A Stern Talking To: John Lukacs' Last Rites

Since I failed to get a post up yesterday I am doubling up with a pair of posts today. The first of which is one of the strangest, most useful books of the year and the other is my pick for the best book of the year.

That's right, this evening I am going to such lengths as to tell you what I think was the most important book of the year.

I'll try not to disappoint.

But first to the most underrated book of the year, and really I am not blaming anyone for its underestimation. It merely is one of those quirky books that seems one way and really is drastically different.


Last Rites by John Lukacs. Yale University Press. History/ Intellectual Memoir. Hardcover. 208 pps. ISBN: 0300114389. Click the picture above to purchase Last Rites from Powell's Books.

When I first met John Lukacs it took him very little time to announce his unfortunately rare brand of incisive wit. Standing in my former bookstore, holding a John Updike new release, Lukacs hit my former business partner and I with a wonderful little gem.

"John Updike writes very beautifully but has very little to say."

Such is the sort of unabashedly aggressive remark that Lukacs is capable of. He knew not our opinion of Updike and really, he did not care. If we adored the writer then certainly some intellectual sparring would have ensued. The reality was that we more or less agreed with Lukacs on the fact that Updike was a great writer who chose the most mundane of subjects.

The first chapter of Last Rites is titled "A Bad Fifteen Minutes" and the great historian opens up with an insult levied at modern attention spans. Bare with him, he asks, because for the first thirty-three pages of his memoir of personal ideas are going to be brutally forward.

The dissolution of physics into lurid fantasy, the death of the historical novel, the closing of the modern era and its chief creation: liberalism, and a lengthy and immensely entertaining rebuttal of Cartesian notions of objectivity and subjectivity all populate this "bad fifteen."

One of the literary observations that I found very interesting was how Lukacs cites the uselessness of historical fiction. Those sweeping dramas by Lloyd Douglas, Mika Waltari and Anya Seton, which so popular and useful in their day, have been replaced by the engrossing popular historians like David McCullough, Dorris Kearns Goodwin and David Brinkley.

The argument, in my opinion is air tight and incredibly observant. As a former owner of a used & new bookstore I can tell you that there is an amazing separation between the number of "historical" or "period" set novels from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries through the 1980's, which suddenly drops off with the rise of best-selling history writers like Shelby Foote and those mentioned above. Think of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, stow your bile, and then think of how little actual historical fiction (not books merely set in the war years) has been written since that publication.

The most striking aspect of Lukacs memoir is the fact that it maintains a touching biographical component along with the rigorous philosophical bombast of his bold assertions, all of which are well equipped to defend against counters.

So while Lukacs may sing a dirge for liberalism, point out the historical misprision of modern conservatism in the US (Reagan, contrary to what you may think, did very little to close the book on communism) he also writes beautifully on the quiet moments of a very impressive life.

I suppose that's the most important thing to note about this strange book. For all its polemic and intellectual firepower, it is the essentially nostalgic Hungarian who emerges in the end. Lukacs is capable of extreme compartmentalization however, and none of his softer moments leak into the hardened philosophical ones.

This is a Hungarian Catholic man with a Jewish mother, who has spent a good portion of his life thinking about Hitler. He is that rare form of intellectual that appreciates the difference between understanding and knowing.

This slender book is by far one of the most interesting books of the year and a worthy introduction to the wonderful mind of John Lukacs.

It is rare to find someone willing to roll up their sleeves and soberly say what they think is the case. And back it up. Please do not confuse this with the bullshit sophistry of TV pundits.

And just think: This is only the first post of the day.