Joseph Epstein has a book coming out about charm this fall—Charm: The Elusive Enchantment— and this is what he has to say about his subject: “Charm is magic of a kind; it casts a spell. In the presence of charm the world seems lighter and lovelier. A charming person can cause you to forget your problems, at least temporarily, to hold the world’s dreariness at bay. Charm is a reminder that the world is filled with jolly prospects and delightful possibilities. Watching Fred Astaire dance, or listening to Blossom Dearie sing, or reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, or merely looking at Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, one recalls that the world can be a pretty damn fine place.”

I’ve been dipping into the work of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan again and believe charm—casting a spell—to be one of his chief virtues. It isn’t an unearthly charm, like the dancing of a Fred Astaire or the beauty of a Rita Hayworth, but of a  more mundane variety. It consists in the humor and gentleness with which he treats his characters. The book I’m reading is The Bachelor of Arts, the second short novel in a quartet bound together by the Modern Library. The central character, Chandran, is at first a ruthlessly overachieving student, who after graduation discovers the only reading plan worth putting into action:

“He became a member of the Town Public Library and read an enormous amount of fiction and general literature. He discovered Carlyle. He found that after all Shakespeare had written some stirring dramas, and several poets were not as dull as they were made out to be. There was no scheme or order to his study. He read books just as they came. He read a light humorist and switched on to Carlyle, and from there pounced on Shakespeare, and then wandered to Shaw and Wells. The thing that mattered most to him was that the book should be enjoyable, and he ruthlessly shut books that threated to bore him.”

I’ve finished An Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and noodliest—some critics believe the best—of Montaigne’s essays. In my translation by Donald M. Frame it runs a stout 170 pages, whereas few of the other essays measure much longer than 10 or 20. It’s as though Montaigne prefers the to run the quarter mile, but mid-way through track season, decides to take up the marathon.

It’s a peculiar riffing essay and has little to do with the medieval Christian apologist of its the title, whose book Montaigne had translated at his dying father’s request. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” Montaigne writes, “but being by chance at leisure at the time, and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it the best I could; at which he was singularly pleased, and ordered it to be printed; this was done after his death.”

In an introductory essay, Frame notes: “Less than one tenth of the chapter deals with Sebond at all. Primarily it is a sustained argument of the impotence of unaided human reason…”

It is addressed to a princess whom Frame believes to be Margaret of Valois, who—the theory goes— asked Montaigne to publish a defense of the thinking of the man he had translated. What a response she got instead!

Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a biography of Nikolai Gogol that I'm about to receive in the mail, said of his fellow Russian: "Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange." That's the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition of Dead Souls, trans. by Robert A. Maguire. True to Nabokov's reckoning, Dead Souls is a very strange book. The plot is simple: "a gentleman of the middling sort"—"not good looking, but not uncomely in appearance either, not overly fat, nor overly thin"—arrives in a nameless provincial town with an unspoken purpose that gradually reveals itself: to buy the legal rights to the deceased serfs of neighboring landowners. The sleepy town is aroused by this visit from a stranger whom the gentry speculate to be a millionaire; the officials of the town fete and flatter him. Meanwhile Chichikov—that's the name of Gogol's "hero"—drives around in a britska, getting lost and waylaid, paying visits to the landowners and, without revealing why he wants to purchase the dead souls, tries to wheedle them into making a sale.

As one might expect from this description, Dead Souls is a funny book. Gogol's style is wonderfully discursive without coming unglued. He conjures up a world not only through Chichikov's various adventures, and the pen-portraits of the strange landowners he visits, but from wild similes that can end up being small stories of their own, dream-like images, or compose little moral sermons, even attacks on middle-brow taste. Here's an example taken from Chichikov's visit to the demented hermit Plyushkin:

"...suddenly across that wooden face glided a warm ray. It was not a feeling that had found expression, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon like the unexpected appearance of a drowning man on the surface of the water, which evokes a joyful shout from the crowd gathered on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the arms exhausted from struggling—his one appearance was the final one. Everything is quite dead, and thereafter the becalmed surface of the unresponsive element becomes even more dreadful and desolate. So too the face of Plyushkin, in the wake of the feeling that had glided across it for just and instant, became even more unfeeling and more ordinary."

Clippings:

Karen Altenberg reviews Adam Nicolson's The Seabird's Cry.

"The early 20th-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll, the 'Prospero and hidden mage of all modern seabird studies,' as Mr. Nicolson puts it, introduced the concept of Umwelt, German for 'surrounding world,' to describe how each species exists within a 'self-centered world' in which the biological foundations for a cognitive being are fostered. According to Uexküll, animal behavior can only be described in relation to the environment that a particular species perceives. The Umwelt of the seabird is oceanic: a realm that the human mind can never fully understand. 'That,' Mr. Nicolson writes, 'instinctively and subliminally, is what these birds mean to us, voices from the interior of self and ocean, bringing to consciousness those unseen worlds, making apparent what would otherwise be hidden.'"