Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) *****

Some novels create an entire universe to dwell in. Books that come to mind are "Lord Of The Rings", "Les Bienveillants", or "2666". Their sheer size and the introduction to a reality about which you knew nothing before - immersing you now in full and in minute detail in an alien universe with which you gradually grow more familiar, page after page, character after character - makes this a unique and memorable reading experience. 

The author's incredible effort to create a universe, 900 pages long, full of detail and coherent, well-paced, rich in style and full of different perspectives, requires the same effort from the reader. Superficial or quick reading will not work. As the reader, you have to submit yourself to the work, become part of it to the extent that it will be high on your mind for the period it takes to read it till the end. 

The story is about the real person called Jacob Frank, who lived in Poland in the 18th Century. He was the leader of a jewish sect, and he proclaimed to be the Messiah, and he converted to the catholic faith to demonstrate that he was the bridge between all abrahamic religions. The fact that a jewish community was willing to convert to christianity obviously served the agenda of the Polish catholic church, some secular leaders, while leading to the ex-communication by the jewish community. 

I have applauded Olga Tokarczuk's writing before, especially the brilliant "Flights", which received a 5-star rating, but this novel is even better. Tokarczuk must have researched this book for many years in order to provide such a complete picture of all that happened during Jacob Frank's life, even if this novel is not a historical novel in the purest sense. It's a literary work of art, and her angle of approach is to create dozens of perspectives in the stories and the lives of the people who girate around Frank. Frank's perspective, even if he is the book's protagonist, is only given succinctly, and rarely. All information we get is indirect, which makes his presence more abstract, mythical, legendary, full of contradictions. 

It's a novel about the human condition, about people struggling with their poverty, their friendships, their beliefs, their hunger for power, their allegiances, their lusts, their love and their fears. The myriad of stories leads to a kaleidoscopic view of what actually happened, sometimes clarifying, often obfuscating. 

What makes this an absolutely brilliant novel: 

- the knowledge: as mentioned, an extremely well-researched book, full of real-life figures, but also about the little facts of life during 18th century Poland: the food, the living conditions, travel, world views, and then especially the jewish literature of Talmud, Kabbalah and Zohar. Tokarczuk does not explain or describe or educate us on all these topics. No, they are just part of the background, unexplained often but present as if a given.

 - the writing: like many good authors, the pleasure of writing is palpable in almost every sentence. Nothing is cheap or fast or hurried. Every character's story has its own style, its own approach, its own language even. Some characters only come to life through the letters they write to each other, others tell their story in the first person, some others in the third, and in some stories you get stories within stories, with diary scraps interspersing the rest of the narrative. 

- the humanity: just like in "Flights" and other novels by her, there are no real bad guys. She has a tremendous empathy for each character, understanding their motivation and behaviour, while at the same time taking a wise distance, slightly humouristic mocking over the absurdity or the all too human actions that take place. It's a book about moral choices, about indoctrination and tolerance, about open-mindedness and self-preservation, about narcissism and altruism. And to the author's credit, she does not judge, she does not take the moral highground, she leaves every character with its own beliefs, doubts and consequences. 

- the creativity: or maybe I should say the smart and intelligent way she presents things, the offering of obvious things through a different lens, including the Garcia Marquez-like magic realism of Yente, the old woman who is not dead but neither alive, who found her last resting place in a cave, and who watches everything that happens knowingly, including the thoughts and feelings of the book's characters. 

- the coherence: despite the book's length, and despite its dozens of perspectives, its geographic spread from Germany to Turkey, its chronological span over several generations, the quality of the writing is maintained till the very end, as is the perfect composition of the book. Tokarczuk does not guide the reader through her universe. You are thrown in, and like in Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to work your way through it, trying to find out what's actually happening and how or if it makes even sense. 

I could add some more categories of why this novel exceeds many of the books I've read in my life. 

It's massive, it's brilliant, it's unique. 

It's also right to give kudos for Jennifer Croft for the translation. 

David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything (Allen Lane, 2021) ****½

With 526 pages of text, and around 170 additional pages in notes, bibliography and index, this book will take some time to read and to absorb. Its lead author, David Graeber, died in 2020, and was a very influential economic anthropologist and "anarchist activist", very active in the Occupy Wall Street movement. David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at  University College London.

Despite the label of "anarchism" that Graeber carries, this is a scholarly work, even if it's published in the form of popular science. Graeber and Wengrow refute with lots of minute detail and a treasure of references some conceptual mistakes in many existing theories about how humanity evolved, and especially decided to evolve. This last aspect is essential in their thesis that the way societies evolve is as much a question of choice as it is of necessity. They give the example of native american tribes in California, who - despite contacts and interaction with other ways of life - chose not practice agriculture, but to continue to live as hunter-gatherers. "Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live". The quality of these life's choices are not only determined by technological innovation. They cite the comments of native american chiefs on the French way of living in the 18th century in what is now the United States, commenting on their poverty, their submission to orders from superiors and their lack of freedom, insights which have been taken on board to develop the enlightenment by French intellectuals. 

In a sweeping overview across the globe and across cultures, Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate the kaleidoscopic nature of human societies, in all their variety, choices, modes of interaction and pace of change, including different modes of operating depending on the seasons, and the acceptance of even different leadership and hierarchy as a result of this. Hierarchical inequality is not the result of size, nor is the existence of aristocracy or monarchy. Smaller settlements may have been very hierarchical and with inequality embedded in them, as much as larger ones could be more based on equality and lack of hierarchy.

In the process, they counter many false assumptions among anthropologists, historians and archeologists, whose lack of perspective, and even lack of words for some type of societies prevent them making the correct analysis and synthesis. Their constant effort to refute what their scientific colleagues are assuming or writing is often a little irritating to the non-specialist: they first have to explain what theories others have, before refuting them with counter-evidence, before expanding on their own ideas. 

Graeber and Wengrow's book is exceptional in its breadth and depth. This is a very erudite, well-researched and balanced book, that actually counters Graeber's label as an anarchist. He clearly was a real scientist, looking at facts and observations of reality to start with, while at the same time loving humanity and trying to understand what can be done to improve democracy and equality. 

If you have time, and if you're interested in society, this is obligatory reading. 

Nicholas A. Christakis - Blueprint - The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society (Little Brown Spark, 2020) ****½

"The evolutionary origins of a good society" is the book's subtitle and subject. Its author, Nicholas Christakis has degrees in biology (Yale), medicine (Harvard) and public health (also Harvard). He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. This broad background, including his ground-breaking work on human networks forms the basis of "Blueprint". 

Christakis is convinced that we carry with us a genetic blueprint for doing good, despite all the wars and atrocities of human history. "Natural selection has shaped our lives as social animals, guiding the evolution of what I call a "social suite" of features priming our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, learning and even our ability to recognize what is unique in other individuals". 

He gives a broad overview of unintentional communities (like shipwrecked people on an island forced to live together), intentional communities (utopianists, hippies, ...) and artificial communities. The last category has been created in Christakis' lab, running groups of people to work toward common goals. Their software programme - Breadboard - identifies the ways of collaboration among groups of people who do not know each other. In 'fluid' societies, in which the participants can choose their friends, but are also tied to social networks, generosity prevails, and because the friends can shift groups and be in various groups, the generosity extends to the whole society in the end, in contrast with 'rigid' societies where such a choice does not exist, leading to more defectors and the ultimate collapse of the system. 

Christakis uses hundreds of examples of the creation of 'societies' in the natural world, among animals, to show the systems they have set up to live together and prosper together. His social network has been tested  in groups of animals, in villages in various parts of the world as well as among students and other study subjects, allowing to compare how human interaction and networks grow. "Bigger populations are better suited to social learning and to maximizing opportunities for valuable innovation." Instead of all the rhetoric of many social scientists, Christakis can show this with the data. Quantifying vocabulary, technology, group membership and interactions, current software is able to map all this into visualised networks that allow to compare (not judge). 

He also discusses the gene-culture coevolution and suggests to have more bridging research between biology and sociology. The answer to the question "Is it nature or nurture?" should simply be "Yes!". 

His view is one of optimism, but not naive, in the sense that he of course acknowledges that humans have both competitive and cooperative impulses, both violent and beneficient tendencies. Our history and our human narratives have to often been focused on the violent part of our humanity, and less so on the beneficial part. 

There is no question that his work and that of his lab deserves wider attention. There is a lot to learn here. 

Russell Blackford - The Tyranny Of Opinion (Bloomsbury, 2019) ***

Russel Blackford is professor of philosophy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In "The Tyranny Of Opinion" he gives an overview of the boundaries between free speech and harmful comments on others. His angle of attack are the writings of John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'. It is a scholarly book, possibly too scholarly, in the sense that - like a true university professor - he gives an overview of the existing literature on the topic, giving a lot of opinions from other scholars, giving an overview on the current debate instead of giving a frame of reference for the reader to identify where the limits are. He describes the issue, but does not give a sense of direction of how to address it. 

The topic is possibly one of the most important ones to tackle in our times of social media, war propaganda, nationalism and populism. 

Maybe my expectations were too high, or rather, what I expected to learn from the book is not actually in the book itself: a simple framework to identify the boundaries of free speech. As it stands, many of the situations he describes are so familiar that most people who follow current events or are active on social media are aware of: intimidation, self-censorship, conformtiy, harassment, hate speech, religious sensitivities, quenching debate, blasphemy, etc. You would wish a scholar such as Blackford would indicate a clearer line than he does in the book. In the end, it all depends on an assessment of the situation itself (but by which criteria?), with considerations of respect and good taste. He comes with the recommendation for more self-interrogation among liberals, but fails to come with recommendations for society as a whole. 

Would the best policy not be to organise open debates in which all opinions are welcomed and discussed, regardless of their nature? How can this be done on mainstream media and social media? Which role can education play? How can universities become havens of public discussion on new ideas? What can legislators do (for instance: even in most democratic societies, blasphemy is still a criminal offence)?

What was a grey zone before has remained vague after reading Blackford's book. 

Soumaya Majdoub - Consumeren als Konijnen (ASP, 2021) **

Soumaya Majdoub is a PhD researcher at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a demographer. She holds degrees in political sciences and journalism. This relatively short book (88 pages) is part of a series of essays on our climate. Majdoub's thesis is that demographic growth and over-population are not the cause of our current climate issues, even if the topic is wrongly used by environmental activists. 

Her text is more a pamphlet than a scientific text. Majdoub has a cause to defend, called "ecofeminism", a concept that she jumps on the reader in the last pages of the book, without any prior discussion or introduction, as if it was the solution to all the wrong thinking of neomalthusianists, neoliberals, environmentalists ... Many of her comments and attacks are directed to older thinkers such as Malthus 
himself, with little attention to current facts or trends. Her major influence is Eric Ross, whose "The Malthus Factor Population, Poverty and Politics in Capitalist Development" (1998) offers the foundation of Majdoub's thesis. In order to be fully convincing, I - as the possibly naive reader - would have liked more data (see for instance Rosling's 'Factfulness' on demographics) on the real global challenges and trends. 

There is no doubt that our current way of life will lead to extinction of life on our planet, possibly sooner than later. It is also evident that we need to change our consumption of resources, both fossil and non-fossil. That women may play a crucial role in all this, could be a change compared to how things were organised in the past, and thus be welcomed. The major downside of Majdoub's thesis however, is that there is no obvious nor substantiated link between the identified problem and the possible solution. Her thesis is too much a personal crusade than a scientifically clear way forward. 

Hervé Le Tellier - L'Anomalie (Gallimard, 2020) ****

"L'Anomalie" received the French Prix Goncourt in 2020 and I think this is deserved - with the perspective of course that I am not an expert in French literature and that I did not read all the shortlisted novels. 

The plot derives from the realm of the fantastic, with a quirk in the rules of physics resulting in a doubling of a plane and its passengers, one landing 106 days later in June 2021 after the already landed version of March 2021. As you can imagine, the plane is filled with people from different countries, backgrounds, skills and situations in life:  a Nigerian homosexual pop star, a girl who loves her frog, a lawyer, a professional assassin, a movie editor, a famous architect, a terminal pancreas cancer patient, ... The characters used for their narratives all have one thing in common: they believe they have a secret life that nobody is aware of, which becomes of course a challenge when suddenly their doubles appear on the scene. 

Le Tellier tells their double stories, their true natures and their shadow natures, in this way demonstrating the chance event of how the same people might react differently and how often futile the sense of self is. 

Apart from the gimmick of the doubling of the characters, their stories can stand on their own, as commentaries of our everyday life in the 21st century, our little petty attitudes and the decisions made in the grand scheme of things, including the geopolitics and the fear of a new weapon devised by the enemy. 

The story is both entertaining and profound, well-written without any stylistic pretence. 

J.M.G. Le Clézio - Ourania (Folio, 2006) ***

I am not sure what to think of this novel by Nobel Prize Winner Le Clézio. It starts strongly, in the prologue, somewhere in France. The rest of the novel takes place in Mexico, where the author lived for a while. The main character is a geographer, Daniel Stillitoe, who participates in a broader academic project in which archeologists take the lead. He meets a young Inuit boy, Rafael, who lives in a Utopian community. Different world views collide and none of them succeed, each already presenting the germs of destruction before they come to full fruition. 

The concept is interesting, but like so many utopian literature, also utterly boring. The personal tensions between the characters seem sought just to get some suspense in the story, which is a pretext to present world views. The ideal would be to have a perfect match between the abstract and the concrete, or to present the abstract through the struggles and dreams of the concrete, creating tension and suspense in the process, but that does not happen. There seems no obvious reason of why the main character does what he does, or why Rafael would do what he does, and why both characters would even be interested in each other. The emotional drivers seem absent. 

As much as I liked his "Ritournelle De La Faim", as nonplussed I am by this novel. 

Carson McCullers - The Member Of The Wedding (Penguin, 1947) *

Many years ago I read and liked "The Ballad Of A Sad Café" by Carson McCullers. I liked her voice of the narrative, its southern US climate and the sympathy for the characters. This novel I did not manage to finish. It was too friendly, too sweet, too much lacking in suspense. Maybe because I am not a little girl and maybe because I do not have an older brother who will get married, it was difficult for me to relate to the story, but I assume that a good author would manage to write something appealing to audience wider than the main character's situation. 

Why would I continue reading if it does not resonate with me at all? I have dozens of other books waiting to be read. Onward and forward. 

Dave deBronkart - Let Patients Help (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)

This book was recommended to me 'professionally', as I'm working as a volunteer patient advocate, including the improvement of listening to the patient voice during consultations with medical teams. 

The gives an easy to read overview of where the patient voice can bring value to the healthcare debate. As a patient advocate, I applaude the initiative and the informal way things are presented. However, the focus is primarily on the input from the individual patient, whereas we are trying to get the voice of all patients with a specific disease to work in an organised and systematic way with key stakeholders in order to improve services and outcomes. 

Much needs to be done, and the inventory of this book can function as a starting point. 

Roberto Bolaño - Cowboy Graves (Penguin, 2021) ***

 When Chilean author Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, he left behind his computers with lots of files of unpublished material. Some of those were just scraps of ideas and concepts, several were short stories or novellas that could be published as they were. Over the last years, several of these files have been prepared for publication, including the three novellas in this compilation: "Cowboy Graves", "French Comedy of Horrors", and "Fatherland". Based on the dates of the files, the first must have been written between 1995 and 1998, the second just before his death in 2003, and the last one around 1993. 

There are no surprises in the three novellas: the writing is fast-paced, Arturo Belano is the author's alter ego in the stories, which deal with writing poetry, politics and the revolution, with sentences full of uncertainty about things that happened or what may have motivated actions in the past. At the same time, the stories are full of concrete everyday activities, with a sense of mystery and humour about it, and the unpredictability of what may come next. 

Like in his other books, there is a wonderful admiration of poets and people who want to improve the world, all this written with a deep authenticity and openness of mind, lightfooted and full of the pleasure of writing. 

Fans of Bolaño should definitely seek this book out - even if it does not bring anything new - just for the joy of reading, while people less accustomed to his work, may want to start with "The Savage Detectives" or "2666". 

Georges Perec - Les Revenentes (Juillard, 1997 - originally 1972) ***½

We already loved "La Disparition" (translated in English as "A Void"), Perec's novel in which something has mysteriously disappeared, perplexing the characters and making them look for this 'present absence'. The book is written without the vowel "e", which leads to weird sentences at time, considering how omnipresent the letter "e" is in French. 

With "Les Revenentes" he does the exact opposite, writing a novel in which the only vowel is an "e", which makes it almost impossible to translate into any other language, but even the French original remains a feat of concentrated creativity. Sure, he tweaks the rules a little bit - for instance the "u" can be dropped when used after a "q" - but that does not diminish the effort it must have taken. 

The story itself is a wonderful romp of Berber rebels, criminals, the selling of stolen gems, and perverted clerics who all end up in a great orgy which would be considered pornographic by all standards except maybe in this situation of exaggerated story-telling. 

Perec loved language, as he again testifies here. There is fun in every word, in every turn of phrase, there is pleasure in the effort itself. And even if it's showing off his skills, that is not the main thing. It's all about the joy of language, including the weird twists of sentences and probably of the story too that comes with the possibly toughest stylistic restriction that an author can impose upon himself. 

It leads to sentences such as this one, which made me laugh out loud: 

"Cependent, le chef des rebelles berbères, Mehmet ben Berek, enlève Thérèse Merelbeke et l'emmène en jeep dens le bled. René, désesperé, redescend prestement et presse Leclerc de rechercher les rebelles. Mets le chef reste ferme et prétend que Thérèse est décédée!".

or some more: 

"Bérengère de Bremen-Brévent (B de BB, elle est célèbre, tel BB) entreprend de vendre ses perles et se sert de l'entregent de l'Evêqe d'Exeter, Serge Merelbeke, leqel, en être pervers et dégénéré, ne rêve qe sexe, de fesses et dérèglements". 

... and this for 138 pages long, and as you can notice, some words are a little changed, but overall the effort is quite strong. Perec is as a consequence also possibly the only author who wrote two novels with not one word in common.  

The book has also been translated into English as "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" in the compilation "Three" from 2004.

In the total oeuvre of Perec, the real masterpiece to look for is "La Vie: Mode d'Emploi", which goes beyond his obsession with language, style and form into a bigger picture narrative of a more realistic nature, even if most the characters have their own obsessions. 

Julia Galef - The Scout Mindset (Piatkus, 2021) ***

This book has nothing to do with the "boy scouts", but the scout refers to the one finding the right way to your destination.  She puts them in the opposite space as "the soldier", who will do anything to claim he's right, in full disregard for the facts and logic. The author, Julia Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She holds a BA in statistics from Columbia University. "The organization also gives workshops to train people to internalize and use strategies based on the principles of rationality on a more regular basis to improve their reasoning and decision-making skills and achieve goals" (according to Wikipedia).

Galef presents a number of situations, games and tests to help you overcome the traditional flaws of insufficient facts to decide, too narrow perspectives, insufficient self-awareness, prejudice, etc. She presents the different tests more as a do-it-yourself guide to personal improvement rather than a more scientific overview of what can be done to overcome the current societal problems that we encounter daily on Twitter or other social media. I do believe that most readers interested in the topic will already know - and hopefully apply - the content of the book. On the downside, it is a sometimes arbitrary list of tests and ideas, without a comprehensive overview of the biological, psychological, social, cultural and historical reasons why we reason as we do. Many of the flaws in our reasoning also have a positive purpose (such as fast generalisations). She also does not pay enough attention to probability and logic, which seem to me quite essential to make decisions when facts are scarce or fully present. It is written with best of intentions, but sometimes the approach is too much addressed to younger audiences. 

The topic is possibly the most important topic to be written about. This book is not very scientific but its easy access may be a good educational tool, especially for young people. 

The Rough Guide To Cult Fiction (Haymarket, 2005) ***

An overview of Cult Fiction, whatever that means. The introduction defines: "The term "cult fiction" implies lengthy and irrational devotion probably, though not necessarily, by an ardent minority, to an author or a book. A work that is reread over and over". But even that is not a clear definition. They add it could be due to the life of the author (short, controversial) or not. You could say that anyone whose work is compulsory reading at school cannot be "cult", but the book contains JD Salinger, Truman Capote and William Golding. It is very anglo-saxon in perspective, even if some French authors are included: Sartre, Camus, Perec, Saint-Exupéry, some Japanese such as Mishima and Murakami, etc. The scope is wide, and much more popular than the word 'cult' implies. 

Luckily the authors don't take themselves too seriously. Special attention is given to artists with one 'cult' novel, in the "Isolation Ward", although to have Roberto Bolaño in that list is somewhat peculiar, considering his vast output, and special attention is given to Graphic Novels, which is even entirely American in nature, as if there were no great graphic novels from Europe and South America. 

Anyway, it's a nice little book to browse through. Even if most names are known, and possibly not much new is to be learned, you can still find some suprises. 

Damon Galgut - The Promise (Chatto & Windus, 2021) ****

"The Promise" is an excellent book. It has been widely acclaimed and translated. I've been impressed by the number of people whom I have met who were reading it, so I assume there's not much need to further promote it. 

Galgut describes the lives of a family over a few decades, with constantly shifting perspectives among the characters, as if they passed on the third person narrative like relay runners, with the omniscient narrator holding it all together. 

The title refers to the promise made by the just deceased mother of the family to the black maid who worked on their farm and helped raised the children to receive a plot of land with a cabin as her own property. Now that the mother is dead, the father and the other members of the family are not inclined to deliver on this promise. The strongest voice in the book is that of Amor, the youngest daughter, who is the strongest proponent of living up to the promise, resulting in conflict with the rest of the family, or at best total indifference. 

Galgut's writing, his style as much as his sense of composition, is excellent, and he manages to convey a deep sense of humanity - from deep anger to subtle tenderness - and the internal and external struggles they lead to. 

Easy to recommend. 

Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2016) *****

I was more than impressed by Henrich's other, more recent work - The Weirdest People In The World - that I went back to his successful earlier book "The Secret Of Our Success". Henrich is an anthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. 

In this book, Henrich explains how nature and nurture are in fact meaningless concepts, since humans have evolved, also genetically as the result of cultural evolution, and we have changed nature around us as well. We depend on our cumulative culture for survival, we need to live in cooperative groups, using allo-parenting, the division of labour and information, and on our communicative abilities to be what we are today: a biological anomaly, a new kind of animal. The chronological concept that we are developed in nature, and then later developed our culture is an erroneous one: our culture affects our genes and our genes affect our culture: both co-evolve, and are still co-evolving. Henrich provides numerous examples from biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics, economics, history and anthropology to build his convincing case. 

We are a cultural species, whether we want to or not, and understanding this, will help us understand the perspectives of others even better. We are not determined once and for all. Henrich ends his book with eight insights that will help this understanding and paving the way for future research and human progress.  Especially his examples related to language, communication, cooperation and collective brains show how collaborative and communal efforts have led to benefits for us all. Henrich gives examples of how highly intelligent and resourceful explorers did not manage to survive in difficult situations (from the arctic to the Australian desert), despite their brains and technology, while local indigenous people did. They lacked the collective intelligence of the local tribes. 

Henrich's sweeping picture of humanity is well-substantiated and easy to read. For instance, his example that humans can outrun quadrupeds in terms of endurance, and have done so daily as hunters, for the simple reason of using gourds of water they took with them to compensate for sweating and dehydration. The cultural invention compensates for the natural deficit, turning it into an advantage, and thus better chance of survival. 

It's a humbling and insightful book, well-written and compelling. Henrich concludes:

‘To move forward in our quest to better understand human life, we need to embrace a new kind of evolutionary science, one that focuses on the rich interaction and co-evolution of psychology, culture, biology, history, and genes. The scientific road is largely untravelled, and no doubt many obstacles and pitfalls lie ahead, but it promises an exciting journey into unexplored intellectual territories, as we seek to understand a new kind of animal.’

Claire-Louise Bennett - Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape, 2021) **

This is possibly the most hyped book of the year. Claire-Louise Bennett describes her main character's situation in an "out of breath" style, with endless repetitions, short bursts of sentences barely qualifying for their definition, in an internal monologue of irritating and often nonsensical emphatic use of repetitions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Repetitions. As much as the writing irritates, like a first year student in creative writing finding a personal voice, the content has not much to offer either, except an endless list of literary name-dropping of literary icons, as a self-obsessed and immature effort to lift herself by her bootstraps, without actually getting anywhere. 

Maybe all this sounds a little too harsh, but I guess that readers need to be warned too when they risk wasting their precious time. 

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme (Gallimard, 2021) ****

In "Le Fils De L'Homme", Del Amo describes the lives of a mother and young boy whose father returns after many years only to drag them to his mountain cabin where they continue to live in perfect isolation and also desolation. 

The father is unpredictable, jealous, erratic, violent and on the verge of madness. The mother is powerless, anxious, loving,  terrified ... and pregnant. The boy oscillates between both parents, happy to be taken for an adult when he gets shooting lessons, feeling lost when he cannot make sense of what's happening with the adults and their environment. 

Del Amo's characters are poor, also in their strength to make something of their lives. The mother reads popular romance novels in order to escape from her dreary reality. The father relives the situation he was brought up in by his own father, an equally violent despot. Both are gentle with the boy, loving even, even if both are too tied up in their own problems to really give him the environment that he needs. 

Del Amo describes and brings to live the terrifying emotions of anonymous characters, in whose situation we are dropped with direct experience of every minute action that each of them makes, full of physical power and virtuose language, and further strengthened by the use of the simple present, which gives the reader to be part of the action as it unfolds in all its dramatic and tragic plot. I am used to read in French, I hear French all the time, but I must admit that many phrases contain words that I now read for the first time. His language is rich, but his style is direct, including in the dialogues. 

The novel is a kind of update of Greek tragedy. Even if the end was not predicted (by Cassandra or some character), every reader knows from the start that things will not end well. The fact that the characters don't have names even strengthens the abstract theme of returning generational violence. It is Del Amo's strength that he made his descriptions tangibly concrete to make us live the experience. 

Highly recommended!

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes (Philippe Rey, 2021) ****

Mystery novel, political novel, humanistic novel, crime novel, sociological novel, a novel about literature ... "La Plus Secrère Mémoire des Hommes" has many levels at which it can be read. 

On the surface, it's a search for a book written in 1938 "Le Labyrinthe De L'Inhumain" (the labyrinth of the inhuman), which was acclaimed as written by the "Rimbaud nègre", an African with the writing skills of one of France's most revered authors. The author, T.C. Elimane, completely vanished from the earth, as the copies of the books were taken from bookshops and destroyed, based on the accusation of plagiarism. 

A young writer from Senegal, Diégane Latyr Faye, the main character, tries to reconstruct what happened, based on publications and people who knew the author, and he comes across even more mysteries, in the sense that every one who ever read the book, has died from unnatural causes. 

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was not known to me, and it is thanks to his winning of the Prix Goncourt that he came to my attention. Sometimes literary prizes are indeed deserved, as is the case here. His writing is entertaining, making this novel as full as suspense as a crime novel, even if the greater theme is about literature and culture, about cross-cultural interaction and adoption, about skills and appreciation. The novel is also about living true to your beliefs, and the fact that a very promising author disappeared from the world in order not to give in to the forces of expectation and society, is also a very modern one. But it also touches on the quality of life versus personal gain, of rationality versus a more mystic appreciation of our world. And despite all these abstract themes, woven together in a tight fabric of stylistically refined text, the characters remain human, with their desires, fears, conflicts and expectations. 

We are spoiled this year with great novels. This one is surely among them. 

Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife (OneWorld, 2020) ****

One of the weird aspects of having received a catholic education and weekly mass, is the amount of fabulation you are being served by the myths of the religion that have actually no real presence in the Bible, be it the Old or New Testament. And then especially about what most people would consider the core beliefs of the religion: there is such a thing like heaven and hell where life after death awaits us, the former for the good people, the latter for the bad. There is even no mention of the "devil" or "satan" in the Bible either. 

Several years ago I read Alan F. Segal's "Life After Death", a very erudite book that gives a history of the concept of heaven and hell, of resurrection and the way they were build up over the centuries after christianity started to get traction. The Church had endless discussions about the form and shape of our eternal soul, material or immaterial, with senses or without senses, recognisable or not. One question was not addressed by Segal, namely at what precise moment the dead would go to heaven, immediately after their death, or at the end of times, when the Final Judgment happens. 

Theologian Bart Ehrman answers this question luckily in his new book "Heaven And Hell". Like Segal, he gives a sweeping and well-documented overview of what the Bible actually says about the afterlife, and how the notions we know today have come into existence. He starts very early on, with the Gilgamesh epos, the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, the gospels, including all the apocryphical gospels that were eventually not included in the canon, as well as later versions that show the various thoughts about what life after death could mean, including by Church fathers such as Augustinus and Tertullianus. 

Thanks to the digital availability of the ancient books on internet, I once made my own calculations based on semantic analysis of the Old & New Testament. Words like "hell" or "purgatory" are never used in the bible, and the concept of "eternal life" gets zero mentions in the Old Testament and 33 in the New, of which 16 in the gospel of John, but he primarily referred to the end times, when the kingdom of god came to earth, and not the other way round that we would go to heaven.  It must be clear that if these are really core beliefs of original christianity, they would appear much more often than is the case now. Ehrman manages to explain all this with the source material at hand. 

This is obligatory reading for anybody interested in religion, both believers and non-believers.