The Ten Heavens of My Literary Paradise

"The Ten Heavens of My Literary Paradise"

A deep-time illustration of Franz Kafka's remark that "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us," Sally Chappell's brief book on the connection between her personal growth and the books she has read focuses on ten great novels. Suggesting that fiction has magical powers to carve out new capacities in the psyche, Chappell tells how Miguel Cervantes's "Don Quixote" helped her dust herself off after defeat; how Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" prodded her to embark on a large theme; how James Joyce's "Ulysses" gave her a new security based on the secret strength of the subconscious. Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" and Gregor von Rezzori's "An Ermine in Czernopol " showed how laughter can make tragedy bearable; Hermann Broch's "The Death of Virgil" and Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian" how death and dying can be borne; and Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" how the act of writing itself can open doors into memory. Finally she absorbed the transforming power of Vladimir Nabokov's merger of satire and poetry in "Pale Fire" and sustained the subversive shock of Jose Saramago's "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ."

The passages Chappell has chosen from each novel to illuminate this memoir of bibliomania will cause readers to cry, cringe, change their minds, and throw away comforting falsehoods they did not realize they believed in. She takes you by the hand, like Virgil, to give you an earthy view of the outer limits of the human imagination. A primer for re-reading, this short book will provide life-long enrichment.

Sally A. Kitt Chappell is Professor Emerita of architectural history at DePaul University in Chicago. Her "Architecture and Planning of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White" (University of Chicago Press) won the Association of American Publishers' award for the best book in architecture and urban planning of 1992. During sabbaticals she wrote two ground-breaking books on the interplay of landscape and culture, "Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos," and "Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture & Landscape." She has contributed frequently to the Travel Section of "The New York Times." An anthology of her writing, "Words Work, " appeared in 2009. Two of her poetry collections were published recently, "Shards" in 2011 and "So Far" in 2013.