Abbott Kahler - Eden Undone (Harper Collins, 2024) **½

When buying books on Amazon, they often give "recommendations based on your past choices", and this book popped up, with the amazing subtitle "A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II", which appealed to my boyish nature. 

I will refrain from doing semantic exercises on the description "A True Story" as initiated by the movie Fargo. What happened then is not a story. It is true. A German physician and his patient move to Floreana in 1930, one of the Galápagos Islands with the sole intent of creating their own paradise, their own eden, far from the madness and obligations of society. Dr. Friedrich Ritter also has the high aspirations to write his own philosophical treatise about how to live in this world. He describes their new paradise in a series of newspaper articles, which of course leads to other people sharing his idea. They are followed by another German couple who are looking for a place where their ill and almost blind son, still a boy, can hope to benefit from a good environment. Next comes an Austrian-French sex-obsessed Baroness with two 'male slaves' and an Ecuadorian translator. The baroness is a true narcissist, self-obsessed, manipulative, dictatorial, charming if need be, seductive and commanding. 

Because the media attention they create, they also generate the interest of the very rich Americans, who come to visit with their cruise ships to see for themselves how these Europeans have eked out a living in the harsh environment of the Galapagos. 

Needless to say that this Eden soon becomes a nightmare for all involved, with the truth becoming a commodity as rare as luxury goods. Human nature comes to the fore even among the most principled people, leading to theft, hypocrisy, gossip, shifting alliances, hate, death and murder. 

Kahler brings it like a documentary, extensively using excerpts from letters and articles, and literally including all events that took place, which gives possibly a very distorted view of the actual boring life these people must have had on the island, with the exception of the conflicts that were documented. The book has also no literary ambition to bring more than just a report. It's a missed opportunity with this kind of material to work from. 

It's a fascinating microcosm of humanity, isolated and reduced to a handful of people. It could have been staged for a play, to reduce the madness of our kind on one tiny location, with high hopes and lofty aspirations leading to a predictable catastrophy within a very short time span. It's a mirror to all of us, and if a fiction author had developed a plot such as this one, the reader would say it's possibly too programmatic, too artificial to be credible. 

In this sense it really is a story. But then a true one. 

Kevin J. Mitchell - Free Agents - How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton University Press, 2023) *****

Earlier this year I read Robert Sapolsky's "Determined - Life Without Free Will" in which he argues that our idea of free will is only an illusion, and that any action our body takes is actually the result of hundreds of unconscious forces that work in it. Much earlier, I also read Sam Harris's "Free Will" which makes a very similar claim, although less substantiated and more philosophical. 

As a counter-argument I came across this delightful book by geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and author of the blog "Wiring The Brain". 

In contrast to his blog, he does not take Sapolsky head-on in this book, but it's clear that some of the arguments come from refutations of some of Sapolsky's claims. Both books are well-documented, both are written by experts in their fields, and both come to different conclusions. Both agree that there is no 'immaterial I" that takes decisions, or that there is no mind-body duality. Both agree that many of our decisions are pre-determined by patterns of culture, genes, education, etc. They disagree whether this body can make any deliberate choice now, at this very moment, by weighing the pros and cons of certain actions. Sapolsky will say the choice is automatic. Mitchell will say that our neurons balance the options and our brain eventually makes a choice. That our body has "agency". 

Interestingly enough, the recent debate on this topic, and largely the spark that lit the fire for the books of Sapolsky, Harris and Mitchell goes back to an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in 1983. Mitchell also comes with a different interpretation on the methodology and the result of the data. 

I share a whole lot of text below, as examples of parts of his arguments. I can only recommend that you read the whole book. 

This question of morality is a topic that Sapolsky ends his book with. And the question is essential. Without free will, how can we make moral decisions? 

"Another barrier to a clear explication of the arguments around whether free will exists is that they are often approached from the direc­tion of their consequences for our positions on moral responsibility. If people are not really in control of their actions - if we are nothing more than physical automata, mounting a wonderfully sophisticated but ul­timately empty simulacrum of free will - then how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment? The stakes here could not be higher. The idea of moral responsibility is the foundation not only of our legal systems but also of all our social interactions. We are constantly thinking about what we should or shouldn't do in any given circumstance and probably spend even more time thinking about what other people should or shouldn't do ( or should or shouldn't have done). But tying the discussion of free will to the issue of moral responsibility muddies the waters. Questions of moral responsibility are crucially important, of course, but they are confounded by all kinds of additional issues: the nature and origins of our moral sensibilities, the evolution of moral norms, the legal philosophies underpinning our justice systems, and the complex and innumerable pragmatic decisions that societies and individuals have to make to keep our collective existence stable. Ask­ing what kind of free will we want that will let us maintain our positions on moral responsibility can become almost a theological exercise in motivated reasoning" (p.17)

Mitchell goes very deep into the origin of our species and explains how even in the most basic forms of life, choices are made, obviously not conscious choice, but choices all the same. Even the very first cells, who function based on chemical reactions, start having options on how to proceed. The concept of 'information' as the basis for agency is essential to his thesis. 

"Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus-response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell's internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions. This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing-and why it is doing it-in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense-it is informational." (p.62)

or a little further ...

"These simple organisms are not aware of those reasons. But it is still correct to say that the organism is doing something because it increases its chances of persistence. Or, at a finer level, that it is moving in a certain direction to get food or to escape a predator. It's right to think of various components and subsystems as having functions. And it's right to say the organism is acting on the basis of inferences about what is out in the world, rather than simply being triggered by external stimuli. The mecha­nisms are simply the means by which those goals are accomplished. Even these humble unicellular creatures thus have real autonomy and agency, as organized dynamic patterns of activity, causally insulated from their environment, and configured to maintain themselves through time. It is not merely that they hold themselves apart from the world outside: they act in the world and on the world in a goal-directed manner. They are causal agents in their own right. As evolution proceeds, the degree of autonomy increases-at least along some lineages, like the ones leading to humans. The tight coupling of perception and action is loosened. With the advent of multicellularity and especially the invention of nervous systems, additional layers of processing emerge. Organisms evolve the means to represent sensory in­formation internally without directly acting on it. More sophisticated control systems emerge for guiding action over longer timeframes. Organ­isms develop internal systems of evaluation that free them from the brutal, life-or-death judgment of natural selection. Crucially, all these systems are informational. Meaning becomes the currency of cognition." (p. 67)

The complexity of our bodies implies that our brains receive information from various sources inside and outside the body, information that needs to be integrated, balanced and decided upon based on neural hierarchies in the brain.  

"But the coupling between perception and action is at least loosened a bit. There are now some intermediate stages of processing-carried out by the middle layers of interneurons-during which multiple signals are integrated to allow the animal to respond to the situation as a whole, as opposed to independent stimuli. Specific interneurons collect signals from multiple sensory neurons responding to diverse aversive stim­uli, while other interneurons sum the activity of a different set of sen­sory neurons responsive to diverse attractive stimuli. The relative activ­ity of these interneurons is then itself integrated at another stage to determine whether the sum of attraction outweighs the sum of aversion. All of this is dependent on the context: responses to those integrated external sensory signals differ depending on the current internal state of the animal."(p.91)

 At a further stage, information becomes meaning. 

"When configured in this way, perceptual systems are not just pro­cessing information-they are extracting meaning. The patterns of neu­ral activity across different areas in the visual hierarchy represent the system's best guesses of what is out in the world, focused on what is most relevant and important for the survival of the organism. Those guesses are not merely passively computed through successive levels of information processing. The organism is actively, subjectively interpret­ing this information, bringing its prior experience and expectations to bear. (p.118)

In this sense, we are neither a machine nor is there a ghost in the machine. We are an organism that decides. 

"In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding­: the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptu­ally, we lose sight of the thing we' re trying to explain. 

However, although we can reject a reductionist, purely mechanistic approach, that should not send us running in the other direction toward a nebulous, mysteriously nonphysical mind that is "in charge": the ghost in the machine. Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physi­cal brains, somehow directing the flow of electrical activity. The activity distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our mental experience ( and similarly for whatever kinds of mental experience other animals have). The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal power based on how the system is physically configured. We can thus build a holistic physical conception of agency without either re­ducing it or mystifying it." (p. 144)

"This skepticism seems partly due to the enduring intellectual legacy of French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, which has shaped the Western scientific tradition. One of Descartes's most famous ideas is that the world is made of two very different types of substance: the physical and the mental. This dualist position gets around having to explain how physical stuff can produce immaterial things like thoughts by simply positing that thoughts occupy a kind of parallel realm of the mental. The problem with this idea-pointed out by some of Descartes's contemporaries, such as the astute and wonderfully titled Elizabeth, Prin­cess of Bohemia - is that it does not explain how the physical and the mental realms can interact. They clearly seem to, because thinking about doing something can indeed lead to us doing it - physically moving our bodies and things in the world - but how? Descartes did not have a good answer to this question (though he did propose a route of communication through the pineal gland, for no particularly good reason). 

You would think we would have moved on by now, after four hun­dred years, but it seems we still get hung up on a version of the same question: How could having a conscious thought move physical stuff around? Doesn't that somehow violate the laws of physics? It seems to require a mysterious form of top-down causation in which the mental pushes the physical around. But this apparent mystery only arises if we think of the mental as some realm of free-floating thoughts and ideas. It's not a question of whether immaterial thoughts can push around physi­cal stuff. Thoughts are not immaterial: they are physically instantiated in patterns of neural activity in various parts of the brain, which can naturally have effects on how activity evolves in other regions. There's no need to posit a "ghost in the machine"-you're not haunting your own brain. The "ghost" is the machine at work." (p. 268)

 By accepting our free will as an evolutionary outcome that gives us powers no other animal has ever had, we also need a heightened sense of responsibility, anticipation and morality. 

"By being able to think at this level, we turn isolated elements of knowledge into a more general understanding of how the world works, something that artificial intelligence still struggles to do. And we can deploy that understanding in directing our own behavior, even in osten­sibly novel situations. We can combine these nested hierarchies of con­cepts and maps of causal relations and system dynamics in new, creative ways within this abstract cognitive space and thereby engage in open­ended, model-based reasoning. We can imagine things. In effect, we can mentally simulate a model of the world and "run" it in fast forward, predicting and evaluating outcomes of various actions over short and long timeframes. 

Our ability to model the world in this way gives us unprecedented control over our environments. When faced with some problem, we have the ability to see the bigger picture by taking into account a wider context and a longer time horizon. This means we can avoid getting stuck in local optima - the quickest, easiest solution to a local problem­and instead optimize for global parameters. We can think strategically, not just tactically." (p. 254)

Without a doubt Mitchell's book is more than welcome and was a great relief to have his substantiated arguments for free will. Even when Sapolsky argues that the absence of free will may be morally liberating, his concept still felt suffocating and utterly reductionist. Mitchell's arguments are scientifically sound and they offer us a much stronger and open foundation to start working on, both as an individual and as a society. 

I have the intense pleasure of seeing my four grandsons - between one month and four years old - learn about the world and their immediate environment. When I see them discover their feet (the youngest) or make choices when playing, or interacting with each other, the only thing I see are four distinct characters, exploring, choosing, reasoning, fantasising, enjoying themselves and the freedom they have to do this. They are not little machines who are fully determined by culture or genes. They are four individuals enjoying life (well ... OK, sometimes not). Their life is in front of them. They will make billions of choices in the future. That is what life offers them, what it offers us. 

Anybody interested in evolution, cognitive science, society and ethics should read this book. But don't trust me ... I am fully confident that you can do this based on your own free will. 

Jean-Baptiste Andrea - Veiller Sur Elle (L'Iconoclaste, 2023) ***½

Recommended by my wife, so it must be good. Winner of the Prix Goncourt, book of the year by Fnac and the favourite novel of the readers of Elle. 

This is the story of Mimo and Viola, born in 1904, two people who should never have met when they were thirteen. He is born into poverty, leaving his widowed mother in France, returning to the Italy of his ancestors to be brought up in the workshop of an alcoholic sculptor uncle. She lives in the most powerful family in Liguria. Two polar opposites trapped in their situation, she in her woman's body dreaming to have the same possibilities as men to fulfill her dreams; he suffering from dwarfism while he intends to master marble blocks to become a sculptor. Yet both are smart and sensitive and exceptional in their own way. And they connect. 

The novel opens in 1986. Mimo, on the threshold of death in a Piedmontese abbey where he has lived in seclusion for some forty years without taking the vows, recalls the thread of his life, his unique relationship with Viola and the story of his masterpiece: a mysterious statue that so disturbing to anyone who saw it that the Vatican decided to keep it out of sight.

Andrea is an incredible story-teller, epic and poetic at the same time, driving the action forward, adding characters, situations, cities ... adding layers that are all representing hurdles in the way for the one romantic ideal of the perfect sculpture and the perfect love. 

Of course you want these two special people to succeed, the identification by the reader with the fate of the protagonists is great even if there are obviously no common elements with my own situation. 

Andrea adds another layer of magic which he keeps hidden as much as possible but that is frequently hinted so that you know that there is more to it than meets the eye. This suspense is also the result of his excellent compositional work. The dying Mimo who reflects back on his life, surrounded by the monks who try to assist him, while the events of his youth unfold in parallel chapters. 

The book is 580 pages long, but I read it in a few days while on holiday. It's not complicated. It's easy to read. The story is captivating and moving. His style is direct and functional. 

A book to enjoy if you like great story-telling. 

Horacio Castellanos Moya - Selflessness (New Directions, 2008) **½

To be honest, when I read the plot - where? - I was immediately interested in reading this novel: "A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army’s massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including testimonies of the survivors. The writer’s job is to tidy it up: he rants “that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger.”

The narrator gets vague instructions and is even wondering whether his boss - the Church - has any idea about the content and potential impact of the report. While reading, he is amazed by the poetic responses by the indigenous villagers when tortured and killed. Some examples

• The houses they were sad because no people were inside them.
• For me the sorrow is not to bury him myself.
• They grabbed Diego Nap López and the grabbed a knife each officer giving him a stab or cutting off a small slice
• While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat

The poetic phrasing by the indigenous people is a way to create distance, or to make sense of it, to objectivise the horror of their experiences. 

The subject is as hard as it can get, yet the personal life of the narrator and his petty sex obsession turn the novel into a puerile story, with long endless sentences that describe in multiple ways what he is doing or experiencing, as a kind of László Krasznahorkai copy-cat. It becomes tedious in the end, including the sexual acrobatics. The harsh reality of the indigenous villagers seems to be a pretext rather than the essence. The author wants to impress instead of to express. And that is rarely good. 

Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible (Penguin, 2023) *****

When reading the short description of the book's content, I was hesitant. I am already convinced of the value of its contents. Second, I have read already so much on the subject that I wondered whether it would convey anything new. The reality of reading proved me wrong. Even if you consider yourself a 'humanist', and maybe because you are, you should read this book. It is extremely well-documented and extremely well-written. Bakewell starts the book with the 'credo' of humanism, as penned by Robert G. Ingersoll in the 19th Century: 

Happiness is the only good. 

The time to be happy is now. 

The place to be happy is here. 

The way to be happy is to make others so. 

Even if I was well aware or vaguely aware of the content of the thinkers and authors that she describes in this book, the real novelty is how these thoughts were received in society and how they evolved to become part of broader political and philosophical thinking. 

Her journey starts in the early 14th Century with the writings of Petrarch and Boccacio ("When his father contemplated training him for the church as 'a good way to get rich' it turned out he had no liking or aptitude for that either"). Both authors raided libraries to re-discover the ancient Latin authors, revived them, wrote about them. Bakewell mentioned that Bocaccio at one stage considered abandoning his literary endeavours because "a monk, Pietro Petroni of Sienna, warned him in 1632 that he would imminently die if he did not get rid of all the non-Christian books in his library and stop writing books himself. This had been revealed to him in a vision". Luckily, Petrarch used smarter arguments to convince him of the opposite: 'ignorance is not the path to virtue". He advocated for knowledge and learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas. 

We take it for granted today that we have immediate access to the works of Cicero, Epicurus, Terentius and Democritus, but that is of course not the case. Very few scholars even spoke Greek, so they had no way of understanding or valuing whatever Greek texts still existed in hidden libraries across Italy or elsewhere. The geneaology goes further: Poggio rediscovered Lucretius' "On The Nature of Things". Printing was invented and became a great power to share old and new ideas about broader groups of people. Lorenzo Valla is the next in line. 

"His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah. All these assets were necessary to Valla, because he was daring to attack one of the church's central modern claims: its justification for having complete power over all of western Europe. It could be a short step from that to questioning its other claims to authority, too, including the authority it held over peo­ple's minds. Valla seems to have been a man who had no fear and could never be persuaded to keep quiet. He traveled all over Italy, working for a series of patrons and supporters-at this point he was living in Naples-but he made enemies everywhere as well. The poet Maffeo Vegio had already warned him to seek advice before writing things that would hurt people's feelings, and generally to restrain his "intellectual violence." (p.87)

It takes courage to have intellectual curiosity, to be open to ideas that challenge beliefs and established authority: "Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life. And crucially, Valla did not merely tell people they were wrong, he gave the reasons why they were wrong" (p.93). 

On Vesalius: 

"He blamed both himself and other anatomists for having been too Galen-reliant: "I shall say noth­ing more about these others; instead I shall marvel more at my own stu­pidity and blind faith in the writings of Galen and other anatomists." He ends the section by urging students to rely on their own careful examina­tions, taking no one's word for anything, not even his own. This was a good warning, since Vesalius himself did not get every­thing right. One error was that he failed to identify the clitoris cor­rectly, misdescribing it as part of the labia. It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it ''amor Veneris, vel dulcedo" ("love of Venus, or thing of pleasure"), gave details of its role in women's sexual experiences, and remarked, "It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility." (p. 130)

On education and Erasmus schooling in a monastery: 

Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aver­sion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: "The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible." That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks' attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlight­ened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live." (p. 142) 

Other luminaries who are part of the genealogy: Pico della Mirandola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andreas Vesalius, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglas ("There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him"), Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt ("The State that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human"), Matthew Arnold. Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernest Renan, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell, ...

Bakewell is also very conscious of the value of humanism to all humans and not only to the male part of it. 

"Pericles (told) Athenian free men in 430 BCE that they are excel­lent because they are harmonious, responsible, and politically active - only to add that this does not apply to women, whose only virtue is never to be mentioned by anyone at all. That continued to be the norm for millennia: instead of the mainstream of human excellence, women were offered a rivulet of negative side virtues: modesty, silence, placidity, innocence, chastity. Each of these is characterized by the absence of some positive quality (confidence, eloquence, active responsibility, experience, and - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what the virtuous opposite of chastity is, but whatever we call it, it is surely more fun)." (p.203) 

There

"Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of ar­bitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.  The old Golden Rule, associated with several religions as well as with secular morality, has much to offer here: "Do as you would be done by." Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diver­sity: Don't do something to others if you wouldn't like it yourself. It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don't like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either. Or, as Kongzi said: "The Master's way consists of doing one's best to fulfill one's humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity." (p 218, 219)

This book is a great overview of humanist thought: inquisitive, inclusive, caring, ethical, motivated by a happiness for all, in diversity of thought and the right of each individual to personal freedom and fullfilment and happiness. For me this overview is the absolute hope and despair of humanity. Hope because it offers a clear perspective and a way of thinking, despair because over the centuries of expanded thinking on the subject, we have not moved significantly further at a global level. Our technology has advanced exponentially over the last two centuries, mainstreaming it across the globe, yet humanist thinking has despite its obvious value and benefits barely created strong understanding and use in most of the world. 

Bakewell is an excellent guide, erudite and entertaining and truly committed. 

Not to be missed. 

Bart D. Ehrman - Armageddon - What the Bible Really Says About the End (Simon & Schuster, 2024) ****

Few things are more intriguing than religious beliefs. Texts written in ancient cultures have received over the years a status of divine truth, regardless of their factual accuracy, their physical possibilities, their internal contradictions and their lack of morals. Bart Ehrman studied religion when still a strong evangelical believer. His knowledge of the ancient languages and ancient history helped him understand the reality behind the texts. I can recommend many of his thirty books, half of which I have read. In the New Testament, the latest book, called "Revelation", written by a certain John of Patmos, describes Armageddon, the End Time, when Jesus returns and the Good will be separated from the Evil. This Book stands in stark contrast to the other books in the New Testament, in that it shows a return of the god of the Old Testament: it's no longer a loving and caring god, but a god full of wrath, vindictive, violent, powerful. A god who demands full submission and slavelike obedience. 

The imagery is strong violent, hallucinatory, excessive, with symbols and signs that are sometimes hard to interpret for modern day readers, but even in the earliest centuries scholars expressed their lack of understanding and there was a lot of discussion whether or not to include it in the New Testament. Eventually it was, but people like Martin Luther put them in the annex to his translation of the book. 

The most amazing thing is that this text is still a very lively prospect among evangelical christians, especially in the United States, and a strong part of Donald Trump's followers. They believe that Jesus will only come back to earth for the end times, when the jews reconquer the Mount of the Rock, and restore the original Temple that was destroyed in 40 CE. That explains the strong support for Israel and the sometimes inexplicable disregard for the human suffering of the Palestines. 

That people actually believe this, and actually build their life around this possibility is astonishing: 

"We are talking about a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon. One fairly recent poll indicates that 79 percent of Christians in America believe Jesus will be returning to earth at some point. Another poll taken in 2010 shows that 47 percent of the Christians in the country believe Jesus will return by 2050 (27 percent definitely and 20 percent probably)." (p. 15)

Many Christian sects have even determined with precision when exactly this would happen. Ehrman gives a great overview of all the wrong calculations by recent Christian sects, but being demonstrably wrong did not deter them from believing. The downside is that because a precise date for the end time was presented, the cult's followers often sold their farms, or did not harvest, or even gave all their belongings away, in the hope of buying their ticket to heaven. 

"Instead of admitting they were wrong, however, the group buoys itself by explaining to one another what really happened, jus­tifying themselves in face of the disconfirmation by pointing out a slight error in their calculations or claiming the event was inten­tionally delayed and then resetting the date. But most interesting, the group further resolves the dissonance by becoming more evan­gelistic, going out to win more converts to their views. Why would a mistake make someone missionary? The theory behind cognitive dissonance is that if more people acknowledge you are right, it eases the psychological trauma of knowing that you are probably wrong. So you set out to win over other devotees. Thus, the Millerites and their resetting of dates. Each time the expectation is disconfirmed, the group gets larger and more fervent, until the Final Disappointment takes effect. But even then, the idea does not necessarily go away, nor do the groups themselves. Various American religious groups emerged from the Millerites' Great Disappointment-"at least 33," accord­ing to sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Sims Bain­bridge. Hope springs eternal, and these groups thrive among us today, holding strong eschatological views about the coming end­normally, now, without setting dates. The two break-off groups most familiar to modern readers are the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists" (82-83)

Another major distinction between this Book and the Gospels, is the future vision of life after the final judgment. The followers of the Lamb or the Lord, will live in absolute power and absolute opulence: all infidels will be violently tortured and destroyed and the followers will live in a city of gold with all the riches and wealth one can imagine. Whereas the Gospels advocate for humility, service, caring, love, even for people of other groups, the Revelation is a brutal tale of reconquering power from Rome, and doing with other peoples exactly what was being done to them in the first place. After the End Times, the oppressed will be the oppressors, the poor will be massively wealthy. Instead of inspiring with new insights, spirituality and brotherhood, the Book of Revelation continues the ancient power narrative, with only a shift in power. 

"We have already seen that the book is massively violent. (...) I want to stress that the violence of the book is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The ultimate goal is revenge. But more than that, it is limitless possessions and power. In the end, the right people will get what the wrong people have now. As New Testament scholar Christopher Frilingos has so succinctly expressed, the book is all about who will dominate the world: ''A frankly imperialist nar­rative, Revelation predicts the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of a Christian one." Revelation does not adopt a new Christian attitude toward wealth and domination. It instead affirms the attitude promoted by Roman culture, the same view held by most people who choose not to follow the teachings of Jesus: wealth and domination can be ultimate goods." (172) 

This text that at first reading appears to have been written by a madman, and that for sure no publisher would even think of publishing today if anyone came with this manuscript, is still today a text that determines the thinking of millions of gullible people, even to the extent that it plays a role in the power politics of the Middle-East. 

 

(Pelckmans, 2024) ***½

Vele zaken zijn cyclisch, en de tijden evolueren. Rond 2010 leidde ik bij Janssen de "branding" oefening om het merk Janssen wereldwijd in de markt te zetten nadat alle farmabedrijven van de groep Johnson & Johnson onder één merk geïntegreerd werden. Samen met bedrijfsmerkenspecialist Fons Van Dyck en zijn teams organiseerden we workshops in Europa en de VS met alle betrokkenen om het merk precies te kunnen positioneren, gevolgd door teksten, video's en ander communicatiemateriaal om het merk tot leven te brengen. Dit jaar werd het merk "Janssen" ten grave gedragen en de organisatie herdoopt in Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, een hele mondvol, en een terugkeer naar het merk van het moederbedrijf. 

Van Dyck is één van die weinige professionals die naast hun werk ook intellectueel maatschappelijk betrokken zijn, met zijn wekelijkse columns in de krant, maar ook als publicist en spreker. Dit is al zijn vijfde boek, een supergoed gestoffeerd werk over een onderwerp dat een kwarteeuw in zijn hoofd heeft zitten spelen. Een merk bestaat uit zeer diepe emotionele associaties die aansluiten bij de doelstellingen van het bedrijf als bij de verwachtingen van de klant. Ook hier wordt diep onder de oppervlakte gegraven om de essentie te vatten. 

Zeer vergelijkbaar is zijn uitgangspunt hier dat er vier krachten onze samenleving bepalen, als grote drijfveren die als optelsom van alle individuen ook de brede golven aangeven van de trends die we zien en mee helpen tot stand komen, en die hij gemakshalve alle vier met "Ver" doet starten. 

Die krachten zijn Verkennen (om grenzen te verleggen), Verbinden (in harmonie met onze omgeving), Veroveren (van macht, status en rijkdom), Verdedigen (wanneer we ons bedreigd voelen). Die krachten zijn op zich niet noodzakelijk negatief, maar ze kunnen dat wel zijn. Ze bepalen de grote tendenzen in onze samenleving als een golfbeweging van het sentiment van de massa. 

Naast deze grote krachten, die Van Dyck toelicht met voorbeelden uit het bedrijfsleven, de mode, de wielrennerij en uiteraard de politiek en vele andere sectoren, verwijst hij naar zijn mentor Helmut Gaus, professor aan de Universiteit van Gent over diens theorie van de grote trends in de samenleving, een cyclus die varieert tussen de veertig en zestig jaar. En gemakshalve vergelijkt hij die met onze vier seizoenen. 

De voorlaatste 'zomer' situeerde zich in 1971, het ongebreideld toekomstoptimisme als een gevolg van de toegenomen welvaart, technologische vernieuwing, en democratie. 

Deze cycli met uiteraard lente en herfst tussenin variëren om de veertig tot zestig jaar. Onze vorige winter was eind jaren '80, met veel werkloosheid, Tsjernobyl, AIDS, terreur (Bende van Nijvel, CCC), enz. Volgens de auteur was de vorige zomer in 2021. Mij verbaast dit. De angst - ook door Covid - met alle anti-vaxers, het extreem-rechts gedachtengoed dat al opgang maakte, was toen al een paar jaar bezig. Maar goed, misschien moet je abstractie maken van een aantal zaken om de grote tendenzen te kunnen vastleggen. 

Voor alle duidelijkheid: deze cycli zijn een reflectie van een mentale dominantie in de samenleving, zoals bijvoorbeeld voortuigangoptimisme versus angst voor de toekomst, vertrouwen in elkaar versus argwaan, en heeft slechts onrechtstreeks te maken met effectieve gebeurtenissen in de samenleving. 

Vandaag gaan we een mentale winter in. Van Dyck geeft de resultaten van een opiniepeiling die hij liet uitvoeren bij onze Vlaamse medeburgers. Zo denkt bijvoorbeeld 91% van de mensen dat de angst van mensen voor de toekomst zal toenemen, of vindt één op de drie Vlamingen dat het onverantwoord is om vandaag kinderen op de wereld te zetten. Deze mentale winter is ook te meten aan het stemgedrag van de bevolking, waarbij Verdedigen en Veroveren vandaag sterker staan dan Verbinden en Verkennen. De mensen plooien op zichzelf terug, stemmen extremistisch en ze denken dat sterke leiders met veel macht wenselijk zijn. 

Ik heb mijn twijfels bij de geïdentificeerde cycli als een soort fatalistische onvermijdbaarheid. Ze zijn ook zeer Westers en zelfs relatief lokaal. Maar ook al ben ik het niet met alles eens wat in Fons Van Dycks boek staat, zijn goed gedocumenteerde visie is meer dan het lezen waard, en zoals elke grote intellectuele inspanningen nodigt dit ook uit tot meer diepgaande reflectie over het lot van ons als mensen. Van Dyck blijft echter optimistisch en eindigt zijn boek met een aantal handvatten om de toekomst aan te pakken. 

Meer dan het lezen waard. 

Noel B. Gerson - Queen of Caprice - A Biography of Kristina of Sweden (Sapere, 1962) ***½

I am sure that all Swedes know the story of Kristina of Sweden, who was queen from 1632 when she was 16 years old till 1654, when she abdicated after having converted to catholicism. She was a unique personality, controversial, smart, curious, headstrong, and sometimes incredibly selfish and even childish. Hence this biography's title: "Queen of Caprice", and that seems an apt description. So many elements of her character were in conflict with each other, that it is easy to qualify her as a tragic figure, but on the other hand she has always been master of her own destiny with a privilege that few other people had. Today we would categorise her as "highly gifted", a situation which was both a blessing and a curse. And that makes her biography so interesting to read. 

Here are some nice excerpts which describe some aspects of her personality. She did everything to make Stockholm the Athens of the North, by inviting scientists from around Europe to Sweden to teach and to experiment and to share ideas. 

"Professor Stiernhielm brought the microscope and the burning glass home from his travels, and in his classroom he demonstrated their marvels. He showed his students a flea under the microscope, and in a dramatic demonstration of the power of the glass, burned the long beard of a peasant. He was arrested, thrown into prison, and tried before a provincial court. The peasant declared that he was a sorcerer, and a pastor who had been present when the flea had been exhibited under the microscope, testified that the professor was an atheist. Stiernhielm was sentenced to burn at the stake. The case was called to Kristina's attention, and she hastily reversed the order, restored the professor to his former position and rebuked the court. But a few months later, Stiernhielm's life again was threatened. He made the statement in a lecture that Hebrew was an older language than Swedish, and this startling pronouncement so infuriated his students that they rioted. A detachment of royal cavalry saved the professor's life and escorted him to Stockholm, where Kristina expressed her opinion in terms that no one could misunderstand: she made Stiernhielm a noble and expelled the rioters from the university." (p. 82)

Despite her being very catholic, and asking any support possible from the Vatican to help her with her situation, she was still - as usual - very critical of the Church at the same time/ 

 In one of her letters: "In all candor, however, I am compelled to observe that the Church must certainly be governed by the Holy Spirit, for since I have been in Rome I have seen four popes, and I swear that not one of them had common sense" (p. 263)

 She was also a social non-conformist, and even when young she enjoyed horse-riding and sword-fighting for which male clothing was more comfortable. She did not care about what other people thought or said about this. If she wanted to wear trousers, she would wear trousers. At the same time she was very conscious of her femininity. She also liked to be confrontational and expose hypocrisy. 

"A new law caused her to revolt. The Pope issued a stern decree in which he said that the dress of ladies was shocking and extravagant; even those who could afford to buy costly gowns should find other, worthier ways to spend their money, and he deplored current styles, which featured low-cut dresses and bare arms. Kristina made no protest, but invited the Pope to call on her at his convenience. When he arrived at her palace, she received him in a shapeless, ragged, long-sleeved dress that she had bought from a peasant woman. She had expanded her court in recent years to include several ladies, and all of them made their obeisances similarly attired." (p. 276)

She was an unusual character with an unusual personality. This makes her biography interesting and fun reading. The book is well written and nicely documented with diary notes and correspondence by the queen herself or by her long-time servant Mathilde. It offers plenty of anecdotes about her interaction with the highest nobility and royalty of Europe, while at the same time about her almost boyish sense of rebellion. You marvel at her single-mindedness, her broad-mindedness, her cultural and scientific curiosity and the constant counterforces in her that undermine most of her grand scale endeavours. 

Dan Goodley - Disability and Other Human Questions (Emerald, 2021) ***

British researcher and disability advocate has published this interesting book full of new insights without being to scientific in his approach, but rather using a more personal and human style. As a patient advocate myself, I found his more scientific work very relevant for my advocacy work, and I'm sure many people, disabled or not, ill or not, will benefit from his insights. He argues that next to the organised care that the state provides to people stands the self-reliance of the individual to deal with these services that are offered. Yet he also argues for a third element, the presence of "the community", the need for connectivity that every human being needs, but especially so for disabled people. 

Just to highlight one passage, but of course there are many more that are noteworthy in this book: 

"What I am suggesting is that disability opens up possibilities for rethinking desire and, in particular, the desire for connection. Like belonging, connection acknowledges our need for others and others' need for us. Disabled people have magnified the importance of these interconnections through their political movements, their arts, their culture and their history. Take these connectivities that are commonly found in the world of disability: human-animal (in the case of guide or service dogs), human-machine (when one considers the use of wheelchairs and other prosthetics) and human-human (in the case of personal assistance or support workers). These exemplify what Barbara Gibson (2006) calls 'disability connectivities'. The centrality of connectivity, care and support in the lives of many disabled people has emphasised the human gains of partnership, community building and interdependence. This latter term, Solveig Reindall (1999) has argued, recognises that we are all situated and embedded in a host of communities. And to pursue interdependence unveils new kinds of desire. 'Desire itself', Margrit Shildrick (2007, p. 242) writes, 'is no longer figured in terms of lack but is always directed outwards' to establish ever renewed zones of connection. Our capacities as human beings- the things we can and cannot do-are always contextual and relational". (p. 50)

Inspirational and valuable. 

Carlos Manuel Álvarez - The Tribe (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022) ****½

I had never heard of Carlos Manuel Álvarez, and to all expectations you probably did not either. He's a Cuban journalist who cofounded the online journal "El Estronudo". He received many literary awards, and was arrested by the police for some of his journalistic activities. "The Tribe" fits in no literary category whatsoever. It is partly journalism, partly fiction, partly political analysis, and all three are written with incredible penmanship. Every sentence of his is a treat, a pleasure to read, despite the deep agony of many of the subjects in the stories. 

I will give a few examples here, because they are sufficiently eloquent to make my point: 

"A throng of brothers, cousins, nephews and neighbours are waiting for the homecoming of the prodigal son. Also waiting for him is a lechona - a fifteen pound suckling pig - transformed by the carver's art to create perniles, masas, brigade, rabo, cabeza, pork stew and a mountain of crispy chicharrohnes" (p.34)

The story of elderly Candida: 

"In 1996, Hurricane Lili destroyed Candida's house. She received a government grant for reconstruction materials, but they never showed up. She stayed in the house, which was almost a complete ruin, until someone in the neighbourhood emigrated to the United States. Before the government could confiscate their property, Candida made it her own. "I'm a force to be reckoned with. I take life on and I'm not afraid, that's how God intends it. I went up onto the roof, got into the little patio, broke the seal and snuck into the apartment where I live today."  When the Housing Department tried to get her out, the neighbours protested. Candida deserved a decent home. She didn't know whether or not she deserved it, but what she did know, as she stood there, machete in hand, was that nobody was going to kick her out. She denounced the police, went to the Party and the government, insul­ted any and every official they put before her, and in the end she won the battle." (p. 198)

A paragraph on the sordid fate of the Cubans who eventually manage to stay in the United States: 

"People who have never learned to ride a bicycle will have to buy a car and learn to drive within the week, to negotiate the broad ex­pressways that zigzag through the city, to negotiate with dealers, to work ten hours or more a day, pay rent and taxes they barely understand, adjust to the gruelling habit of punctuality, of obeying superiors, of applying for debit and credit cards, and other things about which they know nothing.  And they will thrive, because they carry within them a memory of the place they came from, a country that sa­dly had little to offer them, but it won't be a piece of cake. There are almost no documented cases of Cubans who legally travelled to Miami later deciding that they made the wrong decision. Fewer still for these people, who have burned their bridges. " (p.243)

Or on his disappointment with the Castro family regime:  

"It is a personal defeat, where­as we are talking about the defeat of a people. And that's something sacred, it's a tragedy. Cuba is a patchwork of capitalism and socialism that is worse than useless. Go try to buy some food. You won't find any. Just look at the prices. Is the blockade to blame? It's fucking ridiculous. It's just not serious. Does our food come from London? Do yams come from Paris? No. Life is constantly in mo­tion and it's like a game of chess. With every move, the board changes. You can't stay still. Things are the way they are because Fidel and Raul are in a standoff with the United States. And the whole thing is a barefaced lie. Raul says: "We can hold out for another fifty years." Well, yes, obviously, you can hold out. But the people can't hold out" (p. 247)

He describes the situation in a neighbourhood of Havana when there is suddenly again a delivery of eggs to the shop of the butcher who is called Fidel: 

"This explains why, on the day the eggs reach their points of sale - small markets, grocery stores, cafes - there are genuine pitched battles between shoppers. Today is one of those days in this Cardenas neighbourhood. There is a horse cab stand just on the corner of Fidel's shop, and half-starved horses are constantly trotting down the road, wearing down the tarmac with their hooves. Spurred on by necessity, residents from every rung of the ladder hurry out. Word has spread. The neighbour­hood is a chaotic hive. A long, restless and disgruntled queue of thirty people gathers halfway down the block from the shopfront. It's early in the morning, and it's al­ways the same clients arguing over the eggs on free sale - generally housewives, punctilious grandmothers and retired old men. It's a picturesque local scene, touching somehow. Fidel knows every one of them and they all know Fidel. The queue unfurls and at certain points gets tangled up in knots of three or four, or it curves and curls around itself, like a boa digesting on the pavement. People's fabric bags are hanging from their forearms and their disposable bags are scrunched up in their fists or in their back trouser pockets" (p. 269)

Carlos Manuel Álvarez tells us about the lives of famous and less famous Cubans. The personal story is always the starting point: a baseball player, a musician, a gay man, an elderly lady, ... presented with a strong sense of empathy and respect for these people who sometimes manage to break out of the political and geographic shackles, sometimes not, but every personal story is about human nature, its resilience, its inventiveness, its capacity for creative solutions in the face of adversity and political regulations, and then again to lift it a level higher to a general criticism of the Cuban regime. 

You get nineteen stories, nineteen captivating stories that are more literary than journalism, more factual than literature, and written with a great sense of composition and wording. 

I also want to congratulate the publishing company, Fitzcarraldo, for their effort to translate the best of international literature into English. I bought the book because I trusted the publishing company. And they did not disappoint me yet. 

Anne Applebaum - Autocracy, Inc. (Allen Lane, 2024) ****

If one book describes the strings that determine the global geopolitical powerplay, it is this one. Aptly titled, "Autocracy, Inc" it is all about the financial streams that feed the hunger and the power of autocrats around the world. Anne Applebaum explains how for instance Putin as an ex-KGB man had access to all the secret bank accounts of the Soviet regime around the world, with which opposition in local communist parties were financed, and how this network suddenly became a tool to syphon money out of the country after the Soviet Union collapsed. She explains how naive the West, and especially Germany has been with regard to deals about gas transport with Russia. She explains the deep financial connections between Russia, China, Iran and other regimes around the world, such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe. How a few elites in each of these countries sacrifice their own citizens to keep growing their personal wealth, which allows them to buy power, to oppress and manipulate their citizens. 

Informed citizens in the West are aware of these connections, often in a fragmented way, by reading news articles left and right, or by possible links that are claimed by some to exist but without clear evidence. Many of the elements in this book will not be hard news. Yet, the picture that Applebaum depicts in this book brings it all together, and provides much more. She has been a privileged journalist and historian, witnessing things first hand when she lived in Poland, and having interviewed and met many of the protagonists in the book. 

I already recommend her "The Twilight Of Democracy" when it appeared in 2020, but this one is even more relevant. It's well written, easy to read despite the many factual information that she provides. But the strongest message of the book is a wake-up call to anyone who's interested in democracy and justice and prosperity for all: if we don't realise what's happening, if we don't open our eyes and start acting to protect our Western democracies, the few countries in human history that actually generated prosperity for all citizens, we risk to be eaten from within by all the smear campaigns, polarisation campaigns, manipulation and interference campaigns that remain largely hidden but are all too present, led by the autocrats of the world who have found their common interest in destroying the liberal mind. Not to mention their funding of extremist political parties. 

The book was published before Elon Musk starts funding Trump's campaign and distributing money to his voters. I wonder what she has to say about this. 

Next to highly recommending this book, I can also recommend that you follow her on "X" and read her frequent articles in The Atlantic, including her recent podcast with Peter Pomerantzev. 

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein - Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment (William Collins, 2022) ****

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" became a global bestseller, and rightly so, even if many of the book's core positions have been challenged by some cognitive scientists. Be that as it may, the book managed to open many minds to relfect on our own inuitive way of thinking, often very fast and even subconsciously, rarely with considered and conscious rationality. Driving that message home to us humans is already a major achievement, even if I'm not too optimistic about what it actually leads to in practice. 

"Noise" will probably not be a bestseller at the same level, yet it also deserves to be read by many. The core proposition of the book is that we all have a decision-making 'bias' that is linked to our perspective, culture, education, profession, etc. This 'bias' is well understoord by anybody involved in research, in opinion-polling or other levels of understanding decision-making. At the same time there is also 'noise' in the system, a problem of the same nature that is less widely acknowledged. "Noise" is the variation in choices or decisions made based on the same data, and that demonstrate a lack of coherence within an organisation or within the same person. 

The book gives dozens and dozens of examples of for instance claims administrators in insurance companies who give entirely different sums to claimants even if the damage is the same, or judges who give totally different sentences for identical crimes, or doctors who give totally different diagnoses for the same presented symptoms by patients. The stunning factor in the given examples are not only that there is variation in their decisions, but how wide the variations can be, as from three months to three years in the context of court sentences. A even more stunning fact is the variation by one and the same individual. Kahneman and colleagues mention studies that were conducted by presenting the same cases to the same judges or doctors six months after the first evaluation. The same judges and doctors came to a completely different decision so many months later. Some of these differences may even change depending on the moment of the day. Judges are more lenient with a full stomach, and less lenient on an empty one. The same is true with doctors apparently. 

We don't want to judge judges or doctors here, but show how we all should reflect on our own inconsistencies in judgment. In that respect, this book is again an eye-opener for anyone interested in the quality of our thought processes. 

The only downside in the book is the lack of recent data to substantiate their positions. Many of the studies that I double-checked had data from the '90s. It may be that nothing has changed since then, but I think that especially in medicine, many things have changed, including better diagnostics and the use of artificial intelligence to help mitigate the problems mentioned in the book. 

Recommended reading. 

Jim Crace - Eden (Picador, 2022) ****

I'm a big fan of Jim Crace. I like his sytlistic lyricism and the cadence of his writing, as if all sentences have 'metre' like Ovid. Like in some of his other novels, there's a level of abstraction, a distance to the subject that lifts it to a higher plane than the actual plot. 

The story itself is simple: in the garden of eden (without capital), the angels make a group of - what? 50 or so? - humans work the fields and the pond so that they can have food within their totally enclosed little paradise. The humans are immortal and their lives are pure routine. Obviously there's no need for procreation, even if the two sexes are represented. They live in a friendly environment of endless repetition.  One day, one of the female humans, Tabi, decides to escape, despite the risk of mortality, disease, ageing and other threats that are said to be present outside the walls. 

"So this awkward and unnerving day subsides, al­though briefly on a calmer note. The masters can't have helped but smell the unease in the air - for everyone, not just the orchardman - since Tabi disappeared. The ground beneath even the angels' feet has quaked with the shock and disrespect of her departure and the fear of having to explain it all to the garden's lord when they next dare to visit him. They understand their workers, now fewer than fifty, are bereaved and must be reassured at once, before the imp of disobedience takes hold like some fast­growing tare; and first one, then another, then a crowd grow bold enough to think that, possibly, the world is more enticing than eternity. Then what of eden?· Those tares will multiply. Those fields and gardens will grow wild. The masters cannot tend them on their own. Those walls and barns and sacred roosts will age and crack like trees, weighed down by ivy, moss and vines, brought down by wind and time. And what of angels? Where will they take wing? (p. 16)

Tabi has other opinions. She reflects upon her fate and situation. She challenges the other humans with her blasphemic thoughts.  Unless you experience it yourself, you will never know. You just accept the narrative of somebody else. 

"It's possible, she likes to tell her brothers and her sisters, who all must have thought the same a thousand times but never dared to say so, that life beyond the palisades is paradise. And eden is a lesser place! The sermons teach the labourers inside to think that their estate is measure­less contentment and the outside world is little more than famine, pestilence and suffering. Great is their sorrow and fathomless their pain. But who's to say, unless they find out for themselves? Who's to say, indeed, that there is even death out there unless you are prepared, just once, to chance the moment and the toe? No, maybe death is a just a falsehood the lord has invented for fear of losing his labourers, she says. It's even possible his angels made it up themselves without his guidance. And what a fine deceit! If no one fears the world beyond the wall, everyone will leave. And then what will the angels do for sustenance and care? Angels are as helpless as a bush whose berries won't be picked and cooked except by human hands. A wing has never grasped a spade or worked a piece of dough or carried water from the well. They can't even lay an egg, can they? she asks, to shocked silence and then to laughter. What can an angel do without a little help, except expect to be obeyed? It's also possible, she finishes, that there is no lord above - Has anybody looked him in the face? - but only angels saying that there is. They claim to fly up to his firmament to tell him how his garden and his servants fare, when actually they only hide· behind a cloud and then return with lies to tell and further orders for us to obey. We're pinned down in our orchards and our fields, she says, for fear of someone who's not real. (p. 176-177)

Among the angels, there's is also a dissident, Jamin, whose wing is broken and who does not feel like the other angels. He hates the 'snitch' among the humans, the man who reports to the chief angel about all the misbehaviours of the humans, and his feelings become increasingly like human feelings too. 

"No, Jamin detests the go-between. It's not angelic, but he does. And he would like to see his fall from grace. He can imagine a not too distant day when the man, no longer anybody's eyes and ears, is just a common labour­er, a digger in the mud, a beast of burden in the fields, a toiler in the moil, another pair of hands who'll work his bully fingers to the bone and have to spend a so-called day of rest and recovery at the stock pond under Jamin's command. 0 how the gentle angel will torment him then. How hard he'll make him work amongst the mud and weed. He'll have him clearing stones from the deepest parts. He'll have him picking out the duckweed with his fingertips. The go-between will be as damp and lowly as a worm. It is meanly satisfying to imagine him, dangling from a master's beak, as supper for the fish" (p. 38)

 Tabi's friend Ebon wants her back, then decides to go and save her, a risky endeavour for him too, to leave the garden of eden. But the interest is ignited on the other side too, among the mortals, whose curiosity is increasing with the sudden arrival and the visibility of the angel. One of the mortals climbs on the ramparts of the garden of eden. 

"What now? His family and neighbours are asking him to describe what he can see. They've no idea what to ex­pect; but, now that they have somebody - their very first, their pioneer - up on the wall and within sight and smell and hearing of the truth, they're hoping that there is nothing they should fear. All the stories they have told themselves when they have gathered round their fires and heard the night wind beating on the barbican and shak­ing its great gates have never truly been believed but have nevertheless always had a tighter hold on them in the darkness than any daylight logic ever could. A yarn that's spun and woven out of midnight flames is always stronger than the silks of day. But standing in the shadow of the wall this morning they have their fingers crossed that fire­side stories don't come true and that the world beyond the wall will turn out to be not so very different from their own. Something dull and unremarkable would not be a surprise. After all, the great trees that reach out across the rampart are no different from the branches that reach in. The birds that come and go across the wall - the pies, the jacks, the peckers and the tits, the rooks and starlings, and the doves - are all familiar. As are the plumes of smoke when winter fires are lit." (p. 217). 

I will not disclose more about the plot, but both sides are full of disbelief about their own narratives, they are hungry for the truth. This is the universality of Crace's themes: the timeframe and geography are fabulous and fantastic, yet the humanity if all too real. His style is that of wonder and lyrical light-footedness, as if telling a fairy tale on something that happened long ago and far away. I added some long excerpts to demonstrate the wonder of his writing too. 

Enjoy!

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Living On Earth (Harper Collins, 2024) ***

This book is the follow-up of Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Metazoa", a book that I really liked for the new insights it brought to me regarding the emergence of consciousness in animals. It is the final book in the trilogy that started with "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life", which I haven't read. 

This book is less scientific and more observational, like a documentary. He describes the animals he watched under water, in the jungle, in the desert and other places, but without adding many new scientific insights, just adding additional examples and depth to what he wrote earlier. The book ends with a strong plea to safeguard the planet and its vulnerable ecosystem, a topic that we fully endorse. 

We are destroing the earth's riches and wonder and surprises. Sentient beings that took millions of years to develop, with all their skills and features of today, are being wiped out by the dumbest of all animals. We agree, of course, but I did not buy the book to confirm my opinion. 

Michael Cunningham - Day (4th Estate, 2024) **

I have not read everything by Michael Cunningham, but most of his novels: "A Home at the End of the World" (1990), "Flesh and Blood" (1995), "The Hours" (1998), "Specimen Days" (2005), "By Nightfall" (2010), "The Snow Queen" (2014), "A Wild Swan and Other Tales" (2015). His latest novel, "Day", comes nine years after the previous one, and it's possibly the least memorable of all. 

He describes the relationship and inner aspirations of a couple, Dan and Isabel, with two children before, during and after lockdown, somewhere in Brooklyn, and integrating some of their friends the wife's brother, Robbie, into the scenery. The story meanders forward. The context changes, feelings and sentiments change. Something dramatic happens, like in so many lives. It's the story you hear from so many people. And that's maybe the novels biggest problem: it's too real. Even if he brings the perspectives of all the characters separately, as a kind of kaleidoscope of views and feelings, it's too programmatic. Just like the story, the style is not exceptional either. It's in any case not at the same level of his other work. 

Aglaja Veteranyi - Waarom Het Kind In De Polenta Kookt (Oevers, 2024) ***½

De auteur, Aglaja Veteranyi, werd geboren in de Roemeens gezin van circusartiesten dat in 1967, toen ze vijf jaar was, naar het Westen vluchtte. Met haar vader, moeder en oudere zusje, trokken ze Europa, Afrika en Zuid-Ameriak rond. Het is pas als ze op haar zeventiende in Zwitserland een vaste plek kreeg dat ze heeft leren lezen en schrijven, en lid werd van een theatergezelschap in Zurich. Dit is haar eerste roman die in 1999 in het Duits verscheen en zeer goed onthaald werd. In 2002 ontnam Veteranyi haar eigen leven. 

Dat het boek vandaag eindelijk in het Nederlands verschijnt is een goede zaak. Het is een uitzonderlijk boek in vele opzichten. Het is geen echte roman met een plot, maar eerder een mijmering over het leven, vol verrassende perspectieven en inzichten, maar tegelijk ook een aaneenschakeling van korte scènes uit hun dagelijks leven, soms hards, soms grappig. Een opvallend aspect is hoe op zichzelf dit kleine gezinnetje staat. Ondanks hun permanent reizen, de wereld rond, beperkt hun wereld zich tot de woonwagen, de familiefilms die de vader maakt, de circusacts die ze moeten opvoeren. Het is alsof er buiten dit gezin amper iets bestaat. Het enige relaas van een buitenwereld is de tijdelijke kostschool waar zij en haar zusje moesten verblijven tijdens enkele jaren in Zwitserland. 

Het is een boek dat je in een ruk uitleest en dat kan op een paar uur zelfs. Toch zijn er veel passages en zinnen om even bij stil te staan. Absurde gedachten of kleine observaties die je verplichten je te verplaatsen in de jonge vrouw die dit ooit schreef. Iemand die zich losweekte van een situatie van mensen die zelf vluchtten voor een andere situatie, en die ondanks haar nieuw ontdekte mogelijkheden toch geen raad meer wist met haar bestaan. 

En die titel? Staat die 'in' daar niet teveel in? Nee, het kind is effectief aan het koken in de polenta. Het boek probeert dit gruwelijk raadsel in elk geval te beantwoorden. 

Jhumpa Lahiri - Roman Stories (Picador, 2023) **

Many years ago, I read Jhuma Lahiri's "The Interpreter of Maladies", and "The Namesake", which I liked without being too enthusiastic. I was recommended to read "Roman Stories", originally written in Italian, and translated by the author into English. As the title suggests, this is a book of short stories, all set in Rome, Italy. The protagonists in the stories are often higher educated people with children or foreigners working for those same people. The themes are often about fitting in society or not, feeling distant from the culture while trying to blend in. Topics such as latent or manifest racism appear occasionally, but it is more the perspective of the recipient that dominates the narrative. But more often than not, the dissatisfaction byt the characters is more shallow: personal and relational issues, which in my opinion are often petty and bourgeois, making me wonder at times why I would even spend time reading this. It's well written, but not stylistically exceptional or expressive. A cup of tea to drink in between. 

John Banville - The Singularities (Swift Press, 2023) ****

Many years ago I read, and re-read, Banville's trilogy "Athena", "The Book of Evidence", "Ghosts", in which the Freddy Montgomery is the lead character and a murderer. In "The Singularities" he is released from prison after his sentence, and he adopts a new name, Felix Mordaunt, revisiting the place of his youth, which is now owned by a middle-aged couple, the descendants of a well-know physicist, Adam Godley. Mordaunt is a great cynic, arrogant and vicious, always giving the impression of being a true and friendly gentleman. The Godleys have hired the services of a William Jaybee (or John Banville?) to write the biography of their diseased forebear, which entails that he also lives in the manor. Godley's ground-breaking theory in physics is that everything that exists is a kind of zero-sum game, even to the extent that ones you find an answer to one question, something else becomes obscure, making the creation of knowledge a futile endeavour. 

"True, he was as fascinated as everyone else when the Godley Interference Effect arising from the field equations of the Brahma theory - that Effect the reality of which is even still hotly contested by the determin­ists, the priests, and the simple-minded, as we all know all too well - showed that every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality, and that each glowing new discovery we make brings about an equal and opposite dark­ening, the punching of a hole in the wall of the great sphere that is time and space and all besides." (p.90)

This also affects Mordaunt at the start as he enters the gates of the estate. 

"As he went under the stone arch-the low, weather-worn gate had a rusted bolt but no lock-he experienced an odd effect. It was a shiver, or a kind of shimmer, as if he were not he but his own reflection passing through a flaw in a windowpane, or better say rippling over a crack in a full-length mirror. And stranger still, what emerged at the other side was not quite him, or was him but changed, being both less and more than he had been, at once diminished and at the same time somehow added to. The thing took no time at all, was over in the space of the blinking of an eye, yet the effect was palpable, and profound. Something had touched him, and left its indelible mark" (p.21)

The physical, psychological and phenomenological world are all one, and interact in mysterious ways. 

In the old house, the wife of Adam Godley is still alive, living alone in her bedroom, in the presence of her dog. It is unclear whether she suffers from memory loss, dementia or other ailments, but in any case the inspiration for wonderful lyrical paragraphs such as this one. 

"So here they are, woman and dog, the two of them, sharing the vast stillness in which the dog pants softly the way car engines used to pant, pant and shudder, when they still ran on petrol, when she was still a girl. It is as if everything everywhere has stopped, as if the earth has been abandoned. She tries to say the dog's name aloud and some sound comes out, some strangled sound that he seems to recognise, and slowly he lifts his big square head and looks at her, with a calm and disenchanted eye, telling her in a silence more eloquent than any words how it is with him, with her, with all the abounding world." (p.65)

The points of view alternate between Mordaunt and Jaybee, both presented with their respective arrogant and disrespectful view on life, harsh, selfish, with caustic thoughts written in a scathing and judgmental language. There are love affairs, there is theft, there are mysteries and documents hidden in secret cupboards. There is tension all around between the characters, their feelings and their actions. 

But be that as it may, the Brahma theory still acts on all characters, and especially on Mordaunt, as if his prison sentence had only been a kind of interval between two states in the free world, but also as a kind of hard to grasp mystical experience. 

"On that other side, everything had been different, no, everything had been nothing, everything including himself. Nothing. The experience had been, he realised, not an experience in life, and not in death, either, but an absence, an interval, a cae­sura, whatever to call it, such that the minutest particles fall into, fall out of, when they perform that famously impossible leap from one go-round to another, the riddle of which was solved and so simply by Adam Godley's interference equation. And a mark had been left on him, the indelible mark of Lazarus. The life that up to that moment had been a matter of sprawling possibilities had come suddenly to seem as narrow as the chiselled notch between the two bleak dates on a gravestone, an instant of an instant. He had died, and had lived. Impossible, and yet it had happened" (p. 241)

At the end of the novel, the couple living on the estate invite all their friends and neighbours and acquaintances to a big garden party. Mordaunt's and Jaybee's relative alienation increases. Even if both are completely different characters, they occupy some kind of mirror image of each other, different yet ressemblant. Mordaunt reflects on the guests at the party: 

"And yet how nebulous these people were, not like people at all, really, even though he was familiar with at least some of them. The high full clouds imparted to the air a silvery shine, and the figures moving in it moved vestigially, like wraiths, or like the figures crowding in the background of a dream. Their voices too sounded frail in all that space, and instead of speaking they seemed to make a kind of twittering, as a flock of birds will make, settling upon the darkling trees at eventide. Yes, the day moves on, the sunlight comes and goes, the clouds make their stately, indifferent rearrangements, and the world wanes. (p. 298)

Banville creates a very complex narrative and compositional structure, with absolutely brilliant stylistic mastery of the language, deadly in his observations of human nature, and lifting the 'murder' story to a different level, one in which philosphy and the deeper nature of world also find a place. The main character's psychological distance to his world, his sociopathy, is also the main weakness of the novel. It's hard to have any emotional connection as a reader with the characters. It's all interesting to watch, interesting to read, and you want to know how all things will unfold, yet it's hard to even care what will eventually happen to the people in the novel. Distance is both the subject of the book and its hurdle.