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...novel’s flashback plotline explains how Seltzer came to write such a book, recounting his trajectory from life as a long-suffering graduate student in the humanities to becoming personally concerned with matters of faith. Under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper—a Harold Bloom caricature—Cass visited New Walden, a cloistered Hasidic enclave where men and women walk on different sides of the street and modernity has yet to intrude. There Cass meets Azarya, a child prodigy who at the age of six has derived complex mathematical proofs without any formal education...
Goldstein can introduce so many abstract concerns because she chooses here, as in many of her other books, to make her characters professional scholars, a territory she knows well. Seltzer’s academic career is narrated by Goldstein—a former fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other posts—with the skill of an insider. Given Goldstein’s background, Harvard students may find much that is familiar in Seltzer’s story. He works at a predominantly Jewish university named for a famous Jewish jurist—not Brandeis...
...died alone and far from home. This poem, which famously ends “Ave atque vale,” or “hail and farewell,” has inspired the elegies of generations of poets, from Alfred Lord Tennyson to Billy Collins. In her latest book, “Nox,” poet Anne Carson uses Catullus’ elegy as a lens through which to understand the death of her own brother. “I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have...
...Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” and more recently, “An Oresteia.” Her “Autobiography of Red” is a collection of narrative verse told from the point of view of the mythical figure Geryon. This latest book combines her skills as translator and poet; here, her careful translation of Catullus’ poem is combined with a series of short, narrative prose poems...
Advertised as a “book in a box,” “Nox” is an attempted reproduction of Carson’s journal from her period of mourning after the death of her brother. In addition to pieces of Catullus’ poem and Carson’s own writing, Carson has included reproductions of postcards and letters from her brother and mother, photographs of her family, and her own abstract sketches. The pages are designed to fold out in accordion style, so that in theory it is possible to view Carson?...