thorold loves all the forms of the radiant frost in Q1

I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

(Shelley, from “Rarely, rarely comest thou”)

Welcome to my 2020 reading adventures!
My 2019 Q4 thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/311719

For those who are new around here, I'm Mark, originally from the north of England, but I've lived in The Hague (Netherlands) for most of my adult life. Until I retired, I was working for an international organisation here. I've a mixed humanities and sciences background, which probably accounts for a lot, and I come from a family with a long tradition of migration (both voluntary and the other sort).

My reading is — well, you'll soon see what it is — fairly eclectic, but there's usually a kind of centre of gravity around European literary fiction. But crime, bikes, music, engineering history, 19th century classics, travel, literary biography, and all sorts of other things are liable to pop up without warning. I like to read books in different languages, and in particular I've been trying to explore Spanish literature a bit more over the last few years.

Happy New Year, and happy reading in 2020!

I’m hoping for another great year of books, music, walking and travel. Let’s see how it pans out...

Definitely on the agenda for 2020 is the conclusion of my Zolathon: I started with La fortune des Rougon two years ago, and I finished the 14th book, L’Oeuvre, on New Year’s Eve. That leaves six for this year.

I’m also looking forward to tackling Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which a few other CR members have enjoyed recently: it’s sitting on my TBR shelf in four hefty volumes...

The Reading Globally group has some interesting quarterly theme reads planned, they are likely to shape my reading over the course of the year too.

Other than that, expect to see more Gerald Murnane and Antonio Muñoz Molina popping up, more random finds from the library, and probably another Big Poet Project at some point.

2019 Reading stats

Total books read: 201
Author gender: M 133, F 68
Language: English 118, French 29, German 22, Spanish 16, Dutch 12, Italian 4

Unique main authors: 149
Author gender: M 104, F 45
Author country: UK 48, US 15, Australia 3, France 17, Germany, 13, Netherlands 8, Spain 6, Austria 5, Italy 4, Hungary 4, (Others <3)

Books read by year since I started with LT:



Language breakdown by year:



Broad categories (one assigned per book) by month in 2019:



Reading languages by month in 2019:



Reading language vs. original language (translation matrix) for 2019:

Popping in with my star. Happy New Year - look forward to your reviews in 2020.

>5 AlisonY: Thanks!

... Here goes, then, first book of 2020:

About a week ago I read Ordesa, an unusual mix of prose, verse and family photos in which a poet looks back at the lives of his parents. Guess what — here’s another poet doing almost the same thing. One’s labelled a novel, the other a memoir, and the lives of the people concerned have little in common, but it’s a weird convergence of techniques!

The photographer at sixteen (2019) by George Szirtes (UK, Hungary, 1948- )(1/1/2020)

  

Starting with her death and working backwards in time, George Szirtes tries to reconstruct the life of his mother Magda with the help of his own memories, poems that he has written about his family at various times, fragments of testimony from his father and others, and, in particular, photographs. Magda trained and worked as a professional photographer, so the pictures are especially relevant in this case, and he digs quite deeply into what the images seem to be telling us and why.

We go back through the various houses the family lived in after coming to Britain as refugees in 1956, their escape from Hungary, the Budapest apartment they lived in when George was a child and his father an important official in a ministry, and then before his birth to how his parents met (typically, there are several versions), and to the most difficult part of the story, Magda’s experience as a holocaust survivor and her life before the war in a Jewish family in Cluj, where Szirtes is almost completely in the dark, since apart from Magda only one distant cousin escaped being murdered by the Nazis. But there is a tantalising group of early photos showing Magda as a child with her mother and brother.

A delicate and rather beautiful exploration of how much and how little we really know about even the people we have the most intimate connection with. And a lot of interesting background on Hungary in the forties and fifties.

Starred. Happy New Year!

>6 thorold: If you want a third example, there is also Nox by Anne Carson.

>6 thorold: sounds terrific. Happy New Year, Mark. I’ve finally caught with your 2019 thread and, momentarily, with this one (no promises, but I’ll try to keep up all year - well, here and all CR). Always fascinated by your directions.

Happy New Year! I'll be paying attention to your reading too, thorold.

Happy New Year, Mark. I’ll be lurking, as well.

Another one here following you - there's always so much to contemplate.

Good to see you all!
>8 ELiz_M: That sounds worth checking out. I’ve put it on my little list.

In the meantime I got sidetracked into reading something similar, but by an art critic instead of a poet this time...

On Chapel sands : my mother and other missing persons (2019) by Laura Cumming (UK, - ) (2/1/2020)

  

Laura Cumming uses family photos to anchor this novel-like investigation into the early life of her mother in a small coastal hamlet in Lincolnshire, and the slightly mysterious circumstances surrounding her adoption.

The “mystery” trailed in the opening chapter is one of those that ceases to be very mysterious as soon as it is stated, so you’re not really going to be turning the pages in a state of suspense, but that isn’t all that important really, what’s interesting here is the way Cumming (with her mother’s off-stage help) manages to convey something of what life was like in such a village eighty years ago, as well as the peculiarly English passion for family silences about important topics. In this case, everyone in two villages seems to have known all about who the mother’s biological parents were, but not a soul was prepared to tell her, even many years later. My father, of the same generation as Cumming’s mother, read this as well and tells me that she really puts her finger on what these family silences feel like, and the pain that so often goes with them.

Not as lean and to the point as the Szirtes book, but also quite rewarding, especially in the way it shows us how to draw meaning from the photos.

Happy New Year, Mark! It looks as though you're starting 2020 with two good reads. I'll look for The Photographer at Sixteen.

>14 kidzdoc: Thanks! Yes, I think that’s a book to keep an eye on.

Something completely different, this is another book from my parents’ shelves I’ve been meaning to take a look at for a while.

The history of modern France : from the revolution to present day (2015) by Jonathan Fenby (UK, 1942- ) (4/1/2020)

  

Fenby is a long-serving foreign correspondent in Paris, and this brisk run-through of French history in the 200 years from Waterloo to Charlie Hebdo really feels like high-quality journalistic writing. Clear, concise storytelling with efficient little sketches of the main actors, issues and events, enough peripheral detail to keep it lively, but no padding. Of course, even on those terms 200 years in the history of a major European power in 500 pages is a tall order, and that means the focus has to stay quite narrow, with little space for anything beyond political events at the centre of power. This is a very useful book for anyone who has trouble sorting out which was Louis-Philippe and which was Louis Napoleon, or can’t remember whether Giscard or Mitterrand came first, but don’t expect more on cultural history than lists of prominent writers and artists.

Fenby is clearly a big fan of Charles de Gaulle (he’s also written a biography), and his account of the period when he was in charge is one of the most interesting parts of the book. But he clearly wishes de Gaulle had stepped down in 1965. And he evidently has as little sympathy for the rebels of 68 as de Gaulle did. He sees them as just another bunch of protesters following the hallowed French tradition of taking to the streets to defend their own special interests at the expense of the rest of French society. A tradition which he feels is responsible for a lot of France’s problems. Governments come into power with reform agendas, get bogged down in conflict with interest groups who resist the proposed changes, and end up doing nothing. I’m not sure that’s a peculiarly French problem...

A good read and a useful book for filling in gaps and working out who’s who, but leaves you wanting something a bit deeper.

Happy new year! I'm looking forward to following your reading journey again this year, it's always full of interesting facts.

>13 thorold: Interesting. I read a few reviews of the Chapel Sands book last year and it intrigued me, but I couldn't quite figure out if it sounded intriguing enough to move me to get my hands on a copy. You don't seem to be entirely raving about it, so I'm still on the fence.

>17 AlisonY: Yes, a bit ambivalent about it. I probably wouldn’t rush out to buy it, but it was lying around here... The Lincolnshire part was interesting because some of my family came from around there, and there was some peripheral stuff about Tennyson I enjoyed as well, but otherwise just a well-written family memoir. I might look out for her Velasquez book.

Back home after my Christmas break in York, and I've got a few books to catch up with...

(I've also been adding pictures to the posts above, something I've never worked out how to do from my phone.)

This is one to file under "cycling", although maybe there is a peripheral reason to include it in "Mitteleuropa": the "K" is in honour of General György Klapka, an important figure in Hungarian history, who is supposed to have been staying with the Jerome family around the time of JKJ's birth (implausible fact gleaned from a biography I was leafing through without time to make notes: I don't know if there was a source cited). And this book does have a chapter set in Prague...

Three men on the Bummel (1900) by Jerome K Jerome (UK, 1859-1927) (5/1/2020)

  

Jerome K Jerome had the misfortune to write one of the most famous-for-being-funny books in the English language, as a result of which no-one (including me...) seems to be much interested in the rest of his long and quite successful career as journalist, essayist, playwright, novelist and campaigner for copyright reform. This, his third travel book, which reunites George, Harris and J. from Three men in a boat on a trip to Germany, is one of the few that does still get read from time to time.

Three men in a boat was largely fiction — Jerome worked characters based on his friends "George" (George Wingrave, who had been his flatmate when he was starting out as a journalist) and "Harris" (the photographer Carl Hentschel) into the story of a boating trip he actually made with his wife — but the Bummel seems to have been based on a real holiday the three men took together.

It's billed as a cycling holiday, and the book contains a couple of very famous funny cycling anecdotes (the one about the unfortunate tandem rider who failed to notice that he had left his wife behind somewhere along the way, and the one about the officious friend who insists on "overhauling" your bike for you). But in fact cycling in the Schwarzwald and the Vosges only occupies a few days of the holiday, the rest of the time they are travelling around Germany and Austria-Hungary by train with their bikes in the luggage van.

Jerome has learnt from the earlier book that the "purple passages" describing landscape were the parts readers enjoyed least, so he keeps the scenery to a minimum here (but he does include a comic anecdote to underline the point that one forest is much like another as far as the reader's imagination is concerned). What we get most of are stories about the process of travelling in a foreign country (trains, hotels, linguistic difficulties, etc.) and stories about the peculiarities of the Germans (and Czechs and Alsatians) as seen by an English traveller. A recurrent theme is the Germans' strange need to have every aspect of civil life covered by detailed rules and official notices, as opposed to the English habit of leaving things to common-sense. It made me wonder what Jerome would think of the hyper-regulated police-state that is 21st century Britain...

What is striking is that Jerome's knowledge of German life clearly isn't just the superficial observation of a short-term holiday visitor it's presented as. He seems to have a pretty good understanding of the language and he knows about things that a tourist wouldn't think to look at (for instance, he refers to the German criminal law code several times). As he never seems to have lived or studied in Germany, I wondered if some of this is down to Hentschel, who came from a (presumably German-speaking) family that moved from Łódź to London when he was a small boy.

Is it still funny? Well, yes, mostly, although you do have to tune yourself to the slow progress towards the punchline that characterises Jerome's anecdotes, which can be quite painful if you already know where they are heading. And you have to put out of your mind how the sort of harmless jokes Jerome is making about "the Germans" got twisted into savage propaganda later in the century, and how elements of that propaganda, long after it was needed, are still distorting the minds of people who write for and read British tabloid newspapers.

And sometimes it is simply too subtle for a hurried modern reader — for instance, there's a running joke about George's aunt, whom he writes to every day and buys presents for. Only on this (third or fourth) reading did the penny drop that we're supposed to realise that she isn't an aunt at all, and that J and Harris are tactfully pretending that they don't know that...

Frankissstein (2019) by Jeanette Winterson (UK, 1959- )

  

My heart sank a bit when I read the first few pages of this: the story of the Byron/Shelley party on Lake Geneva and the writing of Frankenstein has featured in so many historical novels, films, TV documentaries, etc., that there surely can't be anything new to say about it, can there...? Fortunately, Winterson soon switches to her parallel, present-day story, in which different incarnations of the same characters confront, two hundred years on, updated versions of the same philosophical problems of death, revival, artificial life, body vs. consciousness, and so on, in a world of sexbots, cryonics and AI. And the damp and drizzly shores of Lac Léman become the damp and drizzly banks of the Irwell.

Very entertaining, with some good jokes, some nicely mind-bending philosophical acrobatics, some telling social critique, and plenty of sharp dialogue, just as you would expect. But maybe just a bit too much historical box-ticking.

...And a Maigret for the plane home:

Signé Picpus (1944; Signed, Picpus / To any lengths) by Georges Simenon (France, 1903-1989)

  

A man comes to see Maigret to report that he's seen the image of the words "The fortune-teller will be killed at five tomorrow, Signed, Picpus" soaked into a café blotter(*). Unfortunately, it doesn't say which fortune-teller (or indeed which "tomorrow" or which "five", but those points don't seem to have occurred to Simenon either...). So there's no obvious way to prevent a crime, and the fortune-teller herself doesn't seem to have been able to benefit from her own skills, so at ten past five the report of a murder comes in to police headquarters, and an investigation is launched, soon finding that there's a disoriented elderly man locked in Mlle Jeanne's kitchen. Is he the killer or a witness?

This is a satisfyingly complex Maigret, in which a whole web of different misdeeds comes together in the one central crime, and almost everyone in the cast is guilty of something. And it must have been a nice bit of escapism for Simenon's wartime readers, with no mention of the occupation, of course, and idyllic angling and boating scenes set in a country inn on the Seine. Very nice.

(*)Try explaining to a millennial why anyone would need a blotter in a café: there are layers upon layers of technological and social change packed into that simple detail!

I’ve had this book in my sights for a while, intrigued by the way it keeps getting recommended on lists of “best Scottish novels”, but never quite got round to it — AlisonY raving about another of Jenkins’s books recently gave me a prod to dig it out:

The cone-gatherers (1955) by Robin Jenkins (UK, 1912-2005)

  

A beautiful little rural tragedy, set on an estate in the west of Scotland during World War II and exploring complicated issues of social class, religion, different kinds of relationships with nature, and the way we deal with illness and disability in ways that are both very specific to the time and place and deeply universal. I was expecting it to be a kind of Scottish Of mice and men, and it was in a way, but deep down it reminded me more of someone like Kawabata, in the way the writing forces you to pay enormous attention to small details of social expectation and landscape.

The language is important as well, though, very poetic in places, and carefully graded in its Scottishness according to the character who is giving the point of view. Scots words appear in the text in an undemonstrative, matter-of-fact way wherever they do the job better and more precisely than their Standard English counterparts would, and it’s up to the reader to know what they mean.

I must read more by this man!

I came back from the library with a pile of stuff that looked as though it might be relevant to the RG “Rise of the far right” theme read: this was the thinnest of the pile, so I picked it to start with:

Koning Wilders: een wintersprookje (2017) by Hans Maarten van den Brink (Netherlands, 1956- )

  

Novelist and broadcaster van den Brink wrote this extended essay during the run-up to the Dutch general election of March 2017, in which Geert Wilders and his right-wing populist PVV party were expecting to do well, surfing the same wave as Trump and Brexit. In the event the PVV was the second-largest party, but this placing was mostly an artefact due to the extreme fragmentation of traditional parties: it only obtained 13.1% of the vote. The election led to a record 225 days of negotiation before a coalition (not including the PVV) could be formed under the premiership of Mark Rutte.

Van den Brink uses Wilders’s well-known passion for visiting the fairy-tale theme park, De Efteling, as a hook to explore the way the new populism appeals to its supporters through storytelling rather than an objective discourse of facts and policies. In the process he reminds us that the idea of a canon of “traditional” folk-tales was largely a creation of nineteenth-century nationalists seeking to create a unifying culture for new nation-states like Germany, and that De Efteling, which carefully nurtures its own special commercial brand of folk-tale magic largely based on the work of Dutch illustrator Anton Pieck (1895-1987), was a mid-20th-century job-creation project for an impoverished part of North Brabant. The idealised version of national identity and social relations that Wilders and his colleagues promise to “restore” for the disenchanted people who vote for them is just as illusory, van den Brink argues, and the problem we face is not so much in the lies that the populists are telling, but more in the way that otherwise intelligent adults have suddenly started believing in fairy tales as though they could be literally true. And the only logical conclusion if they persist in that illusion is that we are going to end up with a King Wilders sitting in his fantasy palace in De Efteling with a gold-plated plastic crown on his implausible hair...

>22 thorold: now you're really making me want to read The Cone Gatherers. Sounds terrific. I wonder why he's fallen out of popularity so much (and why he really didn't get the success he deserved). I thought his prose was just wonderful.

>22 thorold: Your review of The Cone-Gatherers captured my interest as well, Mark. Now that it seems certain that I'll return to Edinburgh in August for the festivals I'll keep an eye out for a copy while I'm there.

>23 thorold: Nice review as well. Is it a requirement that far right populist leaders (trump, Boris, Wilders) have weird hair styles?

>25 kidzdoc: The late Pim Fortuyn being the exception that proved the rule, I suppose...

>24 AlisonY: His obituary in The Scotsman suggests that he had really bad luck with publishers. It also sounds as though he wasn't the easiest of writers to get on with, so he may have had a hand in scaring reviewers off as well. But he wrote something like thirty novels...

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Another one for the RG “Rise of the far right” theme read. I found a lot of satires and books attacking right-wing politicians, but I also wanted to read something that isn't just telling me things I already agree with. This sounded as though it might be a useful introduction to the whole theme.

The authors are both professors of politics at UK universities who have written extensively about right-wing political organisations. Goodwin is apparently famous for having promised to eat one of his books if a prediction he had made about the 2017 election was wrong: he did eat the page in question on live TV afterwards...

National populism : the revolt against liberal democracy (2018) by Roger Eatwell (UK, 1949- ) & Matthew J Goodwin (UK, 1981- )

   

With the success of Trump and Brexit, and with right-wing parties from outside the political mainstream getting significant chunks of the popular vote in many European countries, it's becoming obvious that we can't go on dismissing the "national populism" of the new far right as something that attracts only extremist criminals, deranged cranks, and the stupid and gullible. There are clearly millions of otherwise well-adjusted, intelligent and responsible members of society who are voting for these people.

Yet, from where I'm sitting, Trump and Boris are bumbling oafs without a coherent achievable policy between them, Brexit is economic suicide for the UK and the abandonment of the system that defines my identity and rights as a European citizen, Wilders is a hateful racist, and so on. It's impossible to imagine myself or anyone I know wanting to listen to any of them for five minutes, let alone vote for them. Somewhere, there is a huge disconnection going on, and until we've worked out what's driving that we're clearly not going to be able to have any meaningful attempt at putting the political system back on the rails again.

This is the question Eatwell and Goodwin are trying to dig into in this book: rather than explore in detail how populist politicians operate and what policies they are promoting, they look at the "demand side": what are the factors that are pushing voters in the US and Europe towards populism, and which groups in society are providing those votes?

In a classic social-science rhetorical flourish, they come up with "the four D's":
- distrust: a feeling of estrangement from a "political elite" that is no longer drawn from your part of society/your part of the country, and doesn't pay any attention to your views; meanwhile, important decisions are increasingly perceived as being taken by distant entities outside direct democratic control (IMF, EU, etc.)
- destruction: worrying and apparently irreversible social changes, in particular immigration, but also things like women's and minority rights, that seem to be threatening treasured national and cultural identities
- deprivation: the sense that you are losing out economically or in terms of opportunities/jobs/housing, etc. compared to other groups in society; inequality seems to be much more important here than absolute prosperity
- de-alignment: (*) the general loosening of traditional (inherited) party loyalties caused by a succession of ideological shifts over the past thirty or forty years

What's clearly important in the data they present, and the point I found hardest to come to terms with, is that these factors are all based on perceptions that are subjectively true for the people concerned, and play a big part in their experience of life, quite irrespective of whether or not they reflect any kind of objective reality. (This is obviously why you get such blank stares when you try to explain the democratic accountability of EU institutions to someone who has been conditioned to think that a contradiction in terms.) It's also striking that the standard assumption that votes are mostly driven by economic self-interest is clearly way off in the current climate. And bizarre how wealthy, privileged figures like Trump, Boris and Farage can get away with making the claim not to be part of "the elite"!

What I missed in this discussion was any sense of how these attitudes are affected by political rhetoric — do people become more opposed to immigration if they hear speeches by anti-immigration populists? Can their minds be changed in the other direction by a different kind of campaign strategy...?

Eatwell and Goodwin also caution against oversimplifying the social stratification of the populist vote. Profiles are very different in different countries: the US pattern is not the same as that in Western Europe, and that is different again from Poland and Hungary, with Germany, for obvious historical reasons, somewhere between the two. Age, gender and income group play a part, to different extents in different places, but they tend to be fairly weak indicators. The authors don't trust the "generational correction" theory, that support for populism will be wiped out as older voters are replaced by millennials, pointing out that there is already a significant chunk of right-wing support in the younger generation in most countries, and that people tend to shift to more right-wing positions as they get older anyway. The one reasonably strong and reliable indicator for potential populist voters seems to be education: very few people with university degrees vote for populist parties anywhere.

Since they don't discuss populist programmes in detail, they also don't have much to say about how support for populists is affected by their actual performance in government (they probably don't want to get into another book-eating scenario by predicting whether or not Trump will be re-relected). It might have been instructive to look at — for example — the way attitudes have or have not been changed by Australia's anti-immigration policies. But they do point out the way mainstream conservative parties in a number of places have recaptured part of the populist vote by embracing populist rhetoric, as in Rutte's last-minute lurch to the right in 2017 and the British Conservatives' reinvention of themselves as a more extreme (and less organised) version of UKIP.

A depressing book, on the whole, but quite illuminating. If the authors are right, it's difficult to see how the educated, liberal, voting-with-its-rational-mind part of society can ever get back together with the rest, when our political attitudes are so far apart.

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(*) sic. — Rhetorical flourishes don't always have to respect the traditional rules of language, it seems

>27 thorold: I think in many places it's becoming akin to the Northern Ireland voting disaster, with people voting to keep other leaders / parties out rather than particularly wanting to vote for a certain party. I think that was the case in the UK elections, anyway. Quite a scary thought that Boris for many was the best of a bad bunch.

>4 thorold: I've filled in the missing stats post with various unnecessary but pretty charts.

>28 AlisonY: Yes, there's a lot of that about — sometimes working in favour of the populists, as with UK December 2019, sometimes keeping them out, as with the French presidential elections with a Le Pen candidate.

I like your charts!

>27 thorold: Great review of and comments about National Populism, Mark. The trump (I refuse to capitalize the first letter of his last name) phenomenon in the United States remains completely beyond my understanding, as not one single article I've read or person I've heard or spoken to has explained his popularity and the blind devotion he has received from a large minority, if not a majority, of white Americans. The fact that a majority of white American women, given the choice between a strong, well educated and highly intelligent fellow white woman and a barely educated (if you actually believe that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, which many of us don't, since he won't release his college transcript), incoherent, boorish, misogynistic philanderer and possible rapist, decided to vote for him instead of her is nothing short of astonishing and incredulous, especially given that the vast majority of women of color in this country voted for her (at least 85% of women in those groups voted for Clinton, IIRC). IMO these trump worshipping women have set back the cause of women's rights in this country by 50 years, and I suspect that history will not look at them kindly for their decision to choose white privilege over equality for their fellow women and their own daughters.

>31 kidzdoc: Yes. Exactly. The trouble is, we don’t get anywhere by waiting for history to blame them, we urgently need to find a way to understand what the world looks like to someone who believed that Trump was a better answer than Clinton, and what we can do to find an answer for next time that meets their concerns without sacrificing our values. Which is probably impossible. Eatwell and Goodwin go some way in that direction (inter alia they make it pretty clear that “intelligent” and “educated” are seen by many as undesirable qualities in a political leader: intelligent, educated people are assumed to follow the self-interested orthodoxy of the liberal elite, rather than listening to what ordinary people think). But of course the book only sets out the problems, they don’t have a nice glib solution to offer.

...and another quick read from the same pile. A novel this time. Hans Münstermann is known mainly for his series of novels featuring the character Andreas Klein, especially De Bekoring (2006).

De populist (2019) by Hans Münstermann (Netherlands, 1947- )

  

This is a rather dark novel about the rise of a populist politician. The blurb calls it a satire, but Münstermann never quite makes it clear whether it's the central character he's satirising, or the way that society reacts to him, in particular the media and political establishment.

The novel is narrated by Anita, a writer who arranges to spend an election campaign shadowing Harrie Honthorst, an eccentric and outspoken elderly barrister who by some fluke won a seat for his one-man party in the previous election and is now widely expected to disappear from the political scene. It looks as though the campaign is already over a couple of days in, when Honthorst has a row with a party worker and sacks him on stage during a live TV debate.

But then a new figure turns up to replace the sacked man, the suave, intelligent and very young James Moreau. Within a matter of days, Moreau has started to attract the attention of the media in a big way, and has quietly taken over the leadership of the party from Honthorst. He's a clean-cut, house-trained populist-with-a-PhD in the style of Pim Fortuyn and Thierry Baudet (significantly, these two are just about the only names from recent Dutch political life that are never mentioned in this very name-droppy book), who renames the party "Geweldig Oud" (Fabulously Old) and markets himself almost exclusively to elderly voters. His policies are somewhat nebulous — he's going to give old people back the right to hold their heads up high and be proud of their country's achievements, he's going to give them a voice again, and so on, although he never seems to say how. All we know for sure is that he's against immigration and the EU. And that the oldies all love him when they meet him. But he does keep telling everyone that he isn't a racist, and that — like Baudet and Fortuyn — he considers women's rights and LGBT rights as inalienable parts of Dutch culture. But, also like Baudet, he is mysteriously stumped when someone asks him whether he believes black people are less intelligent than whites.

Meanwhile, Honthorst is allowed to roam freely through the press jungle saying totally unacceptable things about black people, euthanasia, and whatever else comes into his head, all of which Moreau can distance himself from as required. Death threats against Moreau increase as the press coverage mounts in the Netherlands and abroad, and his security man Ron achieves whole new levels of paranoia (he would like to live in a world where everyone is covered by facial recognition cameras 24 hours a day).

Right up to polling day, neither we nor Anita are allowed to be quite sure whether Moreau is the sincere champion of the elderly he makes himself out to be, the sinister crypto-fascist-with-a-hidden-agenda the liberal press and his mainstream opponents believe him to be, or as Anita half suspects, just an opportunistic con-man with no convictions at all. There's plenty of evidence for all three possibilities.

A bit predictable, and more in-jokes about Dutch media figures and politicians than really fit into a book of this length, but quite fun in parts.

National Populism - how depressing. I am not sure I want to understand it. I feel like I already do, but I might be tempted with >27 thorold:

>27 thorold: leaves me thoroughly discouraged. Sorry, Mark. Great reviews all. It’s just that once you remove logical thought processes from the thinking, I’m at loss how to respond. I sense here in a red stare that irrational anger/fear are driving forces and I see Right-leaning people try to play that. Basically the more upset you can make people with the world, the more right they go.

The fact that a majority of white American women, given the choice between a strong, well educated and highly intelligent fellow white woman and a barely educated (if you actually believe that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, which many of us don't, since he won't release his college transcript), incoherent, boorish, misogynistic philanderer and possible rapist, decided to vote for him instead of her is nothing short of astonishing and incredulous,

I share your feelings of outrage and disbelief but the (moderately) good news may be that at least some of it may be incredible because it really isn't true. The bad and sad truth is that there really are millions of racist white women in the US who voted for errr the Abominable One. But are they "the majority" of American white women total? Maybe not. (For the purposes of this post I'm leaving out the questions of systemic racism and white privilege that accrues to all white people--this is narrowing "racism" down to the 2016 votes for the AO.)

"A majority of white American women" is really the majority only of those who came out to vote... and at that, maybe a majority (more on the "maybe" in a sec). As a Vox headline put it in 2016: "Trump was elected by a little more than a quarter of eligible voters"--and Michael Moore discussed recently, most white women (as indeed most people in all demographics) didn't come out to vote. Total voter turnout was only 55.7% of the eligible electorate.

Moreover, the much-bandied statistic of 52 or 53% white women voters in 2016 who voted for Trump is possibly wrong, see the analysis here (a Time magazine article from October 18, 2018--I'm very sorry the page seems to open with a video of You Know Who babbling on top, I'd warmly recommend turning sound off first): Donald Trump Didn't Really Win 52% of White Women in 2016

The Time article is based on this 2018 study from the Pew Research Center: https://www.people-press.org/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-ba...

Quoting (from the article): "According to a later analysis that experts consider more reliable, a study published in August by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of white women who voted for Trump was actually 47%, compared to 45% for Clinton. That’s still a plurality, and still makes white women more Trump-positive than the overall electorate, which supported Clinton by a 48%-46% margin. White women, who will again be a critical demographic group in the 2018 midterms, were considerably more pro-Trump than nonwhite women, who went for Clinton by a huge margin, 82%-16%. But it’s essentially a tie, which makes for a very different story than a 9-point margin for Trump."

IMO, while it's still plenty appalling and well deserving of outrage that so many white women would support Trump, the real (likely) numbers both make more sense, given the realities of American life (basically, it's a racist country with millions of white racists) and lend hope (a "tie" is easier to negotiate than a larger point gap, and according to multiple sources, the GOP has been losing pretty steadily what women's support they had).

The Pew numbers for the 2016 Mango Mussolini white voters are 47% of white women and 62% of white men.

There is MUCH more data that could be shredded, sliced and diced for a deeper understanding (for example, the fact that non-college white women had supported Obama more than they did Clinton implies that not only racism was overall a factor, but also anti-feminism).

A thousand apologies for this lengthy digression, Mark! But it's become so "memetized" I feel an obligation, after having done my share of expostulating about the "53%" for years, to mention that a more careful analysis may be warranted--something I realised just recently, having listened to some interviews with Michael Moore where he talked about the demographics, working class vote, abstainers etc.

>36 LolaWalser: thanks for sharing. This makes me feel a tiny bit better about the world...I mean that in a good way. There’s a big difference between 53 and 47%.

>36 LolaWalser: No need to apologise, that sort of thing is good to know.
One thing that really struck me in the data Eatwell and Goodwin quote, although it’s not something they spend much time analysing, is the spectacular variation in abstention rates between different countries and different types of elections. I wonder if that’s really the elephant in the room for mainstream politics. Even in the last UK election, which was about as high-profile as it gets, turnout was only 67%, so more people stayed at home than voted for either of the main parties.

>36 LolaWalser: Excellent post, Lola! You're absolutely right; I should have said "the majority of voting white American women". It is somewhat reassuring that the often quoted 53% figure is likely exaggerated, although the huge disparity between the percentage of white women who voted for trump vs women of color who did so is very disturbing.

I won't forget November 9th, The Day After the election. I went to work that day, and Anna, the (white) nurse in the left in the Christmas Day photo I posted on my 2020 Club Read thread, came up to me with tears in her eyes. We hugged each other for maybe half a minute, both of us crying at that point, and after we finished she said "Thank you. I needed to know that there are still good people left in this world." I can't remember if the gender and racial breakdown was available by that day or the next one, but two of my white female partners, who are both more liberal than I am, came to my desk to apologize for the election result (which they hardly needed to do, since they both voted for Clinton), then blasted the white women who voted for trump in the harshest way possible; this message would be flagged if I wrote some of the things they said!

I also agree that careful analysis of what happened in that election, and the original Brexit election and the most recent general election in Britain that handed the Tories control of Parliament, is warranted, and long overdue...unless it's already been done.

>37 dchaikin:, >38 thorold:, >39 kidzdoc:

Thank you all for indulging the topic. I want to be careful and emphasise that the picture isn't rosy, only maybe less bad than generally thought. The worst problem (speaking practically, regarding immediate effect, as opposed to "changing hearts and minds") is the system that does not honour the popular vote in these elections--and my great fear is that we shall see the mechanism historically set in place to ensure victories of the slaveholders (today's right wing) triumph again.

>38 thorold:

is the spectacular variation in abstention rates between different countries and different types of elections.

Yes, and also, besides the abstaining (a big topic in itself with many causes) when it comes to the US in particular, we outsiders don't generally appreciate the existence, let alone the effect, of the enormous voter suppression that goes on there--specifically black vote, Democrat vote. Without this we would not have seen, among many other things, Dubya as POTUS and almost certainly the war in Iraq and everything that followed from it.

>39 kidzdoc:

Yes, what a terrible day that was. I'm not even American and I felt visited by death and shame.

This year everything hinges on people coming out with the express goal of defeating Twittler. No one should hope that someone else's votes will do the job for them. I also hope no one lets themselves be influenced by the polls and the media in deciding to vote or not. That people will just get out and do their civic duty. We KNOW the majority of all Americans, of all voting Americans, did NOT want this and do not want this.

People of colour, still a minority overall and particularly in the "swing" states, can unfortunately count on a large mass of whites, men and women, voting racist. But maybe this time the damage done will galvanize enough of the "other" white plurality to be damn human.

I'd be interested myself in a comparison between the US and the UK. It would require quite a complicated analysis but I do wish someone would undertake it... From what I have read about the UK elections, there are some similarities with the 2016 US elections (but also, of course, differences that reflect and prompt different interpretations). For example, one similarity I read about concerns the youth vote, ages 18-24--that is overwhelmingly progressive in both countries, but in both countries young women are (voting) more progressive than young men. And, as in the US, education makes a huge difference, with the more educated consistently voting more progressive. I haven't seen a race breakdown for the UK though, nor by faith/immigrant status. Some information:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-vot...

>36 LolaWalser: I appreciated your remarks and explanations, Lola. I am American, and I was just stunned and sick to my stomach about the election results in 2016. It is good to thing that it might not be as horrid a situation as it has appeared.

Something a bit lighter — I've been busy with friends from England taking the last chance to see the Rembrandt/Velasquez exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (which was well worth seeing, as you would expect...). And Pieter de Hooch in Delft, which still has a couple of weeks to run, and was also really excellent.

---

This one, drawn to my attention by Dilara86 (thanks!) and recently acquired by the city library, manages to tick three of my boxes in one go — cycling in literature, books in Spanish, and crime fiction. I'd been expecting the author to turn out to be a Spanish sports writer or a retired pro cyclist, but on looking him up it turns out that he's a mainstream political journalist from Mexico, with a PhD from the Sorbonne and various non-fiction books on politics and economics to his credit before he started writing thrillers later in life. Good for him, anyway!

Muerte contrarreloj (2018; The black jersey) by Jorge Zepeda Patterson (Mexico, 1952- )

  

The Tour de France has been plagued by a series of targeted attacks — contrived to look like accidents — on key riders, culminating in a murder. It looks as though there's someone in the closed and overexcited world of riders, managers and support staff who is prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that the right person ends up in yellow in Paris, but who can it be, and in whose interests are they working...?

The narrator, French-Colombian rider Marc Moreau, is approached for help by the head of the police investigation, Commissaire Favre, ostensibly on the grounds that he had been a military policeman before turning professional. But of course Moreau spent most of his time in the army training for amateur cycle races, and he's not very well up on detective work. And besides, there's the small matter of competing in one of the world's toughest sporting events to take up most of his waking hours. But when he has two narrow escapes from attempts on his life, he sees the need to try to work out what's going on before anyone else gets seriously hurt.

Moreau's role in the team is as a domestique, to support and protect the star, his close friend the American rider Steve Panata, who is on his way to his fifth Tour de France win. Although his position means that he's never been allowed so much as a stage-win in his own right, Moreau is an outstanding climber, and he's coming under strong pressure from friends outside the team to move out from Steve's shadow and build a career for himself. One way or the other, he's going to have to betray somebody close to him...

This is perhaps not the most sophisticated of crime stories, but there's an interesting element of moral ambiguity, and the background story of the tactics, politics, and sheer grunt of competition in the Tour is well-developed and very interesting, if not always completely plausible. A necessary and quite workable compromise between a readable story and the dull routine that would probably be all you would get off the course in a fully realistic account.

...and another shortish book for the populism theme. I listened to this one as an audiobook from Scribd.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) by Fintan O'Toole (Ireland, 1958- )

  

Fintan O'Toole is a well-known journalist, with a regular column in the Irish Times, author of many books criticising the Irish, British and US political establishments (and a couple about Shakespeare...).

This book was published towards the end of 2018; the Brexit nonsense has moved on since then and O'Toole published another book about English nationalism in 2019.

This is primarily a book about the rhetoric that was used in the referendum campaign by the proponents of "Leave", looking at the background and origin of the tropes used and the ways they worked with voters, as well as the reasons why the success of the campaign has been such an embarrassment to the Brexiteers, and why they can't possibly deliver whatever it was that the people voting for them were hoping for.

O'Toole writes from the point of view of a critical outsider with a sharp eye for literary and cultural subtexts and a long experience of the newspaper world. He lays into Boris Johnson's lies with gusto and obvious enjoyment (but still manages to underestimate Johnson's capacity for bouncing back from deep disgrace into public life...), whilst drawing interesting parallels between Johnson's style and that of Enoch Powell.

Whilst O'Toole is no enthusiast for the EU (he hasn't forgiven it for what it did to Greece, Ireland and Portugal after the financial crisis), he is clear that leaving it can be nothing other than a major act of self-harm for the UK. But intentional self-harm can be a very attractive thing in certain situations — he's at least half-serious when he draws a parallel with the popularity of Fifty shades of grey, and very serious when he argues that Brexit is the same kind of self-defeating rebellion as punk. When you feel powerless to change things, an act of self-harm puts you in a position to make yourself the centre of attention.

And of course this links into the English cult of heroic failure, which he sees as a way for a dominant, colonising nation to appropriate the moral high-ground of the colonial victims — the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage, Michael Caine and the Zulus, etc. Johnson opportunistically took up "Leave" in the certainty that it would be a glorious flop and that his "selfless" engagement with it would earn him credit with a large section of the party. O'Toole quotes Sarah Vine's famous comment to her husband Michael Gove on the morning after the referendum: ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ — a line from The Italian job, a film whose relevance to Brexit O'Toole also has a lot of fun deconstructing.

The book concludes with a warning that the Leave vote overwhelmingly came from people who self-identify as "English" rather than "British", and who feel the current political system in the UK doesn't take any account of that identity. O'Toole urges politicians on the left and centre to find a way to talk to those people and take English nationalism away from the exclusive province of the far right before it's too late. Presumably his next book will be about how Jeremy Corbyn failed to do that...

...and another recent book about populism in Europe from my library pile:

De onfatsoenlijken: een reis door populistisch Europa (2018) by Jan Antonissen (Belgium, 1964- )

  

Flemish journalist Jan Antonissen travels through the rust-belts of the former European Coal and Steel Community, plus the UK, to meet the sort of people who vote for populist parties, whose voices "we" (i.e. the middle-class political mainstream) normally don't get to listen to, precisely because we write them off as people who vote for populist parties. The book is laid out as a series of nineteen interviews, framed by a prologue and epilogue in which Antonissen talks about his grandmother and her experience of social change in the Antwerp neighbourhood of Borgerhout — a friendly working-class district when the family moved there, depressed and mostly immigrant by the end of her life (but currently being marketed as "vibrant and multi-culti"). It's a little bit reminiscent of Geert Mak's monumental survey In Europa, but on a much more manageable scale.

The people Antonissen talks to are a mixture. A few are individuals who have been involved in recent news stories, like Alessandra Verni in Rome whose daughter was murdered, apparently by Nigerian drug dealers; Jörg Sartor, director of an Essen food-bank which got into the headlines when it temporarily stopped accepting new non-German clients; Michel Catalano, the printer taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers after the Charlie Hebdo attack; and Jayne Senior, the whistleblower in the Rotherham child-abuse scandal. But others seem to be "just" ordinary people he happens to have met — unemployed men in Bergamo and Gelsenkirchen, a truck-driving couple in Hasselt, a former call-centre worker in Enschede, a candidate for the local council in Sittard, and a retired farmer on the French-Flemish border. In Wallonia, just for a change, the people he talks to are all supporters of far-left parties — a couple of former shop-stewards and a communist radio journalist.

The interviews are short, and don't always explore as far as we might like, but they do bring out a lot of interesting material about the ways that life is treating working-class people in Europe and the sort of difficulties they face. In particular, the difficulty of earning enough money to be able to do anything other than stand still in life. For a lot of them, getting back to where they were after something like a health setback is simply not achievable, and they don't have the sort of employers who support them through difficulties. Although most could have grounds to resent immigrants, Antonissen rarely finds them using explicitly racist language. Most seem to have sympathy and understanding for their immigrant/refugee neighbours as individuals, but complain about the social problems caused by the arrival of so many in so short a time.

Another book about the importance of talking to each other!

>20 thorold: I like your brief review of the Wintersson. Well said. I'm now reading the new Jane Rogers and I'm wondering if the two them met over drinks before beginning their books....

>27 thorold: Great review! You might like the Madeline Albright book, although she comes at it another way. This is the bit of my review that covered the end of the book and gave me pause: Albright brings her narrative around to serve her purpose; this is a warning, she wants us awake and paying attention for we are susceptible and "of two minds": we desire liberty and yet that desire "often competes with the longing to be told what to do."

>36 LolaWalser: Lola, thanks for the post. Really, thanks.

When May came, life lay round Miriam without a flaw. She seemed to have reached the summit of a hill up which she had been climbing ever since she came to Newlands. The weeks had been green lanes of experience, fresh and scented and balmy and free from lurking fears. Now the landscape lay open before her eyes, clear from horizon to horizon, sunlit and flawless, past and future. The present, within her hands, brought her, whenever she paused to consider it, to the tips of her toes, as if its pressure lifted her. She would push it off, smiling—turning and shutting herself away from it, with laughter and closed eyes. She found herself deeper in the airy flood and, drawing breath, swam forward.

Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb, ch.VIII

Time to start to get to grips with a mini-project that I committed myself to a couple of months ago, after several other people in CR were talking about it — most recently japaul22, I think. It was also discussed fairly extensively in Elaine Showalter's A literature of their own, which I read in November. And of course it's an interesting fore-runner of all that auto-fiction I've been reading lately...

Pilgrimage 1: Pointed roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb (1915-1917; Virago compilation 1979) by Dorothy M. Richardson (UK, 1873-1957)

  

Pilgrimage was published as thirteen separate novels over a period of twenty years, but it's clearly meant to be read as a single work, in the same sort of way as À la recherche du temps perdu — Proust was two years older than Richardson, and oddly enough the first part of his book came out just two years before hers. In a preface written with hindsight in 1938, Richardson, with typical perversity, traces the ancestry of her project to the great realists, Balzac and Arnold Bennett. But she does also admit that there is an important parallel to what she is doing in Proust, and also cites Henry James as an important influence. But none of these, evidently, gave her a pattern for "a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" (oddly, she doesn't mention the Brontës — too obvious to name, perhaps?). And neither did Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, the obvious parallels we would think of: they hadn't got going yet. A hint of D.H. Lawrence might have been in there somewhere (see the lovely passage I quoted in >46 thorold:), but he was ten years younger and only just getting going as well.

To all intents and purposes, Richardson was beating her own path into modernism, and it's an astonishingly straight and narrow one. However experimental and unregulated her syntax is, there's a rod of iron ruling the narrative structure. She never steps outside the head of her fictitious alter ego, Miriam, and she tells us about Miriam's perceptions of the world and her thoughts and experiences strictly in the order in which they enter her head. It's a stream of consciousness without any eddies or whirlpools. Unlike Proust, she never takes advantage of the 25-year gap between experience and writing to comment or analyse or fill in background details. She selects, of course, and we know it's a trick, but it often really feels as though you're looking at the world from the point of view of a teenager in the nineties and you don't know what's coming next.

1. Pointed Roofs (1915): It's early in 1891, and seventeen-year-old Miriam is off to Germany to work as an English assistant in Fräulein Pfaff's school for young ladies in Hanover. The school turns out to be everything but a serious educational establishment: there are only ten pupils, most of them about the same age as Miriam, and the only other staff member is "Mademoiselle", a French protestant teenager who seems to be almost as much out of her depth as Miriam. It's all rather closer to Villette than to Mädchen in Uniform, but Miriam doesn't quite fall for either the professor or the clingy younger girl.

Fräulein Pfaff decides capriciously when she gets up in the morning what the school is going to do that day — housekeeping, walks, excursions, an improvised concert — and Miriam is only rarely called on actually to teach. It's a pleasant life, but it peters out after the end of the first term, since Miriam doesn't have enough money to support herself in Germany through the holidays, and has to go home to her parents and sisters in Barnes.

2. Backwater (1916): Miriam has found a job nearer to home, in a school in North London. Not as much fun as Germany, and coming from Surrey she looks on Finsbury Park as practically the Arctic Circle, but it's a better-organised school and she likes her employers and builds up a bit of confidence in her teaching abilities. In between times, there's still her sisters' world of tennis clubs, dances, boating on the Thames and trips to the seaside, and the young men that go with all that. They still don't seem to be as important to Miriam as her life in the school, but she is beginning to notice them a bit more...

3. Honeycomb (1917): It's now early 1895 and the family finances have taken another turn for the worse, so Miriam has had to take a better-paid job, and is now governess to the children of a wealthy family somewhere in the Home Counties. She enjoys being on the fringe of the carefree late-Victorian country house life, but the Oscar Wilde trial is rumbling on in the background, and there are a lot of offstage worries in her own family — her father heading for bankruptcy, her mother seriously ill, and two of her sisters on the point of marrying. And it's all that that eventually forces her to give up the pleasant job at Newlands.

Are the above 3 books all the books that make up Pilgrimage 1 then?

The writing sounds wonderful - I'm sure I'd enjoy it, although I'd struggle to commit myself to reading all 11 on the trot I suspect, especially as Jennifer commented that some weren't as strong as others. Roughly what sort of length is each book - the 200 page mark?

>42 thorold: Glad it was an OK read... The Tour de France should be going past my windows, or near enough next summer. I'm almost tempted to borrow it then...

>47 thorold: That's another book (or 13!) in my wishlist...

>48 AlisonY: Yes, those are the three novels in Vol.1 — sorry if I obscured that. They are all quite short: the thirteen books come to slightly over 2000 pages in all. I found them a relatively quick read, so far: obviously I don't know if it gets more difficult up ahead...

The writing is quite wonderful, very varied, and there is a lot of nineties pop culture going on in the background (Ouida, G&S, music-hall songs) as well as more serious stuff (Miriam has been to Clara Schumann's farewell concert in London). And it's fun to put Richardson's comments on Germany next to Jerome K. Jerome (see >19 thorold:) and realise that there isn't a single point where they overlap!

---

Back to the library pile:

Als dit zo doorgaat: let's make literature great again, with all the best words! (2017) edited by Auke Hulst (Netherlands, 1975- )

  

In early 2017, in the run-up to a Dutch general election in which it was feared that Geert Wilders would end up in power, Auke Hulst recruited twenty-three fellow writers who shared his anger and frustration with the way things were going in the world to contribute to this short story collection inspired by the title of Robert A. Heinlein's 1940 story "If this goes on..." The idea was to demonstrate how engaged literature can still contribute to political debate in the 21st century.

Obviously, it was a rush job, and many of the contributors didn't get much further than rehashing the ideas of all the over-familiar giants of dystopian fiction, usually with a Wilders-like figure pasted-in over the picture of Stalin, and Muslims or Moroccans standing in for Jews. The general theme seems to be "something bad is happening and there's nothing we can do about it" — a position depressingly summed up in Wytske Versteeg's "Ervaringsmachine", in which the narrator's diagnosis with a progressive, incurable disease parallels the collapse of liberal democratic values around him. Only a few of these dystopias really seemed to do something original: Mohammed Benzakour's deceptively simple Panchatantra-style animal fable "De knorrige koningin" is one that will certainly stick in my mind. Jamal Ouariachi's story, in which the narrator goes to Casablanca to report on the Eichmann-style trial of a fallen ex-dictator with more than a passing resemblance to Wilders, also struck me as an interesting shift of viewpoint.

A few stories struck out in different directions: Frank Westerman's "Animal farm 2.0" sounded as though it was going to be another animal fable, but it turns out to be about the way that the discourse of ecology and zoology, with their emphasis on restoring "unspoilt" environments, rooting out invasive species and back-breeding "pure" lost species, actually propagates ideas that originated under the Third Reich (Hitler would have loved the idea that wolves were returning to Western Europe) and provides a hidden ideological foothold for racist ideas that we otherwise wouldn't feel comfortable expressing. Alma Mathijsen also forces us to stop and think by imagining "a world without men" in which it is women who are the ones exercising fascist power, and men, apart from the occasional specimen retained as a captive sperm donor, are rooted out from their hiding places and mercilessly eliminated.

>45 avaland: Thanks for the hint! I saw Scribd had the Albright book on audio, and listened to it over the weekend (mainly while I was out in the woods enjoying the unexpected good weather on Sunday).

Fascism: a warning (2018) by Madeleine Albright (USA, 1937- )

  

Albright takes us through the history of anti-democratic political movements in the twentieth century, trying to isolate the things they have in common, and then explores the ways in which those elements can and can't be mapped onto the rhetoric and actions of the current crop of (would-be) authoritarian leaders. Obviously, her main goal is to alert her US readers to the possible danger to democracy posed by Trump's rants against judges, legislators and journalists, but there's also a lot here that can help us understand some of the things going on in Europe and elsewhere.

The book is written for readers who are assumed to know nothing about world history outside the US, which is probably a good thing, but makes it a bit frustrating for the rest of us as we go at what often feels like a snail's pace through the familiar stories of how Mussolini, Hitler, Franco et al. came to power. It gets much more interesting as she advances to the late 20th century and to leaders she dealt with face to face in her own long career in international relations, including Milosevic, Putin, Chavez and Kim Jong-Il.

But we have to pay attention throughout, because she is picking up a lot of crucial points along the way: how most authoritarian leaders come to power in the first place by constitutional means (but often without majority support); how power is entrenched by "necessary reforms" to constitutions and by control of the media; the "Mussolini-model" where the leader refuses to delegate and increasingly overrates his own competence until everything collapses around him, versus the "Hitler-model" where the leader delegates as much as possible to competing subordinates and distances himself from unpopular decisions ("If the Führer only knew").

Albright — despite the title of this book — is very wary about how she uses words like nationalism, populism and fascism. She maintains that the first two are positive qualities, to be admired in liberal democracies. Politicians who don't have the interests of the nation at heart or who don't seek popular support for what they do are clearly going wrong somewhere. And fascism is a term she only wants to apply to leaders who claim to speak for the people without giving the people the chance to comment or contradict, who disregard the rights of minorities, and who impose their ideas inside and outside their country by violence without democratic or judicial controls. The only current fascist state, by her definition, is North Korea. On the other hand, she sees plenty of other leaders who appear to have some of the characteristics of fascism and give reason to fear that they might go further, especially with the examples of impunity Trump and Putin give them.

Obviously the chief interest of the book is that it is written by someone with exceptional practical and theoretical knowledge of how relations between countries work (and personal experience of being a refugee from first Hitler and then Stalin). And a communicator who is very good at making us feel that we can understand very complex questions, even whilst she warns us that the ability to reduce complex questions to simple answers is a strong indicator of anti-democratic rhetoric. Needless to say, there are no simple recipes provided for cooking up democracy at home, other than a warning to stay vigilant.

>49 Dilara86: The chapters mostly correspond to Tour stages: if you wanted, you could read it in "real time" with the TV on in the background...

This is another one that caught my eye in the library — interesting, but I don't suppose many people will be rushing out to borrow it...

Niet te moeilijk graag : de verkleutering van het publieke debat (2012) edited by Simon Knepper (Netherlands, 1955- ) and Johan Kortenray (Netherlands - )

  

The editors, both working in the communications department of the university hospital (AMC) in Amsterdam, got a wide range of Dutch public intellectuals to put forward their views on the infantilisation of public debate (read: “dumbing down”). Philosophers, sociologists, historians, political commentators, even a linguist and a psychiatrist, contributed essays. Which already answers the first questions: yes, there are still public intellectuals, and yes, there is (or was, in 2012) still work for them to do. And at least two people (judging by the fact that there were already pencil annotations in the copy I got from the city library) have read the book, so we can also conclude that, yes, their views still matter...

As you would expect, the contributors disagree on whether there is such a thing as “dumbing down”. Several remind us that cultural pessimism and the conviction that the “youth of today” are lazier and less intelligent than previous generations goes back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks. Reality TV and professional sport may be stultifyingly mindless, but at least they are less reprehensible than bear-baiting, gladiatorial combats and public executions. There has always been a high culture reserved for the elite and a low culture enjoyed by the masses, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that high culture is now accessible to a greater part of the population than it ever has been.

Very few of the contributors agree with Frank Furedi that there has been any real decline in cultural values. Nozick’s Experience Machine is invoked a few times, most interestingly by psychiatrist Damiaan Denys, who warns us that we are hard-wired always to select physical pleasure over intellectual stimulation, whatever we might think we would do in the abstract. Brecht was right to say “Erst kommt das Fressen,” but we shouldn’t count on “dann kommt die Moral”. Meanwhile, philosopher and novelist Désanne van Brederode turns the question round and asks us whether our talk of “infantilising” really exposes our inability to recognise children as the future adults they are, and talk to them as such.

Similar arguments apply to political debate, although the contributors have a harder time staying positive here. Politicians aren’t meant to be evidence-based decision machines, it’s their job to weigh scientific facts against emotional, traditional, economic and other arguments and come up with the best solution for the people they are representing. Democracy is the best tool we have for appointing the right people to do this job and changing them when we get fed up with them: at the moment it seems to be hiccuping a bit, the electorate are losing trust in the political class, and some contributors think that needs to be addressed by fine-tuning the democratic process, e.g. by making more posts directly elected.

Quite a few contributors see causes for concern in technological change, the growth of social media, globalisation and the fragmentation of communities along new lines, but none seems to see any reason to despair. Human society is pretty good at adapting to change, seems to be the take-home message. I wonder if they would have come up with the same answers five or six years later...?

Less reflective, but perhaps a bit more to the point:

The death of truth : notes on falsehood in the age of Trump (2018) by Michiko Kakutani (USA, 1955- )

  

Does exactly what it says on the cover. A short, clear, hard-hitting summary of the violence that Trump and his supporters do to truth, facts, and objective debate, and the dangers that that brings for liberal democracy around the world. There won't be much that is new here for anyone who reads a newspaper from time to time, but Kakutani does join up a few dots here and there to help us understand what's going on, particularly the surprising ways that both the far-right nationalists in the US and their self-invited guests from Moscow are using propaganda techniques that owe as much to Lenin as they do to Goebbels. Kakutani warns us that we can save democracy only by resisting the nihilism and resignation the propagandists are trying to push us into, and suggests that engaging in collective action instead of clicking on endless depressing news stories is the best way to retain a sense of what democracy actually means.

Your comments on these last several political books are much easier on the emotions. I can appreciate them without getting so discouraged. : ) Of course, it’s still not optimistic, but it seems easier to take in as critical essays than some of the more straight (depressing) reportage.

Also, interesting to read about Kakutani, since I’m more often reading her to learn about others (she’s a prolific NY Times book reviewer). Enjoyed your first review on Pilgrimage and the excerpt.

>54 thorold: I read this shortly after it came out so it is no longer fresh in my mind, but I recall being intrigued by how she connected the decline/death of truth with some theories of literary criticism. From my notes: From Post-modernism—denying an objective reality existing independently from human perception—to Deconstructionism—all texts are unstable and ever variable meanings can be imputed, I.e. Anything can mean anything. And we end up with everyone has their own truth.

>56 arubabookwoman: Very interesting comment, and a lot of food for thought in your to-be-point note.

>56 arubabookwoman: Yes, Kakutani and several other writers I’ve looked at on this theme comment on how the right has hijacked (parts of) what was originally a critical tool that the left-wing rebels of the sixties used to attack the complacency of the establishment. Kakutani makes much of how one of the prominent Putin-propagandists started out as a postmodern theatre director. Depending on where you stand, it’s either poetic justice for the over-reach of literary theory in the 80s and 90s or cynical misuse of rhetorical tools.

>51 thorold: Of course I do not agree with Madeleine Albright's contention that populism and nationalism are positives and so I think I would feel frustration when reading her book.
Enjoying your comments on the `"political" books that you are reading

There's a kind of morbid fascination in reading all these books about the end of the world as we know it — I brought another pile home from the library yesterday, will see whether I have the courage not to read them ... :-)

In the mean time, some fiction. Or a novel, anyway. It turns out that this is yet another novelist who hated the idea of "making things up".

B.S. Johnson is the sort of eccentric, experimental writer I ought to know all about, but for various reasons I missed out on him altogether: for my parents "contemporary fiction" in the sixties meant Northern Realists, so he wouldn't have stood much chance as a modernist from London, despite being indubitably working-class. And for me, at the time I got interested in reading challenging modern books, he'd been dead just long enough to drop off the radar, I suppose, and somehow I wasn't looking when people started getting interested in him again. I even got hold of a crazy idea at one time that he didn't actually exist, but was a kind of literary counterpart of P.D.Q. Bach... But he's cropped up in conversations a couple of times recently, and I noticed a recent reissue of one of his books at the library, so time to start rectifying that:

Trawl (1966) by B. S. Johnson (UK, 1933-1973)

  

Taking a cliché seriously and forcing the reader to think about what the words actually mean is a classic poetic device. But there probably aren't many writers who would be prepared to put themselves through three weeks of chronic physical discomfort and deprivation merely to justify their use of a corny metaphor. That, however, seems to be exactly what B.S. Johnson was up to when he joined a Hull trawler for a fishing voyage in the Barents Sea, to spend much of the time lying in his bunk suffering from terrible seasickness while he made a trawl through memories of his early life.

The result, as Jon McGregor suggests in his introduction to the 2013 reissue, is certainly "one of the finest novels about seasickness ever written." But it's also a fascinating (fictionalised) autobiography, in which Johnson takes us through the experiences of his wartime childhood, evacuated from London first to a farm in Surrey and then to High Wycombe. And through some of the more-or-less disastrous erotic adventures of his early years as a clerk and later a student in London.

Like practically all sex in British novels of the fifties and sixties, the bedroom scenes are catastrophically inept: rooms are inadequately heated, walls are too thin, clothes are awkward to take on and off and get tangled at awkward moments, condoms are a constant source of trouble and alarm, the participants usually turn out at a critical stage in proceedings to have had different, conflicting, agendas, and the evidence of what has happened has to be concealed from parents/landladies/flatmates afterwards. Johnson has a gift for making these episodes — in other writers often merely painful — both comic and touching, and his narrator always gives the impression of being open about his own inexperience and bad behaviour. He behaves like a man of his time, but in hindsight he's aware of his failure to take proper notice of what the women might have wanted.

The life of the fishing boat at first doesn't intrude very much into the narrator's self-centred reflections, apart from providing him with the need to vomit at intervals, but as we go on he starts to tell us more and more about the trawlermen and the work they do. And the fish — there are some wonderfully vivid descriptions of the varied catch that comes out of the net. At times the book almost strays into the territory of journalism or travel writing.

The two streams of narrative in the book seem to converge in the narrator's troubled sense of his own class-identity: in childhood, the kids in Surrey and High Wycombe looked down on him as a working-class Londoner; now he is cut off from the trawlermen by their sense of him as a graduate and a writer, despite his own (self-mocking, but still half-serious) idea of himself as someone who is doing hard physical work with his pen and notebook. Most of his relationships with women seem to have stranded on difficulties of class as well, although there is also an undercurrent of "perhaps it's just that no-one likes me". Or perhaps I'm just reading that in from knowing that it was depression that cut Johnson's life short so young.

Johnson is known for hard-core experimental tricks with the physical form of his books, but this one is almost conventional, with its only really obvious departure from classic book design being in the use of inline pauses  ·  ·  of various lengths  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  marked by dots, which take the place of conventional paragraph breaks. Not especially intrusive, and you soon get used to it. It's hard to say whether the subtle difference between — say — a five-dot pause and a seven-dot pause really makes a difference to our reading, but I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Not just a period-piece, definitely something that's still worth reading today.

But life can't all be fun and games in the Arctic. Back to the grindstone:

Chavs : the demonization of the working class : with new preface (2011, 2016) by Owen Jones (UK, 1984- )

  

Jones documents how successive British governments, from Thatcher onwards, have pursued policies that had serious negative effects on the working class, by accelerating the shift away from manufacturing industry, enacting repressive measures against trade unions, cutting welfare benefits and support for public services (especially education), shifting from income tax to VAT, selling off most of the (council-owned) social housing stock, and so on. These policies have often been sold to the electorate on the back of patently untrue assertions that "we're all middle-class now" and accompanied by equally misleading propaganda about "welfare scroungers", "workshy single parents" and so on, echoing a negative stereotype of feckless working-class people as "chavs" propagated by right-wing newspapers, TV game-shows, and the rest.

In reality, of course, there is still a large section of British society that thinks of itself as "working-class". Since the annihilation of manufacturing, most of them work in retail, catering, call-centres, construction, agriculture and the like, often in jobs that are less fulfilling, less secure, and far less well-paid than the jobs their parents had in factories and mines. Those who are unemployed, Jones urges, are unemployed not because they are feckless and idle, but because there is a structural shortage of jobs, especially in former industrial towns. And most of them feel let down by the political establishment, which has less and less contact with them and their concerns. Even the Labour Party has few MPs with working-class roots these days, a result of the professionalisation of politics and the "unpaid intern" system, which effectively closes off political careers to those whose parents can't support them in unpaid jobs (in London!) whilst they gain experience. And the same goes for journalism and the law.

Jones also argues that social mobility in general is far less significant than it used to be (other people dispute this, and it's not easy to find an agreed definition of social mobility anyway). The education system is "rigged" by the middle classes to make sure their own kids have access to good schools and university places, leaving the schools most working-class kids attend marginalised; the cost of university education has become so high that few young people from working-class backgrounds can see the benefit of saddling themselves with student loans they won't necessarily ever be able to pay off.

All this demonization and exclusion of working-class people has created a political vacuum that right-wing nationalist parties have moved into. From the interviews and canvassing he's done in working-class neighbourhoods, Jones concludes that the people who vote for the likes of UKIP and the BNP usually don't support the explicitly racist parts of their platforms, but they do respond to the way those parties seem to be listening to their concerns, unlike Labour and the Conservatives. Worries about immigration (competition for housing and services, possible undercutting of pay rates) don't necessarily equate to racism, and Jones argues that the notion of an "embittered white working class" is both false and counter-productive: working-class districts (and working-class families) tend to be more mixed ethnically than elsewhere, and it's often second-generation immigrants who are most worried about the effect of newcomers.

It all sounds pretty convincing, even if it is quite at odds with my experience of British society. I grew up in an environment where the line between "working-class" and "middle-class" was fluid and hard to pin down, and where no-one would have dreamed of mocking the class, or the type of work, that most of their neighbours and relatives were associated with. Or of voting for anyone, under any circumstances, who didn't have "Labour" after their name on the polling card. Even at university, I don't remember anyone expressing disrespect for working-class people, and most people I knew were at most a couple of generations away from miners and factory workers. Except the drunken public-school prats we all laughed at, who are now running the country. But I moved away from the UK about the time Jones must have started primary school, so I've probably missed a lot.

Interested in your review of B S Johnson's book. I have not read any, but he is one of those authors who keep cropping up, but I don't know anyone who has read him.

The Owen Jones book seems like a story that the left wing press would take as gospel. It might be true and I am inclined to believe it is. I also came from a poor working class background and got to university on the back of a full grant. If I was at school leaving age today things would probably be more difficult.

>60 thorold: He kinda looks like P.D.Q., too.

This is the first time I've read someone's reviews and not wanted to read the books. The one thing I don't read about is politics.

Still, these reviews were good enough that I feel I understnad the basics of these books. Thank you, thorold, for the gift of your time and reporting.

>62 baswood: Well, Jones writes for the Guardian...

>63 kac522: :-)

>64 sallypursell: I don't really read about politics either. But it's interesting to make an exception from time to time.
I suppose there wouldn't be much point in having reviews if we all ended up reading every book we saw reviewed.

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A novella that popped up in my Scribd recommendations for audiobooks:

Mostly Hero (2014, 2019) by Anna Burns (UK, 1962- ) audiobook read by the author

  

In what's essentially a postmodern graphic novel without pictures, Burns enjoys herself by playing with the conventions of superhero action stories as she explores some of the strange world of relationships between men and women. It sometimes feels like a joke stretched a little too far, as the camera pans away for a philosophical digression halfway through a cliffhanger scene, or as a succession of corpses pull their guns for one last shot in a Grand Guignol set piece awash with various colours of blood. But it's hard not to enjoy the audio version, with Burns's deadpan Northern Ireland intonations adding to the ironic quality of the bizarre storyline. I won't be able to stop thinking about "superpaws" for quite some time!

This novella was originally self-published online in 2014; Fabers reissued it commercially in 2019 to cash in on Burns's Booker win.

This was an impulse buy at an airport bookstall (you know, those annoying "buy one, get another half-price" offers where you end up with two books you didn't really want). I thought it looked vaguely relevant to the populism theme.

The fifth risk: undoing democracy (2018) by Michael Lewis (USA, 1960- )

  

Three-quarters of a worthy, if slightly pedestrian, book about the value of good public administration and about how much of it there is lurking in unexpected corners of the US federal government, is oddly squashed together with about one quarter of a more sensational book about the chaotic way Donald Trump handled the complex process of transition from the previous administration.

Both are interesting ideas, but spoilt by the way they have been cobbled together into a single book that was obviously rushed out to hit the shelves whilst “Trump” on the cover was still a selling point. The “transition” story is the more compelling one: we are shown the president-elect dismissing the team that had been preparing for an orderly transition and capriciously leaving key posts unfilled or sending in friends and family apparently at random, or appointing people with a personal interest in undermining the work of the departments they have been appointed to run. The general impression is that they never expected to win and don’t have any real interest in running the government. But there’s no overall analysis, no attempt to talk to people in Trump’s team, no examination of what damage has actually been done, just a small selection of anecdotes, most of which we already know about from news stories. This part of the book just seems to scare us and then runs into the sand.

The other part of the book, mostly built up out of interviews with people in the public service obviously written as magazine articles, turned out to be unexpectedly interesting for an outsider, but also oddly fragmented. We get to see the people who are clearing up the mess of former nuclear weapons factories, making sure that tornado warnings are effective, running the complex “food stamps” programme, managing the government’s data, and improving the efficiency of the Coastguard’s search and rescue operations. The message is that public administration does a lot of vitally important things we rely on in our everyday lives without ever really noticing that they are there. And that there are at least as many clever, innovative people in the civil service as in the population at large. Worth saying!

Lewis’s style is rather journalese, in the tradition of “When Mary picked up the phone on September 27th in her tastefully-decorated office in downtown Washington DC, she little knew it was going to change her life.” This gets on your nerves more in a book than it would in a 2000-word article. But it’s not as bad as many similar books...

>66 thorold: "And that there are at least as many clever, innovative people in the civil service as in the population at large. Worth saying!"

I found this to be the case during my 4+ years working at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. I found the same percentage of smart, motivated, conscientious people there as anyplace else I've ever worked. (Of course, the last 19 years of my working life, I worked for myself. :) )

The only book of Lewis' I've read is his famous baseball book, Moneyball. I found it to be a book of interesting information marred by Lewis' chatty style and desire to present himself as one of the guys.

A slight side-track: after reading A literature of their own and Geraldine Jewsbury I had a hankering to read something by a working-class woman writer. Showalter didn't really find any to discuss in her book, but a bit of googling around brought up the name of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, who seems to have had a minor upsurge of popularity in the last three or four years. She's a rough contemporary of Dorothy Richardson, although I don't think they had much else in common. An interesting contrast to Pilgrimage, anyway. This is one of two of her novels I found on archive.org — a couple of others have been reissued lately in modern editions.

The taming of Nan (1919) by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (UK, 1886-1962)

  

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (born Ethel Carnie, published variously under her birth name and married name, and anonymously as "an ex-mill-girl") grew up in a working family near Blackburn, Lancashire. Like most children of her time in that part of the world (including my grandfather) she went to work part-time in a cotton-mill at age 11, and full-time at 13. "Part-time" meant a half-shift in the mill, running between the machines to join broken threads for five or six hours, and a half-day at school. It isn't hard to imagine how awake and motivated the kids would be in the classroom. In her early twenties, she took to writing poetry, and had a considerable success with her first collection, Rhymes from the Factory in 1907. Ethel Smyth set two of her poems to music. She became active in all the usual socialist and feminist causes — the Co-op, the ILP, unions, left-wing newspapers, anti-conscription protests during the war, etc. — and studied part-time at Owens College. Her big breakthrough as a novelist came with Helen of Four Gates in 1917.

The taming of Nan starts off rather alarmingly, with Nan Cherry going off into an unprovoked and apparently quite involuntary attack of rage against her gentle-giant husband, Bill. It soon becomes clear that this is a regular occurrence — Bill and teenage daughter Polly merely chide Nan for inflicting it on them before breakfast — but she refuses to stop throwing things until she has provoked Bill, much against his will, into "giving her a thrashing" to calm her down. Before going off to his job as a railway porter, Bill has to take his valuables to a neighbour, to stop Nan pawning them to go off drinking. There's not much idealising of the married state going on here.

Then Bill has an accident at work and finds himself trapped at home, at Nan's mercy. Meanwhile, Polly is starting to build a career as a semi-professional soprano, whilst getting tangled up in a Hardyesque romance plot with the serially unlucky small farmer Adam Wild. Plenty of trouble ahead...

The fun of this book is mostly in its very unromantic and down-to-earth depiction of working-class Lancashire people and the way they think, speak and act, the large and small problems that they face in their daily lives. Absolutely the opposite end of the scale from Dickens's bizarre and implausible notions of "the North" in Hard Times. I was struck by the way Holdsworth keeps sneaking in mentions of her characters' — real, but necessarily fragmented — passions for bits of "high culture". The grannie with pictures of Milton and Cromwell on her wall, the farmer and mill-girl who are both crazy about Handel and Grieg, and so on. The border between high and low art has always been porous in both directions.

Holdsworth borrows bits of plot and elements of style freely from all sorts of different writers, old and new, serious and popular, perhaps most obviously Mrs Gaskell and the Brontës, Balzac and Zola, Hardy and Arnold Bennett (maybe also D.H. Lawrence?), and seems to be pasting them together any old how, without bothering to put up a sign to say whether she considers herself a romantic or a realist, but the result seems to work well in spite of that: there's a huge amount of energy and momentum in the plot, carrying us forward at a tremendous rate.

There's not much in the way of explicit politics in this book: maybe a general underlying theme of the demands society puts on working-class women to do paid work and bear children and run households. Nan's idea that she has failed to live up to this standard is at the root of her breakdown. And Polly redeems herself from the risk of becoming a "flapper" by learning to churn butter and bake cakes. But there are also a lot of interesting little details in the background, like Bill's legal action (supported eventually by the NUR) to force the railway company to base his disability pension on actual earnings including tips, which came to about twice his nominal wages. Very interesting.

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Bio and readings of five of her poems here: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/ethel-carnie-holdsworth/

>68 thorold: Absolutely unknown to me, but really interesting! Thanks for sharing this. A new-to-me author, worth exploring!
So many books and writers I don't know about!

This one has been on my TBR shelf since June 2017. Time to read it: not only because it's always a good time to read Perec, but also because the theme ties in very nicely with The photographer at sixteen (>6 thorold:) as well as with Vie de ma voisine, one of the books that has particularly stuck in my memory from last year.

W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) by Georges Perec (France, 1936-1982)

  

Perec explores his memories of childhood and his reaction to the loss of his parents, both Jewish immigrants from Poland, during World War II. His father died in 1940 from wounds he received fighting in the French army; his mother was deported by the Nazis in early 1944 and is presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Perec was evacuated from Paris to the Dauphiné by the Red Cross in 1942, where he attended a Catholic boarding school and later went to live with relatives.

The book has two alternating and apparently independent narratives. The even-numbered chapters form a fairly conventional memoir narrative, in which Perec examines memories, photographs, and texts he has written about himself earlier and tries to resolve them with what he can learn from family members and others who were around at the time. In many cases he finds that his memories don't square with the facts: he has appropriated to himself interesting or significant events that actually happened to other people, or he has shifted things around in time.

Meanwhile, the odd-numbered chapters, printed in italics, tell the (imaginary) story of a deserter from a French colonial war, now living in Germany under the false name Gaspard Winckler, who is asked to go to the island of W in Tierra del Fuego in search of the real Gaspard Winckler, missing after a shipwreck. As the narrator tells us more and more about W, we start to realise what a strange and disturbing place it is, in which the whole of life is centred around meaningless sporting competitions conducted under an arbitrary, changeable and undisclosed code of rules. Eventually we work out that it is a coded, indirect way into exploring the distorted moral universe of the Nazi concentration camps. Perec doesn't trust himself, or doesn't feel entitled, to write directly about what his mother and other victims must have experienced, and he works his way in by this unexpected and very effective side-entrance. Perec obviously meant us to come to a clear realisation of how the two halves of the book fit together only in the last chapters, but my copy had helpfully been annotated all the way through by an earlier reader. It didn't really spoil it.

>69 raton-liseur: So many books and writers all of us don't know about ...

The trouble is, we've got this internet thing now to keep telling us how many of them there are. In the old days we thought we were up to date when we had dealt with everyone in the bookshop or the local library catalogue.

>68 thorold: PS: I wondered if Holdsworth might have had Kathleen Ferrier (also from Blackburn) in mind when she made Polly a singer, but it turns out that she was only born in 1912, so obviously not. But she clearly came out of the same music culture.

Enjoying all your posts. fascinating window into that world with Holdsworh. I’ve never read Georges Perec, but it looks like I ought to. W sounds fascinating. (Actually, I typically haven’t read the authors you review. I have read Lewis, though, and I liked Moneyball, even if I think he didn’t fully got what Bean was doing. But thoughtful stuff on baseball is a hit for me. He’s not a perfect author, he’s very present in his reporting, and I felt like he promotes himself as really smart - like tech-community hip-smart. I also read his book on fatherhood - don’t recall the title. Fun and light)

I’ve been having a look through Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s two poetry collections that are on Archive.org

Songs of a factory girl (1911) turns out to be disappointingly unindustrial, and not very feminist or political either: there are a few nice things in it, especially the spirited ode to failure that ends the book, but most of it is a little bit over-exalted. The faults are mostly the faults of youth and enthusiasm, though, and too much exposure to bad verse of the Moody and Sankey variety. Not that Holdsworth is feeding us religious propaganda: several of the poems seem to have semi-covert atheist messages. But you can often see that there’s a good poet in there, struggling to find her true voice.

Voices of womanhood (1914) is more interesting. More angry, less lyrical. Quite a lot of the poems have explicitly feminist messages, monologues from the point of view of unmarried mothers, domestic servants, battered wives, etc. Or calls for revolution. I particularly enjoyed this passage of covert rebellion from “Behind the mask”:

I hate the senseless mirror on the wall,
The chat of ribbons, and the latest news
Of who is dead, and who in love doth fall
The price of butter, and the style of shoes
What is it that I pine for ? I scarce know.
But something bigger, broader than a tomb.
For glorious winds, and piles of waist-high snow,
For risks to run, for life, for gain, for doom !
To be some strong man's comrade—but instead
My husband, like a woman, fears the wind.

That could almost be Elizabeth Barrett Browning (apart from the dig at the husband).

ETA: found a recording of the Smyth settings, “Possession” and “On the road: a marching tune” (from Songs of a factory girl): they appear on a record called “Ethel Smyth Kammermusik & Lieder Vol. III” (https://youtu.be/p5Ttw1MYWFE)

>68 thorold: fascinating - I notice the thriving high culture interest which seems to have bee challenged bit in stereotypes and also by tv culture etc. But a huge part of our history with root I think in the civil war/revolution and also Reformation (which seems to have changed a bit, people's engagement with some things these days).

>73 thorold: I like that quote.

>6 thorold: & >13 thorold: - I'd meant to say, and hope it's of interest, both of those books are of interest to me and reminded me I have Mother Departs by Tadeusz Różewicz to complete and wonder if you know it or if it's of interest.

Need to catch up on your others.

>74 tonikat: Thanks, I didn’t know about Różewicz. Noting.

Yes, a lot of that high-culture crossover was obviously political/sectarian in origin, like my socialist uncle who had no secondary education but seemed to know most of Shaw and Wells by heart, or all those people who found a way into classical music through the Chapel choir. And Blake and Milton were at the intersection of those two strands. There was a lot of that sort of thing on the OU courses I took as well...

>68 thorold: >70 thorold: >73 thorold: Oh, wonderful. An opening into something I know little about. I wish I thought that kind of domestic violence was confined to the working-class, but it isn't, of course. That hardly matters, because this sounds fascinating!

Another enjoyable side-track yesterday, as I got a request to dig out poems for a Burns supper (at which some seven or eight nationalities were represented, but no-one from Scotland). We ended up with poems by Jackie Kay, Norman MacCaig and Douglas Dunn as well as works by the birthday boys Robert Burns and (who knew?) John Cooper Clarke. And I'm unlikely to be forgiven in a hurry by the Spanish friend who found herself nominated to read Edwin Morgan's Loch Ness monster poem...

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I started reading Geert Mak's De goede stad the other day, but put it aside when I realised how heavily it drew on a book that's been sitting on my TBR since 2013. The main reason I hadn't read it was that I bought the English translation shortly before starting to learn Italian. So I ended up getting the Italian version as an ebook as well. Which worked out quite nicely, because it turns out that the Italian edition I bought came with an extended bio of Calvino, the text (translated from English to Italian!) of a lecture about the book he gave in the US, and an essay by Pasolini. All in all it added up to nearly as much as the text itself.

Calvino was living in Paris in the late sixties and early seventies, and was close to Queneau and Perec, who elected him a "foreign member" of OULIPO, so this ties in well with >70 thorold:

Le città invisibili (1972; Invisible cities) by Italo Calvino (Italy, 1923-1985)

  

Marco Polo sits in an idyllic garden with Kublai Khan and spins him stories of exotic cities he has visited, in between sipping sherbet, playing chess, looking at old books, and reflecting on philosophy. A simple formula, but Calvino doesn't want us to take it literally: for one thing the cities often have surreal elements that we can't imagine the canny Khan crediting; for another, many of them have features, like oil refineries, airports, roller-coasters and bus terminals, that even a notorious liar like Marco Polo would have had difficulty inventing. Someone seems to be pulling the reader's leg...

Calvino obviously wants to break the automatic presumption that narrative in a novel involves a progression through time, much as Perec did a few years later in La vie: mode d'emploi (or Cortázar a few years earlier in Rayuela). The cities exist in a different time from the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whilst both are arranged in nine chapters without any obvious progression from one to another. Calvino cautions us against putting extra weight on the words that happen to come at the end of the book, and invites us instead to start in the middle, if we feel like it. To confuse things further, the cities are given titles in groups like "Cities and memory"; "Cities and signs", etc., whose members are scattered across different chapters, as though those would give us other kinds of sequences to read in.

Of course, being Calvino, he also wants us to reflect on how the imagined cities relate to their descriptions by the imagined narrator and (presumably) real author, how they relate to the set of all possible imaginary cities (cf. Borges's library), and what they tell us about the role cities play in our own real and imaginative lives. And — crucially — he wants to amuse and dazzle us with his wit, paradoxes, and crystalline prose. This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level, without ever consciously getting tangled up in literary theory. But the philosophical vaulting horse and parallel bars are set up for you as well in case you want to use them.

>77 thorold: This is a book you can get a lot of pleasure out of on an Arabian nights level ... Oh my yes indeed, and very well put.

>66 thorold: I didn’t find The Fifth Risk very well written either, but I found it fascinating to read about all the important things our government does for “we the people,” and does well. I wish some of the “drown government in a bathtub” people would read it and pay attention.
>70 thorold: I’ve had W on my shelf for several years and need to get to it. I’ve read Life, A User’s Manual twice—it’s one of my desert island books.

>70 thorold: and >77 thorold: Two very interesting reviews on books I'd like to read some day (but likely to be in a distant future). And some interesting parallels between those two authors. Thanks!

Re Perec & Calvino: do try them if you get the chance. There's absolutely nothing to be scared of — and a lot to enjoy — even if they are counted as "experimental" writers. La vie: mode d'emploi would be a fantastic desert island book, certainly up there with The Oxford book of English verse 1250-1918 and The Jeeves omnibus...

Re The fifth risk: On reflection, I think one of the things I liked most about it was how it brought out the usefulness of some less obvious areas of public service. Having been in an obscure corner of an obscure field (not one of those Lewis writes about) myself for a lot of my career, I appreciated that! And it's only fair to add that the counterparts I worked with from time to time in the US federal government confirmed the image Lewis gives of the competence and motivation of public servants.

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An essay collection by a respected Dutch journalist and writer of non-fiction. Outside the Netherlands, Mak is probably best-known for his millennium travel book In Europa and his social-history survey of a Frisian village in the 20th century, Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd/An island in time:

De goede stad (2007) by Geert Mak (Netherlands, 1946- )

  

The essays in this collection are a mixed bag of lectures and newspaper articles written between 1995 and 2006, although Mak says that they have all been reworked to some extent for book publication. About half the essays are about cities and urbanisation, with special reference to Mak's own city, Amsterdam — he looks at the 17th century city and the role of the City Hall on the Dam, the history of ideas of urban design, the role of nostalgia and preservation in a living city, the shift from individual cities to the "Randstad" conurbation, and the history of the garden suburbs built in the 1920s. But there is also a reflection on the role and development of folktales in rural life, drawing on the Frisian folktale collector Ype Poortinga, and there is a group of essays on truth, fiction, and the role of journalism.

As in In Europa, Mak is clearly pessimistic about the way society in general, and the Netherlands in particular, is going. He is especially worried about what he sees as the destructive growth of inequality resulting from the policy of a succession of Dutch governments to copy the Thatcherite ideology of unfettered free-market capitalism, the moral bankruptcy of blindly following the US into two Middle East wars, and the way the press and society in general prefer to close our eyes to some difficult truths (e.g. climate/resources/immigration/colonial past). All of this, he feels, is providing breeding ground for dangerous populism. He points to the way voters in the US, against all common sense and self-interest, have felt compelled to elect the most self-evidently incompetent and venal president in history (no, not that one: he's talking about George W Bush). And to the vacuum in Dutch politics that Pim Fortuyn was able to move into, and which his murder has left open again.

Erudite, well-argued and elegant prose, as you would expect from Mak, but reading it 13 years later it does make you wonder how we made it through the 2010s without encountering the end of the world as we know it...

>77 thorold: very nice

>81 thorold: I think Mak characterized W just right, just that W got one-upped on 2016. Next will come someone worse.

>82 dchaikin: Yes. It wasn't so long ago that the newspapers were joking that Mrs May's continued leadership of the Tories was solely based on Hilaire Belloc's dictum, "... always keep a-hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse." How right they were.

At least we have our pessimism to keep us cheerful!

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I haven't read anything by Juli Zeh since Adler und Engel, which I didn't like that much. Time to give her another chance:

Leere Herzen (2017; Empty hearts) by Juli Zeh (Germany, 1974- )

  

We're somewhere in the late 2020s, and Germany is being governed by the BBB (Concerned Citizens' Alliance), who have closed the borders, cleaned up the graffiti, and are steadily dismantling the outdated restrictions of the constitution in a series of "efficiency packages". Not everyone is happy about what the politicians are doing, but no-one seems to be upset enough to do anything to change things ("what good is voting anyway?").

Britta seems at first sight the absolute model of a middle-class working mum. She is a partner in a therapy practice, her husband is setting up an e-commerce startup, and they live with their eight-year-old daughter Vera in a modernist concrete cube on the fringes of Braunschweig, possibly the least memorable town in Germany. In their spare time they socialise with the parents of Vera's best friend. But we soon realise that there must be more to what Britta and her colleague Babak do in their work with suicide-risk clients than meets the eye, although it takes a while until we work out exactly what that involves. In any case, there seems to be someone a lot less scrupulous trying to move into the same field, and Britta is forced to reexamine her priorities in life...

This isn't a simple dystopia-novel, the mood has more to do with a satire of the kind of disenchanted liberal detachment that got the country into this mess in the first place, exemplified by the way Britta and her friend Janina play the "dilemma game", speculating about how they would deal with hypothetical moral choices, whilst all the time Britta is moving towards a real-world dilemma she seems to be refusing to confront. Zeh keeps the tension up and doesn't let us get away from from Britta's sometimes rather restricted viewpoint: the book is written like a thriller, but doesn't fall into the obvious plot-traps we might be expecting. And we get some nice jokes about the brave new Germany, and some lively minor characters, in particular Babak and the young woman Julietta.

Another Owen Jones book (cf. >61 thorold:):

The establishment : and how they get away with it (2014) by Owen Jones (UK, 1984- )

  

Where Chavs looks at how the people at the bottom of British society have suffered under recent governments, in this book Jones turns his focus on the other side of the same coin, the way that it has become effectively impossible for anyone with power and influence in Britain to argue for any other kind of policies than those which exacerbate inequalities in society, put money and power into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful, and leave the poor struggling to survive.

Jones looks at the development of neo-liberal free-market ideology, championed by intellectuals and think-tanks he calls "the outriders", mavericks who were mocked and despised in the post-war decades, but have found themselves in a robust position close to the centre of power since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher. He interviews several of the leading figures, and clearly has a lot of respect for them and the way they fought to promote their unfashionable ideas, even if he detests the ideas themselves. Whatever set of ideas eventually supplants the "tyranny of the markets", Jones suggests, will have to work its way into the mainstream the same sort of way, and we would do well to study how the neo-liberal think-tanks operated.

But the main part of the book is an analysis of the unhealthily close relationship between business, media, parliamentarians and government in Britain. The political class have almost no links with working-class people any more, and it is all but impossible for someone from a poor or even lower-middle-class background to get into politics, whilst wealthy business-people often become MPs, and MPs and government ministers frequently do consultancy work for business whilst serving, and move into well-paid senior posts as soon as they leave politics. Few MPs would have any motivation to vote for policies that might be considered disadvantageous to business or to people on high incomes: as Jones point out, successive governments have cut the top rate of income tax, a move the overwhelming majority of voters on all sides of the political spectrum disapprove of.
The free press is supposed to keep politicians under scrutiny, but almost all British newspapers and TV stations are the personal property of Rupert Murdoch and a handful of other wealthy individuals, and run stories that serve the interests of the oligarchs. The BBC has long ceased to be an independent voice, not least because the government holds its purse-strings. And of course there is also an active revolving door between politics and the press (vide Boris Johnson and George Osborne). Even the Observer isn't entirely free of that particular taint, it seems.

Jones argues strongly that the "small-state" ideology is inherently hypocritical: the same business people who call for the "rolling back of the state" rely on that same state to provide them with all kinds of things necessary for their businesses to function, including infrastructure like roads, police to protect their possessions, education to train their future workers and provide child-care for their current ones, and most especially social security benefits that allow them to get away with paying absurdly low wages as employers and charging ridiculously high rents as landlords.

Jones also talks about how the police have come to be seen as the enforcers of government policy, since the miners' strike, and are suffused with the idea that poor people, especially if black, are the major threat to the welfare of the nation. He also draws attention to the unhealthy relationship between the police and the media, where journalists have frequently been caught making payments to police officers for information, and officers caught feeding journalists false stories that serve the interests of the police. A relationship that must have caused some awkward moments when the police had to investigate the phone-hacking scandal that brought down the News of the world, and the same editors who were under investigation were taking senior police officers out for meals.

As he also pointed out repeatedly in Chavs, he reminds us that the amount of tax wealthy individuals and companies avoid paying is many times greater than the small amount estimated to be lost to benefit fraud by the poor, but somehow the tycoons never seem to end up in jail. Could this be because the same big accountancy firms that advise them on their tax strategies are also employed as consultants by the government when devising new tax law? Surely not.

As in Chavs, there isn't a huge amount here that will be new to anyone who regularly reads the Guardian, but it is quite impressive seeing it all assembled together in one place like this. I'm not sure how useful it is: even though Jones ends with a call to action of sorts, and has been involved in setting up various groups to fight back against the evils he discusses, it's difficult not to be pushed into despair and start feeling that the dominant ideology will always get you in the end. Especially if you look at what happened to Jeremy Corbyn.

>51 thorold: That's a fab review of the Albright. And I do agree that the book is aimed more at US audiences with less European history under their belts, so to speak.

>84 thorold: As you say it's nice to have all this in one place.

Another politics book that caught my eye in the library:

Kleine anti-geschiedenis van het populisme (2018) by Anton Jäger (Belgium, 1994- )

 

Jäger, although still in his mid-twenties, already seems to have become a recognised authority who has published a string of articles about European and American populism (e.g. in the left-wing review Jacobin). He is currently finishing a doctorate in history in Cambridge — this book is essentially a reworking of his earlier master's dissertation for the mainstream Dutch-language market.

This is not so much a history of populism as a history of "populism". Jäger takes us through the different ways the term has been used to describe political movements by academics, journalists, and politicians themselves, from its origins right through to the era of Trump, Wilders and Farage. He is particularly interested in the divergence between the positive view of populism as a grass-roots movement to right economic wrongs, as seen in the original use of the word to describe the politics of the US People's Party in the 1890s, and still apparent in recent positive statements about populism-as-such made by Americans like Obama and Albright, and the more familiar negative view of populism as demagogic identity politics, usually based on a "paranoid" idea of a common enemy, which goes back to the explanations of McCarthyism put forward by writers like Richard Hofstadter in the fifties and sixties.

Jäger raises some interesting and non-obvious points about the way politics is tied to its representation in the media, including the way journalists have latched on to "populist" as a safely non-judgmental term, which can cover anyone from crypto-fascists to mainstream party politicians who are a bit too fond of speaking in slogans. Interesting too how he identifies a key problem in the way that newspapers have moved away from being the organ for readers with a specific party affiliation, which formerly made them effective places for informed debates and dissident views on policy, but now leaves even "serious" papers looking in the first place for the sensational and newsworthy, which inevitably means that "badly-behaved" demagogues float to the top in the clickbait.

Like other things I've been reading about populism lately, Jäger seems to take the view that "populist" demagogues are responding to real concerns in their audiences (as well as manufactured ones), in particular growing inequality and a sense of detachment from the political process. The answers the populists put forward, however, are mostly vague and concerned primarily with reinforcing self-respect and national/ethnic identity. Unfortunately, voters seem to respond to that kind of slogan-based politics in a way they no longer respond to arguments about economics and social policy. Even if the majority of respondents in a survey think it would be a good idea to renationalise public utilities, that thought isn't going to drive them to the ballot box, especially if they have good reason to doubt that the party proposing such a policy will ever implement it. The left needs to find a way to get around that.

This is one I've had on my "to read" list for a while, so I can't quite remember who (or what..?) recommended it — maybe it was simply because it was on the Booker longlist. It's about time I read something by Enright, anyway!

The green road (2015) by Anne Enright (Ireland, 1962- )

  

This is billed as a family-saga, but it often feels more like a linked-short-story sequence, as the viewpoint switches between Rosaleen Madigan and her four children in a series of extended vignettes spread over some twenty-five years. Even when she brings the family together, three-quarters of the way through, they all still seem to be living in their own bubbles, and the book is often more about what people don't tell each other than about how they interact.

But the vignettes are all very finely realised, with lots of telling observation: Enright is clearly up there with Alice Munro when it comes to short stories, and it almost seems like an irritating distraction that we have to map all these disparate people together into a coherent novel.

Enjoyable and rewarding.

>88 thorold: I really enjoyed The Green Road. Enright isn't afraid to jump right on into family dynamics.

>89 RidgewayGirl: Yes. I enjoyed the Irish topography and poetry too. She writes about what the landscape of County Clare means to her here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/09/return-western-shore-anne-enright-...

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This was another very short book, a Boekenweek gift I missed at the time and came across recently in a Little Free Library:

De Pianoman (2008) by Bernlef (Netherlands, 1937-2012)

  

Hendrik-Jan Marsman wrote poems, novels, and (jazz-) stories under the pen-name Bernlef (sometimes J. Bernlef), borrowed from a possibly legendary 8th century poet. He's perhaps best known for his 1984 Alzheimer's novel Hersenschimmen (translated as Out of mind). He was also known as a translator into Dutch from Swedish and English.

This is a deceptively simple little story, adapted from a real case, of a young man who turned up on a beach in Sheerness with no identification and apparently unable — or unwilling — to talk, but quite happy to play the piano. Bernlef ties this in with the tough rural culture of the northern Netherlands, where the wind is always blowing in your face and no-one wastes their breath on talking, to make us think about the uses and dangers of silence. Very nicely done.

I was interested in your Enright review. I've skirted round The Green Road a few times, but somehow have always avoided going for it. The only other one of hers I've read is The Gathering, which I really appreciated as a well-crafted novel but didn't 100% love. Probably that's coloured my thoughts on picking up this one.

Back to pessimism, but pessimism from an Algerian perspective for a change:

2084: La fin du monde (2015; 2084: The end of the world) by Boualem Sansal (Algeria, 1949- )

  

Sansal, formerly a senior official in the Algerian industry ministry, started writing novels relatively late in life. He writes in French, and is known for his outspoken criticism of the Algerian government and his antipathy towards religion, Islam in particular.

A young man confined to a TB sanatorium in the high mountains is forced to reconsider some of his most basic assumptions about the world he is living in ... hang on a minute, this is supposed to be a new take on Orwell, not Thomas Mann, isn't it?

Anyway, it soon becomes clear that we aren't in Davos any more, Toto, but in a dystopian, post-nuclear world, where a benevolent leader, Abi (even I know that means "elder brother", so we're back on track), his face on millions of posters, protects his people against a remote but always dangerous enemy, in return for their devotion and complete submission to the intrusion of the state into every corner of their lives and thoughts.

This isn't quite the 1984 we're used to, though. The use of Abilang (Newspeak) constrains the things that can be said and thought, there is no history of any time earlier than 2084, but in place of Orwell's metaphor of the Party, Abistan is a world run under the religious slogan that "there is no god but Yölah, and Abi is his representative". It turns out that a cruelly distorted version of Islam can be used to create a totalitarian, fascist society every bit as effectively as Stalinism did.

As in Orwell's original, we're well aware that a lot of the horrors and abuses Sansal describes are not a million miles away from things that happen in the real world in our time. It's only really the scale that changes in this dystopian view: Abistan claims to be the whole world, but our Winston Smith character, Ati, has his doubts: there are rumours of a frontier, and if there is a frontier, then there must be something on the other side of that frontier.

Clever, angry, engaged humanism, very engaging once you get into it, although I did find the first few chapters, in which the pace of the story is slowed down to Magic mountain-like speeds, quite hard going. Worth the effort, though.

>92 thorold: Really interesting review. I had heard about this novel when it was published (last year if I remember correctly) but it did not appeal to me.
Your review makes me think it's worth a try, although I might need to re-read 1984 first!

>93 raton-liseur: Yes, there are a lot of buried allusions to 1984, I don't think I picked them all up, it would help to have it fresh in your mind. Knowing some Arabic would probably be a help as well: I'm sure there were a lot of buried jokes in the names that I didn't get. (Not all the word-play is from Arabic, though: the Abilang for a prayer-house is Mockba!)

One thing that only struck me afterwards: the one big thing he doesn't take over from Orwell is the love-story. I'm not sure what we're supposed to read into that, but for Ati the desire to achieve intellectual freedom is clearly a lot more important than sex.

I was planning to stick to fiction for a bit and stay away from all those tempting political science books, but then I saw this one on the "Recent acquisitions" table at the library...

Wilders gewogen: 15 jaar reuring in de Nederlandse politiek (2019) edited by Gerrit Voerman (Netherlands, 1957- ) & Koen Vossen (Netherlands, 1971- )

 

The long-serving Dutch MP Geert Wilders broke with the mainstream VVD party in 2004, and since then has been leader of his own party (literally his own party: he is its only registered member), the PVV. With a platform combining nativism and rabidly anti-Islamic attitudes with promises to improve social security provisions, the PVV has been a minority party in the Dutch lower house (and the provincial states and the European Parliament) since then, and from 2010 to 2012 a tacit supporter of Mark Rutte's minority government. After a massive defection of PVV voters to Thierry Baudet's newly-formed populist party, the FvD, in 2019, it looks as though Wilders's career might be nearing its end (although he's always proved singularly unflushable in the past...). To mark that, the editors of this collection brought together a diverse group of political scientists, sociologists and historians to survey the tactics, ideology and impact of the PVV over the past fifteen years from various different standpoints.

Although it's by no means uncritical of him, this may well be 300 pages of Wilders more than anyone really wants or needs, but there are some interesting things to be learnt from it, particularly in the analysis of his tactics and of the background and views of the people who have been voting for him. I was particularly struck by the way so many of the contributors felt that the primary purpose of the PVV was purely and simply to keep Wilders in the public eye and in parliament. For Wilders himself, because he is clearly addicted to being an MP, and for many of the voters, who don't for a moment believe that he will ever succeed in introducing a headscarf tax, but like the idea of him being there in parliament to annoy "the establishment". Which of course begs the question of how Wilders himself, the most careerist of career politicians, manages not to seem part of that establishment...

>95 thorold: Sounds like another Nigel Farage - where do these people come from?

>96 baswood: where do these people come from? — Quite. Although the message here seems to be that they don't "come from" anywhere, there are always opportunists on the look-out for gaps in the political market. Perhaps we only get what we deserve...

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As the Netherlands is battening down for a storm, time to catch up with a couple more reviews. This was one of my Christmas presents this year:

A line in the sand : Britain, France and the struggle for the mastery of the Middle East (2012) by James Barr (UK, 1976- )

  

This is one of those books that seem to have been written in reverse: Barr started out from what was apparently a chance discovery in "a newly-declassified document" he was looking at, that showed that France had been sponsoring Zionist terrorists operating in the British mandate of Palestine in the 1940s, and decided to go back over the history of Anglo-French relations in the Middle East to work out how things had got to that point.

He identifies as starting point the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of January 1916, in which Britain and France, faced with the disintegration of Ottoman power in the Middle East, assigned themselves spheres of influence divided along an arbitrary line on the map "from the 'e' in Acre to the last 'k' in Kirkuk". Making, of course, no allowances for the way the world had moved on since the "race for Africa" of the 1870s, or for the complex religious and political history of the region, and laying the foundations for no end of trouble in the century to come.

Barr charts the continued distrust and jockeying for strategic advantage between the two countries, complicated no end by a succession of mavericks on both sides determined to pursue their private agendas in the Middle East by "unconventional methods" — T.E. Lawrence was only the most famous of many semi-official troublemakers. Not to mention an equally impressive succession of incompetent administrators and overconfident military commanders.

Barr is undoubtedly right that a lot of the past and present problems of the Middle East can be traced to the arrogance of both countries in the way they assumed they knew best for the area, and to Britain's selfish preoccupation with protecting the Suez Canal and the oil supplies for its Mediterranean fleet and France's concern to project its image as a successful colonial power despite the damage done by the two World Wars. And he tells a convincing and lively story, with a lot of detail I didn't know about in between the more familiar big events.

I did wonder a bit, however, if he is giving Britain and France too much credit. Even with the best of management, Suez and the oil resources were clearly strategic problems that would lead to conflict (and still do) whichever powers established themselves in the region. Arab nationalism wasn't invented by T.E. Lawrence, it was always going to play an important part as Ottoman influence faded and self-determination became a norm for people all over the world to aspire to. And Zionism had its roots in the situation of Jews in the Russian Empire and Germany: even if the British and French had kept their fingers out of the pie, it would have found sponsors somewhere, in the US if not in Europe, and as soon as it did, there would have been emigration to Palestine, making conflict with the Arabs almost certain.

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BTW: is it just me? I can't look at that author photo without getting the idea in my head that he's just about to step off a battleship for 24 hours of shore-leave in Manhattan (...the Bronx is up but the Battery's down).

And stage two in my exploration of B.S. Johnson (cf. >60 thorold:):

House mother normal: a geriatric comedy (1971) by B. S. Johnson (UK, 1933-1973)

  

This is hardcore experimental fiction, but still touching, funny and entertaining. The events of a ghastly "social evening" in a care-home for elderly people are described in turn by eight of the residents, each from his or her own perspective, and each in exactly 21 pages. And then described again by the sinister House Mother, but she gets 22.

All of the narrators are unreliable, of course, that should go without saying. But they are unreliable in different ways. The residents are lucid and articulate to different extents, and have varying attention spans and amounts of sensory acuity (tabulated carefully with mock-clinical precision for each of them at the start of their section). Some drift off into petty quarrels or memories of their earlier lives (usually concerned with sex), some tune out for long stretches — up to three pages at a time — of white-space. One gives us thirteen pages of apparently random Welsh words, scattered in the white-space at the rate of about five or six to a page, before bursting out with "I am a prisoner in my self. ... Let me out or I shall die."

But we're encouraged by the way the narratives all seem to advance through paper at the same speed to treat them as parallel texts, flipping back and forth, superimposing one account on another in our minds, until we have a fairly clear picture of what must have happened

                              including an introduction to the fascinating sport of wheelchair-jousting.

                                                                                          Unexpectedly inspiring.

>98 thorold: You got a lot more out of this than I did. Another book where it is perhaps better to know about it before reading it (I went in blind).

>99 ELiz_M: Yes, I can imagine it's a bit of a shock if you've no idea what's coming!
Probably still less scary than Ivy Compton-Burnett, though.

Middle East again. This is a novel that caught my eye in the library: I knew nothing about the author before picking it up:

Das dunkle Schiff (2008; The dark ship) by Sherko Fatah (Germany, Iraq, 1964- )

  

Sherko Fatah was born in East Berlin, the child of a Kurdish father and a German mother, and grew up in the DDR, Iraq and Austria before settling in Berlin again. He writes in German, and his novels all seem to focus on Northern Iraq in one way or another.

Das dunkle Schiff tells the story of Kerim, whose father, owner of a small restaurant in Iraq, is casually murdered by Saddam Hussein's security forces. On the eve of the Bush-Blair War, Kerim falls into the hands of Kurdish Islamic guerrillas when they hijack his car. They recruit him, but he is able to escape after a while, and makes his way illegally to Berlin, where his uncle helps him to gain asylum. But he soon finds that you can't escape from past traumas simply by moving away.

This is an odd and rather disconcerting mixture of adventure story and dark introspective psychological drama, but it seems to work as a novel despite that. Kerim is at times a cunning and endearing protagonist, but he's ultimately a failed human being, who can't achieve dramatic resolution by any of the conventional means. We are shown pretty clearly where the roots of that failure lie, and how little chance he had of avoiding them.

The account of the guerrilla fighters is at the heart of the book, and it is carefully calibrated to allow us to be revolted by their violence and its consequences, as Kerim is, but still take us at least part of the way into understanding the emotional and political logic that leads them into the belief that violence is right and necessary. Fatah's clean, undemonstrative writing style is probably the key to making this approach work — and making you feel afterwards that you'd rather not have been where you just were — and so is his insistence on keeping the viewpoint strictly with the Kurds, so that we never get to see the Western invaders as anything other than murderous intruders.

The nightmarish voyage as a stowaway in a cargo ship from Turkey, which gives the novel its title, is also grippingly described, but it doesn't seem to mesh very well with the rest of the book: it's almost as though it was pasted in as an afterthought. It acts as a kind of intermezzo to separate the Iraqi and German parts of the story, and it reinforces Kerim's sense of himself as unreliable, but it doesn't really advance the plot much.

Obviously, this is a book that's meant to leave you feeling uncomfortable and less sure of your ideas than you were when you started, and it does that very effectively. But it isn't much fun...

The 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth is coming up this year (and by an odd coincidence, it will also be the 193rd anniversary of his death!), so he's been chosen as the theme for the 2020 iteration of our local chamber music festival. I remembered in the nick of time that I'd been meaning to read up a bit to prepare, so I picked out a handy biography, and finished it with about 6 hours to go before the first concert...

Beethoven (1977, 1998) by Maynard Solomon (USA, 1930- )

  

Besides being a musicologist and biographer, Maynard Solomon is at least as famous for his role as co-founder with his brother Seymour of the iconic Vanguard Records in the 1950s, bringing out many landmark classical recordings as well as signing Joan Baez, The Weavers, Paul Robeson and a host of other big names.

This is a somewhat dated biography, originally written more than forty years ago and last revised in 1998, and that shows in things like the rather heavy-handed Freudian analysis Solomon brings to bear on his subject, on various minor characters, and even on himself as author. That seems to mean that the women in Beethoven's life, in particular, don't really get a fair hearing, and judging by reviews, is enough to put some readers off.

On the other hand, the psychoanalysis is only a rather small part of the whole, and Solomon certainly knows his way around the music and the biographical sources, both of which he'd been studying for many years before he started on this book, and that counts for a lot with a figure like Beethoven where there is so much historical misinformation flying around. Solomon takes us through the verifiable facts, reasonable inferences and probable falsehoods swiftly and efficiently, setting out clearly what the evidence is and how he reads it.

Of course, every Beethoven biography requires a theory about the "Immortal Beloved", the unnamed woman to whom Beethoven wrote a letter on Monday, 6th July of an unspecified year (we don't know whether he actually sent it, though...), and who seems to have been the only woman in his life who actually reciprocated his affections. Solomon puts forward a plausible case for Antonie Brentano (the Viennese sister-in-law of the ubiquitous Bettina).

On the music, Solomon seems to have found a good compromise, showing us why and how particular works bend the rules and display Beethoven's creativity (or don't!), and why they matter in music history, without either getting deeply into technical language or straying into the realms of superficial generalisation. There are a few odd moments, like the extended, lyrical epiphany about variation-form he goes into when discussing the Diabelli Variations, but on the whole it's all very sane and informative, telling you the sort of things you would like to know when attending a concert or listening to a record.

A good, brisk introduction to Beethoven.

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Beethoven walking in the rain, by Johann Nepomuk Höchle, ca.1823

I fell behind, and just read your last eleven reviews. Outside the Johnson and the book on Wilders, they pretty much all appeal. The cross cultural authors, Fatah and Sansal (who
maybe isn’t really cross-cultural) Interest me a lot.

>84 thorold: the worst thing about this and the American equivalent and we know all this information and can’t do anything about it. Those is power are in content denial.

>102 thorold: Fun to see that the programme notes for the Beethoven festival don't follow Solomon's theory on the Immortal Beloved, but take it for granted that it was Josephine Brunsvik. Clearly Beethoven is one of those cases where the more you read, the less you know for sure!

>103 dchaikin: Yes, Sansal is definitely someone I'd like to explore further, possibly Fatah too. BS Johnson is fun, if you like that sort of thing, but probably not necessary in any important way...

...and next is a book I found out about from your thread, Dan. It looks as though we both had quite similar reactions to it.

John Lanchester was someone I'd heard of — he's a regular contributor to the LRB — but I'd never read any of his books.

The Wall (2019) by John Lanchester (UK, 1962- )

  

This is clearly a book you have to read both as a climate-change dystopia and as a Brexit fable: either way it's an attack on British smugness and selfish insularity. Although, with a few small changes, it wouldn't be too difficult to imagine the same idea working for Australia, the USA, or even France. And Jose Saramago already did something similar for the Iberian peninsula with The stone boat. Islands are more common than you might think if you live on one...

In the world of the story, Great Britain has come out of climate change less badly than most of the planet. A 10 000 km concrete wall around the island is keeping the sea under control, and conditions within it are still relatively prosperous, even if young people find it difficult to forgive their parents for what they did to the world, and have little desire to become parents themselves, despite various bribes and incentives from the state.

Naturally, there are a lot of "Others" on the wrong side of the Wall who would like to get in, which means that it has to be guarded, by a huge conscript force of Defenders. The story opens with the narrator, Kavanagh, beginning his two-year stint of "sky      cold      water      concrete      wind", scanning the sea for approaching lifeboats and swimmers.

Lanchester frames the conscript experience in terms that (apart from the Defenders being co-ed) are clearly meant to reflect the National Service our fathers experienced in the forties and fifties. Specific things like bits of period slang and nicknames and the two-year term of service, and more general parts of conscript experience like the mix of unnecessarily basic living conditions and odd bits of luxury, the constant risk of draconian (collective) punishment for often incomprehensible offences, the arbitrary social mixing, the camaraderie with other wearers of the uniform, the way civilians react sympathetically to individual Defenders but stay out of the way when they see a group together, the counting down to discharge day, the temptation to avoid difficult life-choices by signing on for another term, and so on. My own father still talks more about the two years he spent in the army in the mid-1950s than about any other part of his 80+ years; I'm sure Lanchester must have had the same sort of thing inflicted on him, and he's clearly made profitable use of it.

This is a fable, not an attempt to create a realistic picture of a future world. The opening chapters are very powerful and effective bits of description, quite poetic in places, and there are a lot of nice satirical hits: reading about a society where exile is the ultimate penalty struck home on a day when the main British news story is about the government trying (and failing) to make good publicity for itself by sending a plane-load of unfortunate ex-convicts to Jamaica. But the book as a whole doesn't seem to work very well, probably because of Lanchester's pessimistic — but not unreasonable — refusal to imagine a sustainable future for his characters. I started to lose interest well before the end.

>104 thorold: I read Lancaster's The Debt to Pleasure last year. A whole different kettle of fish but very well written and, in the end, quite disturbing.

A very good post-Brexit, post-apocalypse novel I read last year was Arkady by Patrick Langley

>105 rocketjk: I'll probably end up reading The debt to pleasure (especially as one reviewer calls it "Highsmith meets Wodehouse"). I liked Lanchester's voice here, and I've often enjoyed his columns.

Arkady sounds interesting, although the author interview here: https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Patrick-Langley is almost pretentious enough to put me off. Taking note of both, thanks!

>106 thorold: A pretentious young author? Surely you're joking!

Like everyone else here, I've been enjoying your reviews. Cheers!

>104 thorold: listening to the second half of The Wall, I kept thinking to myself, this book is done, what’s he doing. But another part of me was telling me I’m missing out on some fun post-apocalyptic adventure story. I kept wondering if I really was missing out. But, glad you enjoyed to first half. I was worried how you would take to this, but it seems our responses were similar. (At some point in writing my review I totally smashed the plot...and then decided, too harsh, and wrote it up more softly. Also, I spent some time on the plot contradictions...but decided those weren’t the point.)

Your comments about the National Service are fascinating to me. Curious what you made of the tone. It seemed so polite and reserved to me. Was that my American hard head, was it more bitter with the right language sensors? or does it come across that way to you too? Seems the National Service aspect you describe plays a great deal into the narrative tone.

>104 thorold: I go back and forth on whether to read this one. I've read two of Lanchester's novels (Capital and A Debt to Pleasure) and while both were very different from each other, they were both excellent. I've heard mixed reviews on The Wall and given your comments, I'll probably just wait for his next one or read from his backlist.

>97 thorold: No, it isn't just you. The lines of the jacket make that photo look like one of my Dad's photos from the navy (49-53).

Have you read A peace to end all peace by David Fromkin? I read this a few years ago and found it eye opening and helpful. I assume the emphasis in A line in the sand is on the unclassifed documents that have been recently made available.

>110 markon: No, I don't know the Fromkin. I see he gets criticised for his strong focus on British influence in the Middle East; Barr is mostly about Anglo-French rivalry, which I suppose is one step better. I will probably look for a book by an Arab historian, if and when I get around to a deeper dive into Middle Eastern history.

---

>102 thorold: A long time ago, among my clever friends from college, it became a standard joke to refer to each other's continuing failure to produce any deathless works of genius by saying "if you were Mozart..." — which soon enough turned into "...you'd have been dead by now". Scary to think that we've now all outlived Beethoven (and, as far as I know, none of us has been revealed as a genius yet...).

In that context, it's a good moment to read a writer who didn't get his big breakthrough until he was nearly seventy (to be fair, he already had a distinguished career as a director on stage and TV behind him by then). He obviously didn't believe in retirement, and carried on to produce more than thirty Montalbano books before his death last summer.

La paura di Montalbano (2002) by Andrea Camilleri (Italy, 1925-2019)

  

This was Camilleri's fourth collection of short stories featuring Commissario Montalbano, falling about a quarter of the way through the series. There are three short pieces and three novella-length stories. The short pieces all feel rather slight, less like stories than extended jokes navigating their way to a predetermined punchline, but they are quite fun because two of them take Montalbano out of his normal environment, one on a business trip to Rome and another on a holiday (at Livia's insistence) in the Alps.

The longer pieces give us all the elements we look for in a Montalbano story — Sicilian scenery, good food, pretty girls, bizarre conversations with policeman Catarella, in-fighting between different police and justice departments, and a hint of organised crime and political corruption. Unlike the TV series, we don't get to see Montalbano taking his shirt off in every episode, but there is a little bit of male nudity to enjoy here and there.

"Ferito a morte" has the Commissario investigating the murder of a moneylender. The man's plucky young niece has managed to fire a shot at the escaping assassin with her uncle's revolver, and the wounded man is found dead a short way from the scene, so it looks like an open-and-shut case, but Montalbano isn't so sure.

In "Il quarto segreto" an anonymous letter makes Montalbano take an interest in a building-site accident, where there seems to be a Mafia connection. But the construction site isn't in his jurisdiction: his police colleagues are dismayed and horrified to see him working together — apparently quite amicably — with an officer of the Carabinieri. There's clearly something fishy going on. Catarella gets more than his usual walk-on part in this one, and we start to see him as a more rounded character — slightly autistic and not so much the village-idiot role he has in the earlier books.

"Meglio lo scuro" is a cold-case story: a priest takes Montalbano to see a dying elderly woman, but she doesn't survive long enough to repeat to him what she's already told the priest under the seal of the confessional. He has to work out for himself what exactly it was that she was involved in fifty years ago, and whether any further action from the police is needed, or it's better to leave the whole thing in the dark.

>104 thorold: >108 dchaikin: — Thinking about this made me want to read a contemporary account of National Service, so I dug out this one, which I haven't read for a long time.

A big difference from Lanchester struck me immediately: the characters in The Wall have the idea that they are doing a purposeful job, even if they don't like the way it's being done, whilst Lodge's characters (and just about everyone else I've heard talking about National Service) see their time in the army as completely pointless. They're not being "prepared for war" in any obvious way, they are just there to keep an inefficient and ludicrously overstaffed machine running.

Interesting that Lodge doesn't pick up on the one cogent argument in favour of conscription that more recent commentators sometimes make: a democratic state that relies on a conscript army full of the unwilling sons (and daughters, nowadays) of the middle class has to use it far more prudently than one with a professional army recruited mostly from the poorest sectors of society. Obviously that's a post-Vietnam way of looking at things.

Ginger, you're barmy (1962, 1982) by David Lodge (UK, 1935- )

  

This was Lodge's second novel, drawing on his experience of National Service in the late fifties (but written when he was safely out of the clutches of the army again and conscription itself was being wound down). It tells the story of two young men who do their military service after studying English at London University. Mike ("Ginger") is a rebel, Catholic, red-haired, of Irish descent and always ready to challenge authority, whilst Jonathan, the narrator, is more of a survivor, an agnostic who is ready to learn to compromise his principles a bit to get what he wants from life. He's got a First where the cleverer Mike messed up his degree, and we soon realise that he's also ended up with Mike's girl.

The army is predictably awful, with a basic training programme at Catterick that focuses on breaking the spirit of the conscripts and occupying them with mindless and pointless tasks, mainly involving cleaning and polishing their equipment. The classic example are the boots, supplied by the manufacturer with a matt, waterproof finish that has presumably been specified for practical reasons by the army itself, but which have to be polished to a high-gloss finish to pass kit inspections. Naturally, the polishing process requires the soldiers to maltreat the leather in ways that destroy the waterproofing and ruin the boots for actual use. There is only the most minimal attention to actual military training, and everything takes at least three times as long as it needs to.

Graduates or school-leavers going on to university (for some reason, those going to Oxford and Cambridge do their military service beforehand, others go to university first) are automatically flagged as "potential officers", which means going into a selection process where they have to compete to show "leadership"

Whatever this mysterious quality might be, I was fairly certain that I did not possess it. At Wozbee it was apparently assessed by one’s ability to handle a knife and fork and to cross a seven-foot ditch with two three-foot planks. I did not see myself excelling in either of these tests.

Mike and Jonathan make a minor gesture of rebellion by asking not to be considered for this process. For Mike this is the first of a series of acts that will get him into more and more trouble with the authorities and eventually mess up his life completely; for Jonathan it marks the start of his recognition that army life is something one can survive, if one searches out the most comfortable path through it:

All human activity was useless, but some kinds were more pleasant than others. The Army had taught me that much philosophy.

The book seems to be largely a response to the politician quoted in the last chapter extolling the virtues of National Service just as it is being wound down "National Service has done much to teach the younger generation independence, initiative, responsibility,—qualities which have stood this country in good stead in two World Wars." For Lodge, as for most of his contemporaries who actually did National Service in peacetime, what the army taught them was how to look busy while avoiding actual work as far as possible, and how to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. If they came from an upper-class background, it taught them that arrogant self-assurance will get you everywhere; if they did not, it taught them that most people in positions of in authority were arrogant, brainless incompetents. And that you were free to think what you liked of them, as long as you saluted and said "Yes, sir!"

A book that is tilting against a long-dead institution, and with a certain period quaintness (in his afterword, Lodge is visibly amused at the way the publishers of this 1980s reissue have "restored" the pre-Chatterley bowdlerising of swearwords of the first edition — "fugg" and "c—t", etc. — which the 1970s edition had happily turned back into the real swearwords they were meant for). But very interesting.

>111 thorold: "I will probably look for a book by an Arab historian, if and when I get around to a deeper dive into Middle Eastern history."

One book I found extremely enlightening, although not entirely on topic, as I recall the book, re: the colonial influences of the European powers, was The Dream Palace of the Arabs: a Generation's Odyssey by Fouad Ajami. The one and only LT review on the book's work page is by yours truly, so I'll just let that stand as my explanation of the book's value. It was published in 1999.

>Thanks for that recommendation. I definitely would like to read something from a local, non-European perspective.

>113 rocketjk: Thanks! I might have a look at that. Although Ajami looks like a very American kind of Arab, maybe not much more representative than the Mancunian Lebanese Albert Hourani, whose big book I read a long time ago and should maybe re-read...

>115 thorold: Yes, Ajami's is certainly not the only perspective on relatively modern-day events you'd want to have.

>104 thorold: catching up...

But the book as a whole doesn't seem to work very well, probably because of Lanchester's pessimistic — but not unreasonable — refusal to imagine a sustainable future for his characters.

This, I think, is what fuels my usual reluctance to rush to read dystopian novels. Isn't it generally quite a pessimistic genre? Even if there's an ending where things look like they'll work themselves out, I'm still left with an overall aftertaste of mild depression after reading one (and this from she who has just given Blindness 4.5 stars).

>117 AlisonY: Yes, I have trouble with dystopias too.

This was a more-or-less random pick in the library the other day. I didn't have a bag with me, so I could only borrow something that would fit in a pocket: this was a recent short novel by a female German writer new to me, that mentioned "terrorism" and "Wittgenstein" in the blurb on the back cover, so it sounded worth a try,

(This has been translated into French, but I don't think it's available in English yet)

Hier sind Drachen (2017) by Husch Josten (Germany, 1969- )

  

Husch Josten is a journalist who has worked in Köln, Paris and London. She's written several novels, of which the two most recent, Hier sind Drachen and Land sehen, seem to have attracted quite a bit of critical attention.

Caught up in a security lockdown at Heathrow Airport, Caren gets into conversation with the passenger sitting next to her, who is reading Wittgenstein. She's a journalist, on her way to Paris to report on the aftermath of the terror attacks of 13 November 2015, whilst he turns out to be a philosopher who has written about the role of coincidence and self-fulfilling prophecy in the prediction of terror attacks. They get into a deep, theoretical conversation about the nature and purpose of storytelling, and the man shares his notebook with her, but then there is an explosion, and it turns out that a lot of Caren's ideas about coincidence and about the story she is living in herself need to be revised.

An intriguing little philosophical diversion, with a surprising amount of interesting things to say about the modern world and the way we perceive it. Josten has obviously learnt a lot from her own journalistic background about packing a story into the minimum number of words. A writer to follow up!

---

Essay by Michael Braun about Josten's work on the occasion of her winning the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung prize in 2019: https://www.kas.de/de/web/die-politische-meinung/artikel/detail/-/content/wittge...

This sounds interesting. I've wishlisted the French version (Wittgenstein à l’aéroport).

>112 thorold: Lodge's book sounds fun, but not sure it will give me insight into Lanchester's The Wall... Also, >118 thorold: enjoyed your little insight into Josten. Someone to keep in mind, when she is translated into English.

>120 dchaikin: No, it might be interesting background, but I doubt it really holds the key. The puzzle of The Wall isn't really the conscription element, but making sense of what (if anything) he's trying to do with the last part of the story.

Another Juli Zeh novel. This is the one immediately before Leere Herzen (>83 thorold:). It's been translated to French, Dutch and Italian, at least, but apparently not English as yet.

Unterleuten (2016) by Juli Zeh (Germany, 1974- )

  

A small community in Brandenburg is thrown into turmoil by a proposal to build wind turbines, and the unhealed wounds of old conflicts get mixed up with new tensions between the different priorities of old residents and incomers. Sounds like every novel about a fictional small community you've ever read. That this doesn't turn into an East German version of Midsomer Murders or The Archers is mainly due to the very unusual, but effective, way Zeh structures the book: the 61 chapters (plus an epilogue) rotate between eleven main viewpoint characters, so that the idiot/bigot/evil manipulator of the previous chapter becomes the sympathetic centre-point of this one, and a background irrelevance in the next one. It sounds disorientating, and it is rather: this is a rural tragedy with eleven different people competing to fail most spectacularly, and most of them end up with more soap than opera. It seems to be making the point that tragedy is a form that only exists on the stage, not in real life.

But of course there is also a lot of clever observation of how small communities work, of the problems specific to rural East Germany after the fall of the DDR, and of the classic dilemma of how to manage the countryside against the conflicting claims for it to be a food- and energy-factory, a museum, an unspoilt nature-reserve, and a recreation-ground for city-dwellers. Zeh has fun showing us how confusing it is for outsiders that the villagers of Unterleuten(*) insist that business should be done face-to-face, that deals should be arranged with the minimum possible involvement of lawyers and officials, and that barter or (social) credit are better than cash. The person in the strongest position in the village is the one who is owed most favours. Incomers like the bird-warden (and downscaled academic) Gerhard completely fail to see this, and put themselves in the wrong by bombarding their neighbours with official letters.

Very enjoyable, in a dark sort of way: the 600+ pages flew past.

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(*) There's a running joke that, as in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire, many of the place-names in this part of Brandenburg, although made up of conventional German place name elements, turn out to have double meanings: Unterleuten, if read as "unter Leuten", means "among people".

Juli Zeh sounds like a good author to try, if I ever finish Herkunft. Thanks for the excellent introduction.

>122 RidgewayGirl: ...and I should get around to Herkunft one day too!

Meanwhile, a mini-project that got pushed back up the to-read list thanks to last week's Beethoven-orgy:

One of the most famous music-literature chains starts with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47, of 1803, usually known as the Kreutzer Sonata after the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, its dedicatee.

Tolstoy used a performance of this sonata as the climactic event of his 1889 adultery-novella The Kreutzer Sonata.

In 1923, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček took Tolstoy's novella as the starting-point for his String Quartet No.1 "The Kreutzer Sonata". Since he was desperately in love with a married woman, the much-younger Kamila Stösslová, it's fair to assume that his viewpoint wasn't quite the same as Tolstoy's.

Needless to say, lots of people at different times have had a go at continuing this sequence. Last November I saw a Dutch adaptation of Laura Wade's play Kreutzer vs. Kreutzer, in which scenes from a story loosely based on Tolstoy's novella were acted out — first from the wife's point of view and then from the lover's — in between the movements of a performance of both pieces of music. That made me want to re-read the Tolstoy, but it's taken a while to get around to it. In the meantime, I've come across another short novel based on this idea.

< Go away and listen to the Beethoven before reading further >

The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) by Leo Tolstoy (Russia, 1828-1910), translated by Aylmer Maude

  

I listened to this on audio, read by Jonathan Oliver, but it turned out to be the same Maude translation as my little World's Classics hardback, marked "Bolton Libraries: withdrawn from stock October 1980". Which is probably when I last read it.

During an interminable Russian train journey, the narrator gets into conversation with a man called Pózdnyshev who has been mocking his travelling companions' modern ideas about love, marriage and the emancipation of women. As far as he is concerned, "love" is an illusion, sex is degrading and filthy, and marriage a legalised form of prostitution. The only way men and women can live together in a fair and equitable society is by abolishing sex altogether. If that means the end of the human race, then so be it: after all, as Christians we are supposed to be looking forward to the Last Days, aren't we?

Obviously he's not quite all there, but he has a story to tell, and it's going to be a long night, so the narrator settles in to take notes. Pózdnyshev describes how, after a typically debauched youth, he made a typical bourgeois marriage with a Pure Young Woman who had been brought up by her typical bourgeois parents with the sole aim in life of finding a good husband. Believing their conditioning they thought themselves in love, but in practice living together turned out to be sheer hell, mitigated only by occasional bouts of physical pleasure in between pregnancies.

Then, on the advice of a clearly malignant physician, the wife decides to stop having babies and takes up her interest in music again. An old friend of Pózdnyshev, a violinist, turns up. The jealous Pózdnyshev catches them playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata together. This is music so dripping with animal passion that it actually renders sex superfluous, and poor Pózdnyshev convinces himself that he has no alternative to stabbing his wife to death. With hindsight, he realises that wasn't such a good idea, but it's too late now...

Fair enough, and a deranged murderer is pretty much the ultimate unreliable narrator, so we can be suitably chilled and horrified and move on. But before we manage to put the book down, Tolstoy himself has stepped into frame in an Afterword, telling us that he is aware we will think it strange but, all the same, he has thought it over and he's 100% behind Pózdnyshev's crazy ideas about the desirability of us all adopting celibacy. St Paul was only halfway to the right answer. And while he's got our attention, he would also like to invite us to consider taking up vegetarianism and manual labour. It will make us feel so much better.

I don't remember it being so off the wall last time I read it: perhaps I was more inclined to take Russian sages seriously when I was younger? At least we can all be thankful that none of our (grand-)parents followed Tolstoy's advice!

< Now listen to the Janáček >

Kreutzersonate (2001; The Kreutzer Sonata) by Margriet de Moor (Netherlands, 1941- )

  

Margriet de Moor trained as a singer and pianist at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague; she's been writing fiction successfully since the early 1980s.

This short novel riffs off Tolstoy's story of the same title, giving us a modern-day story of music and jealousy with a rather different sort of ending from Tolstoy's. As in Tolstoy, the narrative frame is given by the narrator meeting the husband on a journey: in this case, though, they meet on a succession of plane journeys to music events over the course of a number of years.

Marius van Vlooten is a music critic, blind as a result of a suicide attempt at university when his girlfriend ran off to Venezuela with another man. The narrator first meets him when they are on their way to a music summer school in Bordeaux, and there introduces Marius to his student friend Suzanne, now first violinist in a string quartet that is working on Janáček's "Kreutzer Sonata" Quartet. They obviously hit it off, because next time they meet, years later at Schiphol, it turns out that Marius and Suzanne have been married for some time, but their marriage is in trouble, because Marius suspects Suzanne of deceiving him with the viola-player in her quartet...

Of course, de Moor isn't quite as concerned as Tolstoy with big general principles about sex and marriage; she has time to develop the relationship between music — Janáček in particular — and real life, and look into what it must be like for Marius to go through life knowing that everyone else can see and he can't, and to feed us some interesting little observations along the way about air travel, the musical world, and so on. I loved her little sketch of Dutch musical life in the sixties: the socially-repressed but musically experimental students at the Royal Conservatorium versus the unfortunate men of the Amsterdam University music department who had to spend all their time plotting revolutions and went in constant fear of sexual harassment from their women's-libber colleagues. No doubt grossly unfair, but fun!

An enjoyable little love story with an engaging musical theme.

Enjoying your review (and mostly lurking). The Tolstoy sounds.... I'm reaching for the right word... no, crazy keeps springing to mind most. But fun crazy! I can't believe I've still not read anything by him. Anna Karenina has been on my shelf for so long, and I don't know why I keep avoiding it as clearly most people love it. I'm guessing The Kreutzer Sonata isn't the best place to start with him?

>124 AlisonY: Others probably have better ideas than I about Tolstoy: I've hardly read him at all since my teens. War and peace is the one I really remember enjoying, but that might have something to do with the way I read it to take my mind off Finals...

Back to string quartets: An equal music is the classic string-quartet novel, of course, and it will probably come up for a re-read some time, but in the meantime here's another Dutch musician-novelist (Enquist is also a poet, and under her real name a psychoanalyst). I've read several other novels by her already. I particularly enjoyed her Goldberg-novel Counterpoint. Not so long ago I was at a concert by a young Dutch string quartet, and was pleased to find that they had commissioned her to write a set of micro-essays for the programme notes on why we should still listen to Haydn.

Kwartet (2014) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

In a nameless City that — as usual in Enquist — looks, sounds and smells very like Amsterdam, the friends Hugo (1st violin; director of a doomed performing-arts centre), Jochem (viola; violin-builder), Carolien (cello; GP and Jochem's wife) and Heleen (2nd violin; nurse in Carolien's practice), meet most Fridays on Hugo's houseboat to play string quartets together. Carolien also still goes regularly for lessons with her old cello teacher, Reinier, now in his eighties and very frail.

They all have major problems in their personal lives, which they don't quite like to ask for help with. And they all find the work they are doing less and less valued in the new order of things around them. Healthcare isn't what it used to be, no-one even dares ask what the situation is like with care for the elderly, the City and the government have made it clear that funding classical music is very low on their list of priorities, and there's a major corruption scandal coming to trial in the City, always provided the glittering new court building doesn't fall down first.

The only thing that keeps them moderately sane and functioning is to spend a couple of hours immersing themselves in Dvořák, Mozart or Schubert, and occasionally sharing that pleasure with a few friends who are prepared to listen to them. Needless to say, Fate isn't too happy about this cultural escapism, and has a nasty surprise in store for them.

This should be a very depressing book: on the surface, Enquist clearly means us to see that the only reasonable response to the modern world is thoroughgoing pessimism. But it rather oddly isn't. Admittedly, the power of music can't solve the world's problems, nor can it provide us with a proper answer for our own private sorrows and fears, but somehow the assertion of its power to alleviate these things at least temporarily leaves us with a little glimmer of hope.

>123 thorold: >125 thorold:

Coincidentally I just started a week ago working on Kreutzer's violin etudes with my teacher. I played violin from elementary to high school but never had a teacher so I'm only now getting to classic etudes (and scales!) now! A little late in the game but interesting nonetheless.

So it's interesting to see some violin related books on LT. I've not been against reading violin books but I've never stumbled on any and haven't made an effort to search them out.

>126 lilisin: Great! The Tolstoy’s more about the supposed effect of music than about actually playing it, but you might like the other two, and the Seth novel. (Not sure if Kwartet is available in English, but the de Moor definitely is)

Another one I read not long ago is Take nothing with you by Patrick Gale, a British musician-novelist. About someone who re-starts cello in adult life, with a lot about learning technique and about the relationship with the teacher.

Violin novels, according to tagmash — seems to be mostly Sherlock Holmes: https://www.librarything.com/tag/fiction,+violin

This is a very short novel I started reading on my e-reader before Christmas, then put aside for some reason. It's another one I found out about because practically everyone on CR was reading it at one point: the English version was on the Booker International shortlist and in the Tournament of Books. So very much a case of late bandwagon-jumping. But good to find out about a female Latin American writer — not a category that's over-represented in my reading.

Distancia de rescate (2014; Fever dream) by Samanta Schweblin (Argentina, 1978- )

  

Amanda and her young daughter Nina are spending a summer holiday in a village in the country (the old-fashioned sort of holiday where dad comes out from the city at the weekends). Amanda is a nervous mother, constantly aware of the length of the invisible cord attaching her to her toddler — the "rescue distance" of the Spanish title. And she's all the more frightened when her neighbour, Clara, tells her a strange tale about how a local traditional healer saved the life — but apparently not the soul — of her son David. Despite herself, Amanda has come to believe that there is something very evil, in a horror-film kind of way, going on in the village, involving children with strange deformities, and the unexplained deaths of farm animals. As David patiently interviews her in her hospital bed after she falls ill herself, we start to realise that there is a horrifyingly simple, and quite rational explanation for all this. He keeps trying to steer Amanda towards seeing it, but she can't help veering back to the irrational.

Clever, and written in a very original way (and with a lot of characteristically Porteño vocabulary that defeated the dictionary on my Kobo...) — I found myself reading this as more a book about parenthood than about pollution catastrophes. And of course about the struggle between the rational and the irrational in our minds when we come under stress.

>128 thorold: This sounds right up my alley, and it's available from my library!

>128 thorold: I bought an English language copy of Fever Dream right after returning from Argentina, having somehow found myself looking at the Schweblin shelf in a great Buenos Aires bookstore. It's on my short-stack TBR so I'll be reading it relatively soon,

This is another e-book I've had on the go for a while, mostly because I've been reading library books at home and not travelling much the last few weeks. I don't remember exactly how I came to it, but I think it was after reading an article by Davies in the Guardian (review of another author's book?).

In an odd sort of way, it's a counterpart to the Schweblin book — she's trying to use an irrational, subjective format to reveal more about physical events than a scientific account might; Davies is trying to make a scientific, objective analysis of irrational, subjective behaviour...

Nervous states : how feeling took over the world (2018) by William Davies (UK, 1976- )

  

Davies teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, London.

This is essentially an account of the breakdown of the scientific, rational, objective way of looking at the world that western society has been developing since the early seventeenth century, or how we got from Hobbes and Descartes to Trump and Facebook.

Instead of taking the primacy of rational expertise and scientific method for granted, Davies goes back to look at where they come from and why we needed them, and then at how some of the most important ideas it relies on have been undermined. Inter alia, Descartes's concept of the objective, rational mind as something separate from the subjective body falls in the light of modern developments in physiology and psychology, and the parallel development of artificial intelligence; the ideas of Hobbes about our need for an authoritarian regulator to enforce the rule of law are undermined by the ideology of free-market capitalism and by the disproportionate economic and political power of a few wealthy capitalists (who are in effect their own regulators), whilst the distinction between peace and war that was at the heart of Enlightenment ideas of civil order has come into question, not only as a result of terrorism and revolutions but also from the increasing tendency to use the language and attitude of war in areas that ought to belong to civil life. The speed at which knowledge moves and decisions have to be taken in the internet world are more akin to Clausewitzian war than to civil peace, as well.

One of the things it's most difficult to grasp if you've been brought up in the rational, liberal tradition is that very often people don't act in the self-interested way that Hobbes and common sense say they ought to. Self-harm is a classic response of the powerless to their powerlessness, and it happens at the ballot-box just as much as it does in the off-licence or the pharmacy. Inequality isn't just an economic fact, either, but it is often an existential one: Davies draws attention to the figures that show how life-expectancy in the poorer sectors of society is declining in many developed countries, especially in the US. And how a disproportionate number of the people who voted for Trump have chronic illnesses.

Davies doesn't suggest any easy answers, but he does insist that we can't turn back the clock to an Age of Enlightenment rationalism any more than populists can turn the clock back to an imagined age of national supremacy and prosperity. You can't win arguments against people who don't accept the terms of rational debate, a new strategy is needed. He sees a kind of glimmer of hope in the realisation that we will soon be forced into concerted action against the climate emergency: like a war, this stands the chance of giving people a united purpose and a willingness to accept collective decisions. Oddly enough, I don't find the thought of wet feet very comforting...

Still, this is a useful, well-written book, that seems to make sense of a lot of stuff that doesn't actually make sense.

'Eye for an eye, tooth, for a tooth' is the basic rule that is followed in soxiety for the returning of visits.
**
'My dear sister-in-law, may I make You acquainted with Lady H. ?'
**
Never look at the clock when entertaining guests.
**
Do not expect your neighbour at table to admire your beautiful eyes if he still has a pheasant's wing on his plate.
**
If you have made a mistake when playing the piano, play on - no-one will notice .
**
As a lady, do not scatter the ballroom with the Flowers of your headdress or pieces of your dress.
**
Never eat in the street.
**
No lady will ever comprehend why she should behave according to traffic regulation, and not the regulation according to her.
**

I found this on a badly-typed half-sheet in a folder with a lot of other old stuff. I think it must have been excerpts from an old etiquette book I was using for touch-typing practice ca. 1975 - that would explain the random capitals and why I spelled 'society' with an x. But it has a nicely random bizarreness about it.

Enjoyed reading your thread on the Kreutzer Sonata - which made me make a quick search amongst my classical music cd's - alas I will have to find a copy elsewhere - plenty on youtube I see.

>128 thorold: Fever Dream sounds great - that one's gone on the wish list. The Quartet sounded up my street too, but alas doesn't seem to be translated (yet).

>134 baswood: I've got used to Szeryng and Rubinstein, which is the one I have on LP (easy to find streaming too). The recent recording that seems to come up whenever someone asks for recommendations is Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazıl Say.

In Kreutzer vs. Kreutzer, Antje Weithaas performed her arrangement for string orchestra, which is an interestingly different way of hearing it and seems to work well: she's recorded that on CD with Camerata Bern.

---

From Beethoven to ... bees! As someone else was saying recently (was it Alison?) any reference to bees in a book-title these days seems to conjure up the nightmare world of the suburban book-club. But this one, spotted on the recent acquisitions table at the library, has a hornet on the cover, so I thought I'd give it a try...

L'amas ardent (2017) by Yamen Manaï (Tunisia, 1980- )

  

Yamen Manaï grew up in Tunis and now lives in Paris; this is his third novel, which has won a whole string of prizes (but as yet only two copies on LT).

A beekeeper in a small village in the mountains is alarmed when one of his hives is devastated by a ferocious attack of a kind he's never seen before; at the same time, the newly-established democracy in his country is overwhelmed by an authoritarian political-religious movement financed by foreign billionaires who've found that the combination of oil dollars and medieval religion is just what they need to hold on to the political power their grandfathers grabbed from the retreating Ottomans.

It turns out that Asian bees have learnt to defend themselves from hornets by forming a "burning swarm", clustering round the hornet until it is killed by its own body-heat. Can the North African ones be taught this strategy? And can we draw any parallels from that for civil life?

This is an engaging book, despite itself. The Don, the beekeeper, is a wonderful character, and Manaï does a very good job of taking us into the detail of his craft and into the menace of the Asian hornets (you may end up having nightmares about these...). The observation of village life and the author's very genuine anger at the extreme poverty and hardship the villagers have to put up with also comes over very well.

But the higher-level political satire comes over as crude and unsophisticated by comparison, even if its heart is obviously in the right place. It's not helped by a farcical Prologue in which a caricature Arab prince is making caricature deals on his supermodel-filled superyacht with a European media tycoon called Silvio Cannelloni, giving the impression that we're going to get something quite different from the quiet rural fable we actually do get. And there are other big structural faults in the book as well: major new characters are introduced without warning three-quarters of the way through, and then dropped again without their stories ever being resolved.

Worth reading, I think, but it could have done with a bit more work.

>136 thorold: I'd be interested in what's prompted the run on bee-related fiction over the years. This one sounds interesting enough, but noting the issues you highlighted so probably won't overly rush to read it.

>137 AlisonY: Hmmm. There's certainly plenty: https://www.librarything.com/tag/bees,+fiction

After The Wall, the Box...

Ben Jennings cartoon in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2020/feb/23/ben-jennings-on-bo...

>139 thorold: very good and the link to the previous cartoon about Pritti Patel is also on the mark, but you need to make the link to the Sex Pistols.

>140 baswood: My knowledge of punk is more-or-less confined to what I can remember from The Buddha of suburbia, but I managed to catch the allusion.

Back to a great writer I only found out quite recently. After enjoying Scenes from village life and A tale of love and darkness last year, on to another of his best-known books, one that Alison was raving about quite recently. When I saw it was all about a bearded postgraduate in a duffel coat, it made me feel very nostalgic...

Judas (2014) by Amos Oz (Israel, 1939-2018) translated by Nicholas de Lange

  

In the Jerusalem winter of 1959-60, at the height of the duffel-coat era, the life of the hairy postgraduate Shmuel Ash seems to be falling apart. His girlfriend has decided to marry a hydrologist, his parents can't afford to support him any more, his research has run into the sand, and to cap it all, the socialist discussion group has broken up after an ideological dispute ("Among the four who split off were the two girls in the group, without whom there was no longer any point.").

The scene seems to be set for an old man to have a good time whimsically making fun of his younger self, but of course there is a lot more to it than that. Through Shmuel's research into "Jewish representations of Jesus" and his discussions with the old history teacher Gershom Wald, Oz draws us into thinking about the figure of Judas and the idea of the "betrayer", and sets up parallels with the father of Shmuel's landlady, a member of the Jewish Agency council who was ostracised for opposing Ben-Gurion's partition policy in 1947 and 1948, believing that the only secure future for the Jewish people was in seeking peaceful cohabitation with the Arabs. Where is the line between an act of betrayal and an act of conscience? Does it make a difference whether history proves you right or wrong?

A lovely, very literary novel, with a quotable phrase on every page, a wealth of learning and cross-references deployed not to impress but to make you question what you thought you knew, and a lot of very enjoyable historical colour about Israel as it was sixty years ago.

>141 thorold: So glad you enjoyed it too!

>142 AlisonY: Yes, I have a feeling it's going to be one of my books of the year!

Meanwhile, I remembered that there's only a month to go before the next Reading Globally theme read, on Southern African writing, starts, and I need to have at least something prepared. So I made a big pot of soup and invited a few South Africans round so that I could pick their brains. They turned up with the contents of their TBR shelf. It wasn't quite what I had in mind, but it's as good a place as any to start thinking about Southern Africa, and there are at least two or three authors there that I already had in my sights, and several others I know nothing about :-)



Rumours of rain by André Brink
* A dry white season by André Brink
Karoo morning by Guy Butler
* The story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
My traitors heart by Rian Malan
Rainbow journey by Sipho Sepamla
The oral and beyond by Ruth Finnegan
* Dog heart: a memoir by Breyten Breytenbach
The Black People and Whence They Came: A Zulu View by Magema M Fuze (first book to be published in the Zulu language, 1922)
Fighting for hope by Carl Niehaus
* Dusklands by J M Coetzee (this is lying on top of a 19th century novel in Dutch by Pierre Uys)
Crossing over: stories for a new South Africa compiled by Linda Rode & Jakes Gerwel
Truths drawn in jest
The heart of the hunter by Laurens van der Post
Not in the picture: * Year of the uprising by Stanlake Samkange (Zimbabwe)

I've borrowed the ones marked with asterisks for the moment. Looking forward to getting started in April!

>143 thorold: I would add Alan Paton. I've read and admired both Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope.

>144 rocketjk: Don’t worry, that’s just a fairly random first iteration: Paton’s definitely on my list, and there are quite a few big beasts I’ve read and/or already know about who will be on the agenda — not least Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head. And also some more fringe figures the same friends introduced me to, including Herman Charles Bosman and Pieter-Dirk Uys. Watch this space...

Coetzee I have a love / hate relationship with. When I look back on what I've read by him it feels thought-provoking and admirable, but I'm never 100% sure that I enjoy it at the time. Disgrace sticks in my head in particular - again, whether for the right reasons or not I'm unsure.

Damon Galgut I would also throw out as another option. Not The Imposter, which I didn't enjoy at all, but The Good Doctor or In a Strange Room. I think you might enjoy his writing style.

>146 AlisonY: Thanks, Galgut sounds interesting.

I enjoyed Foe and Coetzee's autofiction trilogy (Boyhood, Youth, Summertime) but also remember not enjoying Disgrace. I was warned that Dusklands isn't much fun, but "essential if you want to understand..."

Back to my library pile, with a Venezuelan author new to me:

Patria o muerte (2015; The Last Days of El Comandante) by Alberto Barrera Tyszka (Venezuela, 1960- )

  

Alberto Barrera Tyszka wrote one of the first biographies of Hugo Chávez, in 2005, so it's perhaps a little bit unexpected that he chose fiction as the medium in which to write about the President's death. But it isn't a totally crazy idea: by framing the book as a novel and looking at Chávez from the point of view of a wide range of characters from different social backgrounds and with different political opinions, he can bring out the difficulty of pinning down a character who was so focussed on the projection of his own image. We follow the situation in Venezuela between the announcement in June 2011 that Chávez was being treated for cancer and his death in March 2013. Amongst others, we watch him from the point of view of a retired doctor, who sees himself as politically disengaged but becomes interested in Chávez as a suffering human being (the last thing the President wants the world to imagine him as); the doctor's very anti-revolutionary wife; two journalists, one Venezuelan and one from the US, who are both finding it very difficult to write books about Chávez; a Cuban guest-worker trying to get herself and her family out of the island for good; a middle-class woman who is mostly just concerned about about getting the tenants out of her apartment; a working-class woman who has become a prisoner of her fear of street crime; three militant Chavistas from a poor barrio on the fringes of Caracas; and a couple of young children who happen to have got caught up in the middle of it all.

And, intercut between all of this, Barrera keeps turning back to the Venezuelan crowd, mostly as seen through TV reports, whose collective reaction to the President's illness has quite a different character from that of any individual. It's striking how often he needs religious language to deal with this: Chávez seems to be comparing himself to Christ almost as often as he is projecting himself as the new Simon Bolivar.

Very interesting, but perhaps too short a book really to develop all these themes — we are left rather frustrated at the end by the way none of these individual stories is resolved after the President's death. Presumably Barrera wants us to realise that the country's fate at this point is just as undecided...

And another of those snipe-like changes of course...

Yesterday I was browsing idly on the BBC iplayer, and came across a Horizon programme from 1981, "Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", which turned out to be a lovely uninterrupted 50-minute film of Feynman sitting in an armchair talking to camera about his background, his work as a physicist, what being a scientist means, his approach to teaching, and so on. I loved his admission that he always pretended to be completely irresponsible so far as teaching and administrative matters were concerned, so that the university would leave him in peace to do actual physics...

That reminded me that I had this little book, given to me by a physicist friend not long after it came out, at a time when I was rather more preoccupied with literary theory than with quantum physics(*), and thus never properly read it. Fortunately it came into my library long before the days of the official TBR pile...

QED - The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985) by Richard P Feynman (USA, 1918-1988)

  

... since there are obviously more people here tonight than there were before, some of you haven't heard the other two lectures and will find this lecture almost incomprehensible. Those of you who have heard the other two lectures will also find this lecture incomprehensible, but you know that's all right: as I explained in the first lecture, the way we have to explain Nature is generally incomprehensible to us.

This is a transcript of a set of four lectures Feynman gave to a "non-technical" audience in 1983, with the goal of giving them an intelligible account of quantum electrodynamics, one of the most conceptually-difficult bits of physics, an area that is normally reserved for graduate students, and the field in which he had earned his Nobel prize.

It's the kind of challenge that Feynman obviously loved, and he rose to it with enthusiasm, taking care to make sure the audience realised that what physicists are trying to do is not so much to arrive at a philosophical "understanding" of the how or why of the physical universe, as to attempt to find mathematical tools that give them a reasonably good chance of predicting the numbers that will come out of an experiment. By the time we get down to the scale on which quantum physics operates, we don't have the mental equipment to make any kind of imaginative sense of the phenomena that are being described, and those mathematical tools are all we have. But that's perfectly OK, as long as they work we can use them, we don't need to waste time trying to visualise what they represent. And when they don't work, it starts to get interesting and we can do more physics...

Feynman takes us through the interactions of photons and electrons in an astonishingly painless way in the first three lectures, then in the fourth he sketches in the missing part, what happens in the nucleus.

Another of the really great science writers. A pleasure to read, even if it doesn't really put you into a position to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron...

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(*) It would be tempting to make a neat analogy here, and say something to the effect that literary theory is rather similar to quantum physics, in that it's a set of rules mostly contrary to common-sense and impossible to understand, which can nevertheless make useful predictions about certain kinds of real-world problems. But that would be to risk being torn to shreds by the people who really know what they are talking about in one or other of these two fields...

I’ve enjoyed catching up with your thread and reading your reviews (you managed a much more coherent review of Distancia de rescate than I did), but what I really want to know is how you come to have a book from Bolton libraries (>123 thorold:), being from Bolton myself.

>150 rachbxl: Small world!

>121 thorold: For anyone not convinced about Unterleuten, my mother's been reading it as well and declares herself a big fan!

I'm doing a bit of catching up and I found some interesting and diverse reads!
Adding some to my wishlist, in particular Wittgenstein à l'aéroport and Patria o muerte, I have another book on Venezuela to read soon, but this one seems quite interesting as well!

I'm in the middle of a couple of other books but seem to have slowed to a crawl in both of them, so a quick in-between read from the TBR shelf, my third dip into B. S. Johnson. (I still have his book-in-a-box, The unfortunates, the one he's brandishing in the author-photo below, waiting for me...)

Christie Malry's own double-entry (1973) by B. S. Johnson (UK, 1933-1973)

  

In what would be his last book to be published in his lifetime, Johnson deliberately goes back to the early days of English fiction, with jokey chapter summaries — "Chapter XX: Not the Longest Chapter in this Novel" turns out to be only three lines long — and both the narrator and the characters repeatedly remind us that we are in a work of fiction. When asked by his supervisor why he had arranged his mother's funeral so soon after her death, Christie replies "There wasn't any more time. This is a very short novel." At times, the characters stop off to argue with the author — 'you shouldn't be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it' — and at other times the narrator insists to us that there is no independent reality they exist in. If it were only a few hundred pages longer and set in Yorkshire, it would be Tristram Shandy.

But the central structural device of the book goes even further back than that: office-worker Christie Malry reviews his success or failure in life by means of a balance-sheet, just as Robinson Crusoe did. But he takes it a few notches further: where Crusoe used the balance-sheet to demonstrate to himself, against all reason and common-sense, that he was relatively fortunate and should be content with what Fate had delivered, Christie's balance-sheet consistently shows that his account with "Them" is in debit. He tries to resolve this by contriving acts of revenge — against his employers, the state, the world, the universe — that gradually escalate from minor acts of office sabotage (an order for "5 cartons of carbon paper" modified to read "5 tons...") to large-scale acts of terrorism. The latter probably aren't quite as funny now as they were in 1973, when bomb-scares were still something of an amusing novelty for most of us, but it's pretty clear that this isn't a novel that's meant to be read realistically.

As usual, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle wit, a good deal of entertaining sex, and some learned references (lots of citations from Brecht and from Luca Pacioli, the "father of book-keeping", but also an epigraph from Széll Zsuzsa, a literary critic so impressively obscure that he still only has Wikipedia pages in Hungarian and Esperanto!). Great fun!

I managed to finish another audiobook, which turned out to be shorter than I expected (there should have been a clue in the title...):

Fascism : a very short introduction (2002, 2014) by Kevin Passmore (UK, 1950- )

  

Passmore is professor of history at Cardiff, he's published extensively on the history of facist and far-right movements.

This is clearly a book aimed particularly at students, and seems to achieve its brevity by compressing its contents rather than thinning them out, so it wasn't the easiest thing to listen to as an audiobook whilst busy with other activities. But it overlaps quite heavily with other things I've been reading over the last couple of months, so I think I was able to grasp the essentials...

Passmore spends quite a while dealing with the problem of definitions. The two clear historical examples, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, differed in important ways from each other, and both also changed considerably over the course of time. Other right-wing movements in Europe and elsewhere in the inter-war period often borrowed language, labels and ideas from the successful Italian and German movements, but differed considerably on things like the way they came to power (if they did), the extent to which they worked together with church, army, monarchy and mainstream conservatives, and even on whether or not their ultranationalism was based on racism (and if so, against which groups). Since World War II, the label "fascist" has been so tainted that no serious political movement (except the Italian Neo-fascists) has used it to define itself, whilst the rest of us have been happy to attach it to just about any political movement we didn't like. (Since the book was written in 2002 and only partly updated in 2014, it doesn't have much to say in detail about the current crop of far-right parties.)

Academic political scientists also use the term in conflicting and confusing ways. Passmore urges us to separate this essentially historical problem of definitions from the more important question of what we find morally repugnant in the programmes of far-right/nationalist/populist parties, which seems a helpful way of looking at things.

The other interesting point I took from the book is his identification of the common element between the ways Mussolini and Hitler came to power. In both cases a relatively modest electoral success was backed up by the (perceived) threat of large-scale civil disorder from the party's paramilitary organisations, which was enough to intimidate established parties into putting the extremists in power, and once in power the existing mobilisation of activists allowed the party to eliminate effective opposition very rapidly. None of the other movements of the 20s and 30s achieved this combination, and — so far — most of the modern far-right parties have shown no sign of trying to lock up their opponents and impose a single-party state. As Passmore says, this doesn't make their xenophobic rhetoric any less offensive, but it does mean that it probably isn't helpful to use their perceived similarity to Hitler and Mussolini as the core of our strategy for opposing them.

Probably a good book to read if you want to get the historical background clear in your mind, but rather superficial in its treatment of 21st century movements.

And another audiobook that was hanging around unfinished...

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that : selected writing (2014) by Ben Goldacre (UK, 1974- )

  

This selection of Goldacre's journalism touches on many alarming things, but possibly the most alarming is to realise how long it is since he stopped writing his "Bad Science" column in the Guardian — 2011! Where does the time go?

It is a testament to his skill as a writer that I remembered a very large proportion of these pieces from when I first read them in the Guardian or on his blog. But it was nice to come back to them, and to discover a few other pieces that were new to me, including things he published in the BMJ, the introduction to a government report on using evidence-based research in teaching, a prize-winning essay about treatment of heroin addiction from his college days and — rather unexpectedly — the foreword to the official guidebook of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway.

The general themes are what you would expect: tireless evangelising for scientific method, criticism of incompetent or sensationalist science journalism, and a certain amount of amused baiting of homeopaths, nutritionists, magnetism purveyors, and other kinds of quacks. But the main point is always to help us to get a critical understanding of how (medical) scientists go about doing research, and why it matters that they do it correctly and openly. Anyone who reads Goldacre's columns (or his previous books) is in a better position to ask the right questions of a newspaper piece that starts "Scientists have..." — I suspect there are quite a few working scientists who've brushed up their knowledge of experiment design after seeing him point out other people's mistakes, as well!

I came past a bookshop in Delft this morning and noticed that it seemed unusually busy: of course it's the opening of this year's Boekenweek. So, naturally, I bought a couple of Dutch books I didn't know I needed, to qualify for this year's gift, which turns out to have been commissioned from the biographer Annejet van der Zijl, who's probably best known for Sonny boy, the story of a Dutch-Surinamese couple who helped fugitives from the Nazis during WWII. Several of her books, including that one, have been translated into English.

Leon & Juliette (2020) by Annejet van der Zijl (Netherlands, 1962- )

  

The 2020 Boekenweek gift tells the (true) story of Leon Herckenrath, a young man who emigrated from the Netherlands to Charleston in 1818 and soon built up a successful shipping business there. He fell in love with a young slave, Juliette, who looked after him during an illness, and — contrary to local law and custom — he obtained her freedom and secretly married her before setting up house together. Naturally, although many of his white business colleagues in pre-Civil-War Charleston carried on sexual relations with slaves, they would have been horrified at the thought of associating with someone who was married to a free black woman — if it had come out, Leon's business would have been destroyed, and Juliette and the children would have been in serious physical danger. Nevertheless, he seems to have managed to keep up the pretence for a good ten years, before he started using his shipping connections to smuggle the family one by one out of Carolina to his mother's house in Monster (just south of The Hague).

Van der Zijl tells the story as a straightforward piece of journalistic non-fiction/family history (the Boekenweek format doesn't allow space for the necessary footnotes and references, so she has put those on her website), without going in for much in the way of novelistic reconstruction, which seems like a sensible choice: it's an interesting story that deserves to be told, but the source material is clearly quite thin, and van der Zijl wants us to know that, and she is also well-aware of the potential hazards of writing about the slave experience from a 21st century outsider's perspective. But it does leave you as a reader with a lot of unanswerable questions. It's obvious from what we know about Juliette and the children after they came to Holland, for instance, that the relationship between Leon and Juliette in later life must have been a partnership as equal as any mid-19th century marriage. But Leon bought Juliette's freedom when she was eleven, and married her three years later, whilst Juliette's mother and brothers were still slaves of Leon's former business partner — surely van der Zijl is overstating the case a little when she talks about Juliette's free choice to marry him? What life could she possibly have had in Charleston if she'd spurned his advances?

A nice little diversion, anyway. And I'm now curious to go and look at that family tomb which van der Zijl talks about...

Wow, am I behind on your thread!

>104 thorold: I last read Lancaster in the 90s, but The Wall is intriguing. I love a good dystopia.

>154 thorold: I have read several of the OXU's brief introduction books. Not sure I want more any more of this subject after the Albright book, but I'm glad to have your excellent review.

>156 thorold: The story certainly sounds interesting, but I'd probably share your concerns about thin sources and Juliette's "free" choice.

>156 thorold: I bought a couple of (...) books I didn't know I needed.
I love this sentence and I guess it applies to many of us here!

>158 raton-liseur: I suspect I must have borrowed it from someone, but it does seem to meet the case!

If anyone's curious, they were:
- Eens ging de zee hier tekeer: het verhaal van de Zuiderzee en haar kustbewoners by Eva Vriend — about the changes the people in communities around the Zuiderzee had to deal with when it was cut off from the sea in the 1930s

- Te hooi en te gras over het Engelse platteland en het Engelse kinderboek by Gerrit Jan Zwier — a Dutch anthropologist investigates a large island off the coast of Europe

>159 thorold: Some rather serious reading then!

I hope to have time to go to our regional book fair in Rennes in a week time, if it is not canceled due to the current epidemy, and I suspect I might find books I did not know I needed, I'll try to be as reasonnable as you were, after all, it's only two books more!

>160 raton-liseur: There's nothing like a good book fair for revealing unsuspected gaps in your library :-)

Another Montalbano story (cf. >111 thorold:) — but this is from towards the end of the series. 25 of 27, if I'm counting right.

La rete di protezione (2017; The safety net) by Andrea Camilleri (Italy, 1925-2019)

  

A Swedish film-crew have taken over the town of Vigata to make a fifties costume-drama, which leads to the welcome return of Ingrid, the Swedish rally driver we met in some of the early novels, now acting as translator and community-liaison for the film people. But of course the town is all at sixes and sevens, Montalbano's favourite restaurant is full of noisy foreigners, Mimì Augello has embarrassingly been caught taking a moonlit boat-trip with the Swedish leading lady, and worse, the general disruption seems to have caused a suspension of all normal criminal activity, leaving the police bored and frustrated.

Montalbano has even resorted to working on his backlog of paperwork, and is only too happy to investigate a minor oddity the Borough Engineer has discovered in his father's collection of Super-8 films, a puzzle that none but the most habituated of crime-novel addicts could possibly imagine has any connection with violent death. (We know better, of course...)

Then, some 150 pages into the book, when we have made our minds up that nothing is going to happen at all and Montalbano has made the supreme sacrifice and got on a plane to the North to visit his girlfriend, all hell breaks loose. There's been a shooting in a school in Vigata. To track down those responsible, Montalbano has to delve into the murky world of blogghi, tuiti, and fessibuc. Even with Catarella by his side to translate social-network American into Sicilian, we can tell it's not going to end well...

Camilleri tells us in a note that this is the first novel he's dictated rather than writing it himself, and that perhaps accounts for the rather rambling structure and the absence of much real mystery in the solutions to either of the two plotlines. But there are still plenty of nice jokes, a few sharp moral observations, lots of good food, and rather more Sicilian dialect than they would have got away with earlier in the series.

Not for newcomers to Montalbano, but addicts will find plenty to keep them happy.

Catching up on your thread - you've been busy as ever! The B.S. Johnson book caught my eye in particular - he's not an author I'm familiar with, and I'm even more intrigued since Googling him. One I might just have to visit soon.

>159 thorold: Those books by Eva Vriend and Gerrit Jan Zwier sound fascinating. Do you know whether they are available in English?

>163 sallypursell: No, doesn’t look like it. They are both quite recent, so it would be unlikely anyway, but they are also the kinds of books that — regrettably — tend to be very low in foreign publishers’ lists of books to acquire. Local history is perhaps rightly seen as an interest that isn’t likely to spread outside the range of the local language, and as for travel books, it’s probably cheaper and more profitable to commission a new one targeted to your own market than to get an existing one by an obscure foreigner translated. A shame, I really enjoy reading travel writing about places I know written by people with different perspectives from mine.

I’ve started reading the Zwier book, and I’m enjoying it, but I don’t see it as something that would work in translation. More later!

ETA: Vriend's work was sponsored by the Zuiderzeemuseum, which gets a lot of foreign visitors, so maybe they will make (part of) it available in English.

Gerrit Jan Zwier seems to have averaged well over a book a year since the mid-1970s, novels, stories, biographies, and — in particular — travel books about cold and rainy parts of the world. He's a frequent contributor of reviews and travel articles to Dutch newspapers and magazines, and a translator. He studied botany, geography and anthropology in Groningen, where one of his teachers was the celebrated geographer-novelist Willem Frederik Hermans.

Te hooi en te gras: over het Engelse platteland en het Engelse kinderboek (2020) by Gerrit Jan Zwier (Netherlands, 1947- )

  

This is the kind of book you can only really get away with in old age, when you've got an established audience who are prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for a chapter or two until they've worked out where you're going. It's a rather rambling assembly of memories from a whole host of different visits to England over a span of half a century, an improbable number of chapters start with "Many years later...", and he bafflingly goes straight from visiting the "Peter Rabbit Experience" with grandchildren to camping on a Cornish beach with his student girlfriend ca. 1967.

The linking theme is the way English writers (mostly, but not all, children's writers) have used the English countryside in their work. He goes to the relevant places to talk about the books of writers like Richard Adams, Beatrix Potter, J R R Tolkien, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, A A Milne, Daphne du Maurier, Kenneth Grahame, and a few others (well, mostly relevant: sometimes the choices are rather odd, as when he talks about the characteristically Hampshire novel Watership Down during a ramble in Wensleydale).

Despite the randomness, he often has interesting things to say about the writers he's discussing: on Beatrix Potter, for instance, he concentrates on her serious interest in plants and animals, her skills as a botanical illustrator and her later interest in farming, and shows us how her famous children's books came out of that almost accidentally. It's also fun to see how he links Potter's and du Maurier's determination to keep messy tourists out of the regions they themselves were largely responsible for promoting (something that also applies to Wordsworth, a writer Zwier can't manage to like).

Zwier makes a lot of comparisons to Dutch writers, and there's a running gag through several chapters about how the photographer he's travelling with is obsessed with the writer, TV presenter and dodo-fanatic Boudewijn Büch, whom Zwier doesn't seem to have much time for, whilst he himself is fanatical about the poet and ship's surgeon J. Slauerhoff.

What Zwier has to say about Adams and Tolkien gets rather drowned in his contempt for the botanical and ornithological illiteracy of their translator Max Suchart — only a bilingual expert on wild plants would be likely to have the patience to sit through the long catalogue of mistranslations here — but the amount of detail in these lists does illustrate how closely both writers observed nature and how concerned they were to represent it accurately, even if, like Tolkien, they were writing about an imaginary place.

Zwier himself isn't immune to inaccuracy, and there are at least two major howlers that should have been trapped in proofreading. It's pretty obvious how your fingers would be inclined to type "Catherine Brontë" when you mean "Charlotte", if you've just been writing several pages about Wuthering Heights, but it's difficult to understand how that sort of typo could percolate through to a printed book. And as for saying that King John signed Magna Carta at Bury St Edmunds, that just suggests that you are relying on illegible handwritten notes you took on the spot and haven't bothered to cross-check in Wikipedia.

The publisher inevitably uses the "B-word" in the jacket blurb, and Zwier dutifully remembered to ask a few British people he met during his 2019 trips for their views, but in most cases he's only able to report that it's not a subject they want to talk about any more, least of all to a Dutch travel writer. On his own initiative, he mentions that he doesn't have a very high opinion of Boris Johnson. Nothing controversial there, then!

Despite its faults, an endearing and intelligent book from someone who is clearly passionate about literature and the natural world. And a book that gave me more than a few nudges towards things I really ought to read or re-read soon...

>165 thorold: PS: ...and I never heard the Dutch expression 'te hooi en te gras' before — it seems to mean doing something when you feel like it, although in medieval law it meant 'twice a year' (hay time and grass time).

thorold, I saw in another thread that you were looking for good books about WWI. At project Gutenberg you can read a book I had a good hand in producing there. It is called One Man's Initiation: 1917 and it was written by John Dos Passos. I believe he was an ambulance driver because he was a conscientious objector, but that was in 2008 that I did that. I can vouch for the quality of the book.

>167 sallypursell: Thanks! I don't think I was actually looking for recommendations, I was recommending a book to someone else, but that one sounds interesting anyway. Dos Passos is someone I really need to get around to. Good to know that he's been Gutenberged! (And well done for putting your time into it!)

With QED in mind (>149 thorold:) I noticed this in passing in the library — another one I never read.

"Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" : adventures of a curious character (1985, 1997) by Richard P Feynman (USA, 1918-1988), "as told to" Ralph Leighton, edited by Edward Hutchings

 

Reminiscences, rather than memoirs, obviously transcribed from audio recordings and rather rambling and peppered with exclamation marks as a result — all the anecdotes implicitly either end in "look how clever I was!" or "...and look what a mess it got me into!" But of course it's very interesting because of who it is. You pretty much have to forgive him for revelling in his own cleverness. After all, if theoretical physicists aren't allowed to cleverer than the rest of us, then it's probably a poor look-out for the world...

Feynman tells us about his childhood teaching himself how to mend wireless sets in Far Rockaway (apparently without electrocuting himself or starting any fires he couldn't extinguish), his student days at MIT trying to learn the social conventions of college life by experiment and rational enquiry, his time at Los Alamos (where we hear essentially nothing about atomic bombs and a lot about lock-picking, drumming, and fights with base security), his experimental approach to responsible adult life (most experiments mainly involved sitting in bars picking up girls), unexpected disadvantages of winning the Nobel Prize, the idiocies of school textbooks, more drumming, idiocies of Californian Cargo Cult Science, and learning to draw (...naked women). Often very funny, although, inevitably, not all the jokes are as funny as they were when he first told those anecdotes, or indeed as funny on the printed page as they would have been when he told them in person.

It did make me wonder how many perfectly competent nerds of my generation were lost to science because we realised we could never hope to be anywhere near as cool as Feynman...

(Unfortunately, this Norton paperback (rebound by the library) turned out to be just as over-busy in its internal layout as that terrible front cover. The 80s and 90s in the US were not a good time for book-design — people were still learning what not to do with computer typesetting, I suppose. Then again, if it had been designed twenty years later, they would certainly have put a headless physicist on the cover...)

>143 thorold: >144 rocketjk: >146 AlisonY: etc.

I sent off for a big pile of southern African books - Paton and Galgut as discussed, but also Unity Dow, Charles Mungoshi, and Neshani Andreas. And A History of South Africa by Frank Welsh. Should be here before the start of Q2, with any luck...

>169 thorold: Will be following with interest. Some interesting writers from that part of the world.