here are nine nonfiction books and seven volumes of fiction on the 1988 list of best books of the year, chosen by the editors of The Book Review from among those reviewed here since last year's Christmas issue.
There are nine nonfiction books and seven volumes of fiction on the 1988 list of best books of the year, chosen by the editors of The Book Review from among those reviewed here since last year's Christmas issue.
Among the fictions are two historical novels of a very different stripe by Thomas Flanagan and Don DeLillo, one by Anton Shammas that uses history to make time disappear, a magnificent grown-up love story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that gives healing voice to a history of centuries of silent suffering and a circus of storytelling by Milorad Pavic that ties the history of never-never land in knots. And there are two collections of short stories, by Raymond Carver and Harold Brodkey.
The nonfiction list includes books about cosmology by the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and the journalist and teacher Timothy Ferris. James McPherson's book on the Civil War, Neil Sheehan's on the Vietnam War and Taylor Branch's story of the early years of the civil rights movement are histories, while Paul Kennedy's analytical survey of the great Western powers and Leonard Levy's account of the framing of the Constitution might be called both history and current affairs. There is one autobiography, by Ingmar Bergman, and one biography, by Michael Holroyd.
In case anyone has failed to notice, none of the books on this year's list is by a woman. Among more than 40 volumes originally nominated by individual editors were many, both fiction and nonfiction, by women. But none remained among the final choices after two months of weekly discussions.
Diaries, journals and letters are excluded from consideration. In 1988 there were volumes of letters by Richard Wagner, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill and William Morris, letters exchanged by Henry Miller and Anais Nin and by Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, and even love letters between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo.
Descriptions of the best books are drawn from reviews published in these pages.
ARABESQUES By Anton Shammas. Translated by Vivian Eden. Harper & Row.
Despite its autobiographical qualities, this book, by a Christian Arab who writes lyrical Hebrew and considers himself an Israeli, is called a novel by its author perhaps because its real aim is the discovery, or creation, of a self, not merely the story of a self already made. In an arabesque of movement between two voices called the Teller and the Tale, Anton Shammas conducts a hunt for a heritage that rivals anything in Dickens. He creates a world in which the present searches into the past even as the past peers into the future. His tale is set in a time of vengeful troubles when state security, religion and economics dictate death; suspicion, bravery and betrayal are everywhere; and violence is as common as climate. But Mr. Shammas is a true artist who keeps his heart clean and his eye clear, so that these conditions rise around us naturally as we read.
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM The Civil War Era. By James M. McPherson. Oxford University Press.
James M. McPherson's book - eloquent but unrhetorical, scholarly but not pedantic, succinct and comprehensive at the same time - may be the best volume ever published about the Civil War. Everything Mr. McPherson touches drives his narrative forward, and yet there is not a hint of ostentation from the first sentence to the last. He makes the war steal up on the reader the way it did on the nation, teaching the most important and dreadful truth of all - that no more than ordinarily sinful men and women, and able and patriotic politicians, and a nation enjoying unrivaled prosperity, can make irretrievable and deadly blunders. It is the timeliest possible lesson for us now, and we get it here from a great teacher.
BERNARD SHAW Volume One, 1856-1898: The Search for Love. By Michael Holroyd. Random House.
There should be no need of another biography of George Bernard Shaw for perhaps a century, when the passing of time may require one. In this first of three projected volumes, Michael Holroyd gives us the child Shaw in Dublin, Shaw the struggling novelist and ghostwriter, the indefatigable letter writer, the virgin philanderer, Shaw the champion of Ibsen and the perfect Wagnerite - and all this before he hits his stride as a playwright. And, what is most important, Mr. Holroyd has got Shaw's intrusive fingers, which have been everywhere in previous accounts, out of his own life story, and he has written his book in his own admirably clear and concise style, free of Shavian echoes.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME From the Big Bang to Black Holes. By Stephen W. Hawking. Illustrated by Ron Miller. Bantam Books.
Physics in the 20th century is a tale of two revolutions. Einstein taught us that gravity, the weakest of nature's forces, is best described as a warp in space-time. And at the level of nuclear particles, quantum mechanics turned nature into a game of probability. Stephen W. Hawking of Cambridge University, who has survived Lou Gehrig's disease for more than two decades, has been a world leader in the effort to bring these two provinces together. In a jaunty and absolutely clear little book, he shares ideas about the universe, its origins and its fate, with everyone who can read, along with some provocative revelations of his own motivations, hopes, mistakes and prejudices. His book is a rare sharing of confidence by a scientist with uncommon courage, a dazzling vision and an impish sense of humor.
A BRIGHT SHINING LIE John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. By Neil Sheehan. Random House.
If one book captures the Vietnam War on the Homeric scale, this is it. Neil Sheehan tells the story of the war through the focus of John Paul Vann, an Army officer who faced down South Vietnamese politicians and American generals to expose the corruption that undermined our efforts and later was President Nixon's civilian adviser in Vietnam until he was killed in a helicopter crash in 1972. It is a dramatic device that lets Mr. Sheehan bring the very palpable feel of the war to us with passionate power - especially after, halfway through this long book, he surprises us with the revelation that Vann was not only brave, resourceful and incorruptible, but also selfish and duplicitous. The war story and Vann's story do not fully overlap, so the book is a montage, and what a montage it is.
COMING OF AGE IN THE MILKY WAY By Timothy Ferris. William Morrow & Company.
With a lyrical flair Timothy Ferris recounts humanity's growing knowledge of the universe from the earliest cosmologies to the burst of discoveries of the 20th century, presenting the story as the consummate human adventure. He also reveals enough of the arrogance and foolishness of scientists along the way, and of the ignorance, panic and prejudice of rulers, religious leaders and ordinary people, to make us understand that genius is sometimes fed by jealousy, and scientific progress sometimes measured by failure. Even though it is feverish and breathless toward the end, where it deals with a bewildering array of new sciences and discoveries, this book is a glorious adventure for the reader.
DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words. By Milorad Pavic. Translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric. Alfred A. Knopf.
This ebullient and generous celebration of the reading experience should be read just about any way except cover to cover. Milorad Pavic assembles not one but three dictionaries (Christian, Islamic and Hebrew), in which each entry is a story about a lost people who lived in the Balkans 1,000 years ago. With its chronologically disturbed entries and cross-referencing, it looks complex but surrenders easily to any reconstructed reading you choose. From this feast of folkloric anecdotes and legends, you make your own story, or hundreds of them. And what stories they are, about such things as a hen that lays ''time eggs,'' seasons that contain two years going in opposite directions, dream hunters who plunge into other people's dreams and purloin bits of them and a man who turned his soul inside out and slipped it on like an inverted glove. The novel gives a tantalizing life-after-death illusion of an inexhaustible unending text.
LIBRA By Don DeLillo. Viking.
The richest novel so far by Don DeLillo pitches into the history of the assassination of President Kennedy from angles that at first disorient us and finally leave us feeling we have understood something - about ourselves and history and the nature of perception - that can only be grasped from history on the margins, what people don't want to know. Mr. DeLillo has a merciless ear for language and a mastery of people's elliptical speech that allow him to turn commonplace moments into the work of genius. It is the accumulation of those moments that makes his portraits of Lee Harvey Oswald and many others moving and frightening, and the Kennedy murder as tragic and dramatic as are the catastrophes of the great classical tragedies, but with an entirely American twist.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf.
This shining and heartbreaking novel may be one of the greatest love stories ever told. Inspired by the long pursuit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mother by his father, it is the tale of a vow of love that takes 51 years to fulfill. Writing with impassioned control and out of a maniacal serenity, the author creates language at once classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, that is able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and soar. Mr. Garcia Marquez redeems the silences of history about a Caribbean haunted by centuries of war and disease that have brought so appallingly many people down. This may be the only way to write about love; without the darkness there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera - all also present in this book - but not the Big L. There is nothing like the final chapter, symphonic, sure in dynamics and tempo, moving us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy to an end that makes us realize this novel can return our worn souls to us.
THE MAGIC LANTERN An Autobiography. By Ingmar Bergman. Translated by Joan Tate. Viking.
It is not autobiography in the usual sense. For instance, there is much less about films than you might expect, even though Ingmar Bergman is the most thoroughly artistic film maker ever. And there is not much about his wives or other lovers, nor about his children. But there are gripping revelations, especially about his childhood, told in an unrelentingly honest manner. It is a random, anecdotal, unchronological book that gives you a picture of a highly emotional and not very adaptable soul. It holds you as many of his films do, and his story deals in totally unpredictable ways with a life filled with maladies and rages as well as with an intense love of theater. As in many of his films, by the end he has revealed things you may find it discomforting to know and a central character whom you may not like but who is stamped into your imagination.
ORIGINAL INTENT AND THE FRAMERS' CONSTITUTION By Leonard W. Levy. Macmillan Publishing Company.
Those who have been hearing a great deal about the original intention of the Framers of the Constitution in the past decade, and certainly those conservatives who have insisted on limiting interpretation to ''original intent,'' will be surprised by this lively book by a leading constitutional historian. With rigorous scholarship and vigorous wit, Leonard W. Levy demonstrates that the Framers themselves did not regard their debates as the final word on the meaning of the Constitution; they expected the Republic to develop naturally as it grew. Mr. Levy uses his fine analytical powers, his crackling humor and the gifts of a superb teacher to help us understand, and take comfort in, the fact that judges must go right on interpreting the spacious words of the Constitution as they have always done.
PARTING THE WATERS America in the King Years 1954-63. By Taylor Branch. Simon & Schuster.
Taylor Branch has reached into the crevices of history where much of the change in the nation occurred unnoticed to produce a sweeping history of the beginnings of the civil rights movement. To be sure, there are moments of high drama that will be familiar to most readers, remembered by many - the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., the Selma march, the byzantine negotiations between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover over wiretapping the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But what accounts for the power of Mr. Branch's book is the knowing, careful buildup of little human dramas, the heroism, determination, pettiness and bewilderment behind the great campaigns. People who were involved in the movement will come upon scenes they witnessed, battles they were part of, to find them brilliantly illuminated. Mr. Branch's book deepens, expands and fulfills the memories of many of us and the history of a time of great change in the nation.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000. By Paul Kennedy. Random House.
Professional historians now tend to abjure the notion that we can learn from history, but Paul Kennedy has produced a work of almost Toynbeean sweep that not only is relevant to our times but is clearly meant to be read by policy makers. As he surveys the rise and eclipse of Spain, France and England through 400 years and the rise of America, Mr. Kennedy avoids determinism and argues that it is always political skill that accounts for the maintenance of hegemony; the failure of shrewd political intelligence is the principal reason for the decline of great nations. His scholarship is great, his eloquence powerful and his argument convincing. He by no means endorses notions of the inevitable decline of the West; he poses a challenge to American leaders that they can meet, although he seems not entirely confident they will.
STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE By Harold Brodkey. Alfred A. Knopf.
Harold Brodkey's considerable reputation rests mainly on his stories that have appeared over the past 25 years in The New Yorker, and they make up the bulk of this book. Mr. Brodkey's gifts are remarkable even though they often cause pain to the reader. For he is a great protractor; his sentences often seem interminable, and the reader comes away from them exhausted. But his efforts to feel deeply are often palpable and tremendous. The dominant theme of almost all the stories is the child's vision of the world and its people, and when the vision is realized it is often infused with a horrified pity. Mr. Brodkey does not recollect in tranquillity, but in a kind of poetic fury. Yet the last story is a kind of gentle apocalypse, and it seems right to end a book that tries to make sense of a frantic world with a Hawthorne-like tale of the end of that frantic world.
THE TENANTS OF TIME By Thomas Flanagan. A William Abrahams Book/E. P. Dutton.
This masterly historical novel is centered on an Irish village for half a century up to 1908, but it is a novel of the world and time and there are scenes in London, Paris, Dublin, Venice, Chicago, and literary references that reach back to myth and forward infinitely. It teems with hundreds of characters and stories within stories and is told in a vast choir of voices, each distinct and eloquent. All these appealing and annoying and strange and familiar characters are seeking to recover their own past. By the end we tend to agree with them that history cannot be captured and yet we have to acknowledge that Thomas Flanagan has in fact just written it, in a magnificent piece of fiction. There is scarcely a single assumption any reader will come to this book with - whether about historical fiction or the history of England and Ireland or the proper conduct of great Victorian women - that will not be shaken to the core.
WHERE I'M CALLING FROM New and Selected Stories. By Raymond Carver. The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Since 30 of these 37 stories have appeared in other collections, presumably the intention was to invite re-evaluation. The point is well taken. It turns out that Raymond Carver, who died this year, was not the minimalist he is said to be, but stands squarely in the line of American realism. His stories create meaning through form, and the best of them are works of great conceptual beauty. Through the often bleak lives of his characters, he evokes a bafflement that does not render an absence of meaning but an awkwardness in the face of meaning. His is an attempt to create a hush, not to achieve silence, but to hear better. What happens most powerfully and often in the stories is the imagining by one character of another character's life, as if the replication of one's own life in another could rescue one from the terrors of randomness or help one find the germ of myth in unstructured experience. That expresses the rationale of this writer's artistic practice, and his fiction transforms our perception. We finally see in it the point made by Henry James, that beauty is the form of address made by the world to the human soul.