He has some controversial things to say...
His latest book is Horn of the Unicorn. (Review of the book by Dr. Chojnowski.) I suppose I could read Bernard Tissier de Mallerais' Marcel Lefebvre instead.
Solzhenitsyn strikes me as someone who is not normally read by the average reader. Can he be recommended broadly?
Yes, he can be recommended broadly if you find the right venues into his works.
First and foremost, the work that brought him international fame, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, can be read by any reader. It is short, it is clear, and it contains all of the major themes of the larger works.
Secondly, one of the most beautiful short stories ever written by anyone in any time is called "Matronia's House", and I recommend it to every reader. In fact, one of the great bits of news in the literary world in the last few years is that Solzhenitsyn, now in his late 80's, has begun writing short stories again.
I would also recommend very highly his later novel, Cancer Ward, where the only off-putting problem is the Russian names. However, that problem crops up for anyone trying to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy as well.
I've said this repeatedly, and I do believe it: the great work of our age is the Gulag Archipelago, and Solzhenitsyn himself said that readers should feel free to flip through pages until they find passages they want to read in it, so one does not have to read that book the way one might read Scripture.
Plus praise of the works of Evelyn Waugh:
Continuing with reading, there is an Angelus (December 1990) "Ambrose Observes" which discusses Brideshead Revisited. That's not the only time we've heard you speak about that work. Let me ask a threefold question for our readers who may not be familiar with Waugh's work: 1) In a sentence, what is the greatness of this work?I still need to read through Brideshead Revisited and Vile Bodies.
Let me quote the author himself, who can say it better than I can. Waugh stated he wrote the book to show the operation of God's grace even in the modern world.
2) What are two or three major lessons or themes to be thought well upon?
I have trouble with this one, and I'll tell you why. I've just been teaching Flannery O'Connor's short stories to my Midshipmen, and I read to them a commentary she made once in which she gets upset when someone asks her what the theme of her stories is as if it were a string holding a sack of chicken feed together–and if you could pluck that one string then the whole sack of chicken feed would open up to you. As she would put it, "the meaning of the story is the whole story," so I hate to do this, but I have to say the major themes of Brideshead Revisited exist in the whole book.
3) Who should read it?
I believe everyone should read it. Certainly Catholics should know the great works of their own time. But I have been blessed by God to see a number of young souls into the Church and into Tradition during my teaching years at the Naval Academy. Among the first books I would hand them was always Brideshead Revisited because it reflected much of the world they lived in, and the exact place they were coming from, in that the narrator himself is an agnostic atheist who is abandoned by all those around him who should have guided him.
It has been for me the single greatest instrument of the conversion of the young–but I fear that the world may now have even moved beyond Brideshead.
Well, in thinking of your thoughts above on universities, I think of Vile Bodies…
It's a magnificent work. I've been teaching it lately, in fact, and my students recognize themselves in it, even though the book is decades old. It is not about universities, it's about young life completely out of control.
For the Catholic reader I would follow up with his two great directly Catholic works: Helena, which is a fictional life of St. Helen, finder of the True Cross, and his great biography of St. Edmund Campion. I would certainly recommend Vile Bodies, and then I would recommend his great WWII work, Sword of Honour. You can get all three novels in one volume. It is one of the few novels to come out of the war that tells the truth about the war, which is that it was a great victory for the Soviet Union and a great defeat for the West. But even beyond that, Waugh has beyond that experience, which he puts in that novel, a sense of the dark time that lay ahead for all Catholics.
There is a horrible scene in which the hero goes to Confession only to find out later that the priest is a spy, and has passed on things said under the seal of the confessional. He didn't even tell him things of a military nature. It's just that the priest is a spy and much more concerned with spying than his priestly duties, meaning, he's more concerned with worldly politics than the care of souls.
[More on Evelyn Waugh: doubtinghall (uk); an article by Joseph Pearce; Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse; extracts from audio interviews]
Then there's this tidbit:
Hrm possible energy crises in the future--I won't disagree with him about the possible impact.
Well, this is the third time you've mentioned it, so let me ask, what do you mean "power going out"?
Well, here is Doc White's crackpot theory. To my mind one of the great essays written in my lifetime is Solange Hertz's essay "Hell's Amazing Grace." In this essay she talks about electricity itself as a satanic invention that stands in opposition to God's true light. If the universe began with "fiat lux," then God is the creator of light, and that light was given to us through the sun, which defined day and night, allowed the crops to grow, and gave us the seasons. It connected us to nature in a profound and beautiful way.
But the invention of electricity has allowed us to turn night into day, winter into summer, and summer into winter, with air conditioning and heating. It has allowed us to feel as if we have the world at our fingertips. It's a brilliant essay. It occurred to me recently that we are now totally dependent upon power and electricity for every aspect of our lives. All that Satan needs to do is turn out the power, and then his false son can step forward to perform the great miracle of restoring the power to us if we fall down and worship him.
And I think even many good souls, perhaps even traditional Catholics might be tempted to worship him if it meant they could get their garage door opener back and have the fridge back, so the beer will be cold again, and have their TV and Internet back.
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