The Dead by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although James Joyce's "The Dead" is a short story from the "Dubliners" collection, it was published as a separate book in the Penguin 60s series. Its 59 pages contain only 15,672 words, which is about 37 times fewer that Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and about 84 times fewer than Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". Still, because of its stunning psychological depth, this short story can properly be called a novella.

The story takes place at a New Year's party in Dublin over a period of few hours. Two elderly sisters are having their annual sing and dance party. Among various colorful characters attending the event is the protagonist, the sisters' nephew, Gabriel, who is accompanied by his wife, Gretta. He is the one to carve the goose and to make the main speech of the night. One of the songs reminds Gretta of a dramatic event from the past.

This is an impressive work of literary art, on many levels. First of all, it is absolutely amazing that the story is not dated at all. The collection was published in 1914, exactly 100 years ago, even before commercial radio was available. Despite all the mindboggling progress in technology, people have not changed. Some topics of conversations at a party held today may be different, although most would be similar to those that Mr. Joyce describes, and, of course, people today would be constantly checking Facebook or e-mail, yet their psychology, reactions, and moods remain the same as hundred years ago.

This is the first book that I have read that focuses on people's moods and here Joyce is a phenomenally skilled observer. Over the few hours, Gabriel's mood constantly changes, either subtly or in a dramatic way, and the intense feeling that the story is real, that the reader participates in the party, is palpable.

While many authors are able to capture sharp psychological observations, very few are so masterful in their writing. The novella is a tour de force of short prose, and the last two pages take your breath away.

I loved Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I read many fragments of "Ulisses" and was very impressed. This novella provides a strong argument for my pet thesis that books should, in general, be shorter. Joyce shows that one can construct a lively, complex, wise, and utterly believable depiction of human behavior on 59 pages.

Five stars.


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Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been torn while reading J.M. Coetzee's "Age of Iron" (it is the ninth book by this author that I have read) - my reactions oscillated from extreme awe to slight irritation. The novel contains so many passages of unparalleled wisdom, depth, and beauty, yet it is marred by a few instances of sermonizing preachiness.

Elizabeth Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, South Africa, is in the last stage of terminal cancer. She finds a homeless man, Mr. Vercueil, in the alley next to her garage. With her tacit approval, he kind of takes residence on her property. This is 1986, a dramatic time for South Africa, the time of burning townships and violent clashes between anti-apartheid fighters and the police aided by conservative activists. Mrs. Curren finds her domestic's son shot dead and a friend of his takes refuge in her house. Isolated from the harsh realities throughout her life, she discovers the true horrors of apartheid in her last weeks.

The novel, framed as a long letter to Mrs. Curren's daughter who escaped South Africa in 1976 and settled comfortably in the United States, has four central themes: the psychology of dying, the relationship between Mrs. Curren and the homeless man, the savagery caused by the apartheid system, and the juxtaposition of the wise reason of the old and the mindless fervor of the young.

The first two themes, the personal ones, are dealt with in an absolutely masterful way, typical for Mr. Coetzee. If the novel stopped there, I would need a six-star rating to give it justice. The two latter themes are different. The author vividly portrays the extreme drama of South Africa, yet I have some problems with the "paint-by-numbers" plot. The fourth theme, the young versus the old, emotion versus reason, feeling versus knowing, is largely conveyed through Mrs. Curren's monologues (since her conversation partner does not talk back), which makes the deep truths stated sound a little preachy. Still, Mrs. Curren is a classics professor, and speaking in perfectly complete paragraphs is what classics professors do best.

"Age of Iron" is an extremely dark book, even darker than Mr. Coetzee's other works. The heavy darkness is needed here, though. How else could one deal with impending death and with massive degradation of one's fellow human beings? Yet it is in no way a depressing novel. Mrs. Curren's involvement with anti-apartheid movement moves her thoughts away from the terrifying prospect of soon not existing any more. Helping others adds meaning to her ending life. Also, there is a beautifully captured fleeting moment of hope late in the novel and the last passages, despite death being near, are wonderfully uplifting.

Even with its weaknesses "Age of Iron" is a great book. The average of six stars for the first two themes and three-and-a-half stars for the latter two is

Four-and-three-quarter stars.


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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1880s) is one of the most horrifying works of world fiction. It is a brutal, clinically precise, explicit book about the process of dying. I read it as a teenager and it shook me hard. Today, after almost 50 years, it has affected me even more, because I am now so much closer to the end. Tolstoy does a better job in describing the progression of Ivan Ilyich's mental states as the illness ravages his body than Ms. Kubler-Ross in her "On Death and Dying" (the "five-stage model of grief"). While we know that all other people die, Tolstoy shows his mastery in making the novella not about someone else's death but about me dying. And you.

The terror of dying has many facets. The first, obviously, is that with death we cease to exist. Today we are, and tomorrow we are not any more. It is perhaps the easiest aspect to bear. After all, we did not exist before our birth and somehow it was OK. All our plans, dreams, knowledge, feelings, and secrets are suddenly gone, but luckily we are not there to miss them.

Then, there is physical pain. Ivan Ilyich's illness causes him horrible pain. He screams for days on end, even on opium and morphine. But then not everybody draws the short straw; we can hope for an instantaneous death, through heart attack or being run over by a car.

Next, there is the deception. Ivan Ilyich, few weeks before his death, "saw clearly that all this was not the real thing but a dreadful deception that shut out both life and death". The doctors deceive him. His wife and children deceive him, pretending they believe he will be cured. His work colleagues pretend he is just sick and not dying.

But the most horrifying aspect of dying is how inconsequential our existence or non-existence is to other people, how irrelevant every one of us is in the big picture, and how replaceable we are. Ivan Ilyich has died, so we need to find someone else for our weekly bridge game that will proceed as if nothing has happened. While Ivan's wife talks to his friend, Pyotr Ivanovich, about her husband's agony and screams of pain, he thinks about the nasty spring in the sofa on which he sits.

Tolstoy is an extremely sharp observer of human psychology and behavior. Just one example: Ivan sees that "the awesome, terrifying act of his dying had been degraded by those about him to the level of a chance unpleasantness, a bit of unseemly behavior (they reacted to him as they would to a man who emitted a foul odor on entering a drawing room)".

This 19th century masterpiece is totally up-to-date in the 21st century. We are still in the business of dying.

Five stars.


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