12.07.2007
Nazaryan: best books of the year
[Posted 12:09 PM by Alexander Nazaryan]
I ultimately find it difficult to declare a handful of books superior over others, but everyone has favorites. So here is my list of top five books.
1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A major event, given the dearth of good translations of his work into English. The clumsy versions that preceded Pevear and Volokhonsky are about as faithful as Tchaikovsky played on a Fischer-Price piano. Be sure to read this excellent essay by Pevear about the multiple drafts he and Volokhnosky produce in search of the musical quality of Tolstoy’s striving for the sublime, as well as The New Criterion’s own upcoming review by Eric Ormsby.
2. The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin. You may not agree with Toobin’s political leanings, but the New Yorker scribe writes with a clarity that is consistently impressive. His explication of the rise of the Federalist Society, and the seismic shifts – in law schools, district courts, federal benches – from the liberal Warren court to today’s much more conservative judiciary is not likely to be matched in erudition or scope.
3. The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Adam Sisman. An intelligent, unassuming treatment of one of the most fruitful literary friendships in recent history. Sisman takes us from the youthful symbiosis that produced Lyrical Ballads to the tempestuous later years, filled with acrimony, that brought the infamous falling out between the great Lake poets.
4. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Okay, so we don’t see jazz mentioned all that often in The New Criterion. But Ratliff is a very capable writer on jazz for the Times, and Coltrane has long been deserving of a study that places his music within the classical American tradition. Ratliff argues, persuasively, that the experimental sound of his band captured the particular zeitgeist of a nation in turmoil.
5. Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich. Pardon me for returning to my native Russia, but this is a strange and beautiful novel, whose protagonist, as she travels from the Siberian town of Asbestos 2 to Brooklyn, recalls the absurd experiments of Tolstoy’s greatest contemporary, Nikolai Gogol.