51.

Tip Marugg, The Roar of Morning [Margellos, trans. Paul Vincent]: Marugg (his actual Christian
names were Silvio Alberto) was from Curaçao, and few would begrudge him the title of that island’s
greatest literary figure (though he was anything but prolific). Among his eccentricities was his belief
that his native tongue, Dutch, was perhaps the world’s most beautiful language.  If so, its beauty is of
a very subtle, perversely elusive nature; but one might be persuaded that Marugg was right from the
evidence of this novel, even when one reads it in English. The action—if that is the right word—takes
place over a period of two and a half hours just before the dawn of an Antillean day presumably like
any other, all in the mind of a narrator given to drink and seemingly unremitting cycles of bitter
reminiscence, personal and historical. The style of the book is definitely (if mostly unobtrusively) a
kind of magical realism, the voice of its protagonist is at once torpid, hectic, lyrical, and slightly mad,
and the atmosphere of the narrative is both mysteriously lovely and full of unnamed menace. The
protagonist’s reflections on his own failures merge seamlessly with others on magic, religion, the
sublimity of nature, the banality of modernity, and the tragic histories of the Caribbean and South
American peoples, who seem to exist always outside of their proper place and time, burdened by
the spiritual inertias of a past that cannot be redeemed. And, as he waits for morning, he
contemplates his own personal denouement in light of an altogether uncanny vision of
eschatological judgment. But I have said enough; trying to describe the book is like trying to explain
a particularly vivid and unforgettable dream.

52. John Heath-Stubbs, Artorius: The great and gloriously idiosyncratic British poet, essayist, and
translator Heath-Stubbs produced an enormous body of verse, all of it marked by formal ingenuity of
the highest order and by a delight in the gorgeously mongrel vocabulary and sonorities of the English
language in its every age. A polyglot, he also produced distinguished translations from Greek, Latin,
Persian, Italian, and French. Artorius, from 1974, is the most ambitious and accomplished of his long
poems. It is his retelling of the Arthurian lore, but one stripped of the later Norman elaborations on
the tale and restored to its Welsh and Romano-British context. It abounds in ostentatious evidence
of its author’s staggeringly immense historical and theological erudition, but it is also pervaded by
magic, myth, and miracle. Heath-Stubbs was a believing Christian, of a very specifically Anglican
variety, whose faith made generous room for all the wisdoms of the world, and in this poem
Christian, Pagan, Druidical, Hermetic, and Gnostic themes are elegantly interwoven with one
another. Ultimately, the poem is a kind of mystical pilgrimage, at once darkly obscure and radiantly
beautiful. Being a work of genius by an English poet, naturally it is almost entirely unread by the
English, and consequently is tragically neglected in the greater Anglophone world.

53. Fernando de Rojas, Celestina [Margellos, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden]: Perhaps it is absurd of

me to include this title in a list of putatively obscure books, since in Spanish literary culture La
Celestina enjoys an eminence and epochal significance not far inferior to those of Don Quixote. But
in my experience most Anglophone readers are not merely unfamiliar with the book, but in fact
unaware of its existence. This is not the only translation available in English, but it is to my mind the
best. Written in the form of a long play and described as a tragicomedy, the tale begins with the kind
of gallant conceit that leads one to expect a grand romance; but it soon becomes something more
complex, cynical, tender, and darkly comic. Calisto, a young nobleman, enters a garden while
pursuing his vagrant hunting falcon, encounters the daughter of the house, the lovely Melibea, and
is at once smitten with love for her—or lust, at any rate, as the two are not sharply distinguished in
the book—but can contrive to see her again, and consummate his “affections,” only with the aid of a
scheming and oddly brilliant brothel madame named Celestina. And she, in consort with a pair of
Calisto’s own unworthy servants, has designs of her own for profiting as much as possible from the
young man’s indisposition. The characters, high or low, earnest or unprincipled, are all vividly drawn,
the plotting ingenious, and the final act at once tragic and deflationary. In any event, not to give
more away, it is a masterpiece strangely neglected in the English-speaking world.

54. Vivant Denon, No Tomorrow: Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon was, among other things, director
of the Louvre under Napoleon and arguably the founder of Egyptology. His immense two volume
memoir of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was undoubtedly his largest literary accomplishment; but
his greatest was a small work of fiction, only just long enough to be classified as a novella,
entitled Point de lendemain. I recall reading it in a high school French class, but only recently,
reminded of its existence by my nephew Addison, revisited it. It is a flawless gem of storytelling, with
an atmosphere that is somehow magical without ever actually lapsing into the fantastic. A tale of
adulterous intrigue, occurring over the course of a single night at a château in the countryside
outside Paris, as narrated from the vantage of a twenty-year-old aristocrat who is practically
abducted from the opera by the noblewoman who desires his attentions, it passes like a dream, full
of enchanting details and episodes in which the erotic, the whimsical, and the ironic are all in perfect
equilibrium. And, also like a dream, it ends in exquisite ambiguity: Je cherchai bien la morale de
toute cette aventure, et...je n’en trouvai point.

55. Ludwig Hohl, The Notes [Margellos, trans. Tess Lewis]: There is something of a tradition among
Swiss writers, it seems—from Amiel’s Journal Intime to Philippe Jaccottet’s La Semaison and other
notebooks—of producing major works composed from apparently fragmentary and occasional
jottings. Hohl’s Die Notizen is a particularly impressive contribution to the genre. Hohl spent most of
his life at the margins of the literary world, recognized for his excellence by a few discerning souls
but otherwise largely unknown. It was only very near the end of his life that he achieved anything
like the celebrity he deserved, and even then only for a season. But his Die Notizen, initially
assembled during a period of intense but diffuse creativity in the mid-1930’s, is an acknowledged
masterpiece: at times as brilliantly aphoristic as Lichtenberg (whom he venerated) or Nietzsche, at
others as evocatively inconclusive as Jaccottet, at others as intellectually severe and beautiful as his
beloved Spinoza or Goethe, and always marked by an inimitable style of attractive bitterness and an
idiosyncratic ethos centered around a very particular concept of “Arbeit,” “work.” The final edition,
appearing in 1981, just before Hohl’s death, was over 800 pages long. Tess Lewis’s translation is only
an extract of the original, alas, but it is a judicious one, and it conveys the author’s genius, as well as
much of his philosophy, about as well as one could hope in English.

56. Anonymous, Vikrāmaditya Simhāsana Dvātriṃśika (Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne of

Vikramaditya): Today more commonly known by the title Singhasan Battisi. One of many delightful
Sanskrit collections of tales from India’s high middle ages, and perhaps the one with the most
ingenious premise. The eleventh century King Bhoja (a genuine historical figure of notable personal
accomplishments) discovers the throne of the great—legendary or only barely historical—Maharaja
Vikrāmaditya (whose reign is usually dated in the second or first century BCE) and desires it for
himself. The base of the throne, however, includes thirty-two lovely figurines that are in
fact apsaras (nymphs) who have been turned to stone by sorcery. Each time Bhoja mounts the
throne, one of the apsaras comes to life and tells him a tale of Vikrāmaditya, in order to convince
him that he is not yet worthy of the seat of so virtuous, pious, and magnanimous a monarch, and
that he must seek to cultivate in himself the love of justice for which the emperor was famed. The
stories abound in magic, monsters, journeys to other realms of reality, battles, divine interventions,
and so forth. As each apsara completes her narrative, she is released from her enchantment and is
able to fly away. The book is an almost perfect entertainment, but it is also a deeply devout work of
Śaivite spirituality. (By the way, at the last Bhoja is convinced that he is indeed unworthy of the
throne and so installs it instead in a temple of Śiva, as the seat of the Supreme Lord himself.)
57. Zyranna Zateli, At Twilight They Return [Margellos, trans. David Connolly]: A more literal
translation of the title—Και με το φως του λύκου επανέρχονται—would be something like At the
Light of the Wolf They Return, which feels in a way more appropriate to the text’s slightly savage
lyricism. A novel consisting in ten interlocking but chronologically discontinuous tales, it is what is
usually called a “family saga,” but that description hardly gives one a sense of its strangeness,
fierceness, beauty, and “magically realist” inventiveness. I might compare it to One Hundred Years of
Solitude, but only to the latter’s disadvantage; where García’s “masterpiece” consists principally in
one damned thing after another, without notable depth or texture, Zateli’s novel is full of genuine
mystery and life, and the interweaving of the narratives achieves a real unity and power by the end.
Zateli was a radio producer and radio actress before turning entirely to her literary endeavors, and
perhaps that somewhat accounts for her remarkable talent at producing living voices; but nothing
except the richness of her imagination can account for the virtuosity of the book’s mixture of
realism, folklore, and classical myth, or for the intricacy of its plotting. Its atmosphere is also
consistently enthralling, and one very much pervaded by twilight (or wolf-light).

58. Norman Douglas, South Wind: Again, a book that can be classified as “obscure” only in the larger
context of current reading habits; in its day (it appeared in 1917) it sold very well, and for many
decades was a stout if minor fixture in most “sophisticated” libraries. Douglas—a travel writer and
novelist—was a dreadful and deviant specimen of humanity, it turns out, and is no doubt serving out
his sentence in one or another hell at this very moment, but he wrote magnificent prose and, in this
one case, one of the most amusing (if in a somewhat cruel way) novels of the twentieth century. It
tells of an Anglican bishop’s encounter, on the way back from his African posting, with the culture of
the island of Nepenthe (a comic portrait of Capri), where the official religion is Catholicism, but exists
in a form that is scarcely distinguishable from a hedonistic and altogether antinomian paganism, and
where a number of expatriates from more northerly climes live out their eccentric and somewhat
suspect existences. The book’s elements are heterogenous—a murder mystery, a character whose
recurring diatribes all seem to be distillates of Nietzsche, an elderly sculptor seeking to defraud an
art-collector with a forged figurine from antiquity, reminiscences of the monstrous Duke whose
brutal reign of centuries past is regarded by the natives as their island’s golden age, and so forth—
but it all works together brilliantly not only as a dark comedy but as a kind of cynical essay in moral
relativism. That said, enjoy the book, marvel at some of the prose, but consider the source.

59. Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke [Margellos, trans. Danuta Borcohardt]: Again, presume here all
the appropriate disclaimers regarding what should or should not qualify as a rare or obscure book.
The first and most famous novel by the greatest Polish writer of the last century (at least, according
to the dominant opinion) should probably be excluded from this list; but, once again, context is
everything. A book once deemed untranslatable, it now exists in English in this very readable
rendering. Gombrowicz fits quite well into the Middle and Eastern European tradition—which
comprises Gogol, Kafka, and Schulz, among others—of the deliriously fantastic or absurdly
nightmarish (or whatever one might call it). It is a style of fiction for which I have to confess an
insatiable appetite. Here the story is of a young man who awakes one morning to find himself
transformed not into a monstrous insect, but into something far more terrible: an adolescent
schoolboy. Surreal episodes follow, grim and comic at once. Both the barbarities of life in his school
and the voguish banalities of the life of the bourgeois family to whom he finds himself attached are
depicted with relish and perverse exactitude, and the culmination of the tale—involving a servants’
revolt and the protagonist’s own participation in a “romantic” abduction—is positively sublime in its
ludicrousness. No doubt it is all saying something quite rude about humanity in general and about
modern society in particular, and most of that is easy enough to grasp, but it hardly explains the
book’s larger appeal. In this case, as is so often so, the carnival is far more interesting than its
occasion.

60. Guo Xiaoting, Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong: A genuinely joyous classic of Chinese
literature, this is the history—or legend, if one feels one needs to make a distinction there—of one
of the most delightful figures of Chan Buddhist history. Ji Gong lived from 1130 to 1209, and is a
revered East Asian saint. By the time of his death, he was believed by many Buddhists to have been
either the manifestation of a bodhisattva or else a reincarnation of Xianglong Luohan, the great
Dragon-Taming Arhat, while many syncretic Daoists considered him an incarnate god. Undoubtedly
he was all of these things, but first and foremost he was an amiable drunkard. As a student of Chan
at the famous Lingyin Monastery in Hangzhou, he was chiefly notable there for his insubordination,
his defiance of all the religious prohibitions on wine and meat he was supposed to observe, his
frequent inebriation, and the deplorable condition of his robes. He was expelled from the monastery
to become a wanderer in the streets and an habitué of the taverns. He was also, however—so the
legend reports or the history records (again, depending on how you see these things)—possessed of
great supernatural powers. He was renowned too for his compassion, and especially his concern for
the poor and the weak; and the special veneration that has attached to him since the mid-
nineteenth century has been historically associated with a piety of charitable relief and good works.
This novel recounts his many exploits, and tells of all the times he came to the aid of those in need
and saved the day when all seemed hopeless (and then got drunk again). For all who love holy fools,
crazy-wisdom adepts, and all the other “left hand” saints of the past, he should be something of a
hero. For myself, speaking as someone for whom, where the cultivation of personal sanctity is
concerned, le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle, I regard him as a shining exemplar of a kind of holiness to
which I might yet aspire.
(Hupao—that is, Tiger-Dreams Spring—in Hanzhou, whose temple grounds contain the final resting
place of Ji Gong)

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