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I don't often read historical fiction, but occasionally a story of a particular period or event will pique my interest. This saga by Humphreys is about the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet II in 1453.

Originally the Greek city of Byzantium, Constantine the Great rebuilt and renamed it in 324 CE as the capital of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it remained the capital of the Byzantine Empire until the events of this book, after which it became part of the Ottoman Empire and eventually renamed Istanbul. So its fall, after 1,129 years must truly have seemed like the end of the world, of a world at least.

Although there is plenty of description of both sides' strategies and vivid battle scenes, Humphreys wisely conveys all of that information through the characters. We learn it as they do. And I was truly interested in the people through whose eyes we experience these events.

They are a mix of real and fictional characters. The protagonist is a fictional one: Gregoras, who has been unjustly condemned as a traitor and banished from Constantinople to make his way as a mercenary, leaving his twin brother to marry Gregoras's beloved and become one of King Constantine's most trusted advisors. This Cain and Abel pair gives us a view into the king's secret deliberations as well as the front line of battle. On the Turkish side, we experience the life of a foot soldier through Achmed, a farmer hoping to find rich plunder in the fabled city, enough to protect his family through droughts and destruction. Moving between Greeks and Turks is the sorceress Leilah, whose prophecies and visions weave through the events like a glittering thread.

Besides Constantine and Mehmet, other real characters include John Grant, the Scotsman trying to open the ancient secret of Greek Fire; Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a former mercenary who commanded the Greek defenses, and Hamza Pasha, Mehmet's servant, through whose eyes we see the 21-year-old Turkish sultan.

Part of the problem with historical fiction is that you know the ending. The solution, of course, is to give us characters we care about and whose fate we are desperate to discover. Humphries does this effectively.

He uses multiple point of view characters, which sometimes made scenes feel superficial. I normally dislike shifting points of view, and particularly when they shift too often. Staying with one or two characters provides a more in-depth experience, I believe. However, as the story unfolded, I understood that he needed all of these people in order to tell it. I would have preferred that he stick to one character at time, which he mostly does. But sometimes he shifts point of view within a single scene, also known as head-hopping, a maneuver that distracts and confuses me.

Still, I loved the characters and found the story exciting. I rather dreaded the battle scenes, but we experienced them through the characters, so that I found them fascinating too. I'm impressed with the way Humphreys revealed the necessary information—such as battle plans, geography, and history—seamlessly through the characters' stories.

What historical fiction have you enjoyed?

The first collection of stories by the Australian writer was given to me by Hayley, who rightly guessed that once I read the first page I’d be hooked. That first piece, “Collected Stories”, remains my favorite, and not just because the protagonist is named Barbara. The mother-daughter relationship struck me as being as true as can be and the writing brilliant. Here is the first paragraph:

My mother, Margaret Hately, was a short-story writer. In the few photographs I have of her she is carrying a book, holding it against her chest as if she were suckling it. There are no photographs of my father. My mother destroyed them when he left her, a month before I was born. I only know him from the parts of him she put in her stories—a limp, a way of reading the newspaper at arm’s length. Whilst my mother wrote, my father was made of words.

The characterisation here bowled me over. The telling details, that wonderful image of suckling a book, and the stunning final sentence left me feeling I knew all three of these people intimately.

The story has an unusual format: it is organised in five parts, each one titled by and referring to one of Margaret’s published books. As we move through her career, we see the relationship with Barbara developing in sometimes surprising ways, always with eminently quotable sentences.

Nearly all of the stories in this collection have some kind of experimental format: one is a series of figures; another a list of rules for writing a short story; yet another an examination paper. Some, such as the one told by labeling the components of a short story, probably appeal most to other writers. However, they are clever and surprisingly effective.

For example, one story, “Tyypographyy”, uses different fonts and a sticky key to tell Amy’s first-person story of grieving for her recently deceased mother, trying to relate to her father who is stuck in his own mourning, and juggling well-meant attempts at sympathy from teachers, including a maths teacher who speaks to the class only in lists of numbers.

Another, one of my favorites, called “The Footnote” tells the story of Thomas Hardie, an aspiring author, who at the age of seven demands to be “called by his middle name, Edward, so there would be no confusion when his first book was published.” We discover from the footnotes that this account is actually being written by his son. Although the footnotes are fairly cryptic at first, the emotion behind them is strongly conveyed by their juxtaposition with the text and by the significant selection of memories incorporated. The footnotes gradually grow longer and we find out why the son’s memories are expressed there. I found the ending enormously satisfying.

As my friend mentioned, the repetition of certain themes and subjects gets a little old. Not another story featuring the Rwandan genocide! I found myself thinking. Not Newcastle again! Perhaps if I hadn’t torn through the book so fast, let days pass between each story, the repetition wouldn’t have bothered me so much.

I also found the cuteness of the experimental formats sometimes overwhelmed the genuine human story within. There are some more traditional stories, including another of my favorites, “The Saved”, about an Australian woman who is in Rwanda teaching English. Mrs. Watt’s efforts to teach the village children and to help another teacher bring her into conflict with the Bishop, the head of the school who makes Mr. Brocklehurst look like a saint.

I highly recommend this collection and am eager to see what else O’Neill has written.

Have you read fiction using experimental formats? What did you think of it? Another example is Jennifer Egan’s popular book, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It was interesting to reread this novel after Forster's Aspects of the Novel. Although it's been quite a few years since I last read it, the story remains vivid in my memory, partly because of the 1992 Merchant-Ivory film starring Emma Thomson, Vanessa Redgrave, and Anthony Hopkins.

Sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel love literature and music and good conversation, all readily available in pre-World War I London where they live with their young brother, Tibby. Secure in the funds left to them by their parents, they occupy a particular niche in the English class structure, the intellectual, somewhat bohemian middle class. They become involved with Leonard Bast, a denizen of the lower middle class, a clerk who aspires to raise himself by attending classical concerts and reading serious books.

The sisters also become involved with a family of wealthy capitalists, the Wilcoxes, first Helen, the younger and more melodramatic sister, who visits their country home. The spirit behind Howard's End is Ruth Wilcox, whose love for her family home has made it a charming country hide-away for her husband and children. Like the heroine of Coventry Patmore's poem, satirized by Virginia Woolf, Ruth is “the Angel in the House”, the woman whose selfless devotion to her family and submission to her husband makes her the unappreciated foundation of family life.

Given these three families from different levels of the middle class, my book club started our discussion with the question stated in the novel: “Who is going to inherit England?” We also asked how Forster followed his own edicts.

Here the plot is indeed “a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence” that are also linked by causality. Our point of view is primarily Margaret, the more practical of the sisters, who struggles to hold within her value system two opposing forces: a devotion to culture and the life of the mind along with an appreciation of the aggressive capitalists who have built the railroads and trust funds and England itself.

If “the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way”, then Forster succeeds with his main characters. Their sometimes-unexpected choices continue to be credible. The events grow believably out of the characters, avoiding Forster's criticism of Hardy's novels that events are controlled by “the fate above us, not the fate working through us.”

Most of all we wanted to know if Forster incorporated what he called “prophecy” in his lectures, something universal. He says it only comes through subtly, in the writer's tone of voice, “the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist's phrase.” It does come out in some of his phrases, such as “Private life holds out the mirror to infinity.” But I found some of his high-flown paragraphs—rare as they are—a bit abstract. Although impatient to get on with the story, I understood that these abstract reveries were the meat of Margaret and Helen's discussions.

But, if I understand it correctly, Forster's prophecy is more generally a theme that makes the story larger than it is, more than just the fate of Margaret or Leonard or any other character. Forster says, “There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than fate . . . something that cuts across them like a bar of light.”

And here is where Forster excels. For this is not just a novel about class differences or about love and marriage. It is not even just about the fate of England, as symbolized by the shifting ownership of Howard's End. This novel is about how we connect to each other and begins with Forster's famous epigraph: “Only connect”. What could be more fundamental to the human condition?

What do you think of Forster's idea of “prophecy”?

I hadn’t looked at this small book since university, so was intrigued when one of my book clubs selected it. The nine chapters are based on lectures Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, and retain the somewhat casual syntax of speech. They are also surprisingly humorous.

When reading a book from my youth, I’m often surprised to find ideas that have become so deeply incorporated into my assumptions and expectations that I’ve forgotten their source. Here, too, I found much that I recognised. For instance, Forster takes the idea of suspense, which makes readers want to find out what happens next, and extrapolates to say that “what the story does is to narrate the life in time.” Then he adds that good novels also incorporate the life by values, meaning “something which is measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity.”

I agree that a novelist who abandons time—”the thread of his story”—risks becoming unintelligible. You can have time that moves backwards or that jumps around, but you have to find ways to help the reader hold onto the thread. As one writing teacher once told me, you have to teach the reader how to read your book. I mentioned earlier that Jen Michalski’s The Tide King is a great example of how to do this effectively.

I also love this quote from Forster, which he has paraphrased from an essay in Système des Beaux Arts (the quotes are his):

“What is fictitious in a novel is not so much the story as the method by which thought develops into action, a method which never occurs in daily life . . . History, with its emphasis on external causes, is dominated by the notion of fatality, whereas there is not fatality in the novel; there, everything is founded on human nature, and the dominating feeling is of an existence where everything is intentional, even passions and crimes, even misery.”

This reminds me of a discussion I had with some friends this week about whether the extraordinary coincidences that have happened to all of us could be used in a novel. For example, my brother found a jigsaw puzzle at a yard sale where the picture is a photo of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and among the people milling around are my family, quite clearly. I maintained that such coincidences could not be used, but one of my friends felt you could get away with one.

Forster goes on to say that to make your characters real, the writer must know everything about them. He will not, of course, share all of that information. “But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.”

There have been many articles lately about the benefits of reading. I enjoyed this recent one by Lauren Martin. She cites psychologist David Comer Kidd: “‘What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others.'” She goes on to say of readers: “Their ability to connect with characters they haven’t met makes their understanding of the people around them much easier. They have the capacity for empathy. They may not always agree with you, but they will try to see things from your point of view.”

Another quote from Forster about character: “Incident springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character . . . characters, to be real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise.”

I’ve just given you a sampling of some memorable bits. There’s much more, including chapters on prophecy and fantasy. It reads smoothly, with examples from novels as varied as Pamela and Ulysses to illustrate his ideas.

What book has most helped you understand the craft behind the novel?

I did not want to read this book. Yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize but that has not always been a reliable barometer for me. Even though it came highly recommended by several of my most trusted reading buddies, I resisted. Why? Because it’s 775 pages!

No book needs to be THAT long, I thought. Either it’s full of extraneous (but possibly interesting) information, like Moby Dick, or the writing in the middle must be really sloppy and nobody had the nerve to tell the author that it needed to be cut. I felt the same way about the later Harry Potter books. They were so long that I didn't want to read them, though I was happy to listen to the wonderful Jim Dale read them to me on long road trips.

Then a similar situation arose: a long flight. I wanted something that would keep me engaged for the whole flight, since I don’t like to go immediately from one book into another.

The Goldfinch was perfect. From the first sentence to the last, my attention was absorbed by the world of the story; I fell into it like a dreamer falling off a bridge, submerged, enclosed. During the last hundred pages I kept trying to slow down because it was so beautiful, some of the best writing I’ve read in a long time. I wanted to savor everything about life and death and art. But no, I kept tearing ahead to find out what would happen next.

At the beginning of the book, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker loses his mother in a horrific accident. That scene took my breath away, a perfect example of writing in the moment. I could tell you what happened in a sentence, but the buildup and Theo’s moment-by-moment experience make the scene unforgettable. In the aftermath, Theo comes into possession of a heavy gold ring and a small painting by Dutch painter Fabritius of a goldfinch chained to a shelf.

Told in Theo’s first-person voice, the story captivated me. The author’s sure hand kept the suspense high and the plot moving. But even more than the plot, smart and unexpected as it was, what held me were the characters. I adored Theo from the beginning, from his description of his artistic and adorably freckled mother. He tried my patience at times, as teenagers will, but I couldn’t give up on him.

Even more than Theo, I loved his mother. Then there are Theo’s schoolfriend Andy and Andy’s mother, a rather scary society matron who likes her gin and lime; they both developed in ways that surprised me and endeared them to me. One of my favorites is his teenaged buddy, Boris, a scruffy Ukrainian who starts out the proverbial bad influence—though hilarious—and ends up showing more depth than I’d have thought possible.

Best of all, for me, is Hobie. An older man who shuffles about, completely incapable of running the antique business for which he’s responsible, Hobie works magic as a restorer of old furniture, a trade he teaches Theo, and maker of wonderful meals. Eccentric and often solitary, Hobie yet has a close circle of friends and an unfailing insight into flaws and how to fix them.

I don’t want to give away any more of the plot. Don’t read about it anywhere. Let it just unfold. Set aside a day or two. Let go. Fall in.

What kind of books do you like to read on a long plane ride?

This first novel in the series featuring Maggie Hope takes place at the beginning of the Battle of Britain in World War II. Although born in England, Maggie has been brought up by her aunt outside of Boston. Excelling in mathematics, her studies at MIT have been postponed so she could go to London to sell her deceased grandmother's home, a grandmother she hadn't even know about. Once in London and unable to sell the house due to the then-imminent war, Maggie decides to stay and support her native country against its worst threat.

Red-haired and outspoken, Maggie is lucky in her friends, who recommend her for a position at Number 10 Downing Street. Her American candor comes to the fore when she is passed over for the job of principal secretary and relegated to the typing pool. Principal secretaries, like her friends David and John, are men of good family destined for high ranking positions in the government.

With a high level clearance and taking dictation from Winston Churchill himself, she has insight into the war effort that she cannot share with her housemates: Paige, a Southern belle friend from college; Sarah, a ballerina hoping to move up to a solo role, and the flighty twin sisters, Annabelle and Clarabelle. Just as she is settling into her job, Maggie is caught up in a mysterious plot to undermine England's government during its time of greatest danger, one that touches on her own family.

Maggie's adventure moves quickly, with something for everyone: well-researched details about the war, lively nightclubs, beautiful Worth gowns, a doomed love affair, a nuanced portrait of Churchill, sparkling characters, plenty of suspense, and a resounding climax.

If you like Call the Midwife and Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, you will like this book.

There are a few missteps in the first half of the book. Published by Bantam, I'm surprised their editorial staff didn't catch them. They aren't misspellings or incorrect grammar. Rather, they are consistency errors, a not-uncommon danger when the writer knows what she means but hasn't made it clear for the reader. Such errors are usually caught early by your beta readers or critique group.

For example, at one point Maggie is talking with her friends David and John. After some conversation, suddenly Churchill says something, where previously there was no indication he was in the room. Then when David and John leave the room they are followed out by another colleague, again someone we hadn't been told was in the room.

In another example, two men are arguing over an envelope. The man who was holding the envelope the last time it was mentioned demands that the other man hand it over. Button, button, who has the button?

Such lapses happen easily enough, especially in the last stages of cutting to get a manuscript down to size. It's important to have a final consistency check done by someone unfamiliar with the manuscript. Some authors read it backwards or aloud to prevent their eyes from skipping over problems like these.

Don't let these few instances keep you from reading the book. It's a rollicking ride with plenty of authentic detail and characters you'll want to follow in the other books in the series.

What's your favorite mystery series?

This Japanese novel from 1962 starts innocently enough. A man has disappeared after boarding a train to the seashore for a holiday. An amateur entomologist, he told the woman with whom he lives that he planned to collect specimens. Since no body is discovered in the area where he was headed, there is little to no investigation. Most people assume he's gone off with a woman or committed suicide.

After this brief introductory chapter, we enter the man's mind as he leaves the train and boards a bus. He takes the bus to the end of the line and then walks through a small village to the dunes by the sea. He wants to collect insects in the dunes, hoping to find a new variety, something no one has seen before. Perhaps it could be named after him.

He's been studying about sand and finds himself thinking about the size of the particles and the particular way it is somehow isolated from soil and clay and stones to create deserts and sandy beaches. As he wanders, eyes alert for beetles, thoughts circling around sand particles, he runs into several villagers who lure him into captivity, trapped in a deep cavity in the dunes where a woman lives in a shabby house. In return for digging the ever-encroaching sand and putting it in tins for the villagers to pull up and take away, they are provided with minimal food and water.

We now enter the realm of parable. Like something out of Kafka or Poe, the man at first rails against his imprisonment, refusing to work and trying to escape. The joy of this book is the slow, subtle, and thoroughly believable way that his spirit is broken. To build his strength and deceive his jailors, he pretends to accommodate himself to life in the hole. When not digging sand, he helps the woman string beads, extra work she has taken on to earn money for a radio. His “gentle contentment” grows until he remembers that “He had intended this accommodation to be a means, never a goal.”

At every turn I thought of my own long life working in offices. I thought of the salarymen in Japan, trying to hold onto jobs by putting in long hours of overtime and not taking vacation or sick days. When I went to Japan again a few years ago, the train from Tokyo was delayed because someone had committed suicide by jumping in front of it. I was told that this was a common occurrence.

It used to make me sad to think of the way we compromise our youthful dreams as we grow older. Then I decided that such a development was only realistic. Once we have responsibilities—spouses, children, mortgages—we must have a thought for these beloved and freely chosen encumbrances. We cannot think only of ourselves.

And office work gave me more than an income. It challenged me intellectually and forced me to become more disciplined. More importantly, it pulled me out of my shell and taught me to interact with and value people from circles I would not otherwise have breached. Working closely with strangers who became colleagues and, often, friends, rubbed off the rough edges of my eccentric solitary habits.

Yet this story reminds me how easily a temporary adjustment can become a prison.

What book have you read that changed the way you thought about your life?

Over the years, the staff at the Ivy Bookshop, my local indie bookstore, have introduced me to many of what have become my favorite books: Stoner, Old Filth, and The Sleeping Dictionary to name just a few. I always go there before my book club’s annual book selection night, and their recommendations are usually the ones we like the best. So when they put up a display of books by Chinese and Japanese authors with lovely covers from Vintage International and Random House, I immediately wanted one of each. Perhaps I will end up there, but for now I’m starting with four.

And what a way to start! Yiyun Li’s short stories bring to life a world of people far removed from the headlines and stereotypes. Some are set in China and some in the U.S., but most include or reference the tension of sons, daughters, or fiancés who have gone to the U.S. to study and may or may not return. All are told in the voice of a storyteller, one who gives us an entrée into the lives of ordinary people with astonishing stories to tell. Each person feels like someone we know quite well.

What I found most fascinating is the mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the first story, “Granny Lin”, the title character seems like many elderly women I've known who have been sidelined throughout their lives, following advice that turns out wrong, working hard. Yet she is uniquely herself. Her neighbor says of her, “. . . were there one honest person left on earth, it would be you.” She loves working as a maid at an exclusive private school where “Every meal is a banquet.” and takes on extra work in the laundry. There, she encounters a young boy who is “the son of a disfavored wife” and they become friends.

I love the way Li uses subtle turns of phrase, as well as proverbs, aphorisms, and references to mythology to convey the flavor of Chinese dialogue. For instance, a boy vowing vengeance on a gang who beat up his brother says, “Boys of the Song family are not soft persimmons for others to squeeze.” A woman says of a man who has been “married three times, and three times the wife died. They say he has the fate of a diamond.” She explains that “His life is as hard as a diamond and whoever he marries will be damaged.”

Also, alluding to a cultural factor that exists in China—and in the U.S. as well, though perhaps more covertly—the smallest happiness must be negotiated against totalitarian powers. These powers may be the state with their one-child policy, or pompous, pampered officials who make free with the lives of their peasant comrades. They may be school officials or parents whose expectations can feel like shackles.

Part of this negotiation is what can be said and what cannot be said, whether out of modesty or loneliness or fear of retribution. There are many silences in these stories. The title story brilliantly explores this theme: the elderly Mr. Shi comes to visit his daughter in the Midwest town where she works in a college library. He befriends a woman from Iran, even though neither speaks much English, and tries to talk with his daughter. The communication between them, in words but also in the food he cooks for her, shifts in the course of the story. His daughter says that a new language “makes you a new person.”

Sometimes the reference to the U.S. may be simply the name of a film. In “Love in the Marketplace”, Sansan is called Miss Casablanca by her students because she shows the film five or six times a semester. I remember my son watching that film over and over. For Sansan, a 32-year-old spinster, a promise is a promise. We go with her to see her mother who sells seasoned eggs in the marketplace. The lives of these two women may seem small, but their choices and the integrity with which they make them loom large. They linger in my memory long after I have finished the story, as I ponder the details of their stories and the larger human context.

What short story collection have you read that lingers in your mind?

I did a reading with Margo Christie a little while ago, and we had an interesting discussion about using life experiences in memoir and fiction. I read from my memoir, Innocent, and she read from this novel, which is based on some of her own experiences.

Fourteen-year-old Becky Shelling idolizes her father, jazz trumpeter Ernie Shelling, a romantic figure whose gigs take him traveling or staying out till the wee hours. He in turn favors her over his step-daughter, treating Becky to dance lessons and taking her along to sing with one of his woman friends, Teri the Canary. To Becky, his glamorous work far outshines their shabby rowhouse in Highlandtown, a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore of formstone rowhouses with at least one bar, if not four, at every intersection.

Then he gets a gig in Miami and leaves, promising to send Becky a bus ticket. Although her stepmother continues to let Becky live there, life becomes more and more intolerable as her stepsister’s boyfriend and his rowdy friends take over the place whenever Arlene is at work. It’s 1974, but Becky has assembled a wardrobe out of the 1940s, thanks to Goodwill shops. Hoping for a stage career, she finds a job at a run-down dinner theater in Middle River, working as an usher, coat-check girl, costume repairer, or whatever else needed doing while snagging some small parts.

It’s there that she meets Lenny Moss, an older man who sells insurance and looks like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. She becomes not just his mistress but also his employee when he fulfills his long-time dream of opening a bar on the Block, Baltimore’s famous red-light district. The Block used to stretch to several blocks of burlesque clubs but by the 1970s had begun its long slide down into an ever-shrinking area of peep shows and strip joints. Moss hopes to reverse this trend by imbuing his club with some of the opulence of the old days, when women wore fabulously beaded and embellished gowns and danced and teased with their fans and feathered boas.

Stories of older men and young teenaged girls make my skin crawl, but there’s something sweet about this one. Becky is so invested in becoming a 1940s glamour queen; she and Lenny meet on level ground when it comes to their dreams. However, morning always comes, and hanging out with her new friends on the Block, Becky begins to learn the truth about her father.

This award-winning book is thoroughly addictive. Long past my usual lights-out, Christie’s prose kept me reading, oh just one more page, one more chapter. Her dialogue is a delight, catching the nuances of the varied cast of characters, from clumsy teenaged boys to sultry torch singers. And bars and kitchens and gowns all come to life in her descriptions. It was also fun to hear all the stories about the Block in the old days. When I was growing up, it was still world-famous. I remember a doctor visiting us from India. “All I know about Baltimore,” he said, “is Fort McHenry and the Block.”

Holding onto the past, wanting to recreate a more dazzling time, seems relatively harmless. Becky’s story, though, makes me think again about the sometimes dangerous allure of nostalgia.

Have you read a novel where someone clings to the past, perhaps in a subtle way rather than insanely à la Miss Havisham?

Although I’ve been meaning for years to read this novel by one of my favorite poets, I only just got around to it, prompted by last week’s The Blind Owl I heard that Hedayat had been influenced by the Rilke novel, and I could see that. Both plunge the reader deep into the mind of a troubled young man, seducing us with poetic prose that draws us in ever deeper. Rilke’s novel, however, is not a plunge into madness, but an existential journey.

Twenty-eight-year-old Malte leads a solitary life in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. He walks the streets, dismayed by the poverty and despair of the people he sees. Death is all around him: a man dying near him in a cafe, a young girl dying in front of his eyes on a trolley. He says, “I have no roof over me, and it is raining into my eyes.”

He takes refuge in libraries, museums, and his own bare room. He reconstructs his childhood, when only his mother was powerful enough to dispel the night fears. Daytime fears abound: a mysterious hand he encounters under a table as he searches for a dropped crayon, costumes and masks he dresses up in that suck his soul away. Two encounters with dead women, one a visible manifestation and one, a story of his mother’s, only felt—but there was the dog’s behavior. And death: he says that we each carry our death inside us “as a fruit has its core.” He movingly recounts the terrible deaths of his grandfather, father and mother.

Masks become a motif throughout the novel, as Malte determines how to live and how to love. They recur in various ways, as decorations on the wall, a death mask of Beethoven, the false front certain other historical figures have put on, the world itself. He asks, “Is it possible that despite our discoveries and advances, despite our culture, religion, and science, we have remained on the surface of this life?”

He explores the lives of various poets, saints, kings, and others, always in beautifully evocative language. Here he is, after pondering a number of women whose stories have come down to us, famous for their grief at having lost their great loves, thinking suddenly of a childhood memory.

I found a jewel-case; it was two handsbreadths large, fan-shaped, with a border of flowers stamped into the dark-green morocco. I opened it: it was empty. I can say this now after so many years. But at that time, when I had opened it, I saw only what its emptiness consisted of: velvet, a small mound of light-colored, no longer fresh velvet; and the jewel-groove which, empty and brighter by just a trace of melancholy, vanished into it. For a moment this was bearable. But to those who, as women who are loved, remain behind, it is perhaps always like this.

He turns to love, requited and not. I remember a long time ago a friend of mine pointing out how much easier it is to be the one who loves rather than the one who is loved. Malte takes this insight even further, declaring that the Prodigal Son left home because he could not bear to be so loved by his family. He imagines the freedom of running away through fields escaping even the dogs, and preferring the harshness of life on his own. “What were all the darknesses of that time, compared to the thick sorrow of those embraces in which everything was lost? Didn’t you wake up feeling that you had no future? Didn’t you walk around drained of all meaning, without the right to even the slightest danger?”

I thought of the two novels I read recently which featured a child mysteriously resistant to family ties who runs away. In The Stone Carvers it was a son who ran away and ran away until finally he didn’t come back. In The Orchardist it was an adopted daughter who goes off with the horse wranglers every season until she too does not return. This beautiful novel by Rilke helps me understand these other two novels better and also myself.

In the Introduction, William H. Gass ties Malte’s story closely to Rilke’s own biography. Yet he also clarifies how much editing and revision went into the final version. We who write fiction may use elements from our lives but using imagination and passion we craft them into something whole and shining, or try to. Rilke succeeds brilliantly.

What novel have you read whose poetic prose you particularly noticed?