Sarah Elisabeth - Duistere Kunst (Librero, 2025) ***

Een kunstboek koop je zelden voor de tekst, wel voor de afbeeldingen. Dit heeft er meer dan 200, alle geïnspireerd door het macabere, het morbide, gevoed door de angst van het zijn, van het leven en de dood. Vele grote namen uit de geschiedenis komen naar voor: Goya, Dali, Magritte, Odilon Redon, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, ..., maar het leuke is dat ze naast moderne schilders worden geplaatst waar ik niet van heb gehoord, maar die echt wel de moeite zijn. Het is op zich al fijn om al die oude meesterwerken gebundeld te zien, maar het contrast en de gelijkenis met de hedendaagse werken lonen echt de moeite. 

De tekst van de auteur boeit me minder, maar ik denk dat dit nu eenmaal een verplicht nummertje is om al deze werken aan elkaar te praten. Maar het visuele zegt meer dan de woorden. 

Nino Haratischwili - The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia (Harpervia, 2025) ****½

In "The Lack of Light", Georgian author Nino Haratischwili tells the story of four friends who were in the same class in school and share the same friends in their neighbourhood in Tbilisi during the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All four girls have different and strong characters, yet they experience the same changes in society, and have a special bond that gradually gets under tension because of love, politics and crime. Dina is extraverted and dynamic, Nene is richer, with a lot of attention to fashion, Rena is more introverted and a little nerdy, and Keto, the narrator is more emotional. Their story is also the story of Georgia, the country that tries to emancipate itself, move towards democracy and Western society, yet ends up in the grips of crime gangs linked to political forces, as it happened to so many ex-Soviet states.

Even if they do not always understand each other, they have a kind of natural attraction and need to have the opinion and support of the others. Together, they feel stronger in the fast changing environment, in which their friendship will also be caught up. 

The story is told from today's perspective when three of the four women visit a photography exhibition of Dina in Brussels. They meet so many decades later, and try to regain the friendship they once had. 

Nino Haratischwili’s novel is a monumental work—spanning 717 pages—yet its fast-paced narrative and dynamic plot keep the reader engaged and eager to discover what lies ahead. Her style is direct, with lots of dialogues and emotional interactions between the characters, with a well-balanced dose of reflection by Keto, the narrator. The four girls live in a web of many other characters, with changing allegiances and friendships, violence and even murder and attempted murder. The streets of Tbilisi are full of blood in this period. 

Keto’s grandmothers are both educated women - one well-versed in French literature, the other in German - and though they constantly quarrel over politics, they are bound by a deep, mutual need for each other’s company. One day, Keto encounters one of their young pupils, perched high on a ladder in the living room - her physicist father having decided that, with the power and heating once again cut off, the air would be warmer up there than on a chair below. In Haratischwili's hands, a wonderful little image becomes symbol for the total decay of the country that just liberated itself from its Soviet yoke: 

" And so I stood there as if frozen to the spot, before the little goddess for whom my father had erected a throne. We had gambled away our future before it had even begun. We had cheated this little madonna of her future, too. We were all lying to her. We let her study Hölderlin while we hurled grenades and set all that was beautiful on fire, while the people who were supposed to protect us preyed upon us, and sold freedom for five thousand dollars. I was ashamed, and couldn't bear being exposed to that open, questioning gaze.(p. 293)

The powerlessness of the individual citizens in the great movement of history is well described in the novel. 

"The realization hit me like a bolt of lightning. We weren't going to escape. We were caught between the shooting and the growling, beneath the only cone of light in the city, in a country that didn't exist, not anymore, or not yet, because there was no better version of us, because we were the people we were— with our guns, with the saved-up money in a coat pocket, with our messiah on our breast, with our will to survive, and our fear ofadmitting that we had unlearned our desperately longed-for and hard-won freedom, like a foreign language you've had no opportunity to speak for decades. We were caught in an endless cycle of repetition". (p. 305)

Or a little further: 

"There is no meaning anywhere, in anything. We're the ones who give meaning to ourselves and the things we do. We give meaning to the person we love." (p. 534)

She makes the interesting comparison of the different names that a plant has in both German and Georgian, as a symbol of how to look at reality: 

"In Georgian, it has an idiosyncratic name that always snagged my attention: Jesus's tears. So I was all the more surprised to discover that, in German, this plant is known as Judas penny. I couldn't decide whether to choose the Georgian name or the German. Were they Jesus's tears, shed when he learned that one of his disciples had, as he prophesied, betrayed him, or were they that same disciple's traitorous pieces of silver? Which story most deserves to be told, that of the betrayed, or the betrayer?" (589)

Yet, the most important aspect of the book are the emotional relationships between the girls/women: who they are for themselves, how they interact, how they relate to each other. Also their lovers are essential. The novel is one of deep humanity, with the individuals being much more important than the political and military turmoil: 

"It was only after voicing this thought that I realized it: maybe that was why I liked to be close to him. I enjoyed the sense that, with him, I had the freedom not to be the Keto I thought Ihad to be. I was free of myself. He saw me as I would like to see myself." (p.535)

It's great, it's grand, it's aspirational, it's sweeping, it's revealing ... also for readers not interested in politics and Georgia. 

It is highly recommended reading for everyone. 

Philipp Blom - Nature's Mutiny (Picador, 2019) ****

From the end of the 16th to the mid-18th Century, the world was impacted by a Little Ice Age, for reasons still unknown. The consequences for people, nature and society were heavy: harvests did not yield any food, floods were frozen, hampering supplies, people were starving. We know this period from the many paintings of snow-covered landscapes and people ice-skating on frozen rivers. 

In this excellent historical review, German historian Philipp Blom analyses the deep impact of this moment of climate change on society, on its economy and as a consequence also on philosophy and science. 

Because of the lack of resources, the rich and powerful could no longer just grab land and levy taxes on the poor, because there was nothing to grab anymore. People in power had to think differently, on how to use the scarce resources in a much more efficient way than before: 

"For the first time in Western history, scholars and administrators began to think methodically about the structures and possibilities of  their  society and its economy without relying on biblical injunctions, their logical arguments by the doctors of the Church, or even the comparatively liberating philosophy of classical antiquity. Instead, they began to form their theories out of perceived current earthly needs such as money for the soldiers, for instance and on the immedi­ate material givens: geographical, demographic, and economic real­ities. They were leaving the Middle Ages behind and preparing the ground for what would eventually be called the Enlightenment." (p. 131)

That does not mean that wealth distribution was already on the agenda. Some thinkers were

"The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: 'As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious." Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it, or whose exceptional personal qualities enabled them to use it well." (p. 134)

Blom gives insights in the many influential thinkers of that time, most of which are known (Hobbes, Descartes, Giordano Bruno, ...), although some new and interesting figures come up, such as the Italian materialist Luciano Vanini, or the French priest and eccentric Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) who strongly believed in observation through the senses instead of dogma and abstract thinking. 

"But if all knowledge comes from the senses, what about know­ing things that do not reveal themselves to our senses? Impossible, judged the priest, taking sides in this debate. Nothing can be known without sensory experience, not even God. Especially not God. Descartes' attempt to prove, through logic, the existence of a being beyond sensory perception, crumbled under the beam of Gassen­di's analysis. You can believe whatever you like, the priest implied, but you can only know something if you can or could experience it through your physical perception." (p. 168)

 Leading some pages later to the observation that "Nothing is certain, we have no access to a transcendental truth. We are alone" (p. 173).

The book is extremely well written, and as you might have understood, more about philosophy and the way learned people started looking at nature, than about the science of the Little Ice Age as a natural phenomenon. 

The book is relevant for today's political context as well. Democracy and science are always the first victims of autocracy, religious zealotry and power-hungry tycoons; 

"Liberal democracy is not, as many of Hegel's latter-day disciples would have us believe, a necessary consequence of historical prog­ress. Instead, it is a largely accidental, contingent, and vulnerable historical experiment with an open outcome, revealed by recent developments to be in present danger of being subverted, ignored, left to atrophy, or eliminated completely. Democracy was born out ideas first broadly debated during the Little Ice Age. It could eas­ily die or be hollowed out to a mere façade during our own era of climate change, as living conditions for ordinary people become harsher and the very rich take more power for themselves." (p. 283)

I am only afraid that this message will only be read and understood by people who are already convinced, while the ones who actually need to hear it, rarely read anything longer than a post on social media. 

Yael van der Wouden - The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024) ***

Interesting that this book by a Dutch author was originally written in English, and then translated by into Dutch by translators. 

The novel brings the story of Isabel, a young single woman, living in the house of her parents on the countryside, while her two brothers live in the city. Her live changes, when Eva, the lover of her oldest brother needs a place to stay for a while. Both women are total opposites in terms of attitude, discipline and enjoyment of life. This leads to the expected frictions and tensions. Van der Wouden is an excellent writer, especially because of her good pace in releasing information about the characters, and managing the introduction of new elements that build up to unexpected plots twists. Much more is happening below the surface and revealed near the end of the novel. 

It's entertaining and interesting. 

Antonio Muñoz Molina - Your Steps On The Stairs (Other Press, 2025) ****

There is one of those visual illusion videos on internet that instruct you to watch closely and notice the changes. Even if you are highly alert to what might change, obviously nothing seems to change (because it is an illusion after all) until you compare the beginning with the end. Then you notice how much has changed, and you cannot understand that you did not notice it. The changes have been so slow as to be barely noticeable. This novel is like that. 

The story is simple. A retired husband and his dog are waiting for his wife, after they moved from New York to Lisbon. She's a brain scientist and is still at an international conference. He prepares the flat for her arrival, making sure every aspect of the place is welcoming and familiar. The background is climate change and its devastating results on society. His thoughts are constantly with her. His every move, his every decision is about her imminent arrival. Like climate change itself, you see barely anything happening at all in the novel, but that is - as said - an illusion. It's repetitive, very detailed, very loving, only things are not as they seem. Readers who appreciate W.G. Sebald will also like to read Muñoz Molina.

The novel is also about solitude, memory and perception. The slow pace of the story is highly enjoyable because of Muñoz Molina's precise style and the warmth of the narrator's feelings for his wife. Apart from the terrible happenings in society, he withdraws from the world and its symbolic center - New York - to a place somewhere on the edge - an old neighbourhood in Lisbon. His cocooning in the warmth of marital love is a kind of weapon against the horror of politics and nature. He is waiting in his flat, and switching channels on TV, giving him a high level picture of the outside world. 

"Nuclear-armed. satraps, would-be dictators and genociders, purveyors of corruption and hatred, apocalyptic heirs to Lex Luthor and Doctor No. I see images of devastating hurricanes and Pacific islands being swallowed by rising seas. I see a procession of thousands of refugees flooding the highways and over­flowing border checkpoints and wanting to reach the United States like a pilgrim nation crossing the desert. I see young deer in the American forests staggering and falling to the ground in agony because each one has its blood sucked from it by more than fifty thousand ticks, which multiply limitlessly now that the winters are not cold enough to wipe them out. I see seabeds depleted by creatures as hardy and fertile as ticks, green crabs, "the cockroaches of the sea," says an announcer who has just come out of the water and taken off his scuba mask. Green crabs are so tough that they can survive up to an hour without oxygen. They are voracious predators that thrive on the same things that harm other species: higher sea temperatures and the lack of oxygen. They open the rocky shells of oysters with their pincers. They work in groups and attack lobsters much larger than themselves. When they've devoured all their prey, they begin to de­vour each other. I change the channel, and a Turkish news program in English says that the Saudi government assassins in charge of executing the journalist Khashoggi began to cut him up with an electric saw while he was still alive." (p. 266)

The horror of our modern era. 

The narrator entertains you - while waiting - about the works in his flat and the handyman Alexis who seems to be everywhere, about other loners in history such as Admiral Byrd who survived alone on the Arctic for six months, or Captain Nemo, or Robinson Crusoe, or even Montaigne in his tower, reading books, about what he understands from her brain science. 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading and to stay attentive to what is actually happening. I have read some reviews of this novels, but I cannot divulge what clearly others have missed. I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading. I can only recommend this novel highly, and encourage you to read it till the end. 

Elizabeth Strout - Tell Me Everything (Penguin, 2024) **

In the village of Crosby, Maine, some characters that we already know from earlier novels by Elizabeth Strout meet: the author Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge. Lucy features in "My Name Is Lucy Barton" (2016), "Anything Is Possible" (2017), "Oh William!" (2021), "Lucy By the Sea" (2022). Olive Kitteridge features in "Olive Kitteridge" (2008).

The main character is Bob Burgess - who is one of the lead characters in "The Burgess Boys" (2013) - an elderly lawyer who gets involved in defending a man accused of having murdered his mother. Despite this, barely anything happens in the novel. People feel some affection for each other or not, they are afraid to speak up their mind, everything appears to be normal, they talk, they eat, they chat, they visit each other. They are all elderly and their pace is slow. They tell each other stories about other people to fill their days. 

The whole point of the story is that "people will be people, with their ups and downs, their good and bad features". And Bob Burgess might be the most boring character ever invented. It is a quaint, petty bourgeois story that quietly babbles along without anything happening to create tension, except for Bob's feeling for Lucy that he never reveals. In the realm of unspoken feelings, Ian McEwan's "Atonement" demonstrates what can be achieved on the subject. This does not even come close in terms of tension or intensity. 

Hiromi Kawakami - Under The Eye Of The Big Bird (Granta, 2025) ***

In some far away time in the future, the human race is close to extinction. People are getting cloned, and educated and somehow supervised by AI generated "mothers" and "watchers". The cloning has been going on for thousands of years, and some clones surprisingly keep the memories of their original genetic line. 

Kawakami plays with this far-away vision to create characters living through this period, with either the clones, or the AI-led individuals acting as the narrator of the short stories. These are all somehow connected, something which is gradually revealed as we become more familiar with the names. 

The view of the narrators on the human race is not very generous. 

"As a species, we simply don't have what it takes, "Jakob had said. His voice sounded strained (...) "The decline of humankind can't be stopped, - not by you, not by me, not by anyone on this planet. None of us has the power", he said. "We were supposed to be so much more than this." (p. 83)

"All right. Well, the humans died out. It was always going to be a matter of time, of course, before they went extinct. (...) The humans kept doing the same things: loving one another, hating one another, fighting one another ... You'd think they might have come up with something else to try, but no matter how many times they went around, they couldn't seem to change course." (p. 252)

Kawakami gives a coherent picture of this distant future and all her stories are quite focused, often unexpected in the sense that you can only figure out gradually what the context is, and to which group the narrator belongs. On the other hand, her literary qualities are too narrow to make the characters come to live. The whole focus of the stories is on the science fiction, not on the emotional power or plot tension as you might expect. 

One character - someone living with several identical clones - says 

"I have considered the word you use about me: boring. Is it boring not to have a personality? I spent a few hundred years on this question. The results, however, were inconclusive." (p. 231)

And that's a little bit my own appreciation of this novel. It gives an interesting perspective from a very distant future, but it could have done with more of today's literary basics. 

Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics (Yale, 2025) ****

In one of the first chapters of this book, the story is told about Greeks in the 5th Century BC who consulted the oracle of Delphi to appease the god Apollo after the plague rampaged across the country. The oracle said that "in order to assuage the god, they should double the size of Apollo's altar, an ornate then-foot-high cube. That didn't sound very difficult to do. Double the cube? How hard could it be? (...). This problem, known as the Delian problem, 'rested on how to find the cube root of 2, and was eventually proven - not until the 19th Century - to be an impossible task using only Euclydian tools of geometry available in the fifth century". (p. 31). 

This little example illustrates the book well. It's a historical overview of new challenges and solutions in mathematics from the earliest ages to today. Math was definitely not my thing in school, and I only realised that integrals could be used to calculate volumes when on the exam we had to calculate the volume of a flat tyre. I never knew what it was actually used for. In retrospect, a lot of math could have been made more attractive by using some of the challenges in this book. It requires some basic knowledge of math, but not exceptionally so. 

The example also demonstrates the weird thing that is relatively unique to mathematics: on a very abstract form, there are many riddles that have no other apparent function or relationship with reality other than keep very smart minds busy for centuries, yet other times, the link with reality becomes obviously clear, and most of our current technology would not be possible without it. 

Lawrence takes us step by step through the creative processes of mathematical geniuses who solved ancient and new problems with sometimes completely creative approaches, opening new vistas for other scientists to go even a step further. This includes the amazingly long time it took to have a symbol for zero or for the equation, things which are so obvious today. 

Maybe in stark contrast to other sciences, discoveries in math have usually been the result of the stubborn passion of individuals to find solutions for mind-boggling problems. I have used the approach of Kepler in some of my presentations: to make people understand that the earth is revolving around the moon, he forced his audiences to imagine they were looking at the earth from the moon, which gave a totally different perspective on how the planets rotated. This sudden change in perspective clarified everything. 

From the early use of numbers to calculating in 24 dimensions, her story is accessible as it is fascinating. Her explanations and examples are sufficiently well explained for non-mathematicians to also enjoy the book, even if many will have trouble understanding how you can work in 4 or 5 dimensions, let alone in 24, but yes, today's math is capable of that. 

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place For Shady People (Granta, 2024) ****

What a wonderful book! So well written, so real and human in its starting situation, so supernatural in its always surprising plot ending. In this collection of twelve short stories, Mariana Enriquez tells us about the lives of ordinary people, usually women who are confronted with everyday problems or issues, but they always come with a twist. Her stories are realistic, and often it's hard to tell whether the supernatural events that take place are literally true or whether they are just imagined by the protagonists who are pushed beyond the limit of their rational powers. 

The supernatural is eery, but not always malicious. It's a presence, or even just the possibility of a presence. In one story an obese girl gets dumped by her parents in their motherland Argentina - where almost all the stories take place - with her aunt and cousin who are the main characters. The obese girl gets literally touched by ghosts who manage to sexually satisfy her. The imprints of their hands are visible on her skin: "If only you could see it: there are fingers that press her body. There are hands that squeeze her breasts! Invisible hands!"

Yet the style of writing is very direct, very concrete, situational, with a tone of voice by the narrator that is often sarcastic and even cynical, commenting and judging about other people, about injustice and lack of understanding. The "horror" or "ghost stories" description of her art should not a deterrent not to read her work. These are not fantasy novels or horror stories in the traditional sense. 

It's really well written, entertaining and surprising. That's all we hope for!

Christoph Ransmayr - The Last World (Grove Press, 1990) ***½

The title of "The Last World" describes a dystopian situation, at the outskirts of society, in an unspecified time, a kind of mixture of an early 20th century period (microphones exist) yet coupled with the reign of Emperor Augustus of Rome (65 BC- 14 AD), who banned the famous poet Ovid to Tomis in current-day Romania, because of a "poem and a secret". The poem was the erotic "Ars Amatoria", and the secret was the Ovid had witnessed something that could embarass or undermine the authority of Augustus.

In this novel, a Roman man, called Cotta arrives in Tomi, looking for the exiled poet. It is unclear why he is looking for the poet, and very soon he gets caught up in the lives of the people living in the small seaside town. Most people get affected by some strange events, literally taken from Ovid's own stories in the "Metamorphosis", a book with poems about people who become animals, or plants, or even rocks. 

Ransmayr's story is dark, uneven and dystopian. Many of the joylike and even fun aspects of Ovid's poetry remain totally absent in his worldview. The characters do not really come to life. Cotta's personality remains vague, unpredictable and without any sense of direction. Even if he is in Tomi to look for Ovid, he does not appear to be very persistent. The real protagonist are the people of Tomi collectively, which gives a strange sense of distance, more like a historian narrating the fate of the village than a real literary author describes the emotional depth of individuals in their relationship to each other or the world. 

The people are all like jetsam and flotsam, washed on the shores of the town, with no real lives, perspectives or future plans. 

"... along the coast of Tomi all biographies were alike in one point at least: whoever made a home in the ruins, caves, and weather-beaten stone houses of Tomi had come here as a stranger from somewhere else. With the exception of a few grubby, raggletail kids, there was no one in Tomi who had lived here since birth, no one who had not been tossed up on this coast as a refugee or an exile after a long, roundabout journey. To hear Fama talk, the town of iron was moribund, little more than a camp for transients, for people who landed here at the end of an unhappy chain of events and reversals of fortune and lived here among the ruins as if in a penal colony, until time or chance freed them from this wilderness or they simply vanished, (...) like so many others who had shown up here at some point, camped in the debris for a while, and then disappeared" (p. 195). 

Despite the strong unity of style and voice, the novel lacks gripping moments, or for the reader to be truly dragged into the lives of the characters. It is worth reading, but not the masterpiece that some claim it to be. 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Dream Count (Harper Collins, 2025) ****

"Dream Count" refers to the list of potential true lovers than Chia, the lead voice in this novel, has had yet failed to turn into true romantic and eternal deep love. She is a Nigerian author living in the United States, and interacting with her two best Nigerian friends: her cousin Omelogor, and Zikora, both of whom are not really on friendly terms, but get called into Zoom calls by Chia, because it's the period of lockdown in the Covid-19 pandemic. All three are well-to-do and well-educated. Chia is a would-be author, but also making a name as a travel writer. Omelogor prefers to live in Nigeria, and works as a financial consultant, after having been a big shot in one of Nigeria's banks, and Zikora is a corporate lawyer living in DC. All three are concerned and discuss the fate of Chia's maid, Kadiatou, hailing from Guinea and involved in a rape case inspired by the court case between IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn and a hotel maid in 2011.  The novel mentions the incident, and that the perpetrator was a French high official of an international organisation, but without mentioning his name. 

Apart from the interrogations and upcoming trial for the rape case, there is no real plot in the novel. The four protagonists each tell their personal history and thoughts on love and society from their own personal perspectives. They talk about their countries, their travels, their family, their friends and lovers. It is programmatic in the sense that all types of men appear to have been one-time lovers of the three forty-year olds. The men are described one by one, some at length, some just briefly. Promising new relationships unfortunately all fail because of some short-comings the men have. 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes extremely well. Her view on society and men through the eyes of the women is harsh, honest, brutal, sensitive, generous and very angry at times. Her feminist agenda is clear, but that should not spoil the fun. The comments and viewpoints of the women are smart, often justified, and made me frequently laugh out loud, yet the deep dark evil of the rape of the maid, the least educated, the most innocent, the most vulnerable gives the book much more depth and seriousness contrasted by the predicament of the three rich narrators who are waiting for mister right. A novel of contrasts, giving an interesting insights in the perspectives of African women living in the United States, but especially one of solidarity among women in world that is far from perfect. 

 

Stefan Larsson - The Patient Priority (McGraw-Hill, 2023) ***½

An excellent book on Value-Based Healthcare written by three consultants of the Boston Consulting Group. Many of the ideas they suggest, I agree with, and they can also be found in my own book "De Stem van de Patiënt" (Lannoo, 2025). As the former co-chair of the European Alliance for Value in Health, I can only support the angle of approach to look at healthcare from an outcomes-based model instead of a service-based model. Originally, healthcare consisted of individual physicians offering care to individual patients, using technology that had been approved by the autorities. Today, healthcare has become much more complex, with many more interventions, stakeholders and integration of care services. All the costs were evaluated by the service provided and the cost of the technology. This is absolutely unsustainable, and other forms of payments are needed: bundled payments, capitation or other approaches that look more at the total picture, more collectively and based on the results obtained. 

They also plead for better integration of care, by type of disease or condition, and based on solid registries. 

"In the past, outcomes measures have traditionally been developed by spe­cialty societies and, therefore, tend to focus on specific interventions or procedures. Sometimes, focusing on a specific procedure makes sense. Cataract surgery is probably the best example, because it is the only treat­ment for patients suffering from cataracts. But in most situations, the ideal health outcomes to track for a given condition should reflect the overall care for a patient's medical condition, in which multiple specialties are usu­ally involved and multiple treatment options are available, so clinicians can assess the relative effectiveness of different types of treatment. Procedure­-based registries have played an important role in improving hip and knee arthroplasty, but they can't really address the broader question about the optimal treatment for the underlying disease of osteoarthritis. Or consider a patient suffering from back pain: for that condition, the relevant out­comes measures should be broad enough to assess the comparative impact of, say, physical therapy versus surgery." (p.56)

This approach should look at the entire patient pathway from prevention to end of treatment. Today, care is really a step-by-step approach, with none of the steps seen as being part of a disease continuum. Obviously the reality is different, and patients also live in a world where they are confronted with other problems that does not always make treatment optimal.  

"An approach to care delivery that integrates both clinical interventions along the entire treatment pathway and nonclinical interventions that encourage prevention and address the social and behavioral determinants of health is not only a more effective way to monitor and treat patients, it also allows for better coordination across multiple stakeholders and gives health systems full visibility of the system costs to make informed trade­offs-for example, investing in preventive care to avoid high treatment costs at later points in the care-delivery value chain." (p. 74)

The Netherlands for instance, had a visionary idea, that we can fully support, based on the following four essential points. Whether this has actually been done, I have not been able to verify. 

1. "To reach a consensus among key stakeholders by 2022 on the out­comes to be measured for conditions representing 50% of the total disease burden, both by adapting international standards for use in the Netherlands and by developing new metrics
2. To support shared decision-making on treatment choices between providers and patients, by making health information more under­standable for patients, and· by equipping health professionals with the necessary skills and information to have meaningful conversa­tions about treatment choices with their patients
3. To promote the outcome-based reorganization of care delivery and reimbursement through the sharing of best practices, the devel­opment of more integrated care chains, and the encouragement of more outcome-based contracts between insurers and providers
4. To facilitate better access to relevant and up-to-date outcome information, through the development of a state-of-the-art health informatics infrastructure, with the goal of making it easy for patients to report data, ensuring that data is well-organized and scalable, promoting access for all relevant parties for the purposes of benchmarking and research, and maintaining privacy and security" (p. 216)

Even if I can agree on most of what the authors write, they still cannot capture the patient perspective on things. Their approach is one of change management for the healthcare system, and of course they are self-interested consultants hoping to get clients among governments to help reorganise their healthcare towards better outcomes and more financially sustainable, yet they somehow miss the essence: patients and the patient community by disease are the real decision-makers when it comes to determining key performance indicators for outcomes, and to assess whether the expected results have been achieved. Without a solid and formal integration of the voice of patients in healthcare, it will remain a structure with one blind spot, and a big one: what patients need. Without systematic and robust feedback from the end users, no system can properly function. 

Because of this lack of patient perspective, there is also barely any mention of patient advocacy or patient organisations in their analysis, which is disturbing to say the least. As representatives of the 'lived experience' we can advocate for better adherence, better alignment with the life goals of individuals, helping to capture patient satisfaction data, etc, etc. 

That is what we are advocating for. That is where the low-hanging fruit is to be found. 

W.G. Sebald - The Rings Of Saturn (Vintage, 2020) ****½

German author W.G. Sebald was also a professor of literature, and was appointed at the University of East Anglia in Norwich UK. Like his other novels "Austerlitz"(2001), "A Place In the Country" (1998), and "The Emigrants" (1992), Sebald's writing fits in a category of its own, a kind of literary non-fiction. In "The Rings Of Saturn", originally published in German in 1995, he describes a long walk along the British east coast, starting is Lowestoft, walking south to Orford, then travelling back inland to the north-west. 

Like in his other books, the travels are just a pretext to tell stories and reflections on historical events that took place in relation to the places he visits. As you can see from the 'content' pages below, he can talk about almost anything yet always with a great passion for the subject, a kind of naive enthusiasm while keeping a cynical distance at the same time. He talks about Chateaubriand, Sir Thomas Browne, Swinburne, fishing fleets, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. His deep interest lies always in the past, in the 19th and early 20th century, and his mood is one of melancholy as if he had hoped to have witnessed those things first hand. His knowledge on the subjects he covers is wide, and he must often also acknowledge that he does not know how he knows this. He can say, "I could not identify where I read this information".

He marvels at the world, at people, at inventions, at nature and animals, and whatever the subject, his writing is entertaining, beautiful and very literary. And always, behind the light-footed tone, behind the apparent sometimes insignificant trivia, behind the text, there is a sense of loss, of doom, of darkness. 

On Sir Thomas Browne: 

"Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowl­edge is enveloped in darkness. "What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world". (p. 19)

On the herring:  

"An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unex­plained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness." (p. 58-59)

Yet his trivia are also fun. He knows how to take the reader by the hand, and make him/her look at things differently. He also tells for instance the story of his grandmather who kept goldfish, and who washed her each of them with soap every day, and then put them on the windowsill to let them enjoy the air a little bit, before putting them back in their aquarium. Or this description is typical of how he builds up his descriptions to a climax. 

"No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eye­witnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour" (p. 77)

I can also appreciate his view on Belgium, yet not entirely either. 

"And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the popu­lation, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere." (p. 122)

Deep down, something is indeed terribly wrong with our world, and he sees things evolving for the worst, affecting the author too. 

"It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane" (p. 182)

Brilliant. 

 

Saou Ichikawa - Hunchback (Penguin/Viking, 2025) ***½

"Hunchback" is the story of Shaka Izawa, a woman with congenital myotubular myopathy trying to become a real woman or person despite her 'hunchback'. She is locked in her wheelchair, in need of a ventilator and she lives in a studio in a residential care home, called Ingleside, which is funded by the inheritance she had from her very wealthy and deceased parents. This is her microcosm. 

To keep herself busy and to break out into the 'real' world, she writes erotic stories for young adult websites, obviously under a different name, until one of the male nurses in the hospital connects the dots. 

Izawa describes in great detail the challenges of living with her disability, the risks of infection, the lungs that don't function properly, the mucus obstruct her breathing. You can only feel sympathy for her predicament and bless her that she is wealthy, because this allows her to do maybe more than more common people could have done. She studies online, like the author herself did. You cannot but admire her desire to do what normal people can, including to have sexual relationship. 

The novel is tragic and fun at the same time. You can appreciate the authenticity and the candour with which Ichikawa describes her disability and her desire to be considered desirable like any other person would fee. She does not complain about her predicament. She does not make fun of her own situation. She tries to live with it, to be more than just a body in a wheelchair, to be herself, to be more than she was. 

Her brutal openness alone makes this book worth reading. It's not ground-breaking stylistically but that's clearly not the purpose. It's straightforward language and narrative make it all the more accessible. 

Louis de Bernières - Light over Liskeard (Vintage, 2024) **½

Because I enjoyed some of de Bernières novels, I keep coming back to his new books, even if the last ones were really disappointing. This one is mediocre at best. 

The main character, Q, a cryptographer working freelance for the British government to prevent hacking of the most vital computer infrastructure of the country, flees to the Cornish moors in anticipation of the IT armaggedon, when all systems will collapse because some lunatic with skills such as his own decides to do so. On the Bodmin Moor, he meets his neighbour Theo with his daughter Eva, who teaches him the skills to survive on the land. Occasionally, his young adult children Morgan and Charles come to visit, while his wife, from whom he's separating, remains in London. Because of Q's exceptional mathematical skills and high education level, he cannot be compared to any other 'prepper' or survivalist. 

That is the plot. To make it a little more interesting, there are ghosts and wild animals such as lynxes and aurochs, and crazy people running around the Moor : hippies, a man waiting for the rapture, a lone man on a horse. To keep the action going, there are a number of things that happen that have nothing to do with the core story, you cannot even call them subplots. For instance, his daughter Morgan sets a number of 'asks' for her new lover before she accepts him as a lover, like a princess in fairy tales. 

The chapters all have different narrators for unclear reasons, and half of the chapters can be omitted without changing anything to the story at all. 

The novel lacks writing discipline, focus, and especially emotional depth. Everything that happens to the main characters remains superficial. They don't feel love, or pain, or existential angst or any other human feelings that can make literature so interesting. 

Finally, there is not even a moral lesson to be learned, except that all our civilisation may be on the brink of total collapse because of a blind reliance on the internet, digital and AI. Environmentalists are systematically described as eco-fascists, while vegetarians and vegan are also not really appreciated. You would expect then that Q, the main character, shows some broader moral vision, yet he does want to create a better society, his only interest is selfish: to survive the IT Armaggedon. 

You get the gist. Not really good, but if you're interested in cheap entertainment, this may be your thing. 

Kaveh Akbar - Martyr! (Picador, 2024) ****½

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet, novelist, and editor. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989. His family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old, and he grew up in several states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

Akbar received his bachelor's degree from Purdue, his MFA from Butler University, and his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

The name of the author and the book's title could be misleading: this is not a novel celebrating muslim martyrs on their jihad against the infidels, quite to the contrary: it's the story of a bisexual, non-religious, addicted poet who struggles with his life, his family, his origins, his place in society. Cyrus, the protagonist of the novel is collecting material to write a book about martyrdom, about people who value life so much that they were willing to die for it. 

Most chapters start by some excerpts from his Book of Martyrs that he is compiling. 

Apart from being very well written, the book is also beautifully composed, with different chapters offering the perspectives of different characters: Cyrus himself of coarse, Roya Shans - his mother who died in the Iranan plane that was shot by the US in 1988, - Orkideh - an Iranian artist organising her own death as an art exhibit at the Guggenheim museum, with some fictional characters interfering at moments, such as Lisa Simpson. 

He is constantly struggling with various addictions, which he also celebrates as much as hates.

"This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glint­ing off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn't until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apart­ment bathtub, everyone else's apartments would likely catch fire too." (p. 14)

 He struggles with religion too, and he clearly is too well-educated and rational not to question some of the  Qran's commentaries: 

"Once, when I was a boy, our teacher told us the hadith of the starving man. The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, "Please help me, I'm starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don't want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering." God, in his infinite wis­dom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive.  

I remember thinking the story didn't make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain­reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell." (p. 109)

He is a writer himself, a poet, struggling with language but also understanding the cultural roll of the dice about which language you speak. He does not claim any identity: 

"It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn't come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one map is called Iraq and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an offi­cer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong." (p. 125)

But language is also the only tool he has to come to grips with the world, to communicate, to express, with all its flaws and possibilities: 

 ""I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it's damned, right? And I am too, for giv­ing my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they're supposed to. It'll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It'll never bring my mother back, you know?" (p. 185)

or also 

 "When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, "It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn't David." It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. 

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?" (p. 270) 

And interspersed with great stories - invented or not - relevant and full of symbolism: 

""Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe-France, Italy, Belgium-and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah's architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches." 

"Whoa." 

"I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These cenruries of Persians try­ing to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred". (p. 157)

These multiple shards also represents his own life: what is he in the end? 

"It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discern­ible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death - an interval where he'd never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes­, neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, nei­ther drunk or in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim." (p. 246) 

It is a very strong novel about existence, about why I'm here, about what I am, and how to get any meaning from this? 

"If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillhess and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity; the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself - which, because it is inevitable, means nothing. 

-from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams" (p. 250)

It's absolutely excellent: deep, smart, intelligent, moving, relevant, tightly composed with a wisdom to ask the right questions, with the wisdom to value personal relationships, with the wisdom to question all this at the same time. 

Don't miss it!

Timothy Snyder - On Freedom (Crown, 2024) ****

What is more valuable than freedom? What is the incredible joy to be allowed to think, to express, to move, to engage, to write, to create, to act ... in total freedom and with respect for the freedom of other beings? Roughly around 80% of the World's population does not have access to this high good. Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specialising in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He recently joined the University of Toronto for an indefinite time.

In this preface he introduces the structure of his book as well as the five forms of freedom that he will elaborate on: 

"The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone." (Preface)

Snyder's book is timely, considering the current situation in the world, with its increasing levels of ignorance, its evolution towards totalitarianism and autocracy, and a gradual decline in tolerance and wisdom. 

"We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to as a positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don't think of freedom as positive, we won't even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom. 

Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to. Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them." (p. 31)

I like his comparison to our situation in which we are often blind for the context that we live in, the automatic responses that we have without truly understanding that there is something outside of the box that we are trapped in, like animals in a behavioural test that our current digital technology could well be:

"The first brain hack is experimental isolation, getting you alone, out of bodily contact with your fellow creatures. It generates an artifi­cial loneliness that enables four more brain hacks, four more kinds of manipulation. In the experiments, the isolated rat or pigeon works one end of the tool but does not see its other end, nor the actions and intentions of the experimenters. We similarly set our eyes on the display of a com­puter or a phone. We are ignorant of what lies on the other side: the tangle of algorithms, the vacuum of purpose. Fingertips on a keyboard, we fall into a trap. We speak of "my computer" or "my phone," but these objects are not ours, any more than the lab belongs to the rat­unless we figure out how they work on us." (p. 101)

 The deliberate intention of people behind the scenes to create algorithms that determine your thoughts and behaviour may seem paranoid but as we're currently witnessing in real life, and many Western politicians and intelligence services seem very naive in this context: 

"Our fears are cultivated to conform to what others in our catego­ries fear. If you are a middle-aged white male and you fear exactly what other middle-aged white males fear, you have been had. When your fears are predictable, then so are you, which means that you (and your digital demographic) are ripe for manipulation. When you are predictable, you predictably bring your country down. 

Conforming, you are easily led. Having withdrawn from the rugged borderland of the unpredictable into the cozy cove of your digital demographic, you await orders, or nudges. You have exposed your buttons, and you wait for them to be stroked and pushed. Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes. Unfreedom is efficient." (p. 105)

The autocrats like Putin and others are real masters at this: taking advantage of the weaknesses and isolation of individuals to rally them for a great sense of historical community: 

"Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that larger forces will always bring us back to equilib­rium. Politicians of eternity are real entertainers who assuage our sense of loss with an appealing tale about the past. They gain our confidence by circling us back to a mythical era when we as a nation were (supposedly) innocent. These time-looping con artists nudge us away from democracy and toward their own feeling that they should rule forever and never be sent to prison (a motive especially apparent in the case of Trump and also Benjamin Netanyahu). Deprived of his­torical knowledge and of the habit of ethical thinking by the politics of inevitability, we are easy marks. Rising authoritarians succeed in this century not by proposing futures but by making any conversation about them seem pointless or absurd. 

"Vladimir Putin was the most important politician of eternity. His Russia drew directly from Brezhnev's 1970s, a time of nostalgia for the victory of 1945. Putin and his generation were raised with the idea that the supposed innocence of an older generation justified any action by a younger one. He looped back to Brezhnev's 1970s, and from the 1970s to an imagined 1945, and then to a baptism a thousand years before that, which supposedly joined Russia with Ukraine for­ever and made Russians eternally innocent. Russia was always the vic­tim and always the victor. Russians had the right to determine whether or not Ukraine and Ukrainians existed; anyone who denied that right was an enemy. A Russian fascist tradition that spoke in just this way was discovered and celebrated." (p. 156)

Yet he is equally severe for libertarianism, where everything is left to market forces.  

"According to the libertarians, the "free market" defends freedom. If the market does not defend something, it follows, that thing is not freedom. If the market does not protect a certain right, then we are expected to concede that it is not a right. When libertarians argue that markets defend freedom, they really mean that humans have a duty to defend markets. In a "free market," freedom is defined as the right of things to move around unhindered by humans, who are defined as barriers, or as entities with duties toward things. Human beings must be denied the freedom to change how capitalism works, and that denial must be labeled "freedom." Thus in a "free market," politics begins from Orwellian oppression. The "free market" only exists as a slogan covering senseless contra­dictions and justifying political bullying. There is no such thing as a "free market" in the world, nor can there be. Capitalism minus norms and laws is murderous conquest. If someone invades your country, seizes your house, enslaves your children, and puts your kidneys up for sale, that is the magic of the unregulated market at work.  Markets cannot be free. Only people can be free. Freedom is a human value. It can be recognized and pursued only by humans. There is no substitute for freedom, no way to delegate it. The moment we delegate freedom, to the market or anything else, it becomes submis­sion. When people surrender the word free, freedom vanishes from their lives." (p. 215)

For us Europeans, who live in a free world where we can do and act as we please, all this seems pretty obvious. My assessment is that many Americans do not understand what freedom means, and they are definitely not the Leaders of the Free World. Obama made this claim, and many presidents before him, but the US is not and has never been this Leader. I think it's up to us Europeans to step up and show to the rest of the world that real population happiness and prosperity are the result of deep democracy, with rule of law, human rights, press freedom, solidarity and a socially corrected free market. 

Snyder's book gives a good analysis, food for thought and also a framework from which to design this freedom we all crave. 

Jessica Au - Cold Enough For Snow (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) ***½

Australian author and bookseller Jessica Au wrote an interesting and memorable novel with "Cold Enough For Snow". The plot is not very exceptional: a daughter and a mother meet in Tokyo, and decide to visit the city and enjoy time together. Interestingly enough, there appears to be a kind of communicative disconnect or distance between both characters. We get a very good insight into the pscyhology of the daughter who is the narrator, but more often than not she meditates, reflects, and even philosophises yet rarely in a dialogue with her mother, who despite being physically present the whole time, often appears to be totally absent at the same time. The paragraph below gives a good example of this imbalance, when both visit an art museum: 

"I turned to my mother, who was still looking at the Monet, which happened to be one of his most famous pieces. She was swaying lightly on her feet, as if to music, or as if very tired. I said that I too sometimes did not un­derstand what I saw in galleries, or read in books. Though I understood the pressure of feeling like you had to have a view or opinion, especially one that you could articulate clearly, which usually only came with a certain education. This, I said, allowed you to speak of history and context, and was in many ways like a foreign language. For a long time, I had believed in this language, and I had done my best to become fluent in it. But I said that sometimes, in­creasingly often in fact, I was beginning to feel like this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for. Sometimes, I looked at a painting and felt completely nothing. Or if had a feeling, it was only intuitive, a reaction, nothing that could be ex­pressed in words. It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak". (p. 43)

Her writing is precise, precious even, as is the description and development of the story itself. It's not boundary-breaking but worth looking for. 

 

Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****

The words that come to mind when reading this book are colossal, gargantuan, massive, monumental, gigantic, not only because the physical characteristic of its 660 pages, but also because of its incredible and erudite picture of the history of our world that is described here, viewed from the perspective of the interaction of our environment with historical events. 

Peter Frankopan is a British historian and writer. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also author of the best-selling "The Silk Roads". 

I identified over fifty passages in the book that I intended to refer to in my review, but this is simply too much. 

The book starts at the real beginning, around 4.5 billion years ago, takes us over the origin of our species, prehistory, and then through history to our currrent times with a view to the future. The geography is our entire world, with impact and interaction between environment and people in every geography: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, plagues, and other calamities that shaped nations, beliefs and cultures. 

"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)

Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe. 

"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)

Despite the endless list of destruction and calamities, the author remains optimistic about man's capabilities of behavioural change and good stewardship, but then with a number of conditions that need to be fulfilled. 

"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others. 

The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643). 

As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse. 

Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material. 

Bertrand Denzler & Frantz Loriot - Musique Improvisée et Questions Politiques (Self-Released, 2025) ***

In this little book, two avant-garde musicians, French-Swiss saxophonist Betrand Denzler and French-Japanese violinist Frantz Loriot discuss the link between improvised music and the question of politics. Their approach is a long dialogue between two intellectuals. Even if Loriot asks the questions to Denzler, he also comes with a lot of ideas and suggestions about which the other can react and comment. The responses are often long, and clearly the result of a written text, with sources and references. 

Obviously, the key question is whether improvised music is political in nature or addressing political questions. Obviously, in the history of improvised music many artists have actually addressed political questions, maybe even more than other genres, yet this is not really the topic here. The question is about whether breaking down boundaries, ideological and cultural, whether relinquishing a pre-programmed structure, is a political statement. I'll translate some passages of interest, with the original text below. It gives you an idea of the kind of discussion both men over the full length of 100 pages. 

"‘When you practise this music, you realise that being concerned solely with the process, tending towards ’without preconception‘, ideally implies that ’the music is produced solely by the relationships that are established, on the spot and throughout the piece, both between the sounds and between those who generate them", to quote what we wrote in the foreword to The Practice of Musical lmprovisation'. Now, despite the gap between music and politics, these relationships do raise questions about equality and freedom, which you say are ‘important ideas’ in anarchism. In fact, it seems to me that improvisers, because they have the possibility of doing so, establish from the outset something that evokes a ‘situation of anarchy’, by implicitly positing the freedom and equality of everyone as principles and by asserting without saying so that there are neither rulers nor ruled, neither representatives nor represented, neither God nor State and so on. So it would seem that improvising musicians are actually prepared to play the game of equality and freedom to see what happens. Rather than trying to understand the link between improvised music and anarchism [a claimed anarchism], I therefore feel that it is more effective to examine the practice of improvised music by seeing it as an attempt to establish a (musical) ‘situation of anarchy’ each time, even when the musicians present don't talk about it or think about it in these terms" (p. 35-36).

Luckily, and interestingly they also integrate the importance of listening, at least for the musicians to perform in public.  

"We're self-proclaimed musicians [without any further details about our status and without worrying about whether we're going to make any money], which doesn't seem to me to be completely indefensible. We just want to make music and we want to make it ‘in public’. Because even if we are aware of the issues mentioned above, we know that the presence of flesh-and-blood listeners and the codified ritual of the concert and the utopia it evokes change the music, and that, for good and bad reasons - some of which remain mysterious - these listeners make the music more intense. The concert is open to criticism, and it would be easy to shoot it down. But thanks to this institution, we have experienced some powerful moments, both as listeners and as musicians. The concert allows us not to isolate ourselves, to shut ourselves in, to barricade ourselves, to self-segregate, to separate ourselves completely, to circulate ideas and sounds, to have experiences, and it changes our music". (p. 94)

What they fail to see in all this is the actual experience of the listener, who is forced by this music to drop his or her guard, to have an open mind and open ears, to welcome the unexpected, the undefined, and welcome novelty, even if some aspects and sounds may appear harsh or strange. 

It's interesting to have this kind of questions about the music we like, and I applaud both authors for the nature and depth of their questions, their proposals for answers, while at the same time being humble enough to not to proclaim anything with certainty or in absolute terms. This short review and excerpts do not do full credit to the conversation, so I can only recommend readers who speak French to give it a try. 

The book can be ordered here. 

Original excerpts:  

"Lorsque l'on pratique cette musique, on s'aperçoit que le fait de se préoccuper uniquement du processus en tendant vers le «sans préconception » implique dans l'idéal que « la musique est produite par les seules re­lations qui s'établissent, sur-le-champ et tout au long de la pièce, aussi bien entre les sons qu'entre ceux qui les génèrent », pour reprendre ce que nous ecri­vions dans l'avant-propos de The Practice of Musical lmprovisation'. Or, malgré l'écart entre la musique et la politique, ces relations posent éffectivement des questions concernant l'égalité et la liberté, dont tu dis que ce sont des« idées importantes » de l'anarchisme. En fait, il me semble que les improvisateurs, car ils en ont la possibilité, établissent d'emblée quelque chose qui évoque une « situation d'anarchie », en posant implicitement la liberté et l'égalité de toutes, de tous, de chacune et de chacun, comme des principes et en affirmant sans le dire qu'il n'y a ni gouvernants ni gouvernés, ni représentants ni représentés, ni dieu ni Etat et ainsi de suite. II semblerait donc que les mu­siciens improvisateurs soient effectivement prets a jouer le jeu de l'égalité et de la liberté pour voir ce qu'il advient. Plutôt que d'éssayer de comprendre le lien entre musique improvisee et anarchisme [un anarchisme revendiqué}, j'ai donc le sentiment qu'il est plus éfficace d'examiner la pratique de la musique improvisée en la considérant comme une tentative pour établir à chaque fois une "situation d'anarchie" (musicale), même lorsque les musiciens présents n'en parlent pas ou n'y pensent pas en ces termes" (p. 35-36)

"Nous nous autopro­clamons musiciens [sans plus de précisions sur notre statut et sans nous préoccuper de savoir si nous allons gagner de l'argent], ce qui ne me semble pas com­plètement indéfendable. Nous voulons done faire de la musique et nous voulons la faire « en public ». Car même si nous sommes conscients des enjeux évoques ci-dessus, nous savons que la présence d'au­diteurs en chair et en os ainsi que le rituel codifié du concert et l'utopie qu'il évoque changent la musique, et que, pour de bonnes et de mauvaises raisons. dont certaines restent mystérieuses, ces auditeurs rendent la musique plus intense. Le concert est critiquable, il serait facile de le descendre en flammes. Mais grâce a cette institution. nous avons vécu des moments forts, en tant qu'auditeurs et en tant que musiciens. Le concert nous permet de ne pas nous isoler, nous enfermer, nous barricader, nous auto-ségréguer, nous séparer complètement, de faire circuler des idées et des sons, de vivre des expériences, et il change notre musique". (p. 94)