inspired by the painting, Kaflka Tamura falls in
love with Miss Saeki both as woman and as his
possible lost mother, embracing one half of the
oedipal prophecy. Yet his story is not truly Kaf-
kaesque, despite the presence of numerous other
inexplicable characters and situations, from
talking cats to giant-slug-spawning stones. The
combination of human warmth and fantastic
situations—a trademark of all of Murakami’s
writing—may cause us someday to term such
novels Murakamian.
Many books span more than one age, and
my next two books encompass both the soldier
seeking, as Jaques puts it, reputation in the can-
non’s mouth and the lean and slippered panta-
loon. At first, the two books appear markedly
similar: a shrunk-shanked old man recalls World
War I while awaiting the approach of death. But
Mark Helprin’sA Soldier of the Great Waris a
young man’s book about soldiers and an old
man, while Peter Pouncey’sRules for Old Men
Waitingis an old man’s book about an old man
and soldiers. Helprin’s has the ambition of
youth, in both size (860 pages) and scope—as
his Italian protagonist participates in a sweeping
range of actions: against the Austrians in north-
ern Italy and Italian deserters in Sicily, in the
Alps and on shipboard, and as a prisoner of his
own side and of the enemy. In contrast, Poun-
cey’s is spare in both ways: a thin book of 200
pages that covers a few days in one trench in
Belgium.
Indeed, the more closely these novels are read,
the more each seems like an unconscious mirror
image of the other. Helprin’s Alessandro Giuliani
is ‘‘tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair
floated about his head like the white water in the
curl of a wave,’’ while Pouncey’s Robert MacIver
is ‘‘large-framed and failing fast.’’ Giuliani, a pro-
fessor of aesthetics who lost the love of his life
decades ago, takes a last marathon walk across
the Italian countryside and tells a young man the
expansive story of his own war years. MacIver, a
professor of history, isolates himself in his summer
house after the death of his wife, and, like Socrates
awaiting the hemlock, turns his hand to creative
writing after a lifetime of nonfiction, developing in
a short story a small cast of characters who face the
moral questions of war as fully as do Giuliani’s
myriads.
Between the wars and the piping treble comes
the justice. Judges and lawyers are, of course, a
mainstay of Grishamite fiction and its subspecies,
but Stephen Carter’sThe Emperor of Ocean Park,
gives us a scholarly lawyer’s views on race, poli-
tics, and privilege under the guise of a mystery
story. The death of a conservative black judge
who almost made it to the rank of justice, and
his son’s quest for the reasons behind both his
literal death and the demise of his judicial career,
make for a summer reader’s mix of melodrama
and social reflection—reminiscent of a LeCarre
or a Graham Greene entertainment, if either had
written of the American scene.
Shakespeare’s final stage is a paradox: a
state of living death, harder to capture than
death itself, ‘‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,
sans everything.’’ There are innumerable master-
pieces, after all, which center on the moment of
death, from Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann
to Leo Tolstoy and Ambrose Bierce. But to con-
vey the state of total loss, of being without either
lower or higher powers, is rarely attempted.
An exception, of course, as he was to so many
conventions, is Samuel Beckett. In his trilogy
Molloy,Malone Dies,andThe Unnamable,he
approached the condition of death from a philos-
ophy as much grimmer than Jaques’ as Jaques’ is
than Falstaff’s. Each of these short novels brings
its narrator closer to his desired end, until in
The UnnamableBeckett raises Hamlet’s existen-
tial question to a new power: what if the
last moment of consciousness is unending but
unendurable?
Apparently Beckett himself passed his last
months in a nursing home in a state much like
those of his characters, or like the real people
who fill David Shenk’s The Forgetting: Alz-
heimer’s, Portrait of an Epidemic.Shenk’s work
combines the latest technical information about
Alzheimer’s causes and treatment with historical
views of aging and decline, as well as moving
encounters with living victims. He is alert to the
scope of the disease, noting that, ‘‘In the nearly
50 years since Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin intro-
duced their vaccines against polio, somewhere
between one and two million lives have been
saved. Curing A’s disease sometime in the first
decade of the 21st century would save as many as
100 million lives worldwide in the same length of
time.’’ But he is also conscious of the fact that the
illness happens to one person at a time, although
‘‘the unique curse of Alzheimer’s is that it rav-
ages several victims for every brain it infects...
roughly half of all Alzheimer’s caregivers strug-
gle with clinical depression.’’Seven Ages of Man