Interesting Emendations: James Wood's "Job Existed: Primo Levi"

James Wood’s brilliant “Job Existed: Primo Levi,” included in his new collection Serious Noticing, originally appeared in The New Yorker (September 28, 2015), under the title “The Art of Witness.” Comparing the two versions, I see many differences: 

New Yorker	Serious Noticing
How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up?	How could it be anything but heroic to have entered hellmouth and not been swallowed up?
To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity?	To have witnessed it with such lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity?
That edition praises the text as “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit,” though Levi often emphasized how quickly and efficiently the camps could destroy the human spirit.	That same edition praises the text as “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit,” though Levi often emphasized how quickly and efficiently the camps could destroy the human spirit.
Another survivor, the writer Jean Améry, mistaking comprehension for concession, disapprovingly called Levi “the pardoner,” though Levi repeatedly argued that he was interested in justice, not in indiscriminate forgiveness.	A fellow survivor, the writer Jean Améry, mistaking comprehension for concession, disapprovingly called Levi “the pardoner,” though Levi repeatedly argued that he was interested in justice, not in indiscriminate forgiveness.
A German official who had encountered Levi in the camp laboratory found in “If This Is a Man” an “overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man.”	A German correspondent, an official who had encountered Levi in the camp, applauded If This Is Man, and found in it“an “overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man.”
He married a woman, Lucia Morpurgo, from his own class and background, and died in the same Turin apartment building in which he had been born.	He married a woman, Lucia Morpurgo, from the same class and background he was born into, and died in the same Turin apartment building in which he had been born.
The publication of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi” (Liveright), in three volumes, represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi’s work. Although his best-known work has already benefitted from fine English translation, it’s a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English (notably, a cache of uncollected essays, written between 1949 and 1987).	[Deleted]
Levi gives ebullient life to this comfortable, sometimes eccentric world in “The Periodic Table”—a memoir, a history, an essay in elegy, and the best example of his variousliterary talents.	Levi gives ebullient life to this comfortable, sometimes eccentric world in “The Periodic Table”—a memoir, a history, an essay in elegy, and the best example of his different literary talents.
From an early age, Levi appears to have possessed many of the qualities of his later prose—meticulousness, curiosity, furious discretion, orderliness to the point of priggishness. In primary school, he was top of his class (his schoolmates cheered him on with “Primo Levi Primo!”). As a teen-ager at the Liceo D’Azeglio, Turin’s leading classical academy, he stood out for his cleverness, his smallness, and his Jewishness. He was bullied, and his health deteriorated. His English biographer Ian Thomson suggests that Levi developed a sense of himself as physically and sexually inadequate, and that his subsequent devotion to robust athletic pursuits, such as mountaineering and skiing, represented a self-improvement project. Thomson notes that, in later life, he recalled his mistreatment at school as “uniquely anti-Semitic,” and adds, “How far this impression was coloured by Levi’s eventual persecution is hard to tell.” But perhaps Thomson has it the wrong way round. Perhaps Levi’s extraordinary resilience in Auschwitz had something to do with a hardened determination not to be persecuted again.	[Deleted and replaced by a completely new paragraph that begins, “But even in this first, light-hearted chapter, Levi announces his theme....”]
On the basis of the first chapter of “The Periodic Table” alone, you know that you are in the hands of a true writer, someone equipped with an avaricious and indexical memory, who knows how to animate his details, stage his scenes, and ration his anecdotes.	If you had not read anything else by Primo Levi, you would know,on the basis of the first chapter of The Periodic Table, that you are in the hands of a true writer, someone equipped with an avaricious and indexical memory, who knows how to animate his details, stage his scenes, and ration his anecdotes.
Throughout, there are wittily pragmatic, original descriptions of minerals, gases, and metals, as in this description of zinc: “Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element.”	Throughout, there are wittily pragmatic, cleverly original descriptions of minerals, gases, and metals, as in this description of zinc: “Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element.”
Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But,above all, they existed.	Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: they existed, and then they disappeared. But above all, they existed.
Pagis’s poem means: “Job did exist, because Job was in the death camps. Suffering is not the most terrible thing; worse is to have the reality of one’s suffering erased.” In just this way, Levi’s writing insists that Job existed and was not a parable. His clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten. There are many such facts in Levi’s books of testament. The reader is quickly introduced to the principle of scarcity, in which everything—every detail, object, and fact—becomes essential, for everything will be stolen: wire, rags, paper, bowl, a spoon, bread.	I think that Pagis’s poem defiantly means: “Job did exist, because Job was in the death camps. The most terrible thing is not suffering: it is to have the reality of one’s suffering erased.” In just this way, Levi’s writing insists that Job existed and was not a parable. His famous clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten. There are many such facts in Levi’s books of testament. The reader is quickly introduced to the principle of scarcity, in which everything,every detail, object, and fact, becomes essential, for everything will be stolen – wire, rags, paper, bowl, a spoon, bread.
Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses.  What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quitetell a story; it has often been poetic (Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Yehiel De-Nur), or analytical, reportorial, anthropological, philosophical (Jean Améry, Germaine Tillion, Eugen Kogon, Viktor Frankl).	Yet many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses of the horror. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not tell a story, quite; it has often been poetic (Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Yehiel De-Nur), or analytic, reportorial, anthropological, philosophical (Jean Améry, Germaine Tillion, Eugen Kogon, Viktor Frankl).
Along with this scientific mastering of the information comes something like a wariness of narrative naïveté	Along with this scientific mastering of the information comes something like a wariness of narrative naivety
Levi’s prose has a tone of similar command, and in his last book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” he became such an analyst, grouping material by theme rather than telling stories. Nor did he always tell his stories in conventional sequential fashion. But “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” are powerful because they do not disdain story.	Levi’s prose has a tone of similar command (its composure, its reticence, its order), and in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, he became such an analyst, grouping material by theme rather than by telling stories about it. Nor did he always tell his stories in conventional sequential fashion. But at the simplest level, If This Is a Man and The Truce are powerful because they do not disdain story.
He introduces thirst like this: “Will they give us something to drink? No, they line us up again, lead us to a huge square.” He first mentions the now infamous refrain “The only way out is through the chimney” thus: “What does it mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.” To register his discoveries, he often breaks from thepast tense into a diaristic present.	Unlike Frankl, for instance, Leviintroduces thirst like this: “Will they give us something to drink? No, they line us up again, lead us to a huge square.” He first mentions the now infamous refrain “The only way out is through the chimney” thus: “What does it mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.” To register his ghastly novelties, he often breaks from past tense into a diaristic present.
The result is a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters. That is why every reader who has opened “If This Is a Man” feels impelled to continue reading it, despite the horror of the material. Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment. The victims’ ignorance of the name “Auschwitz” tells us everything, actually and symbolically. For Levi, “Auschwitz” had not, until this moment, existed. It had to be invented, and it had to be introduced into his life. Evil is not the absence of the good, as theology and philosophy have sometimes maintained. It is the invention of the bad: Job existed and was not a parable. Levi registers the same astonishment when first hit by a German officer—“a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?” Or when, driven by thirst, he breaks off an icicle only to have it snatched away by a guard. “Why?” Levi asks. To which comes the answer “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”). Or when Alex the Kapo, a professional criminal who has been given limited power over other prisoners, wipes his greasy hand on Levi’s shoulder, as if the other man were not a man. Or when Levi, who was fortunate enough to be chosen to work as a chemist, in the Buna laboratory, comes face to face with his chemistry examiner, Dr. Pannwitz, who raises his eyes to glance at his victim: “That look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.”	On its own, Levi’s talent for narrative might amount to little more than a trivial literary preference. But a charged relation to novelty becomes important, becomes a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral)novelty of the details he encounters. That is why every reader who has opened If This Is a Manfeels impelled to continue reading it, despite the horror of the material. Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment – how is this possible? what horror is next? –  and a moral astonishment: not just at the existence of evil, but at the fact that such evil has been made new, introduced into the writer’s world. Levi’s writing thus has the form of continuous moral introduction. It is why the victims’ ignorance of the name “Auschwitz” is not a small detail. On the contrary, it tells us everything, actually and symbolically. For Levi, “Auschwitz” had not, until this moment, existed. It had to be invented, and it had to be introduced into his life. Evil is not the absence of the good, as theology and philosophy have sometimes maintained. It is the invention of the bad: Job existed and was not a parable. Levi registers the same astonishment when first hit by a German officer—“a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?” It had never happened before. This moral astonishment is felt in some of the book’s more celebrated moments, too– when, driven by thirst, he breaks off an icicle only to have it snatched away by a guard, and asks “Why?” To which comes the answer “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”). Or when Alex the Kapo, a common criminal, but given limited power over other prisoners, thoughtlessly wipes his greasy hand on Levi’s shoulder, as if the other man were not a man. Or when Levi, who was fortunate enough to be chosen to work as a chemist, in the Buna laboratory, comes face to face with his German examiner, Dr. Pannwitz, a cold official who raises his eyes to glance at his victim. It is just that, a glance, but Levi has not experienced its like before: “That look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.”
Both “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” contain beautiful portraits of goodness and charity, and it is not the punishers and sadists but the life-givers—the fortifiers, the endurers, the men and women who sustained Levi in his struggle to survive—who burst out of these pages.	Both “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” contain beautiful portraits of goodness and charity, and it is not the punishers and sadists but the life-givers, the fortifiers, the endurers, the men and women who sustained Levi in his struggle to survive,who burst out of these pages.
You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote: his prose is a form of keeping his boots shined and his posture proudly upright. It is a style that seems at first windowpane clear but is actually full of undulating strategies.	You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote: his prose is a form of keeping his boots shined and his posture proudly upright. It is a style that seems at first to be as lucid as glass – an Orwellian windowpane – but which is actually full of undulating strategies.
For surely the power of these impeccable words, as so often in Levi, is moral. First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that; it must be described as an “ordeal”); and then they dryly repel that contamination (no, we will insist on calling the experience, with full ironic power, an “adventure”).	For surely the power of these impeccable words is moral. First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that, it should be described as an “ordeal”); and then they gloriously repel that contamination (no, we will insist in calling the experience, with full ironic power, an “adventure”).
On the morning of April 11, 1987, this healthily humane man, age sixty-seven, walked out of his fourth-floor apartment and either fell or threw himself over the bannister of the building’s staircase. The act, if suicide, appeared to undo the suture of his survival. Some people were outraged; others refused to see it as suicide. The implication, not quite spoken, was uncomfortably close to dismay that the Nazis had won after all. “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later,” Elie Wiesel said. Yet Levi was a survivor who committed suicide, not a suicide who failed to survive. He himself had seemed to argue against such morbidity, in his chapter on Jean Améry in “The Drowned and the Saved.” Améry, who killed himself at the age of sixty-five, said that in Auschwitz he thought a great deal about dying; rathertartly, Levi replied that in the camp he was too busy for such perturbation. “The business of living is the best defense against death, and not only in the camps.”	Yet on the morning of 11 April 1987, this healthily humane man walked out of his third-floorapartment and either fell or threw himself over the bannister of the building’s staircase. The act, if suicide, appeared to undo the suture of his survival. Some people were outraged, others refused to see it as suicide. The implication, not quite spoken, was uncomfortably close to dismay that the Nazis had won after all. “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later,” said Elie Wiesel. Wiesel must, in one essential way, be right. But to lament that the Nazis have won every time a survivor of the Holocaust commits suicide is truly a concession that the Nazis have won. Yet Levi was a survivor who committed suicide, not a suicide who failed to survive. He himself had seemed to argue against such morbidity, in his chapter on Jean Améry in The Drowned and the Saved. Améry, who killed himself at the age of sixty-seven, said that in Auschwitz he thought a great deal about dying; tartly, and with characteristic irony, Levi replied that in the camp he was too busy for such perturbation. “The aims of life are the best defence against death: and not only in the Lager.”
For, above all, Job existed and was not a parable.	For above all, Job existed and was not a parable.

You can see from the above table that most of the differences are stylistic. But there are a few substantive discrepancies, too. I find the formal changes fascinating. Obviously, Wood is not a follower of William Strunk’s famous “Omit needless words” principle of composition (see Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1972). And why should we be surprised at that? In his wonderful “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” (included in Serious Noticing), he defines an “ideal sentence” as “a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.” Wood’s sentences in “Job Existed: Primo Levi” aren’t like that, but many of them could be more concise. For example, in the Serious Noticing version, he writes, 

Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment – how is this possible? what horror is next? –  and a moral astonishment: not just at the existence of evil, but at the fact that such evil has been made new, introduced into the writer’s world.

The New Yorker version is much crisper:

Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment.

Another example: in the Serious Noticing version, Wood writes,

If you had not read anything else by Primo Levi, you would know, on the basis of the first chapter of The Periodic Table, that you are in the hands of a true writer…. 

Again, The New Yorker version is more succinct:

On the basis of the first chapter of “The Periodic Table” alone, you know that you are in the hands of a true writer…. 

Even more interesting (to me, at least), are the differences in word choices. For instance, in the New Yorker piece, Wood writes, “First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that; it must be described as an “ordeal”); and then they dryly repel that contamination …” (emphasis added). But in Serious Noticing, he says, “First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that, it should be described as an “ordeal”); and then they gloriously repel that contamination …” (emphasis added).

Another example: In the New Yorker piece, he writes, “To register his discoveries, he often breaks from the past tense into a diaristic present” (emphasis added). However, in Serious Noticing, he says, “To register his ghastly novelties, he often breaks from past tense into a diaristic present” (emphasis added).

I find the factual discrepancies between the two versions regarding the floor level from which Levi fell/jumped to his death, Jean Améry’s age when he committed suicide, and the exact wording of the famous quote from Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (all highlighted in red in the above table) puzzling. Wood had the benefit of The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers, yet in republishing his piece in Serious Noticing, he chose to ignore their work. As a result, “Job Existed: Primo Levi” is marred by two factual errors and a questionable translation of one of Levi’s key sentences.

From my comparison of the New Yorker and Serious Noticing versions of “Job Existed: Primo Levi,” I conclude that Wood disregards New Yorker editing and fact-checking.  

January 20, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Alex Ross’s fascinating “The Bristlecones Speak,” in which he explores his obsession with bristlecone pines – contorted, wraithlike trees that grow on the slopes of the White Mountains in eastern California and live for thousands of years. Ross visits an area of the Whites known as the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. He describes a forty-five-hundred-year-old bristlecone named Methuselah:

Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above. All told, the tree is an unprepossessing specimen; most people march past it without giving it a second glance. When I sat by the tree for an hour last July, the only visitor who took any notice of it was a dog named Dougie, who briefly sniffed the trunk and then darted away.

Ross visits the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Arizona (“Inside, researchers have access to a kind of arboreal Library of Congress: a vast collection of tree fragments from around the world, including cross-sections of giant sequoias. The lab is affixing each with a bar code, so that researchers can check out samples”). He tells about dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring dating. He visits the site of a study “comparing bristlecone populations with those of the limber pine, another hardy species that grows at high altitudes,” where he sees a bristlecone that, at first glance, appears to be long dead:

It looked as though it had been blown over in a storm, but tufts of green needles emerged from a branch on one side. A vein of live bark snaked around the dead trunk and disappeared into the ground. It was like a vine growing on a ruin, except that the ruin was itself.

My favourite part of “The Bristlecones Speak” is the final paragraph, a description of what Ross sees (and hears and feels) as he hikes out of the Schulman Grove:

By the time I headed back, night was falling. Light fades fast in the mountains, and I walked the last mile to the parking lot in near-darkness. But then a full moon rose, and the dolomite on neighboring slopes began to glow eerily bright, like phantom drifts of snow. The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling. When the wind stopped, the forest felt like a cavernous but soundproofed space—a silent concert hall, an empty cathedral. The moon lit up the mountains as I drove to the valley below.

That “The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely. 

James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

I relish criticism that takes me inside the heart of a piece of writing. James Wood’s essays and reviews accomplish this magnificently. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says of Viktor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, “Both were great critics because, being formalists, they thought like writers: they attended to style, to words, to form, to metaphor and imagery.” This is what Wood does, too. Exhibit A for his exquisite art is his new Serious Noticing, a collection of twenty-eight of his best pieces, twenty two of which are picked from his previous four collections, and the remaining six skimmed from his recent New Yorker work.

Dip into Serious Noticing almost anywhere and you’ll find Wood exploring the interior of a piece of writing, describing how it works. For example, in “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” he points out, “Detail is hardly ever a stable entity in Chekhov’s work; it is a reticent event.” In “Anna Karenina and Characterization” he refers to “the way Tolstoy slows down the tempo of realism.” In “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style,” he shows that the way Bellow describes his characters is a form of sculpture “pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force.” 

For me, the key to Wood’s art is quotation. He is an astute and generous quoter. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s approach. Serious Noticing brims with examples of it. For instance, in “ ‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai,” Wood writes,

Here is a necessarily long quote from early in the book, as Krasznahorkai introduces Korin’s relentless mental distortions:

because he didn’t feel like going home to an empty apartment on his birthday, and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ’s sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in the effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.

The passage displays many of Krasznahorkai’s qualities: the relentless ongoingness of the syntax; the way Korin’s mind stretches and then turns back, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself; the perfect comic placement of the final phrase. The prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer. As in Thomas Bernhard, whose influence can be felt in Krasznahorkai’s work, a single word or compound (“puzzle,” “world-puzzle”) is seized and worried at, murdered into unmeaning, so that its repetition begins to seem at once funny and alarming. Whereas the characters in Bernhard’s work engage in elegant, even oddly formal rants—which can be removed from the fictions and performed as bitterly comic set pieces—Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect.

Wood’s commentary on Krasznahorkai’s passage displays many of Wood’s qualities: the focus on formal elements (syntax, word choice, phrase placement), the brilliant use of metaphor (“like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself), the descriptive analysis of the prose (“a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer”; “Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect”).

In addition to block-quotation, Wood creates wonderful collage-like assemblages of short quotations. “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” contains this beauty: 

This life-sown prose moves fast, logging impressions with broken speed. Rereading Herzog, one encounters too many marvels to record. There is Herzog’s mistress Ramona, sparkily described as “certainly not one of those little noli me tangerines.” And there is a brief memory of Strawforth, a fat schoolboy, with his “fat curling thumbs,” and a rabbi, “short-bearded, his nose violently pitted with black.” And Nachman, who played the harmonica in the lavatory stalls: “You heard the saliva in the cells of the tin instrument as he sucked and blew.” And the light bulb that Herzog remembers at home, ” which had a spike at the end like a German helmet. The large loose twist of tungsten filament blazed.” Herzog recalls his asthmatic brother Willie in the grip of a breathing fit: “Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow.”

My favourite piece in Serious Noticing is “On Not Going Home,” in which Wood connects his personal experience of expatriation with his deep appreciation of, among other works, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. It’s an example of what Wood calls, in Serious Noticing’s Introduction, “writing through” (“And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness”). In “On Not Going Home,” the texts that Wood writes through, in addition to The Emigrants, are Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” Aleksandar Hemon’s Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, and Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone. Two passages in “On Not Going Home” are, for me, unforgettable. The first is an inspired description:

Take the beautiful American train horn, the crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States – at the end of my street at night-time, across a New Hampshire valley, in some small Midwestern town: a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering wail. It sounds less like a horn than a sudden prairie wind or an animal’s cry. That big easy loiter is, for, me the sound of America, whatever America is. 

The second is an inspired notion:

What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, “afterwardness,” which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

That “and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived” speaks to me. I read it six years ago when “On Not Going Home” originally appeared in the London Review of Books. I immediately incorporated it into my own viewpoint. It’s great to see it preserved in such a beautiful book.