lewes, the man of letters and consort of George Eliot, did not live 1885-1951, but 1817-1878. In referring to Keats's poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," Boorstin leaves out the word "first" from the title. He also leaves out a "too" in the opening line of Hamlet's soliloquy beginning "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt." He speaks of "male semen." Aristotle's Poetics does not discuss comedy, except very tangentially. Coleridge never assumed the name Silas Titus Comberbacke; it was Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. An Italian courtesan scornfully says to Rousseau, "Zanetto, lascia -- not Gianetto, lacia -- le donne, e studia la matematica ("Zanetto, give up women, and study mathematics"). Ezra Pound's "E.P. Ode pour l'election de son sepulchre" is not a part of The Cantos (it's the first section of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley").

Such errors can be blamed on carelessness, but there are more dubious mistakes. For instance, Boorstin writes "And Pantagruel shrewdly settles a legal quibble between Lord Kissarse and Monsieur Suckpoop by theological hairsplitting debated in sign language." In fact, he has mixed up two entirely different chapters from Rabelais: In one Pantagruel and the two plaintiffs speak elaborate legal gobbledygook; in the other, Panurge debates an English scholar in sign language. "Balzac did not write about peasants or workers"? Partly true; yet Boorstin has apparently never heard of Le Medecin de Campagne (The Country Doctor) about an ideal worker commune, or is unaware of Les Paysans (The Peasants), Balzac's last major novel. Wagner is not "the only great composer meriting a place in the history of literature" -- Guillaume de Machaut, for one, is both the greatest French composer and greatest French poet of the 14th century.

These, and other matters, are questions of fact. But besides these mistakes, Boorstin also offers some exceptionally doubtful judgments. "The enduring success of Boswell's work is precisely in its artless surrender to chronology." Chronology? More than Johnson's irresistible wit and moody humanity? Boorstin claims that Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is damned by his "refusal to accept the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith." No elaboration of this follows; Faustus's actual damnation occurs because he cannot bring himself to accept the Catholic doctrine of penance, that God will forgive his sins. Boorstin maintains that Gretchen, in Goethe's Faust, "ends in a dungeon and a miserable death -- a victim for Mephistopheles" -- in fact, the last lines of Faust (Part One) are Mephistopheles exulting "Sie ist gerichtet" ("She is judged") and a voice from heaven answering "Ist gerettet" ("Is saved"). Goethe's autobiography has "the puzzling title Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth)"; actually, there's not much puzzle. Wahrheit und Dichtung was the name of a Jena newspaper, and poetry and truth are the twin poles of any autobiography: the need for artistic form tugging against the way things really were.

Disconcerting, too, is Boorstin's practice of quoting something that doesn't quite support his point. For instance, he glosses Chaucer's lines ending "Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille" as readers being invited to form their own conclusions about the poet's stories. Not at all. The fruit and the chaff are a traditional medieval image for the nature of reading: One must look through the secular tale (the chaff) to discover the religious moral (the fruit). All The Canterbury Tales have been interpreted (by some) in this way. But Boorstin finds Chaucer a simple sweet singer, notable for his "charming flow" and "broad humanity." Such simplicities belittle the subtlest English poet after Shakespeare.

And so forth. One expects better from the author of The Image and other good books; as it stands, The Creators is successful principally in discussing historical matters (like the key additive in Roman concrete) and in diverting with occasional items of trivia. Dante's name, for example, is a contraction of Durante. The invention of metal-tubed pigments allowed the Impressionists to work outdoors. Milton, Prescott, Parkman and Joyce all struggled against blindness to write their masterworks. In general, many readers will also esteem the implicit defense of traditional western culture that the book represents (though a more personal survey might have proved more winning). Yet neither interesting tidbits nor admirable purpose can save The Creators. It is, alas, a book that will impress mainly those who have never read, seen or listened to the works it describes..

There are, however, good popular "invitations" to the great art and literature of the past. Readers might look again at Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, a fully illustrated masterpiece of suavity, enthusiasm and deep learning, or Andre' Malraux's The Voices of Silence, rhetorically high-flown yet bristling with original insights. Books as different as Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan and Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, as well as the essays of Virginia Woolf, V.S. Pritchett and Edmund Wilson, have long been inspiring people, especially the young, to tackle serious books. And do not despise good reference works: Anthony Burgess offers a superb short survey of the novel in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Just remember to listen to the music, look at the pictures, read the books themselves -- and not just read about them.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

LEMPRIERE'S DICTIONARY

By Lawrence Norfolk

Harmony. 422 pp. $22

IN 1600 the British East India Company was founded, and quickly grew into a vast global enterprise. Sailing ships plied their way patiently to India and back, bringing with them wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. That much is certain.

In 1627-1628 the French port city of Rochelle, a Huguenot stronghold, was besieged by the Catholic forces of Cardinal Richelieu and its citizens slowly starved to death. Virtually no one escaped, many people choosing to immolate themselves and their children in the town's citadel rather than surrender. Another fact.

Consider one more detail: In 1788 John Lempriere, a young classicist in his early 20s, brought out a dictionary that established itself, for well over a century, as the standard guide to classical mythology.

Three innocent-seeming bits of history: a business, a massacre, a reference book. What connection could they possibly have? Surely none.

Yet, according to Lempriere's Dictionary, Lawrence Norfolk's extravagantly spectacular first novel, a few troubling questions remain. Could there, for instance, be some truth to the legend that a winged being escaped from the burning tower at Rochelle? Why too have all the Lempriere men died violent deaths? And what is the veiled meaning of three fragile pamphlets -- perfervid attacks on the East India Company -- composed early in the 17th-century by "Asiaticus"? For that matter, who is he? And what became of the crucial fourth pamphlet? Did Capt. Alan Neagle really glimpse whales in the Eastern Mediterranean shortly before he disappeared -- or had he discovered something he shouldn't have? What of the symbol, a not quite complete circle, that appears in a luxuriously illustrated edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, on signet rings, even carved in the table at a tavern? One may, of course, also wonder about the automatons, the unnatural orange trees, the orgiastic Pork Club and the Indian assassins, not to mention the elusive and gorgeous Juliette, the blind Sir John Fielding, the Company's "secret committee," the butchered prostitutes. Oh yes, and the French Revolution -- and the high cost of immortality.

Lempriere's Dictionary touches on all these, and much more, deftly mixing what cannot be with what might have been. Imagine Foucault's Pendulum set in the England of Samuel Johnson, with highlights from The Woman in White, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, and Sax Rohmer's tales of Dr. Fu Manchu. Norfolk's book is, in short, a further addition to that diverting sub-genre that one might call the antiquarian romance.

A loose and baggy category, the antiquarian romance embraces Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, A.S. Byatt's Possession, John Crowley's Aegypt, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, and Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone, as well as such recent entertainments as Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's The Difference Engine, Katherine Neville's The Eight, and Charles Palliser's The Quincunx. As different as these novels are, they tend to juxtapose the present and the past, disclose awesome, frequently game-like conspiracies at work in history, draw heavily on some branch of arcane learning (chess, Renaissance hermeticism), provide a trail of scholarly "documents," pastiche earlier styles of speech, offer "intellectual" conversation, and emphasize a Gothicky atmosphere of mystery and foreboding. Not least, they are frequently long, leisurely and deliberately old-fashioned, or seemingly so.

What makes these up-to-date sensation novels so appealing to readers -- and many have been best sellers -- is that they are not simply tales of wonder, but tales specifically about the wonder of reading and the pleasures of scholarship. The main character must nearly always learn to interpret correctly a game, a document, a painting or a book, and thus discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary.

Early in Lempriere's Dictionary the hero's father searches for evidence of a phantom ship, and in so doing describes the defining moment of the antiquarian romance. "Somewhere in the morass of receipts, bills, bonds, affidavits and orders of acquisition which lay strewn about the room, there was a pattern. Somewhere within the pages of handwritten accounts, diaries, letters and notes ran a thread. But he could not find it. A single memorandum, a scrawl on a dog-eared endpaper might supply the link, the key to the pattern. It was here, buried here somewhere. Perhaps he had already seen it and missed its significance." Only the predestined hero, typically a studious sort, can find the thread, read correctly the signs and portents of these adult fairy tales.

Things, after all, are never as they seem. If knowledge is power, then extensive and strange learning implies extensive and strange power. After a secret meeting in a hidden room deep below London, the shadowy mastermind of Lempriere's Dictionary daydreams of "other such chambers. The sanctum of the Eleusinian mysteries, the inner temples of Orphic cults, . . . the other cabbalas which had directed the course of the world's maturation. Hushed meetings such as these had pulled the strings of puppet-despots, directed the transient wills above. The slow rhythm of decisions taken here determined the worldly pulse. The catastrophes, the wars, the deaths of kings were nothing but skipped measures, brief interruptions in the noiseless music of subtler agendas and agreements between those whose faces remained unseen." That the world is run by magicians and grey eminences for purposes of their own may seem fantastic, but there lingers something Calvinistic in our souls -- witness the popularity of conspiracy theories and New Age occultism -- that yearns for an alternative to mere chance and absurdity as the engines of history.

Shortly after Charles Lempriere's death -- he is ravaged by hunting dogs in a scene that mirrors the destruction of Actaeon -- his son John leaves the island of Jersey and goes up to London to hear his father's will. There he falls in with a gadabout named Septimus Praeceps who lures him to the Pork Club where an orgy takes place reminiscent of Circe's transformation of Odysseus's men into swine. That evening young Lempriere meets a nobleman who wishes to buy a document, a kind of contract, that has been in his family's possession for well over 150 years. It appears to grant, in perpetuity, one ninth of the profits from the British East India Company. Mysteries surrounding this agreement, as well as the hope of meeting again the beautiful Juliette, daughter of the imperious Viscount Casterleigh, keep Lempriere in London.

That city itself is one of dreadful night, a stygian realm of both honeyed laughter and sudden death. "Outside, it is the hour of suspicion. The closed hour when men walk the streets with the air of interlopers in a drama played out in silence . . . A cloaked figure crosses the street at a diagonal, his shadow lengthening as he moves away from the lamp. Someone loiters on a corner with studied casualness, looking first one way then the other, offering no clue to explain his watchfulness. The city is almost still, but the slow arc of the moon brings it to something like life . . ."

Against this sinister backdrop, the novel slowly knots together a half dozen strands: Lempriere works feverishly on his mythological dictionary, its major entries -- for Danae, Iphigenia -- uncannily echoed in his own life; an old sea captain learns a secret about the mysterious ship, The Vendragon; Sir John Fielding tries to solve the ritual murder of a woman hideously killed by a shower of molten gold; Nazim the assassin searches relentlessly for the mysterious Nine; an impresario commissions 27 gigantic stone tortoises as roof decorations for his failing opera house; the elusive Farina whips up London with his calls for revolution; a crew of very old pirates kidnaps the internuncio of the Austro-Hungarian emperor; and a plan is laid that turns on a famous date, July 14. All these, especially Lempriere's confrontation with his own bizarre destiny, explode in a grand-guignol climax, featuring a cast of thousands. It is eminently satisfying.

Less satisfying are some of Norfolk's coloratura prose arias and descriptive excesses; a few scenes remain so phantasmagoric that you're not quite sure what is going on. At times the supposedly clever Lempriere even seems just a tad slow on the uptake. Some of the conspirator's elaborate strategems overlook simpler means to the same end.

But these are mere cavils compared to one major criticism: In crossing the Atlantic Lempriere's Dictionary has been slightly abridged, an important character eliminated, a virtuosic epilogue dropped, and a linchpin of the novel done away with. As a result, certain figures have lost a bit of their magic, while a number of small mysteries are never satisfactorily resolved: Who or what frightens the Viscount when he is about to push our hero from a high roof? Why does Lempriere slightly resemble another character? And why is that character afraid of fire? Who is Farina? One cannot help but feel that the novel has been deliberately simplified for American readers; in short, dumbed down. (See Book Report, page 15, for more on the editing of the book's American edition.)

These changes notwithstanding, Lempriere's Dictionary is still a book super-saturated with narrative gusto. Besides allowing the reader to sup on horrors, Norfolk dishes out some keystone comedy, including the misadventures of the Pantisocratic Pirates and an evening with a pair of Tweedledee and Tweedledum scholars who give Lempriere the idea for his dictionary. Characters like the ancient Lady Alice de Vere or the vain archivist Theobald Peppard could have walked out of Dickens. As for Juliette, what is she? By turns ingenuous, robotic and whorish, to Lempriere she becomes the heroine with a thousand faces.

As an artist, Norfolk shows a partiality for multiple perspectives and cinematic cuts: He may hint, for example at some nefarious plan by the cabbala, later follow Lempriere up to the moment of its climax, then abruptly shift away to another character's point of view, going back into the past and advancing again to the climactic moment which is finally shown in its full and sometimes gory detail. The technique seems almost musical, a theme that builds, then falls away, only to return unexpectedly and rush to a final cadence. There is a similar use of leitmotifs. Watch closely, for instance, the deadly progress of Lempriere's miniature of his mother: Stolen by the prostitute Rosalie, accidentally left behind with the debarred lawyer Peppard, casually picked up by the assassin Nazim, unexpectedly crucial in the battle with Le Mara, the 18th-century equivalent of the Terminator.

Myriad wonders and pleasures abound in Lempriere's Dictionary. Not too surprisingly, Zygia, the last entry in Lempriere's actual classical dictionary, provides just the right hint to the ending of Lawrence Norfolk's superbly entertaining novel?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

EVELYN WAUGH: The Later Years 1939-1966

By Martin Stannard

Norton. 503 pp. $25.95

"CHANGE and decay in all around I see," sings out an old duffer in Scoop (1938), Evelyn Waugh's satirical expose' of journalists in action. During the last 25 years of his life Waugh, whom Graham Greene called "the greatest novelist of my generation," must have reflected more than once on the prescience that led him to title his early books Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and A Handful of Dust (1934). "Change and decay in all around I see." Yes, of course, but the post-war Waugh would have added the hymn's next words: "Oh thou who changest not abide with me."

In Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years (1987) Martin Stannard portrayed a young artist's halting progress: Rebel against his upper middle-class family, Oxford aesthete and (temporary) homosexual, admirer of the arts-and-crafts movement, Bright Young Person, social climber, dashing young husband, heart-broken cuckold ("I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live"), world traveler (Africa, Mexico, the Arctic Circle), Catholic convert and, almost incidentally, one of the most amusing authors in the world. That volume closed five years after Waugh completed his early masterpiece, A Handful of Dust, a bitter comedy that includes two of the most shocking scenes in modern literature: In one the adulterous Brenda Last, after some temporary confusion, thanks God that it is her young son John, not her lover of the same name, who has been killed in an accident; in the other, her husband Tony, lost in a South American jungle, finds himself doomed to spend the rest of his life reading aloud from the works of Charles Dickens to a madman.

Waugh looked forward to the Second World War. He thought of it as a crusade, made up of high-born warriors, defending civilization, leading the grateful common people on to victory. As Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years opens, one can't help but respect the man, old enough to be excused from service like many of his friends, trying desperately to get into battle. But, as Stannard makes clear, that just about exhausts one's admiration. Toward subordinates Waugh generally showed, in the words of a fellow officer, "contempt relieved only by avuncular patronage." He abused the shell-shocked as moral cowards and poltroons. When his second wife Laura became pregnant, a nearly annual occurrence during the war years, she would go into her labors alone, while Waugh idly partied with rich friends in London or worked at Brideshead Revisited (1945), awaiting a birth announcement in the Times. "I shall not visit my children during [Christmas] leave," he wrote to Laura in 1941. "They should be able to retain the impression formed of me for a further three months. I can't afford to waste on them any time which could be spent on my own pleasures. I have sent them some kippers as compensation."

Considering Waugh's deeply self-centered behavior (ah, the artistic temperament!), it's hardly surprising that no serious military man wanted him around, so the novelist bounced among various special commando groups, serving mostly as an intelligence officer, ultimately seeing some action in Crete and Yugoslavia. Yet even in wartime Waugh couldn't help but be subversively humorous: In Yugoslavia he fostered a rumor that Tito was actually a woman; he sent a children's encyclopedia to his son Auberon and suggested that Laura might also "find it instructive"; he summed up a Churchill speech as "platitudes enlivened by gaffes"; and in the Middle East he wrote home that "I went to my Easter confession and had to have the priest arrested for asking questions of military significance." True? Fantasy? With Waugh the unreal can turn real (see The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 1957), the supernatural become natural (see Helena, 1950).

Waugh's post-war years, Stannard notes, could be characterized as a combination of pietas and tax evasion. "I know I am awful," he famously observed, "but how much more awful I should be without the Faith." He increasingly saw himself as a Catholic novelist, worked hard to convert friends (e.g. poet John Betjeman and his wife Penelope, the latter successfully), edited Thomas Merton for English audiences, wrote a biography of Monsignor Ronald Knox, bewailed the liberalization of the Church, and tried in vain to have a private chapel attached to his house at Piers Court (and then again at Combe Florey). He undertook numerous acts of private charity, but also spent money with Trimalchian recklessness. He virtually lived at the Hyde Park Hotel for weeks at a time; bought paintings, rugs, silver, Victorian knicknacks, expensive books; supported a household of, eventually, six children and four or five servants; and always lived teetering on the edge of his means.

He was able to do this, in large part, by some pretty fancy money shuffling: The "Save the Children" Fund, for instance, allowed him to sell his own household possessions to his offspring so that he could gain tax-free pounds. He also maintained a substantial U.S. account for cash earned by the best-selling Brideshead Revisited, demanded and got high fees for lectures, enjoyed all-expenses-paid, first-class travel in return for very brief articles (for Life magazine, among others), and found his books regularly optioned for movies. A visit to Hollywood led him to Forest Lawn cemetery and ultimately to his gruesomely funny send-up of the American way of death, The Loved One (1948).

Death, it turns out, was frequently on his mind. By 1951 Waugh was only 48 but already a fat, ugly wheezer ready to die. ("You see that dreadful old bore," Laura remarked to her son Auberon, "he used to be so witty and gay.") After all, what was there to live for? He had finished what he always regarded as his best novel, the now little-read Helena (1950), about the Empress who discovered the True Cross. He was beset by myriad health troubles -- "King Lear's sufferings seem no sharper than mine" -- and he had begun to worry seriously about his paranoia, his accidie, his reliance on drink and drugs. If he weren't careful, he might even -- to use his favorite word -- repine:

"I've felt so very feeble in recent weeks," he wrote to Nancy Mitford, "that at last I called in a doctor who took my blood-pressure & pronounced it the lowest ever recorded -- in fact the pressure of a 6 months foetus. In an access of sudden hope I said: 'Does this mean I shall die quite soon.' 'No. It means you will live absolutely for ever in deeper & deeper melancholy."

There is no dearth of books chronicling Evelyn Waugh's life. His diaries reveal the drunken, mean-spirited melancholiac; his letters the caustic, sometimes self-lacerating wit. Christopher Sykes's memoir is admiring; Humphrey Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation emphasizes social relations and anecdotes; Auberon Waugh's recent autobiography, Will This Do?, is funny and unfilial. (Who can blame him? As Stannard points out, when Auberon lay near death because of an accidental shooting, Waugh, typically, kept on writing and traveling rather than interrupt his schedule to visit his eldest son in the hospital.)

Those looking for outrageous Waugh stories -- and there are scores -- will find a greater proportion of them in these earlier books than in Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years. Stannard instead dwells on more serious matters, especially Waugh's artistic practice (his novels all show "the terrifying formlessness of the rational 'adult' world when seen through the eyes of a naif"), his growing hatred for everything modern, and, above all, his determined attempts to live, despite an inherently dry soul, as a believing Catholic. For instance, the biographer traces the spiritual progress of soldier Guy Crouchback in the Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; Unconditional Surrender 1961 aka The End of the Battle) and also pays a good deal of attention to Waugh's commitment to American Catholicism, his extensive critique of Cyril Connolly's humanist account of spiritual despair, The Unquiet Grave, and his own intellectual need for sympathetic co-religionists such as Graham Greene and Daphne Fielding.

There are two delicate matters about which Stannard slightly fudges discussion: Waugh's love for his daughter Margaret and the circumstances of his death. Stannard hints pretty strongly that Waugh had unhealthy feelings toward Meg. (He does not mention -- deliberately? -- that in Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold the autobiographical hero, during his interlude of madness, believes himself sexually teased by a young woman named Margaret.) Later when Meg goes to work for Father Philip Caraman this Jesuit also falls in "love" with her, and is ultimately forced to leave his post. Stannard suggests that these elderly passions were absolutely pure, but writes coyly enough that one cannot help but wonder.

As one does about Waugh's passage from this fallen world. He was discovered dead in a lavatory at his home on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1966, after attending a Mass in Latin celebrated by Father Caraman. The cause of death was said to be coronary thrombosis. But Graham Greene heard that Waugh had drowned in the lavatory and was found with water in his lungs. The coroner's records, writes Stannard, were destroyed, as a matter of course, a few years after Waugh's death and before any biographer could study them.

What does all this mean? Stannard reiterates Waugh's growing melancholy and despair in his last years, his fear that he might apostasize from the Church because of its distasteful modernization of the Mass. Is there a suggestion that Waugh committed suicide, an act for which he had always felt nothing but contempt?

And finally there is the evidence of Auberon Waugh, not mentioned by Stannard. In Will This Do? Waugh fils goes out of his way to note that when he arrived home on the night of his father's death he glimpsed "excrement" on the floor outside the lavatory. It was soon whisked away and never spoken of. Was this simply good housekeeping, or an attempt to get rid of evidence?

Stannard suggests that Waugh, as a craftsman and connoisseur of elaborate fantasies, might have relished this mystery surrounding his death. He would have deemed biographical speculation about his daughter base and impertinent. (Meg herself was struck and killed by a car in 1986, shortly after writing The Man Who Was Greenmantle, a well received biography of her grandfather, Auberon Herbert.) Still, these two somewhat unsavory incidents -- just the sort of thing that the novelist himself would happily gossip about with Ann Fleming or Nancy Mitford or Diana Cooper -- remind us that, despite Martin Stannard's minutely detailed and thoroughly entertaining biography, there are mysteries surrounding Evelyn Waugh even now. Perhaps Selina Hastings, reportedly at work on yet another life of Waugh, will solve them?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

UP IN THE OLD HOTEL

By Joseph Mitchell

Pantheon. 718 pp. $27.50

Sometimes when it's a damp November in my soul I pick up "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon" or "Old Mr. Flood" and read a few pages. They never fail to brighten my mood. Joseph Mitchell wrote most of his New Yorker profiles of outcasts, obsessives and holy fools more than 50 years ago, but they provide a lot more than old-fashioned entertainment. In fact, Mitchell shows us how to endure and enjoy this heartbreaking world of ours.

"When I have time to kill," he wrote in a typical piece called "Hit on the Head by a Cow," "I sometimes go to the basement of a brownstone tenement on Fifty-ninth Street, three-quarters of a block west of Columbus Circle, and sit on a rat-gnawed Egyptian mummy … with Charles Eugene Cassell, an old Yankee for whose bitter and disorderly mind I have great respect. Mr. Cassell has Negro, French, Portuguese, and English blood. … About fifteen years ago, after he got too contrary to hold down a steady job, he took out some of his savings and opened a museum -- Captain Charley's Private Museum for Intelligent People."

From the first, it seems, Mitchell was drawn to visionaries and pariahs whom the world had passed by and yet who managed to invest their lives with passion, generosity, hard living and flamboyance. Gypsies, carnival freaks, panhandlers, evangelists of all sorts, watermen, calypso singers, deaf-mutes, Mohawk Indians, people who run seafood restaurants and old saloons, people who rake clams, live in caves … Most of them seem more admirable than anyone who has ever graced an issue of Vanity Fair or stood before the crowd at a political convention. They are not, Mitchell once warned, "little people": "They are as big as you are, whoever you are." Today they seem almost like figures from the Old Testament, men and women of power and majesty. As Mitchell says of the Gypsies, they "look like they've thought a lot about the way life is, they and their forefathers before them, and they don't see anything funny in it."

"Up in the Old Hotel" gathers nearly all of Mitchell's mature journalism -- "Joe Gould's Secret" (1965), "The Bottom of the Harbor" (1960), as well as "Old Mr. Flood" (1948), "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon" (1943) and a few previously uncollected pieces. It makes such exhilarating, irresistible reading that those new to Mitchell will hardly be able to turn the book's 700 pages fast enough. But it's also so good that anyone susceptible to Mitchell's bittersweetness -- he might be called a stoic comedian -- will want to linger over every one of those pages.

In most of Mitchell's early work New York appears as an enchanted realm, a Baghdad-on-the-Hudson of magic shops, haunted hotels, secret societies. The wandering reporter encounters beggar kings and Bowery queens, eavesdrops on prophets of doom, hears an unlikely bum recite "Hiawatha" in the language of seagulls, and even learns the secret of the elixir of life. He's like a wedding guest who keeps running into one Ancient Mariner after another.

Mitchell's plain prose unobtrusively employs every resource of art: symbolism (the saloon as womb and refuge), the precise recording of idiosyncratic speech, intricate time-shifts, a mixture of high and low styles, lots of humor and pathos. In essence, Mitchell isn't simply a journalist doing a job, he's a romantic pilgrim, a walker in the city and along shorelines and through old cemeteries, like Leopold Bloom in one of his favorite books. He drinks at McSorley's, eats at the Fulton Fish Market, sits a spell with cranks and retired fishermen mainly for one reason: He likes these things, admires and even identifies with these people. Old Mr. Flood, for instance, suggests a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as an old man, while panhandler Joe Gould eventually grows into Mitchell's Dostoevskyan double.

From people so battered by time and fate comes the wisdom of experience, frequently punctuated by recollections of a lost golden age when, in the words of an old black bricklayer, "there were flowers in every yard, and rosebushes, and the old women exchanged seeds and bulbs and cuttings with each other. … People looked after things in those days. They patched and mended and made do, and they kept their yards clean, and they burned their trash. And they taught their children how to conduct themselves." A smart librarian would categorize "Up in the Old Hotel" as wisdom literature, like Ecclesiastes. Here, for example, Mr. Flood reflects on love:

"I'm ninety-four years … and my mind is just a turmoil of regrets … In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what's the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there's never a day passes I don't think about her, and there's never a day passes I don't curse myself. 'What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?' I say to myself. 'You should've said to hell with what's right and what's wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You'd have something to remember, you'd be happier now.' She's out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she's been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two."

In the pantheon of New Yorker writers Joseph Mitchell is among the least widely known but, I think, the most haunting. If you haven't already gone away on vacation, "Up in the Old Hotel" is the book to take along. And if you have, it's one to salt away as a restorative the next time your thoughts turn to death and doom. There aren't many books that can make you reflective yet happy just to be alive, but this is one.

RUM PUNCH

By Elmore Leonard

Delacorte. 297 pp. $21

A FEW years back I heard Elmore Leonard -- our leading thriller writer -- softly complain that people were always asking him to review crime novels and mysteries, but that he would much prefer a chance to comment on someone like Anita Brookner. Anita . . . Brookner? The Booker Prize-winning English novelist who writes mainly about genteel, middle-aged women who have missed out on life and love? None other. What could Leonard be talking about?

Maybe the man was just being mischievous, I thought, naming someone utterly unlike himself. Made you wonder, though.

Leonard's remark came back to me as I turned the pages of Rum Punch, his 30th novel, which it should be noted is as unputdownable as anyone could wish. The plot -- pleasingly convoluted, of course -- focuses on the attempt of a Florida gunrunner named Ordell Robbie to smuggle some half a million dollars into the United States. Surrounding him are his old friend Louis Gara, just out of prison for the third time; a trio of kept women, including a mid-thirties sexpot named Melanie; the flight attendant Jackie Burke, who has been nabbed while bringing in some of Ordell's money; a couple of eager-beaver lawmen; and the bail-bondsman Max Cherry.

Clearly a volatile mix of characters, but their story goes down easy, and packs a real wallop in the end. Here's a sip of this vintage Leonard. Louis, sitting in a sidewalk cafe drinking, decides to knock off a bank:

"Louis had another vodka tonic, and wrote a note on a cocktail napkin. This is a stickup. Do not panic . . . He used another napkin to write or press a button . . . He saw he would have to write much smaller to get in or I will blow your head off and something about the money, wanting only hundred-dollar bills and fifties. He started over with a clean napkin opened up and put down what he wanted to say. Perfect.

"But by the time he paid his check, walked several blocks to his car, and drove up Collins Avenue to the bank, it was closed."

Neat low-keyed humor, yes, but it also tells you that Louis is a screw-up, a loser burned out from prison and drinking. Not so Ordell. He takes his old buddy and Melanie out to visit the compound of Big Guy, a white-power gun nut; they glimpse some motorcycles and then see two men taking shots at targets on posts:

"'Couple of Bikers for Racism,' Ordell said, 'practicing up to shoot us African-Americans when we go to move in their neighborhood and take our pleasure with their women.' "

A perfect sentence, beyond praise. But this is altogether another kind of humor, revealing a speaker who is rad, bad and very dangerous to know.

Ordell, Louis, Melanie. Haven't we met these people before? Think back to The Switch, a 1978 novel nominated for an Edgar as the year's best original paperback. Elmore Leonard almost never resurrects characters -- though the hero of Stick did first appear in Swag (aka Ryan's Rules) -- so one can't help but wonder why he's done it here. Why indeed? Which brings us again to Anita Brookner, and her books about desperate middle-aged people looking for happiness.

Beneath its fast-moving surface, Rum Punch is a novel about growing old, about the way that time changes us, about the old dream of starting over again and its cost. In The Switch, Ordell and Louis were a couple of amiable ex-cons, reminiscent of Angel Martin and Jim Rockford; they talked like tough guys but neither could ever blow anyone's head off. Louis, especially, was so likeable that the unhappily married woman he and Ordell kidnapped turned to him for sympathy and affection. In the 13 years since then he's become a sorry, burned-out shell, the humanity leached out of him. Ordell has learned to kill with a casualness that takes the breath away. Melanie, once as smart as she was gorgeous, has grown into a pouty, going-to-fat, nagging bimbo.

Getting old. At 57 bail-bondsman Max Cherry looks back on 27 meaningless years of marriage and a life dealing with sleazoids and no accounts; he sees Jackie -- still a stunner even though she's 44 -- as a last chance for happiness. Jackie, after three marriages and a career of phony smiles, naturally figures that Ordell's half a million might just be the ticket she needs to a shiny future. But does that future include Max?

Such fever dreams fuel many of Elmore Leonard's novels, yet seldom has the contrast between youth and age -- and an oppressive sense of the world's degeneration -- been so apparent. The young here are innocent, cocky, stupid: Ordell tries to teach lock-picking to some black kids and they're too coked-up to learn the skill. Later, they laboriously try to puzzle out the simple directions written on a rocket-launcher before the police close in on them. Despite her sexy body, a young girl is so meek she's good for little more than cleaning house; but a 63-year-old woman turns out to be fantastic in bed. When Louis blows an important deal, Ordell says to him, with real sorrow, "What's wrong with you, Louis? . . . You use to be a beautiful guy, you know it?" THERE ARE no heroes in Rum Punch, only survivors. Even Max is passive, henpecked, almost a schmuck; Jackie remains a little unfocused, partly because we need to be kept in the dark about her real loyalties. All the old values -- devotion, love, honor -- fade in the South Florida sunshine, in the brightly lit designer shopping malls. No one knows who can be trusted; no one, in fact, can be trusted. Like many of Leonard's other books, this is not so much a whiz-bang boy's adventure as a hypnotic dance of death.

Because Rum Punch offers so relentless a vision of people at tether's end, one forgives the novel its improbabilities: Big Guy would have searched Ordell and Louis before allowing them in his house; the elaborate scam, involving shopping bags, deserved one more unexpected twist; Ordell would never have come to Max's when all the police in the state were after him. What is harder to forgive, though, is the way that Elmore Leonard has altered the past. The Switch used to be a satirical and light-hearted caper novel, with a surprising, upbeat ending; but now, knowing what will become of its main characters, it seems bathed in pathos, like the photograph of a smiling wedding couple whose marriage ended in sorrow and bitterness.

Of course, life often delivers this kind of unexpected blow, what a Brit like Anita Brookner might even call a rum punch?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

I SAW ESAU: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book

Edited by Iona and Peter Opie

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

Candlewick Press. 160 pp. $ 19.95; all ages

AMONG Bernard Shaw's wittiest efforts -- although effort hardly seems the word for a writer who could write as easily as most of us breathe -- is "The Revolutionist's Handbook," a compendium of provocations and iconoclastic maxims supposedly authored by the luckless hero of "Man and Superman." At the time, the little book struck readers as politically daring and socially irresponsible. But by comparison to I Saw Esau, it represents gentility itself: This "schoolchild's pocket book" collects the traditional rhymes and chants of the playground into a breviary of the cruel, bloody, vulgar, ingenious, disgusting and forbidden. Reading it gave this reviewer, who has not blanched to peruse the more graphic passages of William Burroughs, the kind of shocks and chills he never expected to feel again since quitting the blacktop of Washington Elementary School.

After much soul-searching, not to speak of tedious consultations with local educators and clergymen, the staff at Book World have agreed to allow two or three of these rhymes to be reproduced, strictly as a public service. Thoughtful parents may wish, however, to excise this page, lest younger children looking for the Sunday mini-page come across it inadvertently.

Here, for instance, is a "prayer" before mealtime:

Bless the meat.

Damn the skin.

Open your mouth

And cram it in.

And here's one intended for bedtime:

Good night, sleep tight,

Don't let the bugs bite;

If they do, don't squall,

Take a spoon and eat them all.

Learned readers will no doubt wonder about the possible influence here of the American classic "Greasy, grimy, gopher guts," especially its heart-rending cri du coeur, "And me without a spoon." I once took this matter up with critic Harold Bloom, who referred me to a footnote in Stith Thompson's folklore index, which in turn sent me scurrying to the Child ballad collection; alas, Child reprints variants of both ditties from Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poesy, but otherwise ignores the question of chronological priority. Such are the labors of scholarship, which are certainly underappreciated by children, particularly now at the end of the school year:

This time tomorrow, where shall I be?

Not in this academy!

No more Latin, no more French,

No more sitting on a hard school bench.

No more dirty bread and butter,

No more water from the gutter.

No more maggots in the ham,

No more yukky bread and jam.

No more milk in dirty old jugs,

No more cabbage boiled with slugs.

No more spiders in my bath,

Trying hard to make me laugh.

No more beetles in my tea,

Making googly eyes at me.

No more things to bring us sorrow,

'Cos we won't be here tomorrow.

In all seriousness, reading through I Saw Esau makes one yearn for an era when razzing rhymes and clever verbal abuse were the main terrors of the schoolyard. Could such a halcyon time have ever existed? Nowadays, too many kids know the world, even their cunning little world, to be a place far more violent and dangerous than anything imagined in, or sublimated by, these naughty catches and poems. Of course, I Saw Esau is a reprint of a 1947 semi-classic, the first production of the legendary Opies (known for their anthropological attention to the lore of childhood), and it is also very British. All this guarantees a sort of endearing innocence. Interestingly, there is an almost exactly contemporary American collection of children's rhymes: Carl Withers's 1948 classic, since reprinted, There's a Rocket in Your Pocket -- a book which, all things being equal, I think a slightly better value, since it includes more of the kind of nonsense that otherwise respectable Americans carry around in their heads (e.g. "You remind me of a man./ What man?/ A man of power./ What power?/ The power of hoodoo./ Hoodoo?/ You do./ I what?/ You remind me of a man" etc. ad infinitum or nauseam, whichever comes first).

But as usual things aren't equal, because Candlewick Press, besides doing a bang-up design job in general, somehow inveigled Maurice Sendak to illuminate the Opies's diabolical missal with sly marginal figures, full-page illustrations, and unsettling artwork that not only matches the text in genteel savagery but frequently exceeds it. In a little poem about a girl who daydreams for a husband, Sendak creates a haunting six-part pictorial, loaded with disturbing imagery, starting with the appearance of a naked homunculus in a top hat. In the punning chant that begins "I one my mother, I two my mother" and concludes "I ate my mother" Sendak shows a bawling infant who, given a breast to nurse on, gradually sucks up Mom altogether and then, fat and happy, dances a little jig on a stool -- a simple play on words thus becoming an all-too-accurate parable of mother-child relations. At other times the artist makes one illustration combine elements from two or more rhymes; the result yields a weird, often Freudian synergy as in the picture of a triumphant little boy, holding a human head made of gingerbread, who straddles a donkey dressed in a suit, while a young girl tumbles down the stairs, another swoons and a group of hiding children snicker. Where nonsense leaves off, nightmare begins.

Readers fondest of the dark Sendak of Outside Over There (not many, I should think) know that his top-hatted, plump little manikins and dreamy peasant lasses frequently venture into strange realms indeed. He's more lightsome here, for the most part, but the troubling imagery nonetheless dominates (one more example: a bearded chimney sweeper shoving his second wife up a chimney, as two wide-eyed Hansel and Gretel-like children look on and a youngish first wife, like some Gothic heroine, flees into a forest). Along with these Grimm and Gorey touches, Sendak also indulges his beguiling pictorial allusiveness. Night Kitchen Mickey figures appear once or twice; the devil looks like a Wild Thing. But a shrouded piggish creature hints at some of Goya's "black paintings"; a gigantic, impossibly serene child, oblivious to the taunts of her classmates, clearly pays homage to Watteau's "Gilles," that portrait of an 18th-century clown who confronts the spectator like a Gallic Mona Lisa; and a man burying his face in his hands recalls Adam expelled from paradise in the well known Masaccio altarpiece.

Some of these elements -- the British character of the rhymes, Sendak's more uncanny pictures, the illuminating scholarly notes, the pervasive sense that the world has changed, if only for the worse -- may make I Saw Esau one of those books that critics like, aunts and uncles buy, and children ignore. It's a lovely production, with pictures odd enough to puzzle and dream over, but I don't know that it's finally a kid's book at all.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

THE FAMISHED ROAD

By Ben Okri

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 500 pp. $22.50

"OUR BIRTH," wrote Wordsworth in a famous poem, "is but a sleep and a forgetting." Our souls, he explains, have fallen away from a spiritual realm of unity with God and nature. But for Azaro, the young hero of Ben Okri's 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road, the ghostly world of pre-existence is all too close by and frighteningly real. His ghetto neighborhood, located between a phantasmagoric city and a demon-haunted African forest, shimmers with spirits, talking rats, grotesque monsters and the constant interpenetration of the Other World. It is visited by creatures with three or more heads and by angels, but also by thugs, prostitutes, politicians and beggars. Creepiest of all is a blind old man who squeezes out repulsive, "evil" music on his accordion. All these visitants, supernatural and subhuman, are perceived through a haze of heat and sun, frequently in fevers, nightmares or half-drunken visions.

"To be born," notes Okri, "is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile." Azaro is, almost in spite of himself, a spirit-child, an abiku, constantly pursued by unearthly beings who hope to entice him back into their realm of the unborn. One of their main portals into our human world, it turns out, lies in the bar of the awesome Madame Koto, herself an ambiguous force for both good and evil, crackling with power. Some whisper that she's a flat-out witch; others hint, even more quietly, that she can manipulate reality itself.

Most of The Famished Road ostensibly chronicles the day-to-day life and fever dreams of Azaro, his parents and their neighbors. Mum -- as this spelling hints, the Nigerian Okri currently resides in Britain -- circumambulates the streets, trying to sell oranges and other provisions, with pitifully small success. Dad unloads trucks, hauling heavy bags of cement, little more than a two-legged beast of burden. At one point Azaro wanders deep into the city, escapes some spectral predators, and spies his idolized father at work:

"And then I saw Dad amongst the load-carriers. He looked completely different. His hair was white and his face was mask-like with engrained cement. He was almost naked except for a very disgusting pair of tattered shorts which I had never seen before. They loaded two bags of salt on his head and he cried 'GOD, SAVE ME!' and he wobbled and the bag on top fell back into the lorry." The boy shouts out, "Dad, No!" His father looks round, and "when he faced my direction he stopped." Then "as the salt poured on his shoulder, tears streamed from his eyes, and there was shame on his face as he staggered right past me, almost crushing me with his mighty buckling feet."

Such anguish periodically brings The Famished Road back to earth when Azaro's adventures in anima-land, described in a dithyrambic prose that blends Revelation, almost Blakean symbolism and African folklore, start to seem repetitious and even a little tedious. Nonetheless, Okri seems to be suggesting an analogy between the Other World and ours. The deformed beggars, for instance, who play an important role in the novel, look no different from the weird creatures that Azaro glimpses in the city or at Madame Koto's: "I shut my eyes and when I opened them again I saw people who walked backwards, a dwarf who got about on two fingers, men upside-down with baskets of fish on their feet, women who had breasts on their backs, babies strapped to their chests, and beautiful children with three arms. I saw a girl amongst them who had eyes at the side of her face, bangles of blue copper around her neck, and who was more lovely than forest flowers."

To all the human suffering and haunting strangeness in The Famished Road, politics adds its own macabre humor when the Party of the Rich battles the Party of the Poor in an election that never quite happens. Even though the Party of the Rich distributes free milk, which turns out to be bad and makes everyone sick, Madame Koto throws in her lot with its venal leaders, thereby gaining more and more power. Of all sorts, electrical as well as personal. Azaro has been in the habit of visiting Madame Koto -- for a while she considers him a good luck charm -- even though her patrons are demons more often than not and her bar an analogue to the intergalactic saloon in "Star Wars." One afternoon the boy finds everyone dancing to mysterious music.

"On the counter was an evil-looking instrument with a metal funnel that would have delighted the imagination of wizards. There was a disc which kept turning, a handle cranked round by a spirit, a long piece of metal with a needle on the whirling disc, and music coming out of the funnel without anyone singing into it. It seemed a perfect instrument for the celebration of the dead, for the dances of light spirits and fine witches."

Technology, it has been said, raised to a high enough level resembles magic.

As the novel progresses, Okri shifts his attention somewhat from the spiritual labors of Azaro to the growing political consciousness of his father. Dad's utopian vision of a more equitable and kindly Africa paradoxically arises out of violence. Frequently likened to a boxer, Dad eventually decides to train and actually become a fighter. He takes the name Black Tyger, gaining considerable local celebrity. Then late one night a shadowy figure in the darkness calls him out. Okri's description of the bare-fisted match between Azaro's father and Yellow Jaguar, a legendary but long dead boxer, is one of the novel's most thrilling set pieces, comparable to the death-struggle in the dark between Beowulf and Grendel, or the wrestling match by moonlight between the Icelandic hero Grettir and the monster Glaum. Seemingly invincible, Yellow Jaguar overpowers and wears down the living man -- until Azaro suddenly cries out: "Black Tyger, USE YOUR POWER." Then, "with all the concentrated rage and insanity of those who have a single moment in which to choose between living and dying, Dad broke the chains of his exhaustion and thundered such blows on the man as would annihilate an entire race of giants." Death misses this victory.

HERE, obviously, is a novel of vast ambition and equal achievement, alive with magic, allegory (is Madame Koto a symbol of Africa itself?), lyrical prose, recurrent road imagery, startling sentences ("She wore clothing that made the beggars ill"), and sly humor: At one point Azaro, while being stuffed into a sack by albinos, desperately calls for help, shouting "Politicians! Politicians are taking me away!" Sometimes, though, Okri's prose-poem teeters on the pretentious -- "The world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer" -- and there is a certain sameness to the supernatural encounters. Azaro and Madame Koto are virtually the only people with names; other characters are merely referred to as the photographer or the landlord. Though Azaro's supernatural journeys may derive mainly from folklore tradition and a taste for French or Francophone surrealism, their schizophrenic quality, complete with voices and visions, also recalls the more extreme novels of Philip K. Dick and even Julian Jaynes's controversial theories about human consciousness.

In its picture of corrupt politics, its oblique account of modernization in Africa ("It seemed that the trees, feeling that they were losing the argument with human beings, had simply walked deeper into the forest") and its inspired use of ancient beliefs, The Famished Road suggests a fusion of the two most famous Nigerian novels, Amos Tutuola's fantastic, word-mad The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Chinua Achebe's soberly tragic Things Fall Apart. Still, Ben Okri's novel -- he has previously been admired in this country only for his disorienting stories, Stars of the New Curfew -- is a strikingly original piece of writing and a delicately nuanced picture of love between a child and his parents. After all the fighting ghosts, political violence and mysterious strangers fade, what lingers most in the memory is the recurrent image of a family at night: The boy falling slowly asleep on his mat, listening to his mother's quiet breathing nearby while watching his tired father rock on a three-legged chair in the darkness. The terrors and attractions of the spirit world are finally no match for human tenderness.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

PEOPLE READ the Bible for myriad reasons, discovering in its pages consolation, religious instruction, moral example and even the pleasures of mere literature. Some scholars look upon the book as "the great code" to western art and literature, a glossary of myths and metaphors; others see it as a (flawed) work of history or a polemical tract justifying Judaism or Christianity; for many of the devout it remains quite simply the Word of God and its human redactors little more than the instruments, the quill pens, of its true Author.

Still, there can't be many people who have read the Bible not for the love of God or good prose, but for the love of money. Filthy lucre. Cold cash. Some 30 years ago my father, not himself a religious man though a shrewd one, offered his 14-year-old son $100 to go through the Bible from cover to cover. It took nearly six months, but I did it, and my Dad, to my mind, certainly received his money's worth. Of course, without quite realizing it then, I got even more.

Like a grounding in the classics or a thorough knowledge of baseball, familiarity with the Bible invests life, whether one is a believer or not, with a kind of ballast, steadying one through moments of crisis, providing words or stories of such gravity and soul-shaking power that they become formative experiences, like running away from home or falling in love. Everyone will have his or her favorites: The aged, long-barren Sarah laughing to herself when told that she would bear a son. Abraham's near sacrifice of his beloved Isaac ("Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" "My son, God will provide himself a lamb"). Saul, that tragic king, confronting the witch of Endor. David's secret order to place Bathsheba's husband at the head of a battle where he is sure to be killed. The lamentations of Jeremiah ("The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved"). The existential despair of Ecclesiastes. Job confronting the voice of God in the whirlwind.

Those are from the Hebrew Bible or, with its books rearranged, the Old Testament. Unlike most sequels, however, the New Testament keeps to an equally high standard: John the Baptist saying that "After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie." Any of Jesus's parables -- the Good Samaritan, the Sower and the Seed, the Prodigal Son -- or such miracles as the raising of Lazarus or the exorcism of the Gadarene demoniac ("My name is Legion: for we are many"). Think of Jesus's sad words to Peter, "Verily I say unto thee, that this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice" -- and Peter's horror at their fulfillment. Or Pontius Pilate -- that representative modern man -- asking "What is truth?" and literally washing his hands of the whole Passion. And finally, John of Patmos after the breaking of the last seals: "And I saw a new heaven and a new Earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea."

They don't write sentences like that any more, but they sure do write about them. During the past decade there has been a remarkable revival in Bible studies, as literary critics, poets and cultural historians have begun to venture where both fools and angels have often feared to tread. Even though the Reformation was based, in part, on the notion that people should be allowed to confront God and his Word directly, Luther probably didn't foresee the arcana of 19th and early 20th-century scriptural study, from Wellhausen's discovery of the multiple authors of the Pentateuch (known as E, J, P and D) to the exacting form studies of Rudolph Bultmann. Reading even snippets of these immensely learned scholars, Germans for the most part, can require the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job.

Of course, the church fathers, Origen in particular, had long ago built up elaborate systems for interpreting Scripture, allegorizing nearly every element in the Old Testament as a prefiguration (or type or figure) of something in the New. (It has been said that the entire New Testament is symbolically embedded in the Old.) Jonah's being spit out of the belly of the great fish after three days and nights obviously symbolized Jesus's descent into Hell and his resurrection. A tome like Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob, a several-thousand page study of Job, must rank among the seven wonders of creative misinterpretation: "For whoever is exalted with pride, whoever is tortured by the longings of covetousness, whoever is relaxed with the pleasures of lust, whoever is kindled by the burnings of unjust and immoderate anger, what else is he but a testicle of Anti-christ?"

Besides the typological extravagances of the Christian fathers and the orderly researches of the German scholars, Biblical study has also been pervaded by the enthusiasms of the American true believers. Do air-wave evangelists still invite you to place one hand on your Bible and the other on the radio, so that you can feel the healing power? -- after which, you will of course be asked to place both hands deep into your pockets and give generously. Even an undoubted classic like the 12-volume Interpreter's Bible sounds this note: "The reader should confront the fact that a professor erudite in the Scriptures may miss salvation, while the lowly saint on his knees before the Book may know the presence and almost feel the Hand." Any of us might envy editor George Buttrick his faith, and even admire the rhythms of his prose, but still want a little less fervor.

Literary Views of the Bible

W.H. AUDEN, like T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, criticized those "who read the Bible for its prose." But for many non-believers, that is the only way the book can be approached at all, which accounts for the continued popularity of the 17th-century Authorized Version (aka King James version) over more accurate contemporary translations.

Nearly all modern literary interpretations of the Bible look back to a seminal essay by Erich Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar," which became the first chapter of Mimesis (1948). In that piece Auerbach contrasted the Homeric and Biblical methods of representing reality, the former bringing everything into a uniformly illuminated foreground, the latter dwelling on "the decisive points of the narrative" while what lies between remains in the dark, virtually nonexistent, but generating an immensely suggestive power. The Old Testament, according to Auerbach, is "fraught with background."

In the '50s and '60s poet Robert Graves put forth various obsessive views of Jesus in essays and his novel King Jesus (psychedelic mushrooms, Christ never died on the cross); critic Kenneth Burke offered a characteristically elaborate schema for "the first three chapters of Genesis"; and poet-critic William Empson virtually ruined his critical reputation by the vehemence of his attacks on God, the torturer of his Son. During the past decade a more sober line of literary scholars has come along. In The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) Frank Kermode uses Biblical texts, especially Mark, to address various problems of interpretation, at one point comparing the young man who loses his shirt at the arrest of Jesus (traditionally Mark himself) with the mysterious man in the mackintosh in Joyce's Ulysses (in some views, Joyce himself). Similarly, Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Berkeley, has written a trilogy about understanding the Hebrew Bible: The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) and the recent The World of Biblical Literature (1992, Basic Books, $23). All three books are suffused with a calm studiousness, whether Alter analyzes narrative allusiveness or Hebrew poetry's bent for repetition and parallelism. Eschewing the "excavative" endeavors of scholars who focus on Ugaritic loan-words and the like, he emphasizes "the complex means used by biblical writers to lock their texts together, to amplify their meanings by linking one text with another." In the most recent book, for instance, Alter explicates the rape of Tamar and finds echoes of Joseph's attempted seduction by Potiphar's wife. Amnon and Mrs. P. both use the same Hebrew words for "lie with me," while Tamar and Joseph are the only characters in the Old Testament to wear "a coat of many colors." This unexpected confluence adds depths to Tamar's victimization, as well as taking up the important Biblical leitmotif of family strife.

Alter and Kermode joined up their efforts to edit The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), a massive compendium that includes work by such scholars as Meir Sternberg, Carol Newsom and Bernard McGinn, as well as the general editors. Many approaches are represented. Structural anthropologist Edmund Leach, for instance, judges the Bible as simply "a corpus of mythology which provides a justification for the religious performances of believers." In his essay he proceeds to link the wanderings in the desert with the halfway stage in a rite of passage. "In this Other World everything happens in reverse. The heavenly bread falls from the sky like rain; the heavenly water does not fall like rain but emerges from a rock." Eventually he builds up to a stunning analysis of the fish imagery surrounding Jesus, reminding us that Joshua was generally perceived as a prefiguration of Christ (the two names are virtually the same), that Joshua is called the "son of Nun," and that the word Nun can mean fish.

Such linkages and parallels have long been the purview of Northrop Frye, who capped his distinguished career with The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) and Words with Power (1990). The first of these books opens with an elaborate, nearly impenetrable bramble of 50 pages about the nature of language, and Frye will probably lose many readers in these thistles. But later in the book, and throughout Words of Power, he explores the unifying imagery of the entire Bible. For instance, Frye considers the virgin birth as mythically necessary, the closing of a loop: "The counternatural creation of woman [Eve] from a more or less male body leads to the fall," therefore "redemption would be symbolized by another miraculous act reversing the perversion of sex at the Fall, which for the NT is the myth of the Virgin Birth, the begetting of God from a female body." Sections elaborate, with familiar virtuosity, such archetypal structuring images as the mountain, the garden, the cave and the furnace.

Perhaps the most congenial of recent books is Gabriel Joispovici's The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (1988). Joispovici, a British scholar of modern literature as well as a novelist, stresses reading -- reading again and again -- as the heart of his critical method. Rather than worry about the genesis of scripture, all its strands and threads, Joispovici, like Alter and Kermode, actually prefers to confront the final, seemingly seamless text. He talks about everything from the look of childhood Bibles to the paradox of treating scripture as seriously as literature, reminding us that Dostoevsky and Eliot can change our lives too. At times Joispovici's Bible resembles a modernist classic, sometimes even a post-modernist one.

While Joispovici subtly traces his response to the Bible, Harold Bloom sweeps the reader up with his trademark razzmatazz. In The Book of J (1990) Bloom notoriously proposes that J -- one of the four main authors of the Torah, aka Pentateuch -- was a woman. Bloom enthuses, belabors and soliloquizes with impressive patriarchal fervor, but has to admit that his theory relies almost entirely on his gut instinct as a strong reader. Unfortunately this time out Bloom, despite characteristically provocative insights, strikes many informed readers as not so much strong as muscle-bound. In Robert Alter's review of The Book of J for Commentary magazine (now a chapter of The World of Biblical Literature), his still, small voice -- pointing out linguistic, historical and interpretive errors -- quite overwhelms Bloom's whirlwind.

Besides these major works, several quirky, appealing literary books take up Biblical matters. Translations, for instance: Marcia Falk's edition of The Song of Songs (1990) arrives with Barry Moser illustrations, Hebrew original on left-hand pages, Falk's ripe poetic versions on the right, and a long, thougtful section of notes. I find Falk's poems sexy and successful; they do, however, ride a fine line balancing lush and gush: "Between my breasts he'll lie,/ Sachet of spices,/ Spray of blossoms plucked/ From the oasis." More daring is Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel of Jesus (1991), which aims to present only Christ's genuine words, sans the gospeller's accretions. A dozen pages of wisdom, parables and observations float on a hundred pages of commentary that frequently associates Jesus with other religious masters, especially Mitchell's beloved Buddhist and Taoist sages. This apparent lese-majeste also includes speculation about Jesus's "illegitimacy," his callousness in the Gospels toward his mother, the crucial importance of the episode with the woman taken in adultery (most scholars consider this a later addition to John) -- and that it is no accident that Jesus's last spoken word in Aramaic was "Abba," father. Admirers of Mitchell's work should also look for his fine, and more critically restrained, version of The Book of Job (1987).

Readers who enjoy freestyle interpretation might also relish two good anthologies, Congregation: Contemporary Writers on the Hebrew Bible (1987), edited by David Rosenberg, and Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), edited by Alfred Corn. In these one can read, say, poet John Hollander reflecting on the psalms (quite dazzling), Isaac Bashevis Singer on Genesis, or any number of other fine writers from Anthony Hecht, Cynthia Ozick and Howard Moss to John Updike, Annie Dillard and Richard Howard. Most of the pieces are endearingly autobiographical, none of the writers is a specialist in Biblical scholarship, a few are atheists, and some, like Guy Davenport, even agree with Trollope "that a strong interest in religion is a prelude to insanity."

The Bible and History

ANY of the various college texts used in Bible courses will offer a sound grounding in basic history, archeology, geography and like matters. I'm fond of Joseph B. Tyson's The New Testament and Early Christianity (1984); it summarizes vast learning without flourish but in fascinating detail.

Much the same can be said of Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? (1987), which actually adumbrated, albeit with proper tentativeness, Bloom's theory of J as a woman. Friedman attempts to answer such seemingly impossible questions as why Aaron made the golden calf. Why Aaron? Why a calf? The answer has to do with political gripes against King Jeroboam, whose temple to Yahweh sported a throne supported by golden calves. In another notable incident in the OT, Moses announces he plans to marry a Cushite; Cush was ancient Ethiopia, which suggests that the lawgiver's intended might be black. When Aaron and Miriam criticize his decision -- perhaps an early form of racism -- it becomes ironically appropriate that Yahweh punish Miriam by turning her skin leprously white.

Valuable as these books are, they pale before the relentless, blistering scholarship of Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1992, Knopf, $ 27.50). Augustine used to emphasize that all Bible study should lead to love of God or neighbor; Lane Fox instead proposes truth as the proper aim. Writing with a Gibbonian irony and a soft Voltairean malice (he refers to Yahweh as Number One, calls early Christianity "a harmless cause"), this young Oxford don proffers no comfort for believers, and his thorough study of Biblical contradiction, uncertainty and fabrication will leave a lot of shaken souls in its wake. Who killed Goliath, "the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam"? If you think it was David, how do you explain Elhanan, to whom the deed is also attributed in 2 Samuel? Loaded with odd facts (e.g., Dido was the great-niece of Jezebel), The Unauthorized Version is essentially a work of synthesis, though Lane Fox has his own convictions, among them that Nehemiah and John were eye-witnesses to the events they write about and that Jesus died in March 36 when he was in his mid to late forties. Here is Lane Fox at his most succinctly provocative: "The book [of Daniel] has the formulaic ingredients of a biblical success story: its hero probably never existed, he was credited with visions he never saw and actions he never did; the book itself arose from two separate sources, arriving joined into one, while its dates and kings are incorrect and its setting is a fiction posing as history."

Paul once wrote "if Christ was not raised, your faith is empty." Two recently published biographies take up the issue of the historical Christ: John P. Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991) and John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991). By their titles and subtitles ye shall know them, and these are clearly not your penny catechism lives of Christ. Both writers are distinguished scholars: Meier's book, the first of two volumes, treats the social background and private years of Jesus; it is written with considerable zest, lots of scholarly notes (these are frequently reviews of past scholarship and at least as interesting as the main text; see the notes about Ben Panthera, the Roman soldier sometimes claimed to be Jesus's "real" father), and sticks closely to Biblical and historical sources. As a Catholic Meier occasionally butts up against the dogma of the Church; after presenting the arguments over, say, the virgin birth or whether Jesus had brothers and sisters, he backs away from any conclusions. Similarly, he notes that he will not deal at all with the resurrection, as this is a matter that one can, finally, affirm only by faith. Crossan is more daring, drawing on sociology and anthropology to illuminate his subject and his society, formulating a list of genuine Jesus sayings (a' la Stephen Mitchell), and making extended comparisons between the life of a carpenter in Nazareth and the life of a weaver in Egypt. His notes, however, are sparse (though scholarly references are woven into the text). Sometimes Crossan's prose also betrays an overfamiliarity with modern social science: "We have, then, it would seem, three stages in this movement from commensality to salary." Neither scholar believes Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but the amount of evidence they accumulate leaves no doubt that he did live, preach, and suffer death by crucifixion. On the whole, I prefer the careful Meier to the more speculative Crossan, (who once brought out an interesting book comparing the parables of Jesus with those of Borges), but both strike me as having written very good books about this hero of the Good Book.

Editions and Commentaries

ANYONE starting on a concerted plan to study the Bible should consider acquiring or borrowing the various volumes of The Anchor Bible; they vary in quality but most are the standard references. Of course, it's fine to read good one-volume editions, like the Annotated Revised Standard Version, the Jerusalem Bible or the recent Oxford Study Bible (1992), based on the revised New English Bible. But for serious work you should turn to the best. In the Anchor series (as in the older Interpreter's Bible), each book of Scripture gets a fresh translation, long introductions, and extensive notes, all by respected scholars.

The four gospels also receive splendid annotations in the paperback Pelican New Testament Commentaries. A fat Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul (1972), edited by Wayne A. Meeks, offers 150 annotated pages of Paul's epistles, followed by 300 pages of essays on his life and thought by distinguished thinkers from Kierkegaard to Krister Stendhal. Paul generally gets a bad press as the guy who institutionalized sweet Jesus's message; a good corrective to this oversimplification is the volume on Paul by E.P. Sanders in the PastMasters series from Oxford.

All these works can be relied on, along with such useful, somewhat dated books as Twentieth Century Biblical Commentary. One would, however, hardly call the The Women's Bible Commentary (due out next month from Westminster/John Knox) dated; it is perhaps all too up-to-date. On the one hand, it presents work by leading women Biblical scholars; on the other, it takes with exceeding seriousness a feminist platform that some readers may find upsetting -- or liberating. For instance, in her preface Sharon Ringe (the volume's co-editor with Carol A. Newsom) writes: "In the Christian confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, clearly the reference is to a human male. That fact itself presents problems for many feminist interpreters, for whom the idea that women are ultimately dependent on a male for their relationship to God is unacceptable . . ." Elsewhere we are told that Luke may be "the most dangerous [text] in the Bible" because it shows women as "models of subordinate service." The fairy-tale Esther gets similar treatment: "By working within the power structure of her environment (the Persian harem system) she moves from a completely powerless position into the relatively more powerful one of queen." In a critique of Hosea the commentator faults the book for failing to consider actual battered wives.

Such remarks, as I have said, may seem all too politically current (or correct), and yet it should be evident that the Bible speaks with so much power -- of all kinds -- that the best readings will, in some way, resist its authority. It is a source of unending paradox: As with any book, we need to humble ourselves to receive its message, but can never be truly blessed until we struggle mightily with the text, perhaps remembering how Jacob once wrestled all night with God?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated from the Russian and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Knopf. 564 pp. $25

TO THOMAS MANN he was "The Pale Criminal." Nietzsche thought him "the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn." Freud ranked his imagination with Shakespeare's. As the creator of "novel tragedies," he composed the most harrowing scene in all fiction (the suicide of Kirilov in The Devils, 1871-72), invented the classic existentialist anti-hero known as The Underground Man ("I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man"), and imagined that deeply upsetting philosophical soliloquy, the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, wherein Christ returns to earth and is condemned to be burned at the stake by his own Church.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's life (1821-1881) would seem excessively melodramatic even in one of his novels. Father murdered by serfs. First work of fiction, Poor Folk (1845), acclaimed a masterpiece. Shortly afterwards arrested for revolutionary activity and sentenced to death. Reprieved moments before execution and exiled to Siberia for nearly 10 years. Bouts of epilepsy. In 1864 -- the year before he started Crime and Punishment -- his wife, brother and close friend all die. To fulfill a contract he writes his novel The Gambler (1865) in less than a month and then marries his stenographer. Incessant poverty. Eventually, however, he becomes an immensely popular, politically conservative Slavophile journalist. Some 40,000 people attend his funeral.

Not surprisingly, Dostoevsky's novels depict the world as a battlefield for the soul of man. His heroes resemble fallen angels; his meek, hand-wringing characters seem like early Christian martyrs; and his villains might be demiurges. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) ranks as his greatest achievement, but Crime and Punishment (1866) stands as his most perfect in pacing and structure. There is no more gripping novel in the world.

First translated in 1886 the book became famous in the West in Constance Garnett's 1914 English version, which helped create a vogue for Dostoevsky among intellectuals. In recent years, however, Garnett has suffered potshots as being too smooth, too Edwardian. Currently the most used editions of C and P have been those in the Norton Critical Edition (Jessie Coulson's translation) and the Penguin Modern Classics (David Magarshack's). There have also been versions by Michael Scammell (best known for his biography of Solzhenitsyn), Sidney Monas and recently, David McDuff, this last a Viking hardcover that will, apparently, replace Magarshack as the standard Penguin paperback.

As good as all these earlier translations are, scholars have already welcomed this new one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky as the best currently available. This edition's virtues start with its sturdy binding and large legible type (neither to be despised); as with the Pevear/Volokhonsky Brothers Karmazov, the translation itself aims for an especially faithful recreation of Dostoevsky's rough-edged prose, jerky with a coiled-spring kinetic energy. Crime and Punishment is, however, a story with a power that bursts through any English version. It is also a novel that might easily be set in, say, contemporary Washington, a city as artificial and dream-filled as old St. Petersburg.

A young man of 23 has dropped out of school because he can't pay his tuition. He lives in what amounts to a closet and, being in arrears on his rent, is afraid of running into his landlady. Everywhere he wanders in his ghetto neighborhood people are out on the pavement begging, whoring or drinking. One pathetic drunk buttonholes him and confesses how he sent his own daughter out on the streets. "Do you understand," he implores, "do you understand, my dear sir, what it means when there is no longer anywhere to go?" Revolutionary ideas fill the air, and this rather sullen intellectual finds them attractive. Sometimes, though, he thinks of throwing himself into the river.

And why not? His father is long dead. His fervently religious mother has been reduced to taking in sewing to save some money for her son's "university education." Even his attractive, hot-tempered young sister has accepted a menial job in a rich household. After narrowly avoiding seduction by the priapic husband, she has recently agreed to marry a considerably older and utterly crass businessman who can hardly wait to get her into bed.

Our hero realizes that both his mother and sister are sacrificing their lives for him.

Now, an old witch-like pawnbroker lives nearby, venal, usurious and cruel; she treats her own sister like a slave. Why should such an insect flourish while others suffer? Think what could be done with all her money. An ambitious self-starter could finish his law degree, grow wealthy, divert funds back into his community, build parks, relieve the poor and addicted, achieve great things. Surely, the life of a miserable "louse" is next to nothing compared with all these good deeds. "One death for hundreds of lives -- it's simple arithmetic."

And so Dostoevsky's ambiguous hero Raskolnikov -- for it is he, not some kid in a modern big-city slum -- feverish, despondent, half-sick from malnutrition, starts to toy with the idea of murder, to rehearse it over and over in his mind, but only, he tells himself, as a kind of mental game. Then late one afternoon he inadvertently learns that at 7 p.m. the next day the old money-lender will be alone.

Will he do it? Should he? Can he? Raskolnikov wavers for a moment; then the life of Alyona Ivanova is bludgeoned out of her in a single chilling sentence: "The moment he brought the ax down, strength was born in him." Shortly thereafter, the pawnbroker's unfortunate sister returns home early.

Against all odds Raskolnikov manages to escape the scene of his double murder. He is safe. No one, absolutely no one, can touch him. We are on page 86, end of part one, and Crime and Punishment has only just begun to accelerate.

Already sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, Raskolnikov (his name suggests schism or split) finds that his crime has cut him off from humanity. As Leskov wrote of a Lady Macbeth of Mstsensk District and Turgenev of A Lear of the Steppes, so Dostoevsky creates a "Hamlet of St. Petersburg," suffering his doubts and uncertainties when it is too late. He insults his friends, refuses to see his mother and his sister Dunya, reviles the latter's self-satisfied fiance, falls sick, acts drunk, appears mad. At the police station he faints over a routine matter, drawing unneeded suspicion to himself. Gradually, he also grows entangled with the Marmeladov family, especially the old drunkard's consumptive, half-crazed widow and his prostitute daughter Sonya.

To increase its sense of nightmare, Crime and Punishment takes place mainly in cramped stuffy rooms; footsteps echo down the hallways; outside the weather is humid, the streets crowded. Raskolnikov perceives everything through a mist, his mind blurry with fever and fatigue. Strangers suddenly appear and argue vociferously with him about ideas, religion, the need for suffering. It's as though Captain Ahab, King Lear and Mother Courage were to start debating life's meaning in a garret during a thunderstorm. This is a "polyphonic" novel (Mikhail Bakhtin), oppressively, irresistibly gregarious, abuzz with talk and debate. Do the ends ever justify the means? Is suffering the basis of religion? Does crime stem from the soul or the environment? What is the relationship between impulse and reason? (In the case of Raskolnikov, his natural bent seems to be toward benevolence, while his calculating mind leads him to sin: His is, in a vivid phrase, "a heart chafed by theories.") Under what conditions is suicide permissible? How much do we live in dreams? Above all, why did Raskolnikov kill -- and why does he apparently never feel remorse?

In Russian the word prestuplenie (the novel's title is Prestuplenie i nakazanie) means transgression, as well as crime, and Dostoevsky plays riffs off this image of stepping over or across. For instance, Raskolnikov -- like many young intellectuals -- believes that world-historical figures such as Napoleon step through blood and over petty murders without a second thought or a look back. Indeed, one of the more than half-dozen differing explanations he offers for why he committed murder is simply that he wished to discover whether he might be just such an extraordinary person. As he intuited beforehand, he isn't -- for he finds himself ridden with legitimate paranoia. He comes to exemplify Dostoevsky's critique of pure reason as a basis for living.

Nudging him, steadily, relentlessly, toward an admission of guilt is the novel's remarkable detective, the fat and unprepossesing Porfiry Petrovich, the ancestor of (and a reported model for) television's Columbo. Porfiry nips at the jumpy Raskolnikov with enigmatic winks, quiet chuckles, repeated talk of Napoleon and axes. He describes his investigative technique as a kind of art, unbound by protocols. The murderer, he tells Raskolnikov, will "keep on making circles around me, narrowing the radius more and more, and -- whop! He'll fly right into my mouth."

WITH ALL its naturalistic detail, Crime and Punishment may look like a realistic novel, but it possesses a disorienting hall-of-mirrors artificiality. Prophetic dreams and uncanny coincidences reinforce a sense of fatedness to every action. The most unlikely people turn out to be neighbors. Scenes resembling paintings by La Tour or Le Nain open on dying figures in bare rooms lit by a single candle, or on a harlot and a murderer reading together the story of the resurrection of Lazarus (a tableau derided by Nabokov for its sentimentality). Sentences bristle with foreboding hints -- "afterwards," "later on." The color yellow, hats, an old shawl, a drunkard's uneven walk, a leap from a belltower -- all become emblems of death and transfiguration.

And then, mid-way through this urban Gothic thriller, Svidrigailov appears.

First mentioned as the would-be seducer of Dunya, Svidrigailov is the consummate amoralist, beyond good and evil, a murderer and sexual predator, repeatedly suffering -- that key word again -- from an inescapable boredom. This satanic dandy feels no regrets for his sins; indeed he performs acts of charity as well as evil with equal nonchalance. "I see," he says, that "I may actually strike people as a romantic figure." He is in fact electrifyingly attractive.

In one amazing chapter Svidrigailov traps Dunya in an empty apartment, far from help, and calmly explains to her that he intends to rape her and that if she breathes a word to anyone he will tell the police what he has learned about her beloved brother. I won't say more, except to add that the scene crackles with a palm-sweating sexual current from which Dunya is not immune. Raskolnikov may bend to kiss the foot of the pitiable harlot, but Svidrigailov burns to kiss the hem of Dunya's dress because he can no longer bear the excitement of its constant "rustling."

I first read Crime and Punishment (in Constance Garnett's translation) some 30 years ago when my mother had to tear the book from my grasp to send me to bed. I've reread the novel three more times since, and in this translation by Pevear/Volokhonsky it is better than ever. Don't miss it.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)