Staff Shelf: Milton, The Paris Review, and North Korea

Before this year ends -- and before our office closes in about two hours -- I'd like to get in three final Staff Shelf write-ups, all for books I recommend:

John Milton: A Hero For Our Time, David Hawkes (Counterpoint, 2009, 384 pages, $28)

I couldn't be less of a Milton scholar, but I picked this one up simply because I'm a big fan of artist/writer biographies -- with the opportunities they offer to explore how an artist created, what obstacles he overcame, what breakthroughs he made, how his contemporaries responded or if they did at all. I found enough of that to keep me interested here, with the added bonus of having Hawkes demonstrate the relevance of Milton (who warned against fetishizing images) in our current century (a time when we fetishize a hell of a lot of images). Milton's contemporaries certainly didn't get him (they responded with "incomprehension and hilarity" to his argument in support of divorce, for example), so, Hawkes argues, Milton knew he was writing for future ages anyway. And regardless of your interest in the man's ideas and arguments, there's pleasure to be had in taking in a portrait of an artist this...well, ballsy. Milton was a man not just of great opinions but one armed with a legendarily wicked pen. Hawkes calls him "probably the greatest master of invective in the English language" -- illustrating why in several examples -- and calls his choice to publish one of his works "an act of truly suicidal bravery," both because of the ideas the piece held and the force with which those ideas were delivered. "He wanted posterity to understand him," Hawkes tells us, "because he felt no one else did." Here's your chance to be part of that posterity. 

The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV (Picador, 2009, 476 pages, $18)

I've now read all four of these volumes, and I couldn't pick a favorite -- each one's invaluable and a ton of fun. You can skip right over the Salman Rushdie introduction and get right to the good stuff: William Styron on his profession ("Let's face it, writing is hell"); E. B. White on writing for children ("You have to write up, not down"); P. G. Wodehouse on rereading her own books ("I'm rather surprised that they're so good"); the always charming V. S. Naipaul on his interviewer's questions ("Try it again"). Plus John Ashberry and Haruki Murakami and Maya Angelou, and the list doesn't even end there. If you're a writer/reader -- or if you're in love with a writer/reader and want to show that love -- you're in particular luck: Picador's just released a box set of all four books for $65. If I didn't already have them on my shelf, I'd be leaving my wife gift-idea notes around the house.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau, 2009, 336 pages, $26)

Demick, the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, interviewed about 100 North Korean defectors for this fascinating, affecting, and well-handled volume. The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real. These North Koreans, though, are real and vulnerable and criminally impoverished -- physically, intellectually, nutritionally, you name it. In story after story, we see that everything's meager but the delusions, dreamed up with propaganda; that the citizens are scavengers not just for food (eating grass and picking corn kernels out of animal shit for their own made-up meals) but for anything resembling truth (jimmying TVs and radios to get news from South Korea). Demick has a novelist's eye for details, particularly the heartbreaking ones (a beer the men drink is called "Paradise"; a kindergarten's archway has the slogan "We are happy" above the entrance -- yes, it would seem to be an order). It's truly bleak stuff, but it's an important book and I highly recommend it. And if you need a little something positive amid this despair, remember that those who shared their stories did so because they made it out and are breathing different air. -- Stephen Schenkenberg

(Note: This is part of Staff Shelf, where editors write about what we're reading, which often includes review copies.)