Not going gentle

So why Montaigne? As with that most human of Frenchmen, all 76 pieces are really about himself: almost everything he has thought about almost everything. They ramble every which way while retaining a guiding moral gravity sparked by epigram and brought up short by paradox.

So why not Montaigne? Well, no one could be that (a spaciousness that four centuries later still opens free space in our clotted and encumbered minds), just as no one could be Shakespeare. But even to ask "Why not?" is a tribute.

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins," intones "The Waste Land." These 76 candles James has lighted against the dark ruins of much of Europe's 20th century. It is a moral and existential effort even more than a literary one. What are the lives, the choices, the heroisms, the shames, the difficult truths and difficult falsehoods that his writers have made?

James praises, skewers, laments, sympathizes , and above all ramps restlessly through all he has read, as if beyond its revelations some arch-revelation lurked. "The word: our token of ultimate peace," wrote Miguel de Unamuno (one of the 76), but the unquiet James finds only provisional bits of peace.

There is no single theme among the essays, which range from a page or two to more than a dozen, and are set out alphabetically: Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig. There are clusters of concern, though. Some treat of writers confronting or not confronting Nazism.

There are the heroes: Marc Bloch and Jean Prévost , both of whom perished in the French Resistance. James is more scathing about those -- Sartre in particular -- whom he finds self-protective and subsequently arrogant about it. While admiring Sartre's fiction, he despises his philosophy (along with that of Foucault and Derrida) as intended to fuzz reality rather than reveal it. They write " the sentence that spurns the earth because it fears a puncture."