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Although several years old now, Hessler’s book offers a good introduction to a country that is rapidly changing. Presented chronologically, the stories of people and places and artifacts span the years from 1999 to 2002, when Hessler worked in China as a teacher and journalist from. As in the best of today’s narrative nonfiction, these stories are vivid vignettes that immerse the reader in the experience.

We meet an 82-year-old, tennis-playing man who “carries himself like a soldier” and stubbornly refuses to leave his family home when the developers demand it. We camp in a tower on the Great Wall during a sandstorm, hang out in cafes at night with Uighur traders, and cruise along the banks of North Korea. We talk with peasants and movie stars, archeologists and black marketeers. We learn what a ghost chariot is.

The book’s subtitle, A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, points to the aspect of the book that—next to the stories—most appealed to me. Hessler gives the reader historical context for everything, but so subtly that we can absorb the information almost without noticing it. The trick is that he gives us a snippet of history at the moment we need it and immediately returns to the story.

Also, every two or three chapters we get a section that zooms in on a particular artifact, such as the Flying Horse, discovered in 1969 in the village of Wuwei. Since archeologists were not available in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, the peasants who blundered onto the third century tomb while digging under a temple did the excavation and kept the many bronzes in their own homes until they were finally collected. The background and symbolism of the horse are teased out in a series of interviews that keep the reader’s attention engaged.

Our attention is held, too, by certain people and stories that are carried through the book, such as former students with whom Hessler stays in touch and the mystery surrounding a suicide. Also, descriptions of places come alive with a handful of details, such as this one of the Ju’er neighborhood of Beijing:

Some residents kept makeshift pigeon coops on their roofs, and they tied whistles to the birds, so that the flock sounded when it passed overhead. In the old parts of Beijing, that low-pitched hum, rising and falling as the birds soared across the sky, was the mark of a beautiful clear day. In late afternoons, the trash man pushed his cart through the hutong, blowing a whistle. The sound faded as he made his way out of the neighborhood; usually he was gone just before sunset. Nights were silent.

What sent me to this book were the lovely quotations credited to it in Hélène, by Deborah Poe, such as the epigraph from Chuang-Tzu about the use and limitation of words. My favorite is this from Chen Mengjia, a poet and scholar: “I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs.”

I particularly liked Hessler’s evaluation near the end of the commonalities and differences between China and the U.S. We have more in common than you might think.

Change has only accelerated for China since 2002, but this book is a good place to start if you want to understand modern China amid the fragments of its long past.

What book have you read about modern China?

George Eliot’s last novel is an ambitious undertaking. We follow two people starting with the moment they first saw each other, in 1865 at a resort in Leubronn, a fictional town in Germany. As young Gwendolyn Harleth plays roulette, she is observed by Daniel Deronda. She perceives that while he is taken by her great beauty, he seems to be critical of her behavior. Spoiled and stubborn, she refuses to stop until she has gambled away the last bit of her winnings, trying to appear uncaring. The next day she is called home by a letter from her mother that they have lost all their money, but not before the necklace she has pawned after her losses is mysteriously returned to her.

From there we go back to learn how the self-centered Gwendolyn and the quiet Deronda reached this moment. Gwendolyn has had everything her own way up to this point, ruling over her social circle despite her lack of wealth, uncaring about others, and demanding to be entertained constantly. Just before her trip to Leubronn with family friends, she has refused an offer from Henleigh Grandcourt, a man whose wealth and position would seem to promise all her dreams would come true. However, she has learned that he has a family already, with his longtime mistress.

Deronda is the ward of Sir Humphrey Mallinger, Grandcourt’s uncle. Like most people, he believes he must be Sir Humphrey’s illegitimate son. A most generous and compassionate man, he misses a scholarship to Cambridge through helping his friend Hans Meyrick to win one. He also rescues Mirah, a young Jewish girl who was about to drown herself, and takes her to the Meyrick family for safekeeping. Through her he meets a mysterious Jewish visionary named Mordecai and becomes interested in learning more about the Jewish faith. This novel is the first to treats Jews sympathetically.

From there the two stories continue in tandem, only occasionally intersecting. While there is a great deal of narrative, common in novels of the period, the tale is enlivened by Eliot’s light touch with dialogue and by her penetrating, and sometimes satiric, insight. For instance, she says “it was evident that Gwendolyn was not a general favourite with her own sex; there were not beginnings of intimacy between her and other girls, and in conversation they rather noticed what she said than spoke to her in free exchange.”

I love what Mrs. Meyrick says of her son: “‘If I were to live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother’s love, I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it, from the very first it made.’”

Deronda’s story of growing interest in Judaism and what we would now call Zionism is less interesting. In his introduction to my copy, F.R. Leavis disagrees with Henry James that Eliot’s intellectual ability is the cause; Leavis admires her intelligence and intellectual powers. Rather, he blames the failure of this part of the book on Eliot’s persistence in endowing her protagonists with idealism. He calls this “immaturity” on Eliot’s part, and even describes Deronda as being a woman in his desire to make the world a better place.

I disagree. As Donald Maass points out, “Generally speaking, we choose company that is pleasant.” He goes on to ask writers “What kind of person are you asking your readers to spend four-hundred or so pages with?” In another post he suggests that “Positive emotions are harder to access and more difficult to use. Perhaps that’s because they relieve conflict rather than feeding it.” Yet we as readers treasure our encounters with these emotions. “‘Higher emotions’ are called that for a reason. They elevate and inspire us. Even just reading about them changes us, as Thomas Jefferson once wrote and which more recently has been scientifically demonstrated in studies of ‘moral elevation’ by Dr. Jonathan Haidt and others.”

The trick is to make the character interesting by adding internal conflicts and shadings. He or she cannot be all positive. Plus the character has to change. While Deronda has some internal conflicts over who his parents are and whether the woman he loves will also love him, these do not fundamentally change him and he never does or is tempted to do anything wrong. The only way he changes in the book is through his decision to immerse himself in Judaism. He is still his perfect self at the end. Mordecai too is entirely perfect and does not change.

The other reason why the Jewish part of the story drags is that so much of it is presented in long intellectual monologues by Mordecai, unbroken by action or emotion. Today we call this “info-dumping” and try to avoid it.

I don’t think the problem here is idealism, so much as it is the lack of shading in our idealistic characters and the misuse of dialogue to convey chunks of information. Still, there is much to admire in this book. I found myself, despite having read it before, hurrying to get to the end to find out what would happen to these two characters.

Have you read any of George Eliot’s novels? What did you think of them?

I always start my memoir classes by discussing what a memoir is. It covers a discreet portion of the author’s life, usually with a limited time frame, and is the author’s perception of the incidents described. Autobiography, on the other hand, is expected to be more objective and to cover the author’s entire life. Therefore, we might question this “autobiography” of someone who is only 39 the year it is published.

Yet Agassi is justified in calling this an autobiography. The frame of the book is his last match as a professional tennis player, at the U.S. Open. From there we go back to his childhood and follow him up to that moment in 2006, that last match. Since almost every moment of his life has been devoted to professional tennis, I think it’s fair to say that one life ended that day and another began. Also, the reworking of Agassi’s original material by another writer, the extensive fact-checking and multiple editorial rewrites provide some objectivity to what is a very personal account.

I love watching tennis, the intense one-on-one battles where the advantage shifts back and forth. The psychological battle interests me almost more than the physical one. A person has to stand out there alone under the unrelenting eyes of cameras and spectators, without teammates or coaches or even privacy to collect themselves. They have to summon the courage to keep playing when they are losing horribly, embarrassingly, and the composure to stay calm in the run-up to an unexpected win.

Reading this book just after Wimbledon gave me added insight into what is happening on the tennis court. Agassi speaks of the “magnetic force” that comes near the end of a match that can pull you over “the finish line” into the win and the equal force pushing you away.

More than that, he gives a close description of the shaping of a professional tennis player, something that starts in early childhood. Agassi’s father gave him a racket when he was three but even before that, according to his mother, “when I was still in the crib, my father hung a mobile of tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand.” No wonder he grows up hating tennis and rebelling whenever he gets a chance. Given his seemingly adult-style career, I had to keep reminding myself as he described some of his shenanigans of how young he was.

In some ways, it’s an all-too-familiar story of a childhood stunted and deformed by a stage- or sport-parent who demands that the child’s every moment be devoted to practice. Yet Agassi’s unusual openness about his experiences, his emotions, his misjudgments and mistakes lift this book above the ordinary. The tone is well-calculated to avoid self-pity and show respect and even love for those who might be said to have harmed him.

It’s a compelling read. I was surprised by how well-written it is until I got to the acknowledgments at the end. Agassi credits J.R. Moehringer with transforming their taped interviews into this book, along with input from editors and first readers. He explains that though Moehringer refused to have his own name printed on the cover, Agassi wanted to ensure he got credit for his work. With that, I was no longer surprised. Moehringer is an amazing writer. I’ve written about his extraordinary memoir The Tender Bar.

I treasure the brief outline of Agassi’s second life at the end of the book, a life born of his desire to help disadvantaged children. If we are lucky, we find work that gives our lives meaning.

What sports biographies or autobiographies have you found illuminating?

I didn’t want to read this 2012 runaway bestseller simply because of the title. I have had it with grown women being referred to as girls. No one would refer to a 32-year-old man as a boy. The misogyny makes me want to spit.

However, a book discussion group I’m in selected it, so I gave in. In short, it was a fast read about a bunch of extremely unpleasant people. The voice of the initial first-person narrator, Rachel, felt genuine and well-written. The voices of the other two women narrating the story equally well-written, aside from not seeming different from Rachel’s. There was plenty of suspense from one page to the next, though the solution seemed clear early on, but little else to recommend it. However, as writers, we can always learn something from a book.

Rachel rides the commuter train back and forth to a job she pretends she hasn’t been fired from. Morning and evening, she gazes at her former home where Tom now lives with Anna, the woman he left Rachel for, and their baby. She also speculates about the loving couple a few doors down, making up names and stories for them. She also drinks. A lot.

Her excessive drinking has cost her not only her job and marriage, but made her fat and ugly, at least according to her account of what people say to her. More misogyny, anyone?

From the train, she witnesses a disturbing incident at the neighboring couple’s home, and soon after learns that the woman, whose real name is Megan, has disappeared. In between binges, blackouts and drunken, begging calls to Tom, Rachel decides to help with the investigation. In different chapters and a separate timeline, Megan tells us about events prior to her disappearance, lounging at home months after her gallery closed, feeling sorry for herself. Our third narrator is Anna, smug and arrogant in her marriage, while complaining about Rachel constantly barging in and the incessant trains passing behind the house. She misses the excitement of being a mistress rather than a wife; she misses clubbing and nights out.

What these three thoroughly unpleasant women have in common is that they are bored women living privileged lives yet finding endless complaints to fuel their self-pity. Rachel could set aside her multiple gin and tonics or bottles of wine and get another job. A job would be even easier for Megan; all she has to do is get out of the chair. Anna could find social groups and volunteer activities like other stay-at-home moms. Instead they just whine. The men aren’t much better. They all behave badly, and stereotypically so: abusing the women in different ways.

So what makes this novel so popular? I am somewhat mystified. The theme of work versus marriage and children, which could make it resonate for young women, seems falsely set up to me. Everyone behaves badly at home. We only see Rachel at work, and then only an embarrassing memory. One person in my group suggested that Rachel displayed elements of Bridget Jones and so attracted that audience.

I kept feeling that I was immersed in the 1950s—women stuck at home with or wanting babies while under their husband’s thumb—yet I understand that I’m old enough to have been through several increasingly complex waves of dealing with these issues and that each young generation of women has to address them all over again. I also understand that feminism in the UK is on a different timeline from the US. Still, I didn’t think the story treated these issues with subtlety or awareness of all the social history packed into them.

One reason for its popularity could be that it combines genres. It’s been called a literary thriller, a literary mystery, and a psychological thriller. Also, for those looking for a classic hook, it’s a Hitchcock mashup, combining elements of Rear Window, Stranger on a Train, and a third I won’t mention so as not to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read it.

Yet, mystery fans will find it very thin, with the red herrings barely mentioned before being casually ruled out and the ending well-telegraphed. The two detectives are barely mentioned and have almost no role in the book. Fans of literary fiction will also find it thin. Rachel is the only one whose inner life is developed, though her character is given plenty of layers and her inner monologue very well-written. More development of the other characters, better tying up of loose ends, and a few subplots would have made for a richer story.

I think it is too shallow to qualify as literary fiction. Outside of the three women the characters are not developed and, while there are plenty of layers to Rachel’s story that are reflected in Anna and Megan’s, there are no subplots involving the other characters.

I guess it’s the thriller aspect. Hawkins does a good job of adding microtension to each page. This keeps the reader engaged and the suspense ramped up, even when you know what’s going to happen. I liked the cover, too. With a blurred background fronted by large juddering text, it grabs your attention and conveys the essense of the story.

Is there a wildly popular bestseller that either thrilled or disappointed you? Why?

Not a book this week, or rather a production that started as a book. In 1996, Romanian poet Marin Sorescu died of liver cancer. Earlier that year he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature, and he did not stop writing after his diagnosis. In the last five weeks of his life, he wrote a searing collection of poems, later published as Puntea (The Bridge), much of it dictated to his wife, Virginia.

Taking these poems as his libretto, composer Michael Hersch created On the Threshold of Winter. It is a monodrama, that is, an opera for one voice. I heard it performed by soprano Ah Young Hong and the NUNC ensemble conducted by Tito Muñoz.

I not only heard it, I drowned in it. This stunning performance seized me from the start and immersed me in its tides of emotion. I was swept up in these last cries of grief and despair and anger and longing. Pulled this way and that, repeatedly ratcheted up and released, until reduced to the final letting go, the quiet liberation.

Hersch’s works have been performed around the world by acclaimed conductors with major orchestras and chamber ensembles. He also teaches composition at the Peabody Institute, where Ah Young Hong also teaches voice. Hong’s performance was astonishing. I cannot begin to calculate the physical and emotional strain of singing and enacting such a strenuous role for two hours. She received a well-deserved standing ovation, sustained for some time through repeated curtain calls. The audience simply would not let her go.

Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Ms. Hong. But I defy anyone to experience such a performance without being overwhelmed with awe and admiration at her achievement.

But let’s get down to business. I had not previously encountered these poems, but reading over the libretto before the performance I was horrified on Sorescu’s behalf to read that Hersch had broken them apart and rearranged them. After some thought, though, I realised that such intervention was needed.

A monodrama—or any other theatrical production—calls for a drastically different structure from that of a poetry collection. Hersch repositioned the fragments of poems to create a sustained narrative, with rising and falling action, with dramatic scenes, with a resounding climax. And we still get the power and beauty of the lines (from the translation by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu), such as these:

I balance on something frail . . .

Blasted apart by the spasms
Of a fierce whirlwind
A bridge between nothing and nothing
I have not asked to cross.

I’m not a musician, so I cannot comment on the music, though it certainly supported and enclosed the singer and the song, as one dancer supports another through intricate lifts and catches her when she leaps.

I do want to credit the stage director: James Matthew Daniel. The imaginative set, while spare, gave the solo performer much room for action. Large erections of scaffolding were hung with fabric and plastic. Ms. Hong at times climbed them or arduously pushed them into new positions. Statues, a bed, flowers, and a few other bits and pieces each served its purpose.

Ms. Hong’s costumes enhanced the role. Starting with an enveloping hooded bathrobe, each change revealed a bit more, even as the character’s last self was stripped as she approached the end.

When we write, we are limited to the page, hoping to evoke in readers the kind of sounds and visions delivered directly by a stage production. But there is much to learn here about pacing and setting and blocking and how to use such a limited palette to stun your audience.

What stage production have you seen recently that knocked you sideways?

After weeks of Penelope Fitzgerald’s brisk prose, starting Aslam’s novel, with its rich, luxuriant writing, felt like lowering myself into a hot perfumed bath after a long but rewarding day. Poetic doesn’t begin to describe the fragrant mass of images and sense-impressions that fill every sentence. His personification of the natural world adds to the atmosphere of mystery, of legends handed down through the generations.

Here is the first paragraph:

Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself. With their deliberate, almost-impaired pace, they fall like feathers sinking in water. The snowstorm has rinsed the air of the incense that drifts into the houses from the nearby lake with the xylophone jetty, but it is there even when absent, drawing attention to its own disappearance.

The couple who have disappeared are Shamas’s brother Jugnu and Jugnu’s girlfriend Chanda, who have been living together in the face of the angry opposition of their families and community of Pakistani immigrants. The immigrants from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka who populate this English town have renamed the town and the streets in it with names more familiar to them.

It is this clash of the traditions the immigrants have brought with the Western culture of their new homes which powers the novel. Coexisting with lush descriptions of spices and silks and forests are brutal actions dictated by Islamic holy men and almost, but not quite, equally brutal attacks by furious xenophobic white people.

Shamas is our guide through these conflicting events. Educated and worldly, he is the Director of the Community Relations Council and the person everyone turns to when they need help navigating the world outside the community. With a foot in both worlds, Shamas tries to help his people while despairing at the cruel punishments they inflict on each other for some perceived sin, such as parents asking a holy man to exorcise their daughter—obviously possessed with djinns because she has fallen in love with a Hindu boy—listening as the man tortures and beats their daughter to death.

The clash of cultures afflicts Shamas’s own family, where his devout wife’s adherence to Muslim practices goes so far as to refuse to breastfeed a newborn during Ramadan’s daylight hours. She has driven away their three now-grown children, each choosing to integrate themselves into the wider world.

Yet Aslam presents these characters with compassion, gently asking the reader to recognise the reasons they act as they do. And he wraps the story, with its many pairs of lost lovers, in the beauty of the world in all its flavors and in the intoxication and deep comfort of love.

What novel have you read that opened your eyes to another culture?

I have to admit that I struggled with this book. I loved the beginning, a retelling of a 16th century legend explaining the origin of the stone statues of midgets that stand atop a section of wall surrounding the Ridolfi villa. It is pure Fitzgerald: funny and heart-breaking and bizarre. Plus it introduces a characteristic of the Ridolfis that drives the rest of the story: “a tendency towards rash decisions . . . intended to ensure other people’s happiness”.

Then we move to 1955 when the current count, Giancarlo Ridolfi finds himself torn between his determination to not mind about anything much anymore and his fierce love for his daughter Chiara. At 65, Giancarlo has survived two world wars and now lives in a portion of his decrepit palazzo in Florence with his eccentric sister, leaving the villa in the hands of a caretaker couple. Fresh out of a convent school in England, Chiara falls in love with the unsuitable Salvatore Rossi, a doctor from a village in Italy’s economically depressed south, and he with her, although they excel in misunderstandings, confusion, and awkward meetings.

There are many vivid characters. Giancarlo’s nephew Cesare runs the family farm and can hardly bring himself to speak at all. Chiara’s schoolfriend Barney is a rosy giantess who falls in love over and over but is always certain that she knows what is best for everyone. There is even a scene where a young Salvatore is taken by his father to meet Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini, close to death and severely crippled.

There are also many funny scenes that gently mock Vatican politicians, on-the-make art historians, English transplants, and others. It is a story about innocence, how so many of us act with good intent but poor understanding. It is also a story about happiness, how rare it is, how fleeting, and unequally distributed. And also, how our efforts to bestow happiness on another tend to backfire.

With this novel, Fitzgerald’s writing becomes more impressionistic, giving the reader more responsibility for connecting the pieces. I didn’t have a problem with the shifts in time, or parts of the story being told backwards. After all, Ridolfi does refer to the word for memory, and our memory is anything but linear.

But I did struggle, especially after the legend at the beginning, with what seemed like excessive backstory combined with a lack of necessary information. For example, we are told that Giancarlo’s brother inherited the farm and that he has a wife and son. Some pages later we are introduced to Cesare whose father was killed in the war. It is only several pages later that it becomes clear that Cesare is that nephew. The long digressions, the confusion and misunderstandings certainly do mirror the story, but they risk alienating the reader.

I’m glad I didn’t give up. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this view of some segments of Italian society in the mid 1950s, but I recognise much of what I found during my own travels there some decades later. The 1950s are an interesting period in Italy’s history, with World War II only recently ended, the remnants of Italy’s empire lost, and an economy still some years away from the “Economic Miracle”. These characters, with their varying approaches for facing an uncertain future, will stay with me for some time.

Have you been to Florence? What is your most vivid memory of that visit?