The Book of Dave, by Will Self (Bloomsbury; $24.95).
In this tale of an embittered taxi-driver whose psychotic rantings
become the creed of a blighted people hundreds of years after his
death, Self unleashes his apparently boundless misanthropy on modern
London, the origins of religion, and the postapocalyptic future. Dave
Rudman, driven mad by divorce and ill-prescribed antidepressants,
thinks he is God and writes a vitriolic screed, which he has printed on
metal plates and buries in a garden. Discovered by the survivors of a
catastrophic flood and adopted as a gospel, it demands the complete
separation of mothers and fathers (children to spend exactly half the
week with each). Switching between a narrative of Dave’s unlucky life
and the phonetically rendered “Mokni” speech of his wretched followers,
Self achieves an elaborate vision of vicious superstition and hopeless
struggle, but his insights never quite repay the effort of engaging
with his stylistic pyrotechnics.
The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated from the Latin by Robert Fagles (Viking; $40).
Fagles’s new version of Virgil’s epic delicately melds the stately
rhythms of the original to a contemporary cadence. Having previously
produced well-received translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he
illuminates the poem’s Homeric echoes while remaining faithful to
Virgil’s distinctive voice. Pious Aeneas, passionate Dido, and raging
Turnus are driven by the desires and rivalries of the gods—but even the
gods recognize their obeisance to fate, and to the foretold Roman
Empire that will produce Augustus, Virgil’s patron. The excellent
introduction, by Bernard Knox, gives historical and literary context,
and both Knox and Fagles convincingly argue the epic’s continuing
relevance. Fagles, writing of Virgil’s sense of “the price of empire,”
notes that “it seems to be a price we keep on paying, in the loss of
blood and treasure, time-worn faith and hard-won hope, down to the
present day.”
Woodward and Bernstein, by Alicia C. Shepard (Wiley; $24.95).
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will always be famous for their part in
untangling the Watergate scandal. Shepard, though, is far more
interested in what happened afterward, and in examining the uneasy
rewards of early success. Her prose can be clichéd, but her
biographical curiosity is large; she seems to have interviewed almost
everyone with a connection to her subjects. Other journalists played
important roles in ending the Nixon Presidency, Shepard notes, but it
was the film version of “All the President’s Men,” a retelling that
left several colleagues feeling slighted, that enshrined “Woodstein” in
“fame and glory.” When the pair sold their papers to the University of
Texas, for about five million dollars, one observer noted that they had
become “as much a part of the story of Watergate and historical record
as any of the people they reported on.”
The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton (Pantheon; $25).
Determined to avoid the “two great dogmas of aesthetics”—that there is
only one valid visual style, and that all styles are equally
acceptable—de Botton explores how particular works of architecture
succeed, by offering “more or less adequate responses to our genuine
psychological needs.” Loosely adopting a set of criteria, or
“virtues”—order, balance, elegance, coherence, and self-knowledge—he
delineates the merits of, for instance, Herzog & de Meuron’s 1988
Stone House, in Liguria, whose exposed concrete frame saves rough,
mortarless rock from “rustic incoherence.” Conversely, he excoriates
the folly of Nagasaki’s massive Huis ten Bosch Dutch Village, a theme
park containing a complete replica of The Hague’s royal palace. De
Botton is a lively guide, and his eclectic choices of buildings and
locations evince his conclusion, that “we should be as unintimidated by
architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws.”
