BECCA ROTHFELD
Becca Rothfeld is the author of the essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. She is also the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review. Becca is also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard University. She has contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum (RIP), Art in America, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and more. We asked her to share some of her favorite books.
The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke. I don’t remember how or when I stumbled upon them; now I feel as if I’ve known them forever, and I think I felt the same way when I read them for the first time. “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle,” Kafka once wrote, and that is how the Duino Elegies seemed to me when I discovered them in high school, probably in 2008 or 2009. At the time, I didn’t speak German, so I read translation after translation. I began with Edward Snow’s and continued with Stephen Mitchell’s; I convinced a friend, equally obsessed, to annotate them line-by-line with me; I listened to readings of the original German on YouTube, hoping that something in the sound of the words would put me in closer proximity with the poem. Predictably, it did not. I reconciled myself to the fact that I would have to learn German to quiet whatever was screaming so incessantly about Rilke in me. It was because I wanted to read the Duino Elegies in the original that I opted to take German in college, and so because of the Duino Elegies that I moved to Berlin and became fascinated by German philosophy and literature more generally. In 2016, when I made the inevitable pilgrimage to the castle where Rilke wrote the Elegies, I was able to read them in halting but reasonably adequate German: “Das schöne ist nichts als des schrecklichen anfang” (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”). Even in German, I cannot explain what strikes me as so tremblingly true in that line.
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I read this devastating triumph of a novel, perhaps the best ever written, in 2019. I had been assigned to review its prequel, Stalingrad, and I had no idea what I was in for. The combined length of the two books is something like 2000 pages, and I had to finish both in close to a week and a half if I had any hope of writing my essay on time. It was summer, parole for graduate students, and I was committed to reading hundreds of pages of Grossman a day. I sat in the sun and squinted at Stalingrad, which I found flat and propagandistic, a bit too populated with workers thrilled to be underpaid and a bit too sanguine about the Soviet establishment. Life and Fate could not have been more different. Soviet authorities “arrested” the text, declaring that it would not be publishable for a minimum of 300 years, probbly a conservative estimate. I finished it in four days and wept almost continuously. A novel of both ideas and wrenchingly human dramas, it the most brutal treatment of the twin terrors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism that I have ever read. It comprises such a complex symphony of characters and sufferings that I can still barely believe a single person wrote it: it seems like the work of a god, or of the universe itself.
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. My advisors kept telling me that this was the urtext of contemporary liberal theory, that this was the book that had reinvigorated the discipline of political philosophy, so in 2019, I set out to tackle it with a group of fellow graduate students. Never in my life have I read more slowly or with more frustration. I spent a good six months agonizing over each chapter, collating laborious notes, questions, and objections in a word document that ended up amounting to fifty single-spaced pages. There is still much about Rawls’s masterpiece that I do not understand, but it is such an earnest, careful, and humane inquiry into what we owe each other that I feel grudging affection for it even when I am most maddened: at a time when so much political discourse is so brashly sure of itself, there is something quietly awing about a work so magisterial in scope, so revolutionary in implication, yet so humblingly cautious in method. I had just finished the tome when the graduate student union at Harvard voted to authorize a strike. Applying the Rawlsian framework to the question of my ow working conditions, then to the question of the whole American disaster, politicized me with a newfound vengeance. The elegant principles at the heart of Rawls's theory are so simple, yet so radical. They strip the inequalities that plague our political system of any veneer of tolerability. If we did not know what social roles we would occupy, would we design a society even remotely like our own? The question is so sensible, but its answer is so shattering.
A tie (sorry! I simply could not choose) between Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis and The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. I read the former in 2015, when I was working at a bookstore, ostensibly shelving used books but actually hiding in the storage room and reading intriguing titles I happened upon; I read the latter in 2020, when I desperately needed to immerse myself in something more demanding than the Doom Scroll. Machado’s novel is different from James’s in many ways, but, per my bizarre mental taxonomic system, they belong together. Both interpose such elaborate tapestries of suspicion and convolution between experience and reality that reading them feels like being on drugs.
Mating by Norman Rush. I first read this marvelous novel, which felt like a personal address, in the summer of 2017, after I had been unceremoniously dumped by a man who was significantly older than I was and who was clearly in the business of seducing ingenues whom he could mentor and impress. The man had an especially egregious strain of a common male pathology—that fatal disease of wanting to Teach Women something while remaining coolly uninterested in women who have as much or more to teach back. Mating was the perfect antidote to the condescending facsimile of love pedaled by men with this malady. “Utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want,” writes its unnamed female narrator. She is an anthropologist, and am unapologetically “intellectual love” is what she seeks and (at least briefly) finds. Her quest moved me enormously. For the first and only time, my own vision was reflected back me. It lost the frailty of a fantasy and acquired the weight of a possible reality. Yes, I could hold out for this—for intellectual love between equals. Five years later, I met a man I suspected I liked. He told me he loved William James; I told him I love Henry James; we decided to read each others’s Jameses and compare notes. This first foray was highly promising, so I recommended that he read Mating. He did, and he loved it. He told me that he too had always been in the market for an intellectual love between equals, and, reader, I married him.