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.
About the Author: The Ten Heavens of My Literary Paradise
Sally A. Kitt Chappell's broad range includes architectural history, travel essays, poetry and literary criticism. While a professor of art history at DePaul University in Chicago she published several books and articles, including Architecture and Planning of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White (University of Chicago Press), which won the Association of American Publishers award for the best book in architecture and urban planning of 1992. An anthology of her writing, both prose and poetry, appeared in Words Work in 2009. She has also been a frequent contributor to the Travel Section of The New York Times.
Chappell's ground-breaking book Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos explored the interplay of landscape and culture. It was praised for "the luminous prose that recounted the history of the place from its beginnings in the Mound Builder period to its contemporary distinction as a UNESCO World Heritage Site." In 2007 her Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture and Landscape depicted over sixty places where architecture and landscape were conceived at the outset as a single whole. The result transformed Chicago from a metropolis to a cosmopolis.
In her poetry collections, Shards and So Far, Chappell portrays a world where nature, the city and the self meet in astonishing and revealing juxtapositions. Underlying every poem is a sensibility which celebrates life while affirming its transience.
Her most recent work, The Ten Heavens of My Literary Paradise, is a deep-time illustration of Franz Kafka's remark that "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us." Suggesting that fiction has magical powers to carve out new capacities in the psyche, Chappell focuses on ten great novels-- Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities, An Ermine in Czernopol, The Death of Virgil, Memoirs of Hadrian, Remembrance of Things Past, Pale Fire and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. A primer for re-reading this short book will provide life-long enrichment.
