To Live a Larger Life

“The constant, fundamental underlying urge is surely to live more, to live a larger life.”

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes

It is in the spirit of Montaigne that Ludwig Hohl writes in The Notes. If philosopher is the right word, it is in the sense of one who uses thought to shape a way of passing the world through the self. The Notes or On Non-premature Reconciliation sustains a reflective intensity comparable to Leopardi’s Zibaldone. Each writer, in their medium, faces the fear of inadequacy before the brief span of a human life: the sense of failing to embrace it with enough clarity, intensity, or joy. This is Hohl’s project—to articulate the possibility of being fully human. Tess Lewis’s translation preserves the precision and sharpness of Hohl’s language, with no sense of mediation.

Also read: Anna Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library, a brief, lucid work that resists the fantasy of bibliophilic intimacy with Proust and instead reads him through a critic’s fine and intricate lens. Worthwhile for its focus on Ruskin’s presence in Proust alone: “I don’t claim to know English. I claim to know Ruskin.”

There will likely be attention this year to ancient Greek and Roman literature in recent translations—Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca. Also among current literary concerns: Katherine Mansfield’s stories, the late novels of Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. As ever, the rest will be guided by inclination and the irregular rhythms of reading itself.