W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants ****

 The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character.

W.G. Sebald has a completely distinctive style, a confluence of old-fashionable prose, a consistent narrator (a solo traveler in remote or off-season European locations), overlapping storytellers explaining their personal histories, and a sense that the book is actually about something that goes purposely unmentioned. He creates a pervasive mood of melancholy and nostalgia for a lost world. And there are those enigmatic photographs.

The Emigrants is filled with Sebaldian images:

• A house with "hidden passageways [that] branched off, running behind the walls in such a way that the servants, ceaselessly hurrying to an fro laden with coal scuttles, baskets of firewood, cleaning materials, bed linen and tea trays, never had to cross the paths of their betters."
• The frozen remains of a mountain guide released by a glacier after 72 years.
• A former mental health spa now occupied by a beekeeper.
• A stay in the crumbling nineteenth-century Midland Hotel in Manchester. 
• A visit to an overgrown (and locked) Jewish cemetery.
• A empty streets in the formerly bustling resort town of Deauville.

"If one pauses for a while before the seemingly unoccupied houses, ... one of the closed window shutters on the top floor will open slightly, a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move silently about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by"

Our narrator consistently describes decayed landscapes that obscure the hidden activities of an unfavored group. 

I've noticed that everyone's favorite Sebald book tends to be whichever one they read first, whichever one introduced them to his unique genius. I read The Rings of Saturn many years ago, so I naturally prefer it, or rather my memory of it, to The Emigrants. Would that preference survive a re-reading? We'll find out some day.

Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch ***

From its breezy title, you might not expect Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch to be an occasionally true story* that takes place in Württemberg Germany in 1618. Katherina Kepler, whose son Johannes (Hans) discovered the laws of planetary motion, is accused by her neighbors of being a witch. Once she is accused, everyone in town starts attributing their misfortunes to Katherine. Can her children and her kindly neighbor use reason to challenge the superstitions of the time?

The story shows how Katherine's neighbors come around to believing her intentions are evil and how society encourages her persecution. At one point, both her family and her primary accuser complain to the duke that the expense of her incarceration is draining her estate; the accuser is unhappy because Katherine's assets are supposed to come to her in compensation.

The book ends with a touching scene between Katherine and her neighbor Simon who comes to apologize for not defending her vociferously enough. Katherine doesn't forgive him so much as refuse to judge him.

I'm find of you, Simon. I can see that you want me to be angry with you but I can't do it. You have love in your heart. You've been a friend to me. I don't know what difference your words would have made. I wonder if it's worth two old people spending time reassuring each other of this or that.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch is quite different in style from Galchen's previous novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The earlier book deals with the operations of the human mind whereas this one is about the operations of society. In a blind test, I would never guess they were from the same author.

Spoiler alert! Highlight the next few lines of text to learn Katherine's fate.

Katherine is acquitted but forced to leave her home town, fated to serve as a "tale to frighten children until the end of days."

* To borrow a phrase from "The Great".

Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder), Thinking the Twentieth Century ****

As its title suggests, Thinking the Twentieth Century is about how various constituencies interpreted the major events of the 1900s, primarily in Europe, and what those interpretations can tell us about the proper way to use history. At the same time it is an intellectual biography of Tony Judt, the historian and essayist who wrote Postwar and who was dying from ALS as he conversed with fellow historian Timothy Snyder for this final book.

The discussion presupposes knowledge of the events, so it's a good thing I read Postwar first (and not too long ago). My copy of Thinking the Twentieth Century bristles with Post-it flags marking notable insights, such as:

• The different moral and political lessons that Europe, the United States, and Asia took from the Holocaust –– and the French Revolution
• The fact that communists and free-marketers both think of people as economic abstractions
• The reason we tend to be sympathetic to intellectuals who supported the Soviets but not those who supported the Nazis
• Pre-World War I Vienna as the origin of so much 20th century thought
• The increased vigor of intellectual discussion when a party is out of power

The conversations happened from 2008 to 2010, so the final chapter includes dated talk about the Iraq War. It also include retrospectively disturbing warnings:

The wonderful mystery is that this [suspicion of the elite] has never effectively translated into real demagogic politics in the way that it has in most European countries ... [the right] managing to do just enough harm to threaten the quality of the republic but not quite enough damage to be seen to be what it really is. Which is native American fascism. ...

[This suggests] a certain mission for American patriotic intellectuals: ... are they defending institutions or are they rallying around a person who tends to make exceptionalist arguments about what should happen to those institutions?

 Judt reveals his fundamentally optimistic nature with this passage in the final few pages:

The twentieth century was not necessarily as we have been taught to see it. It was not, or not only, the great battle between democracy and fascism, or communism versus fascism, or left versus right, or freedom versus totalitarianism. My own sense is that for much of the century we were engaged in implicit or explicit debates over the rise of the state. What sort of state did free people want? What were they willing to pat for it and what purposes did they wish it to serve?

In this perspective, the great victors of the twentieth century were the nineteenth-century liberals whose successors created the welfare state in all its protean forms. They achieved something which, as late as the 1930s, seemed almost inconceivable: they forged strong, high-taxing, and actively interventionist democratic and constitutional states which could encompass mass societies without resorting to violence or repression. We would be foolish to abandon this heritage carelessly.

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing ****

Richard Powers is a master of metaphor. The Time of Our Singing is a story about race and cultural inheritance told using the language of music. The book weaves together singing, general relativity, the Holocaust, and the struggle for civil rights into a rich symphony. It includes numerous set pieces that tie the experiences of the Strom family to larger social events and trends.

At 631 pages, The Time of Our Singing is about a third too long. Almost every chapter is impressive but overextended, and there are some that repeat the same themes.  Powers' prose is evocative but a bit too literary. For all of the richness of the story, most of the characters are thin. The most prominent example is the narrator Joseph Strom: through the first 500 pages he is a pure narrator who barely contributes to the situations he describes, with no personality of his own.

As a novel about race written by a white man, The Time of Our Singing raises some of the questions addressed in its narrative by its very existence. I found its insights about race in America convincing, but of course I am also a white man. Powers' descriptions of music are also enjoyable. My only issue with the book was how often I found myself flipping pages to see how far it was to the next chapter break.