On "A Perfect Spy" by John le Carre ***

I'm a bit surprised sometimes by what manages to make it to best-seller lists. This is one of those books. Le Carre is no easy reading, engaging as he does in some high-end literary techniques. And what's left after all of it are a number of open-ended questions to ponder.

Usually, this is just my sort of balliwick, but I guess I was looking for something more absborbing. Much like some classic novels, like Pride and Prejudice, this one was a real slog until substantially into the text. I only felt compelled once I was about one hundred pages from the end. By then, a lot of the little things that le Carre had set up started to pay off. But that, of course, was part of what made the earlier passages so challenging. Why shift from sentence to sentence between first- and third-person, for instance? Who is Poppy? Wentworth? Other named people? As one gets toward the end, one starts to discover the meanings of these details.

The tail is essentially one of a spy who has decided to quit it all. He retreats to location unknown to anyone to do as he had always wanted: to write a novel (or maybe his memoirs), which is itself sort of a note to his son. Meanwhile, the spy world is all aflutter over his disappearance. Everyone wants him, because in their view he's done something heinous, but it appears at least initially that it's a hullabaloo about nothing. This two-pronged storytelling means that one set of chapters follows the current day, and the other follows the memoir. We get past and present occurrences. The difficulty is that from one chapter to the next, one is dropped in to a particular place and location without much background, meaning one is disoriented for about the first third of every chapter. When you finally start to figure out what's going on and maybe start to care, le Carre ends the chapter, and you're back in a spot of being lost. I suppose that's reflective of Magnus Pym's state (or really of many a spy), but it makes for a difficult and unsatisfying read.

In the course of the story, one runs across Magnus's conman father, his spy overseer and recruiter Brotherhood, his wife Mary, various lovers, and his best friend Axel. To what degree any of these people are who they seem, however, is difficult to know. Are his verious acquaintances and friends really that, or are they just using Magnus for their own agendas? Has Magnus actually managed to do anything of value with his life (and his spy career), or has he just been everyone's pawn?

On “Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome” by Clarence Eugene Boyd ***

This short volume covers more-recent material that I've read elsewhere. Even so, there was some information here that I hadn't previously run across.

Boyd starts with Julius Caesar's order to found such “public” libraries, which Boyd really does call “public,” even though other sources make clear that the way we think of public libraries is not the same as Romans thought of them. Nevertheless, it's interesting that Caesar really got the ball rolling on this and that emperors followed suit. There were at least nine such libraries that have been identified.

Other facts I learned: Most such libraries were placed near a palace or temple (though he also notes those that were part of baths). Most faced east, because that direction was best at keeping materials from getting damp and thus being eaten by worms and the like. Most included artwork and served also as places of meeting.

Unlike what I'd read elsewhere, Boyd makes much of people checking materials out of libraries. Indeed, the primary documents support this as a possibility, though such people did seem to be well connected in some way, so I take others' point of view, that materials largely stayed in the library, as being the more usual custom.

Another section discusses bookshops, of which there were a surprisingly number in Rome. Without printing, books were produced by dictation to a number of scribes at one. And as I'd read elsehwere, there were even newspapers of a sort, with information about deaths, marriages, and happenings, updated daily.

All that said, Boyd's book is definitely aimed at early twentieth-century scholars. He quotes frequently from primary documents sans translation. Classicists would know how to read these, and many a schoolboy of the period also probably, but not so much readers of today.

On “Border Lines” by Daniel Boyarin ***

I was a little disappointed by this book. It was actually great in terms of its subject matter and content, but it is very definitely a scholarly work, full of jargon and difficult at times to follow. There are losts of references to theory and theorists, which I've rarely understood the purpose of in texts, since so often such ideas are either not integral to the argument or are basic enough that it seems like no theorist need be named.

The basic point, however, if a strong one. Boyarin makes the claim—one that fits well with contemporary sociological and postmodern theory—that the creation of heresy in its modern sense was largely the result of an attempt by both Christian and Jewish writers to create boundaries around their respective faiths. To explore this point, Boyarin shows how the concept of “heresy” was at one point essentially just another means of thinking about a subject—for example, a sect. It's, in fact, Josephus uses when discussing various sects of the Jewish faith in his time. But roughly a hundred years later, Christians aren't just using the term to show differing sects; they're using it to describe only prohibited sects, nonorthodox sects—that is, heretics, as we think of them today. The Rabbis did something similar, declaring those who did not follow their proscribed ways of thinking as minim, that is, heretics. In this way, the Jewish faith transformed into Judaism, rabbinical Judaism.

Before Christianity, Boyarin notes, the concept of religion was tied into one's ethnicity and culture. There really wasn't much of an idea of one having a religion and then also having a nationality. Christianity created this new category of people. But so too did Judaism. It became a religion—for a while.

Curiously, after the Rabbis had thoroughly established control over what constituted Judaism, the idea of Judaism returned to its former roots as an ethnic thing. Today, at least among Jews, one does not so much talk of Judaism as a religion but of people being Jewish, culturally, ethnically, religiously. Thus, one can be a bad Jew—not following the dictates of the faith/nation—but one can never really renounce one's Jewishness.

Another curiosity: Christianity, in defining what was heresy, established itself through attempts at unity. Arguments in the faith aim for that, for a single correct interpretation. Judasim did the opposite. Once the ground rules were established, separating itself from Christanity, it became about arguing about differences of interpretation, presenting all of those as viable—which is what we find in the Talmud.

The case study is one that Boyarin discusses in other places, in a generally more approachable manner: the idea of God's Logos, or Word, or Memra. Boyarin makes the case, made similarly elsewhere in other people's works (Segal, Shaefer, Heiser, Hurtado), that Two Powers theology, the idea that God has a viceroy or partner or subordinate who is very much like him, was very much part of the Jewish religion until Christian times. That's when it became associated with Christanity and by contrast rejected by Judaism. While adoptionist, modalist, and unitarian ideas were made heretical by Christians in favor of a Logos divinity, Jewish Rabbis came to affirm that biblical passages seeming to point to such a figure were really figurative in meaning and that there was solely one God figure, sometimes expressed in different ways (virtually, one might say, modalism, rejected by the Christians). Hence, each faith defined the other, putting up borders accordingly. Those that fall within those borders, borrowing ideas from both sides of the divide are also made heretics, where once they'd have been accepted by either faith; now, as Jerome and some others would put it, they are neither Jews or Christians.