Books Of The Year 2023

Books of the Year 2023

One of the books I feel most happy about to have bought, is The Voynich Manuscript, of which we do not know whether it's fiction or non-fiction - but to all expectations the latter, a book you cannot read but just browse through and try to identify any possible sense of recognition, patterns or meaning. I never thought I could spend so much time on something that is impossible to understand. The other great winner in my opinion is Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The World - A Family History", a majestic overview of the horror of mankind throughout our common history. In the Fiction department, I had several contenders, of which "The Maniac" also borders on the non-fiction, whereas "Solenoid" and "Orbital" are close to be each other's opposites: the former massive, mad, personal, fantastic, the latter precise, controlled, precious and poetic. Not all of these books were actually published in 2023, and I have still a pile lying here that will be read next year, I hope. 

Non-Fiction

1. Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History  *****
2. Siddharta Mukherjee - The Song Of The Cell ****½
3. Kit Yates - How To Expect The Unexpected  ****
4. Thomas Hertog - On The Origin Of Time  ****
5. Andy Clark - The Experience Machine  ****
6. Robert K. Massie - Catherine The Great  ****
7. Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring  ****
8. Patrick Loobuyck - Wetenschap & Religie  ***½
9. Joren Vermeersch - Vlaanderens Waanzinnigste Eeuw ***½
10. Andrew Doig - This Mortal Coil - A History Of Death  ***

Fiction

1. Benjamín Labatut - The Maniac  ****½
2. Samantha Harvey - Orbital  ****½
3. Mircea Cărtărescu - Solenoid ****½
4. Hernan Diaz - Trust ****
5. Georgi Gospodinov - Time Shelter ****
6. Alejandro Zambra - Bonsai ****
7. Edmund De Waal - Letters To Camondo ****
8. Tim Winton - The Shepherd's Hut  ****
9. Virginie Despantes - Vernon Subutex 3  ****
10. Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards  ***½

Kit Yates - How To Expect The Unexpected (Quercus, 2023) ****

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Bath, UK, and Co-Director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology, amongst others. 

In this excellent book he introduces us to our human strategies to predict the future based on past events, or on support material such as religion, rituals, and other tactics. He gives multiple examples of how our way of reasoning fails because of our failures in adequately assessing the complexity of a situation and the probability of things to happen. In this sense the book is relatively predictable because certainly not the first on the subject, but Yates writes well, gives excellent examples and adds additional strategems to make logical mistakes or to help manage a situation better. 

In the end, of course, there's only so much science and mathematics can do to predict what will happen. Our world is in a state of chaos, and "chaos puts fundamental limits on how far we can peer into the future (...). The ubiquity of uncertainty and chaos mean we shouldn't try to make definitive predictions too far off into the future. And if we do cast our predictive nets a long way forward in time, we should be careful about how we interpret their haul" (p.395).  From my professional perspective, I always liked looking back at the corporate long term strategies we developed even five years ago with the executive committee, only to identify how many false assumptions were made, and how science and technology had indeed progressed without any possibility for prediction. It was a sobering experience, and I can recommend corporate archivists not to throw away these strategic documents. 

Yates is also sufficiently open-minded to allow alternative strategies to intervene and even if they do not actually function as assumed, the result may be beneficial. During my years at university, I used to play with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, not that I believed in its predictions, but they gave me something to reflect on. 

"For hundreds of years, the Naskapi people of eastern Canada have been using a randomised strategy to help them hunt. Their direction­choosing ceremony involves burning the bones of previously caught caribou and using the random scorch marks which appear to deter­mine the direction for the next hunt. Divesting the decision to an essentially random process circumvents the inevitable repetitive­ness of human-made decisions. This reduces both the likelihood of depleting the prey in a particular region of the forest and the probability of the hunted animals learning where humans like to hunt and deliberately avoiding those areas. To mathematicians, using randomness in this way, to avoid predictability, is known as a mixed strategy."(p.129)

He also presents the work of British mathematician Thomas Bayes, who lived in the late 18th Century. 

"This was Bayes' idea in a nutshell: that he could update his initial belief with new data in order to come up with a new belief. In modern parlance, the prior probability (initial belief) is combined with the likelihood of observing the new data to give the posterior probability (new belief). As much as a mathematical statement, Bayes' theorem was a philosophical viewpoint: that we can never access perfect abso­lute truth, but the more evidence that accrues, the more tightly our beliefs are refined, eventually converging towards the truth." (157)

"Despite the continued scepticism and its unfashionable nature, there were many distinct successes during the period that Bayes' theorem spent in the hinterland. In the late eighteenth and early nine­teenth centuries, artillery officers in the French and Russian armies employed it to help them hit their targets in the face of uncertain environmental conditions.75 Alan Turing used it to help him crack Enigma/6 significantly shortening the Second World War. During the Cold War, the US navy used it to search for a Russian submarine that had gone AWOL77 (an event which inspired the Tom Clancy novel and subsequent film The Hunt for Red October). In the 1950s, scientists used Bayes to help demonstrate the link between smoking and lung cancer.78 The vital premise that all these Bayes adherents had come to accept was that it was OK to begin with a guess, to admit to not being cer­tain of your initial hypothesis. All that was required in return was the practitioner's absolute dedication to updating their beliefs in the face of every piece of new evidence that came along. When applied correctly, Bayes' theorem would allow its users to learn from estimates and to update their beliefs using imperfect, patchy or even missing data. The Bayesian point of view does, however, require its users to accept that they are attempting to quantify measures of belief - to cast off the black and white of absolute certainty, and accept answers in shades of grey. Despite the paradigm shift required - thinking in terms of beliefs rather than absolutes - Bayesian reasoning didn't fit the subjective, anti-science label its detractors had pinned to it. In fact, Bayes absolutely typifies the essence of modern science - the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence" (p.159-160)

"We must be wary about overweighting our prior beliefs, too, though. The feeling of confidence in our convictions might make it tempting to ignore small pieces of information that don't change our view of the world significantly. The flip side of allowing ourselves to have prior beliefs as part of the Bayesian perspective is that we must commit to altering our opinion every time a new piece of relevant information appears, no matter how insignificant it seems. If lots of small pieces of evidence were to arrive, each slightly undermining the anthropogenic climate-change hypothesis, then Bayes would allow us to - indeed, dictate that we must - update our view incrementally"(p.167)

 Yates also gives wonderful examples from international policy, and the subsequent excerpt could be as handy for Vladimir Putin as it once was for Nixon. You don't want to negotiate with a madman. 

"In the context of international diplomacy, sticking to a pure strategy - having a preordained response for any given situation -might reduce the ability of a negotiator to bluff, bluster or manipulate an opponent. Conversely, when negotiating with a despot who is employing a mixed strategy - someone who might, for example, have their finger on the nuclear button one minute, while advocating for total disarmament the next - an opponent might find themselves making more concessions than they would to an actor whose rational actions they find easy to predict. One particular mixed strategy, a form of brinkmanship known in political science as the Madman Theory, was the basis of much of Richard Nixon's foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The aim, as the name would suggest, was to convince Nixon's communist opponents that he was more than a little unhinged. He reasoned that if his opponents judged him to be an irrational actor, they would not be able to predict his plays and would thus have to make more concessions to avoid the risk of accidentally triggering him into retaliation". (p.197)

And one other fun example as a last illustration from the book: the strategy of Kleptogamy or the "Sneaky Fucker" strategy. 

"Kleptogamy is derived from the Greek words klepto, meaning 'to steal' and gamos, meaning 'marriage' or, more literally, 'fertilisation'. Natural selection suggests that if only the alpha males were reproducing, then the variation in male fitness in future generations would become limited. The evolutionary game theorist John Maynard Smith came up with the theoretical idea of kleptogamy to explain how a wide range of male fitnesses could be sustained over time, although he and his colleagues preferred to call it the 'Sneaky Fucker' strategy. And in some species, the evidence is there to support his hypothesis. A study of the mating habits of grey seals on Sable Island, off the coast of Canada, found that 36 per cent of females guarded by an alpha male were, in fact, fertilised by non-alpha males". (p.189).

As you notice, there is a lot to learn in this book, and a joy to read, and a great frustration that courses such as this one never actually found their place in the curriculum of all schools and colleges. I think our world would be a better place if people truly understood how poorly they reason. 

Patrick Loobuyck - Wetenschap & Religie (Pelckmans, 2023) ***½

In dit inspirerende boek geeft godsdienstwetenschapper en moraalfilosoof Patrick Loobuyck een mooi historisch overzicht van de interactie tussen geloof en wetenschap. Sinds 2006 is hij hoogleraar aan de Universiteit Antwerpen, en sinds 2016 is hij gastprofessor politieke filosofie aan de Universiteit Gent.

Net als velen is hij religieus opgevoed, maar heeft hij zijn geloof verloren, maar hij blijft verrassend genereus in zijn benadering van godsdienst. Hij begint zijn boek met de verschillende soorten interacties tussen religie en wetenschap in kaart te brengen, van de "battle-field positie" die stelt dat geloof en wetenschap niet compatibel zijn, over de 'nothing in common' positie, die ze naast elkaar plaatst - het ene voor begrip, het andere voor zingeving - tot de 'togetherness' positie, die ervan uitgaat dat beide ook kunnen samenwerken.

Het boeiendste stuk van zijn boek is de lange tocht doorheen de geschiedenis van het ontstaan van het formeel geloof tot vandaag, met alle gekende spelers, van de Griekse filosofen, de christelijke kerkvaders als Augustinus, de moslimdenker Averroës, de opkomst van het humanisme, de grote ontdekkers Galilei, Kepler, Copernicus, over Francis Bacon en Darwin tot de hedendaagse tijd. 

Loobuyck is wetenschapper en docent, en dat blijkt uit zijn boek: hij houdt zich op de vlakte, is open over zijn eigen atheïsme, maar neemt voor de rest geen standpunt in. Dit geeft ruimte aan de lezer om zelf een oordeel te vormen, wat in deze tijden een welkome verademing is. Hij is geen strijder voor het grote gelijk, maar een deskundige die de mogelijke opties voorlegt. 

Ik ben zelf nogal een groot adept van de 'vier ruiters van de apocalyps': Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett en Harris. Wetenschap is geen geloof, maar een methode. Die methode houdt in dat theorieën kunnen worden getoetst aan evidentie en als die wordt tegengesproken, moet de theorie worden herzien. Wetenschap is fundamenteel open voor kritiek. Het geloof staat voor het omgekeerde: het primaat van het 'boek' en de enig mogelijke interpretatie door de 'Kerk'. Geloof is fundamenteel afkerig van kritiek. De basis van elk geloof zit al fout. Als deel van onze realiteit moet godsdienst zich ook kunnen onderwerpen aan wetenschappelijke analyse. De waarheid en fictie van de Bijbel en Koran moet kunnen worden onderzocht en blootgelegd op wetenschappelijke manier, zoals bv Bart Ehrman en vele anderen het Oude en Nieuwe Testament hebben gefileerd. Zaken zijn slechts waar als je die ook kan bewijzen en herhalen. Zeggen dat sommige zaken 'bovennatuurlijk' zijn en dus niet onderworpen aan de wetten van de natuur is onzin. Als je daar van uit gaat, kan je werkelijk alles verzinnen. En geloven. Denk maar aan de Mormonen, Scientology en andere Moon-sekten. Er is dan geen reden waarom zij minder geloofwaardig zouden zijn dan de meer gevestigde godsdiensten. Of zoals Dawkins het graag zegt: in jouw ogen is elk geloof in een andere god ook niet meer dan goedgelovige fantasie.

Wetenschappers die elkaar geen gelijk geven, zouden met rationele argumenten en feiten elkaar moeten kunnen overtuigen. Bij gelovigen wordt die discussie al meteen emotioneel en vijandig, omdat er geen rationele argumenten en feiten te vinden zijn. 

Het is duidelijk dat religie in de samenleving een belangrijke rol heeft gespeeld voor een reeks aspecten van het menselijk bestaan die redelijk fundamenteel lijken: begrijpen wie we zijn en hoe alles ontstaan is, moreel besef hebben en ernaar handelen, deel uitmaken van een gemeenschap, troost vinden, controle krijgen over onze omgeving, en transcendente ervaring. Godsdienst probeert op elk van die domeinen een rol te spelen, maar voor elk van die domeinen loopt ze achter, als een verouderd mechanisme om met de realiteit om te gaan. De samenleving verandert, de mens verandert. Voor elk van deze punten zijn andere vakgebieden of benaderingen een stuk doeltreffender om voor veel mensen een echt verschil te maken. Er is geen domein waarin religie een aparte rol zou kunnen hebben die niet beter kan worden uitgevoerd door seculiere specialisatie. 

Dat we mensen die geloven moeten respecteren, zonder enige twijfel. Maar dat wil niet zeggen dat we het geloof als instelling niet mogen ontbloten en zeggen dat de keizer geen kleren draagt. 

Ook al is mijn opinie duidelijk scherper dan Loobuyck, is dit boek toch een aanrader voor iedereen die in het onderwerp is geïnteresseerd, al was het maar voor het vele historisch materiaal dat wordt aangehaald, zoals het feit dat het tot 1835 heeft geduurd voor de werken van Galilei en Copernicus van de Index werden gehaald, zo'n 200 jaar later. 

Een kleine discussie terzijde: Wanneer werd god uit de wetenschap geweerd? 

"Zowel Boyle als Newton verdedigde het idee van een al­machtige God die ook nu nog kan tussenkomen. Zij kozen de kant van de 'voluntaristische' theologie, in die zin dat God de materiele wereld kan blijven sturen zoals hij dat wil. (...) Maar Newton sloot niet uit dat God nog direct kan ingrijpen in de werkelijkheid. Dat was trouwens ook nodig in het newtoniaanse sys­teem om de planeten in hun baan te houden. Newton doet dus iets wat vandaag erg ongewoon zou zijn: hij gebruikte het ingrijpen van God in de natuur als onderdeel van de weten­schappelijke beschrijving van hoe de werkelijkheid functio­neert. Het verband tussen een voluntaristische theologie en een mechanisch wereldbeeld hielp ook om de experimentele methode te legitimeren. Niet door van aan een schrijversdesk aan filosofie te doen, maar door te experimenteren kon men Gods wil te weten komen. Als de natuur de vrije wil van God reflecteert, is het empirische onderzoek de beste manier om die te ontdekken. 

De Duitse wiskundige, natuurwetenschapper en filosoof Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was een van de belang­rijkste tegenstemmen in dit debat. Leibniz denkt niet dat God nog kan tussenkomen en kosmische reparaties moet uitvoeren aan zijn schepping. Gods vrijheid ligt besloten in het feit dat hij van alle mogelijke werelden gekozen heeft voor "de beste van alle mogelijke werelden". Volgens Newton geeft een wereld­beeld waarin God afwezig is en niet meer kan tussenkomen in de werkelijkheid aanleiding tot een atheistisch wereldbeeld. Voor Leibniz is het andersom. In zijn correspondentie over deze kwestie schrijft hij dat een God die moet tussenkomen te veel lijkt op een gebrekkige ambachtsman "die zijn uurwerk nog van tijd tot tijd moet opwinden". Dit idee van een on­volmaakte God zou de religie kunnen ondermijnen. Hoewel Leibniz zelf nog ruimte probeert te maken voor de vrije wil, is zijn wereldbeeld voor het overige deterministisch ingevuld: de dingen die gebeuren, gebeuren noodzakelijk en met mede­weten van God.

Het determinisme van Leibniz werkte in de achttiende eeuw door bij Diderot, d'Holbach, Condorcet en de La Mettrie. Anders dan bij Leibniz kreeg het determinisme bij hen een atheistisch-naturalistische invulling. (p. 134,135)

Over dit onderwerp was de minnares van Voltaire, de wiskundige Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), een heel belangrijk figuur. Ze vertaalde Newtons werken naar het Frans. Ze was iemand die tegelijk kritisch was over sommige aspecten van het werk van Newton en Leibniz, en voor verschillende van de door haar voorgestelde verbeteringen bleek ze nadien gelijk te hebben (bvb dat vuur geen gewicht had, of dat de energie gelijk is aan de massa maal het kwadraat van zijn snelheid of (e=mv2), een kleine voorloper van Einsteins gekende formule).

"The fourth objection, and one particularly identified with Newton and his adherents, concerned the dissipation or conservation of force (energy) the universe. This issue had occasioned the argument between Leibniz an Newton, and it was with Newton's followers that she argued explicitly. She could not accept the metaphysical connotations of his hypothesis in the last query of the Opticks, that, given the loss of force in the universe because of the infinite numbers of impacts "our System will sometimes need be corrected by its Author". In Newton's world, the Creator had to replenish the force periodically and in perpetuity. From Du Chatelet's perspective, ac­cepting this image of the Supreme Being and his "continual miracles" under­mined any claim to certain knowledge of the workings of nature's laws. As she had argued in chapter II, there could be no '"science" in a universe subject to unpredictable intervention by a deity, however benevolent and reasonable. In contrast, in Leibniz's world of forces vives, there was no need for God to intervene, for the German philosopher believed that this force was conserved in the universe. In fact, Du Chatelet explained to Maupertuis, "all things being equal," the conservation of force "would be more worthy of the eternal géomètre". (Judith P. Zinsser : In Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius of the Enlightenment, 2006. p. 189)

Of nog

"On the one hand, such a God negated her image of his necessary perfection, and, on the other, it raised the chi­mera of unpredictability. No law, not even Newton's, would be fixed if always subject to "the will of God." Thus, there could be no certain knowl­edge, no science, of the workings of the universe"(p.177)

Of, om het anders te zeggen: je kan in wetenschappen niet een hele wiskundige en fysische redenering opbouwen over de banen van de planeten in ons zonnestelsel om tussenin een zinnetje te hebben dat zegt dat God af en toe tussenkomt om de planeten terug op hun juiste baan te brengen. In haar ogen moet God uit de wiskunde en moeten betere wiskunde en begrip van de astronomie dat gat opvullen. Vandaag zouden veel wetenschappers nogal opkijken mocht in een artikel staan dat God plots tussenkomt om het experiment te laten lukken. 

Andere aan te raden boeken over wetenschap en religie

• Amir Alexander - Infinitesimal - How A Dangerous Mathematical Theory Changed The World (Oneworld, 2015)
• Stephen Greenblatt - The Swerve (Norton, 2012) 
• Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books,1997)
• Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion (Mariner, 2006)
• Sam Harris - The End Of Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2006)
• Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great: The Case Against Religion, (Atlantic Books, 2007)

Philippe Claudel - Crépuscule (Editions Stock, 2023) ***½

"Crépuscule" is the story of a village in a remote part of the empire where the catholic priest is murdered one night. The time is somewhere in an imaginary past, in a geography covering a large part of Europe, where different religions live together, and in which the muslim community is a minority. The names of the characters sound Serb or Croatian. 

Claudel uses this village as a metaphor of our world today, with all its intolerance, bigotism, violence, including the violation of reason and human dignity. His characters are all too human, vulnerable, impotent against the great forces of evil that keep oppressing the weak, but also vulnerable to the personal character deficiencies of individuals. In its core theme, there is barely any innocence to be found, except among children and the feeble of mind, who are the first victims of this crushing society. 

The captain of the police, who is asked to investigate the murder case, is caught between the stupidity of his hierarchy who couldn't care less about the remote village, the anti-muslim sentiment in the population who already identified why anyone would kill a catholic priest, and the rich nobility of the region. 

 "La mort brutale du Curé lui apparut soudain un événement dérisoire. Car ce qui comptait desor­mais était ce que certaines forces a l' oeuvre avaient décide d' en faire. II eut le sentiment qu'un rien ferait basculer l' enquête, dont il avait pensé pou­voir se régaler, vers une dimension au sein de laquelle ni la vérité, ni ses déductions, ni l'identité réelle du coupable, ni lui-même n' auraient la moindre importance, et tout en pressentant cela il ne parvenait pas à imaginer la manière dont il pour­rait s' opposer au cours impétueux des choses. II se sentit ridiculement petit et sans pouvoir. Alors il serra ses poings maigres, appuya plus encore son front contre la vitre froide, presque a la faire éclater, et ferma les yeux." (p.132)

The powers that be are not too happy with the captain's investigation, because they see more value in following the initial intuitions of the population, as this would be more politically acceptable than following the road of reason and evidence. 

« Mais nous disons la même chose, il me semble, monsieur le Rapporteur. Je suis autant que vous désireux de découvrir la vérité sur le meurtre du Cure Pernieg. 

« La vérité, certes, trancha le Rapporteur, mai laquelle? Une vérité acceptable par la majorité de notre communauté, ou une vérité qui irait contre son sentiment au bénéfice d'une extrême mino­rité? 

« Il n'y a pas deux vérités. 

« Je n' en suis pas si sûr que vous, Capitaine. Car après tout, est vrai ce qu' on décide qui le soit. Pour le bien commun." (p 150)

Even if Claudel's political message is blatantly clear from the start, he manages to keep the suspense until the very end, with some unexpected twists in the plot, and a bunch of memorable characters. 

It's a good novel, but readers without knowledge of Claudel, I would still recommend to read "Les Âmes Grises" and "Le Rapport de Brodeck" first. 

Joren Vermeersch - Vlaanderens Waanzinnigste Eeuw 1297-1385 (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2023) ***½

Wat een heerlijk boek. Wat een plezier om een dergelijk vlot geschreven geschiedenisboek te kunnen lezen, over een periode in onze Vlaamse geschiedenis die ons helpt om ook onze situatie van vandaag in perspectief te zien. 

Vermeersch 'vertelt' deze waanzinnigste eeuw vanuit de fictionele perspectieven van mensen uit die tijd, visserskinderen, burgers, arbeiders, soldaten, wat het verhaal een stuk realistischer en laagdrempeliger maakt. Deze verhaaltechnische ingreep doet overigens niets af aan de geschiedkundige waarde van dit heel goed gedocumenteerde boek. Het nadeel is wel dat wanneer sommige situaties worden beschreven, we niet meer precies weten of dit nu effectief zo is gebeurd, dan wel dat Vermeersch hier zelf een brug legt naar onze moderne tijden. 

Om een voorbeeld te geven. Op blz 270 schrijft hij: "

"Op 10 maart 1325 had d'Auxonne een bijeenkomst belegd van de grafelijke raad in Oudenaarde, om de rekeningen van het voorgaande fiscale jaar te bespreken. Pas toen drong de ernst van de budgettaire noodtoestand tot Louis door. In 1324 werd er een krater geslagen van exact 5.185 pond. Dat kwam neer op een begrotingstekort van liefst 37%. Gualterotti zetelde op dat moment amper twee jaar als grafelijk ontvanger in de raad, maar had in die periode al bijna achtduizend pond aan Louis geleend. Elke nieuwe lening vergde het verpanden van een nieuwe reeks grafelijke belastingen en tollen. Als de schuld niet tijdig werd vereffend, zou Gualterotti ze vele jaren lang voor zijn persoonlijke gewin mogen innen.   

'Die gewiekste aasgier was goed op weg om heel Vlaanderen uit te kleden,' sakkerde Louis in de marge van die vergadering. Maar d'Auxonne wuifde zijn mokken daarover argeloos weg: 'Maak u toch geen zorgen, Monseigneur. Eens de laatste rebel aan de hoogste boom hangt, zullen we heel Vlaanderen doen bloeden en boeten. Dan kopen we alle verpande tollen en belastingen makkelijk terug. U zal het zien: de staatsschuld is er vanzelf gekomen en ze zal ook vanzelf weer weggaan.' "

Dat laatste citaat lijkt verdacht veel op wat PS Minister Guy Mathot zei over onze Belgische situatie in de jaren '80: "Le problème des déficits budgétaires est arrivé de lui-même, il partira de lui même". Verwees Mathot naar d'Auxonne? Of heeft Vermeersch het citaat van Mathot naar de 14e Eeuw verplaatst? Of is het zuiver toeval? De paragrafen tonen wel aan dat toen zeker de grote financiers, zoals hier uit Italië, een zeer grote politieke macht hadden achter de schermen, met name de Compagnia dei Bardi en de Compagnia dei Peruzzi, zelfs nog tientallen jaren later. 

Vermeersch schetst de machtsverhoudingen tussen alle betrokken partijen zeer goed: de Fransen, de Franse graaf, de Kerk, de burgemeesters van de vijandige steden Brugge en Gent, de gegoede burgerij die over veel geld en macht beschikte, de arbeidersgilden die onder elkaar dan nog naijver toonden. Ondanks de onwaarschijnlijke rijkdom van Vlaanderen, of misschien precies door die immense rijkdom, lag iedereen met iedereen overhoop, wat een ongelooflijke opportuniteit was voor de bevolking om zelf op te staan en een vorm van democratisch zelfbestuur te kiezen. 

"Maar in Vlaanderen was de geest uit de fles. Aangestoken door revolutionaire koorts riskeerden jonge mannen en vrouwen de gesel en de galg om de revolutie te prediken. Er brak een nieuwe tijd aan waarin het volk zelf zou heersen en afrekenen met zijn vroegere meesters, zo orakelden zij. Het zou rivieren van bloed vergen om die geest terug in de fles te krijgen. Daar was Louis van overtuigd. En met hem alle hoge edelen in de grafelijke raad. 

Want het vuur van de opstand - of moeten we zeggen het gif -had ondertussen ook de grate steden aangetast. In februari was ook in Brugge, het kloppende hart van de Europese handel, de revolutie uitgebroken. Opgezweept door heetgebakerde textielarbeiders, had de volkspartij er de rijke poorterij uit het stadsbestuur gekegeld. Voortaan regeerden de ambachten er helemaal alleen. Sujetten met radicale anti-Franse en anti-adellijke overtuigingen voerden er nu het hoge woord." (blz 278)

 Vermeersch vermeldt dat deze "gevaarlijke ideeën uit Vlaanderen over vrijheid, gelijkheid en broederschap begonnen namelijk de geesten te besmetten in naburige vorstendommen" (bls 315). Ook hier neem ik aan dat deze leuze van de Franse revolutie van 1789 eerder een dichterlijke vrijheid is dan dat het Vlaamse volk die zo expliciet uitte in die tijd, om aan te geven dat de zaden van deze revolutie al veel vroeger al werden gezaaid. 

Hij belicht de grote rivaliteit tussen de steden, de ondankbare situatie van de boeren- en arbeidersklassen, de hardvochtigheid van wie macht had, en de absolute gruwel van geweld, folteringen, verkrachtingen, moord. 

Ik denk en ik hoop dat vele geschiedenisleerkrachten dit boek zullen gebruiken bij hun lessen. Ik ben verre van een nationalist (integendeel zelfs), maar het is wel belangrijk dat ook jongeren onze geschiedenis kennen, en uiteraard ook alle Vlamingen. Het is niet allemaal zo zwart-wit als vaak wordt gesteld. Ik heb veel nieuwe zaken geleerd in dit boek, en ook genoten van de vertelstijl. 

Een aanrader!

Yasunari Kawabata - The Rainbow (Penguin 2023) **

I got tricked again, by the mention that this Japanese masterpiece was now finally available in English. It's the story of three half-sisters, born from three different mothers, who struggle with their own personal demons after World War II. Kawabata tells the story through long dialogues between the characters, primarily the two elder sisters and their father, and through descriptions of nature, especially flowers, as a kind of symbolic backdrop for the beauty and vulnerability of the lives of his protagonists. All three suffer, despite their young age because of the consequences and violence of life, and they struggle to find their place in the world and among each other. 

It is a nice book, with fine descriptions of very concrete situations, it is sensitive and precise, but somehow it did not resonate with me. 
 

Benjamín Labatut - The Maniac (Pushkin Press, 2023) ****½

It's impressive to write a brilliant first novel, as Benjamin Labatut did with "When We Cease To Understand The World", but to deliver a sophomore novel with the same power as the first one is exceptional. 

That is the case with "The Maniac", a fictionalised biography of the great 20th Century mathematician John Von Neumann. 

But the book starts with a short story about Paul Ehrenfest, the theoretical physicist, who shot his son and committed suicide afterwards. Despite all his successes, Ehrenfest considered himself a complete failure in all aspects of his life, and was severely depressed, which was even more accentuated by the rise of fascism in Germany. Gripping and precise ... a good warming-up for the rest of the novel. 

Yet the real bulk of the book is about John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath who was probably one of the smartest men who ever lived. He brought significant changes in the field of mathematics, invented game theory in economics, and designed the mathematical work for quantum physics, as well as computer programming, weather programming and other complex systems. He left Europe to work on the Manhattan Project in the United States, primarily on the calculations to design the hydrogen bomb. But Labatut's work is more than just a description of von Neumann's life. He brings him to life in a whole list of short chapters, each with their own style and format, written or told by the people close to him: friends, family members, colleagues, rivals. It is the story of a man who was not only gifted with a great mind, but who also went beyond the boundaries of what people thought was thinkable. He saw possibilities, patterns and future solutions beyond the realm of human rationality and thought. 

Here are two examples to illustrate the differences in styles and narratives: 

By Eugene Wigner - a former schoolmate, and a Noble Prize winner in physics: 

"His (von Neumann's) intelligence was playful, not tortured, and his insights were usually immediate, prac­tically instantaneous, not labored. But Gödel had broken something in him, so he locked himself up and Mariette would hear him scream in six different languages. When he finally emerged in late November, sporting a patchy beard that she would later make fun of whenever she wanted to humiliate him, he walked straight to the post office to send a letter to Gödel, informing him that he had developed an even more remarkable corollary to his already outstanding theorem: "Using the methods you employed so successfully ... I achieved a result that seems to me to be remarkable; namely, I was able to show that the consistency of mathematics is unprovable." Jancsi (von Neumann) had basically turned Gödel's argument on its head. According to the Austrian, if a system was consistent - free from contradictions - then it would be incomplete, be­cause it would contain verities that could not be proven. Janos, mean­while, had demonstrated the opposite: if a system was complete - if you could use it to prove every true statement - then it could never be free of contradictions, and so it would remain inconsistent! An incomplete system was not satisfactory, for obvious reasons, but an inconsistent one was much worse, because with it you could prove anything you liked: the wildest imaginable conjecture and its opposite, an impossible state­ment and the negation of that impossibility. When you combined Gödel's and von Neumann's ideas, the outcome defied logic itself: from here to eternity, mathematicians would have to choose between accepting ter­rible paradoxes and contradictions, or work with unverifiable truths. It was an almost intolerable dilemma, but there appeared to be no way around it. Gödel's logic, however mysterious, was airtight." (p.97)

Julian Bigelow - with whom von Neumann co-created their first computer

"Our funding came mostly from the military. 

Johnny had hooked them by explaining the possibilities that acceler­ating computation by a factor of ten thousand would open up. 

I mean, just imagine ... 

All the calculations for the atom bomb were done with adding ma­chines.

No real computers at all. 

Just women and some fancy calculators.

So those war boys were salivating even before we finished.

They were dreaming big and deadly.

But Johnny was thinking bigger. He was considering problems that were completely unassailable at the time. 

He wanted to mathematize everything. 

To spark revolutions in biology, economics, neurology, and cos­mology. 

To transform all areas of human thought and grab science by the throat by unleashing the power of unlimited computation. 

That's why he built his machine. 

"This species of device is so radically new that many of its uses will become clear only after it's been put into operation." 

It's what he said to me. 'Cause he understood. (p. 158)

Sidney Brenner - Biologist and Nobel Prize winner in physiology in 2002

"No one I knew had ever heard of it, and I'm not really sure how it ended up in my hands, but what he does in that paper is something extraordinary: he managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital. It's so terribly obscure that it's no wonder it went ignored and unnoticed at first. Or perhaps it is just one of those things that are too alien to be easily recognized, ideas that require science and technology to mature and develop to a point when they can finally fall to Earth and ripen. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself,· as well as a description of how to implement those instructions. In his paper, he divided his theoretical construct-which he called the "automaton"-into three components: the functional part, a decoder that reads the instructions and builds the next copy, and a device that takes that information and inserts it into the new machine. The astounding thing is that right there, in that pa­per written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work, long before anyone had ever glimpsed the strange beauty of the double helix. The logical basis of all systems of self-replication is made so crystal clear by von Neumann that I can't believe I wasn't able to figure it out myself. I would have become an instant celebrity! But I simply wasn't smart enough, I didn't understand how you could apply his immaculate mathematical concepts to the messy world of biology. It took years for his concepts to slowly worm their way into my own work. In my defense, it's still hard to fathom how he arrived at his ideas, be­cause he did so not by studying actual living, breathing life-forms made of flesh and blood, but by dreaming up a theoretical entity that could self-replicate, a creature unlike anything that exists, at least as far as we know". (p.189)

The third story in the book is about the creation of DeepMind, its creators and the trial of this artificial intelligence in the game of Go. We get both the perspectives of Demis Hassabis, the brilliant young man who co-developed DeepMind and of Lee Sedol, the Korean Go prodigy who eventually got beatten by AlphaGo, the computer programme designed by DeepMind. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10¹⁷⁰, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, estimated to be of the order of 10^80. 

"But what truly bothered him was not his own remarkable mind, but all the minds that surrounded him, how­ever limited in comparison. Why had evolution built us this way? Why were we burdened by consciousness, when we could have remained blissfully ignorant like-all other life-forms on this planet, living and dy­ing with such an Edenic lack of awareness that pain and pleasure were only ever felt in the present, and did not, like our pains and glories, stretch out from one day to the next, linking us all together in an end­less chain of suffering? He had read enough books to know that in thou­sands of years of civilization, we had not moved an inch closer to understanding any of this. Consciousness remained an unsolvable puz­zle, a dilemma that pointed toward the limits beyond which mankind may never tread. Demis could have accepted it were it not for the fact that, while it was true that mankind had managed to survive thus far without any semblance of true understanding, the future was now bleak, dark, and getting darker, as science-the crown jewel of our species­was so rapidly progressing that it would soon drive us off the edge, into a world for which we were woefully unprepared. It did not take a genius to realize that scientific breakthroughs were transfor_ming every aspect of our lives, while leaving the most fundamental questions unanswered. Soon we would reach a breaking point. Our monkey brains had taken us as far as they could. Something radically new was needed. A differ­ent type of mind, one that could see past us, far beyond the shadows cast by our own eyes. There was no longer any time to waste playing childish, zero-sum games." (p. 290)

Like the other stories, the personal angle, the impact on the emotions of the characters, their isolation, uniqueness, near to madness level of genius, or the single-minded perfection of their work, the defeat in the game, the loss of pride, and loss of perspective, are the true wonders of Labatut's writing. It is not about the science, it is about the scientists, about human endeavour, about excellence, about going where no one has gone before just by the power of mind. The use of fiction makes this much more fascinating because it allows to give different perspectives, to play with form, to use a lot of qualifying adjectives, to describe the inner struggles that could never come to the surface in a real biography, in which description and facts would dominate. Labatut turns a biography into a perfectly balanced, captivating and entertaining symphony. 

By the way, the title MANIAC stands for the original name of Von Neumann's computer: the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. 

Highly recommended!

Thomas Hertog - On The Origin Of Time (Torva, 2023) ****

Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog had the privilege to work with Stephan Hawking during the last decade of his life, and this book tries to capture the essence and the changes in Hawking's thinking over the years, but it is also a testimony of friendship and admiration for the great physicist. 

The book starts with the paradoxes that philosophers and scientists have struggled with for thousands of years: why is there such a thing as life? is there a plan behind it? and why are there laws that govern us? Hertog narrates well, exceptionally well for such a complex, confusing and hard to understand subject. He starts by going back in time, human time, to the ancient Greeks and builds his narrative up with the building blocks that we are familiar with. So far, so good, and we as lay people can still follow. 

One of the leading characters in Hertog's book is his fellow countryman George Lemaître, the physicist and priest whose concept of the expanding universe led to a breakthrough in theoretical physics and astronomy. It took some time, but eventually Einstein became also convinced that Lemaître was correct. In this way Hertog takes us from each step to the next step, a new theory, new findings, challenges, and corrections, which lead to new theories. It is a great ode to the power of science and to the open-mindedness of scientists who through debate and correspondence accept that other viewpoints and findings are more accurately reflecting the complex realities out there. 

But he also describes the changes in Hawking's own theories and perspectives, possibly challenged by himself only, thinking ever deeper into the nature of our universe. Hertog tries to explain all this by using drawings and analogies, but they only lead us so far in understanding the complexity of what the theories entail. Without the mathematics, it is hard to fathom what they are really talking about (not that we would understand it with the mathematics, of course). 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading, even of some of the findings are incomprehensible. 

"STEPHEN'S NO-BOUNDARY MODEL of the beginning-conceived from the top down!-is key to realize the fundamentally historical perspective on physics and cosmology that I have advocated, a view of physics that in­cludes the genesis of the laws. The no-boundary hypothesis predicts that if we trace the primordial universe as far back in time as we possibly can, its structural properties continue to evaporate and transmute and that this extends, ultimately, to time itself. Time would initially have been melded with space into something like a higher-dimensional sphere, closing the universe into nothingness. This led the early Hawking, still reasoning in a causal bottom -up fashion, to proclaim that the universe was created from nothing. But Hawking's final theory offers a radically different interpreta­tion of this closure of spacetime at the big bang. The later Hawking held that this nothingness at the beginning is nothing like the emptiness of a vacuum, out of which universes may or may not be born, but a much more profound, epistemic horizon involving no space, no time, and, crucially, no physical laws. "The origin of time" in Stephen's final theory is the limit of what can be said about our past, not just the beginning of all that is. This view is especially borne out by the holographic form of the theory where the dimension of time and hence the basic notion of evolution, the epitome of reductionist concepts, are seen as emergent qualities of the universe. From a holographic viewpoint, going back in time is like taking an increasingly fuzzy look at the hologram. One quite literally sheds more and more of the information that it encodes until, well, one runs out of qubits. That would be the beginning."(p. 257) 

Fascinating, mind-boggling, and utterly perplexing. 

I can only encourage readers to read it. 

Hernan Diaz - Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022) ****

I liked this book. For the simple reason that it tells the same story from four different perspectives, each in its own style and its own angle of approach, and each with its own agenda. 

It is the story of a young woman, Mildred Bevel, who marries the very wealthy Andrew Bevel, who even during the Great Depression and the crash of Wall Street, managed to out-manoeuvre and outperform everybody else and becoming excessively rich, even to the extent that some claim that he caused the crash himself in order to have more profit and wealth. 

One story is a book written by the journalist Harold Vanner, who attacks the rich financier. The second story is an unfinished manuscript representing the perspective of Bevel, and written by Ida Partenza as dictated by Bevel. The third story is written many years later by the same Ida Partenza, the daughter of an Italian anarchist who ends up as a personal assistant to Bevel, and who tries to reconstruct what actually happened so many years before by digging up the archives the rich man, including the letters of Mildred Bevel. The last story are the letters and scraps of paper by Mildred Bevel herself, little scards of information that shed light on what really happened. 

The story is full of tragedy, honesty and dishonesty, love and betrayal, yet at the same time a mystery novel, because as the reader you feel that not everything is being said, you are confronted with such opposing opinions that you wonder what might be the reality behind the words. 

The writing is excellent, the positions clear, the comments on society and our moral viewpoints. In Bevel's opinion ...

"(...) as any true professional will confirm, it is impossible for one single person or group to control the market. The picture of a cigar-smoking cabal pulling the strings of Wall Street from a drawing room is ludicrous. On October 24, known as Black Thursday, an as­tounding 12,894,650 shares were sold off at the New York Stock Ex­change. On Monday 28, prices kept plunging. The Dow experienced its most drastic fall in history, sinking 13 per cent or 38.33 points in one trading session. The following day, Black Tuesday, all records were shattered when 16,410,030 shares were dumped on the floor. The tape was delayed two and a half hours at the close. These vast numbers indeed confirm that the market was facing forces larger than one man, pool or consortium. 

At the end ofit all, the Dow had dropped 180 points, almost exactly what it had gained over the deranged summer months. Over half of the brokerage loans had been pulled. In this avalanche of liquidation there were no takers, regardless of price. By then I had closed all my positions, and it gives me a certain satisfaction to say that by covering my shorts I was able to step in and provide at least some relief to a multitude of sellers in dire need of a buyer. 

My actions safeguarded American industry and business. I pro­tected our economy from unethical operators and destroyers of confi­dence. I also shielded free enterprise from _the dictatorial presence of the Federal Government. Did I turn a profit from these actions? No doubt. But so will, in the long run, our nation, freed from both market piracy and state intervention".(p.185)

The funny thing is that through the technique of the various perspectives, Diaz can comment on his own writing in the first book through the eyes of Ida Partenza: 

"As I read on, however, the prose itself rather than the content be­came the center of my attention. It was unlike the books they had made me read at school and had nothing to do with the mysteries I used to check out of the library. Later, when I finally went to college, I would be able to trace Vanner's literary influences and consider his novel from a formal point of view (even if he was never assigned reading for any of the courses I took, since his work was out of print and already quite unavailable). Yet back then I had never experienced anything like that language. And it spoke to me. It was my first time reading some­thing that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood at some point that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with extreme discipline-the calm precision of Vanner's sentences, his unfussy vo­cabulary, his reluctance to· deploy the rhetorical deviees we identify with "artistic prose" while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seems to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning­ much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing. "(p. 246)

It is great reading, also the subtle packaging of the ideas, the deliberate camouflage of politically incorrect statements, which in the end is only for the reader to deal with, to try to understand, to connect and to appreciate. 

"A nation's prosperity is based on nothing but a multitude of ego­isms aligning until they resemble what is known as the common good. Get enough selfish individuals to converge and act in the same direc­tion, and the result looks very much like a collective will or a common cause. But once this illusory public interest is. at work, people forget an all-important distinction: that my needs, desires and cravings may mirror yours does not mean we have a shared goal. It merely means we have the same goal. This is a crucial difference. I will only cooperate with you as long as it serves me. Beyond that, there can only be rivalry or indifference." 

He took two or three shallow spoonfuls. Having soup made him look old and weak. 

"There's iiothing heroic about defending other people's interests just because they happen to coincide with yours. Cooperation, when its objective is personal gain, should never be confused with solidarity. Don't you agree?" He seldom wanted my opinion. 

"I think I do." And I think I thought I did.  

"True idealists, in contrast, care about the welfare of others above and especially against their own interests. If you enjoy your work or profit from it, how can you be sure you're truly doing it for others and not yourself? Abnegation is the only road that leads to the greater good. But you don't need me to tell you this. It's something you must have learned from your father's doctrines and his example." (p.334)

But it is not a book about economics, it is not a book about morality or greed, as I read in many comments, it is a novel about human interaction, about integrity and respect, about what is true and what is not true. The real main character of the book is Mildred Bevel. She is the mystery. She is the one person that everything else revolves around. It is about the possibility to be yourself, and to be seen as yourself by the outside world, and not as the result of somebody else's perception. 

Andy Clark - The Experience Machine (Allen Lane, 2023) ****

There is this great quote by author Anais Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are", and it might have been a subtitle for this book by Andy Clark, cognitive scientist at the University of Sussex. 

He describes convincingly how our brain shapes our perception by what we have experienced before, in an approach of increased efficiency and economical use of energy, in order to make predictions. Instead of each time generating a full perception from scratch, our brain selects what it expects, and adjusts when it is presented with unexpected visual stimuli: "the brain is constantly painting a picture, and the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence" (p. 5). This is of course not rocket science, but Clark gives lots of examples of situations in which this operates, including for instance the sensation of pain, and other bodily experiences that are more generated by the brain than by an actual physical cause, such as the "aesthetic chill" or goose bumps. 

He also explains how the counter-intuitive mental images we make of an action may precede the action, instead of the reverse. It's the mental image we have that makes the action take place. 

"Predictive processing suggests a much more thoroughly entwined process in which the way your body feels to you is itself altered by what you know about the overall context. This is because all those sources of infor­mation and evidence (raw bodily signals plus all the knowl­edge you are bringing to bear on the situation) mesh together, feeding influence back downward and impacting neuronal processing at all stages. In this way, even your bedrock bodily sensations may be altered by the way they are currently being framed by your own higher-level thoughts and ideas". 

The experience of our brain can also lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. When you feel high levels of distress or feel threatened, this can predictively contribute to perceiving the world as more stressful or threatening in a very literal sense. On the other hand, fictions and narratives can also lead to the opposite effect and break down stereotypes. 

Clark goes much broader than the typical psychology experiments in cognitive science, expanding the scope to our human physiology in a way that is really refreshing and fascinating, such as the following factoid: 

"Consider coalitions of neurons that are already located out­side the brain. An increasingly familiar example can be found inside the human gut, where upward of 500 million neurons in the gut wall already relay important information to the spi­nal cord and the brain. This circuitry helps regulate serotonin and other neuromodulators. The so-called gut-brain is by a long margin the largest cluster of neurons outside the brain, and an essential part of the nervous system. It is pretty clearly part of what makes you who you are and has a major influence on what you think and feel. This already gives the lie to the idea that your mind consists entirely of "what the brain does." But there's more. Our gut is also alive with (mostly) help­ful bacteria, which together comprise the "microbiome." These gut bacteria (unlike the neurons) are not even "genetically you." But they too make essential contributions, and have been shown to affect learning, memory, and mood as well as basic bodily regulation. Such links are not surprising given the deep role of bodily information in the construc­tion of the mind. For example, gut bacteria manufacture up to 95% of the body's serotonin, which has large impacts on mood and is one of the neurotransmitters implicated in the precision-weighing process" (p. 164-165)

He also goes a step further, and includes our everyday tools, such as our smartphone, as extensions of our mind. And much more. I have so many annotations in the book that will take a full essay to integrate them. This is not the objective here, so suffice it to say that I can recommend this book to any person interest in the workings of our mind. 

Clark's book is solid, comprehensive, well-written, at many times an eye-opener, and as said, includes many other disciplines such as physiology, medicine, computer sciences and more to paint a broad picture of the mysterious workings of our brain as a prediction machine. 

He concludes: 

"WE ARE what predictive brains build. If predictive processing lives up to its promise as a unifying picture of mind and its place in nature, we will need to think about ourselves, our worlds, and our actions in new ways. We will need to appre­ciate, first and foremost, that nothing in human experience comes raw or unfiltered. Instead, everything -  from the most basic sensations of heat and pain through to the most exotic experiences of selfhood, ego dissolution, and oneness with the universe - is a construct arising at the many meeting points of predictions and sensory evidence". 

It's a humbling message. The question now is how to make sure that this is known by as many people as possible. 

 

Samantha Harvey - Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023) ****½

This is a little gem of a book. It's not long, just 135 pages, and describes the lives of six astronauts in the International Space Station. There is no plot. Nothing happens. We just get to know the astronauts, but even what they are doing is less relevant than their perspective from outer space on our earth and our place in the universe. 

I'll just give a few examples, quite randomly on the quality of Harvey's exquisite prose. 

"At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in - a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places - from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceil­ings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being in space - which is everything - ambushes them with happi­ness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded - grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself." (p. 12)

Or one more: 

"Some eighty million miles distant the sun is roaring. It edges now toward its eleven-or-so-year maximum, erupting and flashing, when you look you can see its edges are flayed with violent light and its surface sunspot-bruised. Immense solar flares send proton storms earthwards and in their wake are geomagnetic storms trig­gering light displays three hundred miles high. 

It's a radioactive soup out there and if their shields were to fail they'd be cooked and they know it. But a strange effect happens when the sun is so active, whereby its radiation (comparatively meek and resistible) pushes away cosmic radiation (a veritable bag of spitting snakes) and the soup that they swim in is thereby tem­pered. What their shields don't deflect the earth's magnetic fields do, and the dosimeter in the lab is barely perturbed. The sun's par­ticle clouds billow, flares explode and whip earthward in eight minutes flat, energy pulses, explodes, a great ball of fusion and fury. In the sun's fury they're somewhat and improbably cocooned, as if the sun were a dragon and they, by stupendous fortune, had found themselves in its domain and protection. 

And in that leeside shelter here they are; it's early evening now: Shaun collecting the rubbish bags, Roman cleaning the Russian toilet and Pietro the US, Anton cleaning the air purification sys­tem, Chie wiping and disinfecting, Nell vacuuming the air vents, where she finds a pencil, a bolt and a screwdriver, some hair and some nail clippings." 

 It is poetry, as if every single word has value, neatly arranged next to another word with value, only to convey images and feelings that are even stronger. 

Do you need a plot, a story or suspense to write great prose? Not really, as Samantha Harvey demonstrates here on every single page. 

The Voynich Manuscript (Yale University Press, 2016) *****

The world is strange and full of coincidences. Earlier this year I read "Solenoid" in which the narrator refers to Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole, who is the author of the novel "The Gadfly", which is an impactful book in the narrator's life (p. 161). Later this year, I read "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, in which the following lines are written: "Mrs Bevel had terrible handwriting". "We call them the Voynich Manuscripts", says the youngest of the three with a mysterious giggle. Librarian jokes." (p. 254). I'm usually a fast reader who does not dwell too long on details such as this one, but somehow it struck a chord in my memory. So my curiosity was raised, and I found this wonderful book with the complete content of "The Voynich Manuscript", with essays by scholars on what has been discovered about it over the centuries. 

It's fascinating and a mystery. The manuscript dates from the early XVth Century, and is written in an unknown language for its entire 230 pages. The book contains many drawings of bathing women, unknown plants, astronomical drawings. The book has circulated through the libraries of Emperors, the Vatican and the polymath Athanasius Kircher. It was bought by the Polish antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1907, whose name remained attached to the manuscript. Today it is kept in the library of Yale University in the United States. 

A fascinating book that is impossible to read, but a pleasure to skim through. Many scholars throughout the centuries have thought that it was written in some kind of code, yet it has not yet revealed any indicators to crack the code. If it is not a code, then who in his right mind would write such a long manuscript in an invented and unreadable language? It sounds totally insane, yet it might be the case. My initial personal interpretation was that the original author deliberately wrote it to deceive people and to create a mystery. There are far too many repetitions of the same words in the text to make it real (as in the example below). The same can be said for the capital letter at the beginning of many words: they are almost always the same, as if all words in this mysterious language would start with only a limited number of letters. Just have a look for yourself on the one page here below. 

The book comes with a number of essays at the back by scholars in various disciplines. Unfortunately, it did not include a linguistic analysis of the frequency of the words, which in my opinion should be the real standard to evaluate whether the writing is fake or not. The reasoning is that a fake language would show anomalies in the frequency of both letters and words that normal texts would not have. 

I did come across some interesting articles in this respect which did not find any abnormalities in the "Voynich" language compared to other existing languages, which should confirm its authenticity as a real (underlying) language (Colin Layfield et al. Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript, Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, 2020, and Montemurro MA, Zanette DH. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLoS One. 2013). 

Anyway, this should not spoil the fun. We love books, and this is a great publication with every single page of the original manuscript reproduced, including the covers and the spine. You won't understand a word of it. 

Enjoy!

Virginie Despantes - Vernon Subutex 3 (Grasset, 2017) ****

I finished the last part of the Vernon Subutex trilogy this summer, in which the situation escalates. The group of homeless people led by Vernon continues to organise 'convergences', evenings of discussion and dance in complete darkness, like rave parties but then so special that you get into a trance without even taking any drugs or alcohol. 

"A présent, il (Vernon) jouit d'un confort qui n'est pas materiel - ils dorment dans des maisons vides, quand il ya des maisons, rarement chauffees, ils s'installent à côté de sources quand il n'y a pas l' eau courante et font des toilettes a l' extérieur par moins sept, ils mangent dans des gamelles - et pourtant ils vivent dans le luxe. Ils sont convaincus de partager une expérience à part, une extra ball que la vie ne leur devait pas, quelque chose d' octroyé, de magique. Et il ne veut pas que ça s'arrête". 

Meanwhile, this sense of bliss is in stark contrast with the lives of some other characters, the vengeful Dopalet who will release a wave of terror on the innocent. He represents the rich French, or the middle class French, who believe they only have rights and no duties, who become increasingly right wing and frustrated with life and society, and who also exemplifies the current waves of hate and anger that ripple through French society, feelings that have become totally acceptable now to articulate, leading even to the joy of ventilating anger and rage.

"Il sent monter en lui une haine abjecte et il est étonné de sa vigueur. Probablement le retour du refoulé ... Le plus gênant, c'est le plaisir qu'il ressent quand cette haine le tra­verse. Il sent qu'il se connecte à une énergie du terroir, qu' on lui a interdite pendant de trop longues décennies - une énergie frarnçaise, patriote, puissante et riche. Il est conscient de la monstruosité de ces pensées. Il a cinquante ans, toute sa vie on lui a répété qu'il ne fallait pas les autoriser".

Like in the previous books, each chapter is written from the perspective of one character, and Despentes describes every feeling, thought and action by this character full of cynicism, self-delusion, sarcasm and toxicity. In a way, it couldn't be more French than this. They curse, they rant, they feel misunderstood, they complain about their fate, about society, about everybody else, about everything actually. 

"Sylvie n' avait jamais organisé de soirée chez elle. Par honte. Parce que c'etait un petit appartement ordinaire, sans aucun cachet, bas de plafond. Parce qu' elle y avait empilé les trois meubles qui tenaient. Que la rue était moche, sans charme, que l' entrée sentait la soupe aux légumes, la nourriture de pauvre. Que le dealeur du sixième bloquait la porte et que les toxicos pissaient contre l' ascenseur. Elle avait laissé entrer Olga qui squattait le sofa. Elle savait qu'Olga ne verrait rien de tout ça. Elle est habituée. A ses yeux, cette merde immonde, c' est la vie normale."

The story itself only transpires through these personal rantings by the characters. Vernon himself is but a character in the background, the red thread around which everything revolves, but who is surprisingly absent as a voice in the story. Despentes is ruthless for her characters but at the same time, she brings them to live like real life persons, with their petty thoughts, the little problems of daily life, while at the same time reflecting on society, or even taking the reader by surprise, or by commenting as an omniscient author, breaking the narrow perspective of the characters depicted. 

"Il vomissaient partout sur le camp, avec une belle énergie de soûlards"

"L'intelligence est utile pour justifier les décisions, après coup. On l'utilise pour se raconter une histoire plausible. On fait semblant, d'y voir clair, d'être cohérent. Mais la vérité, c'est qu'on agit sans réfléchir. C'est tout."

It is also a book of human terror, of brutal violence and the absolute lack of empathy. I thought the second volume of the trilogy was not as good as the first one, and I wasn't sure whether to even start on this one, but it is even better than the first book. It is well-written, with a strong pace, wonderful direct language and her vitriolic pen. 

It is the "condition humaine", it is about the deep anger among so many people that society is unfair with little justice, but especially the other humans, to quote Sartre "L'enfer, c'est les autres". Within this gigantic societal terror, there are some real humans, with good feelings of tenderness and respect, so fragile in this violent environment. 

"Cette merde immonde, c' est la vie normale." (This squalid pile of shit is just normal life).

Siddharta Mukherjee - The Song Of The Cell (Penguin, 2022) ****½

Siddharta Mukherjee is a biologist, physician, researcher (Stanford, Oxford, Harvard) and author of the very popular science books "The Emperor Of All Maladies" (on cancer) and "The Gene". With his latest book - The Song Of The Cell - he takes us along for a journey into the human body to find out how our cells work together to give our body all its functions and possibilities. 

His way of presenting this is fascinating: he does this step by step, each time with some personal stories to illustrate, and always by honouring the researchers who discovered the functions he described, including what they looked like, what they struggled with (or even literally killed each other for), yet all this focused on the incredible variety and functions of cells we have in our bodies, and how they have evolved from their original egg cell to become hyperspecialised in some organ or circulating through the body. Bone cells, blood cells, brain cells, liver cells, pancreatic cells, and the zillion of other cells are presented, and how they interact, how our immune cells do their work (or not) ... and all that without going into too much technical details of biology or biochemistry or even physics. 

His biological overview is also a historical one, showing the immense progress we have made in the last decades, almost exponentially, considering how little we knew a century ago, and how we even knew less for thousands of years before. 

In his exploration of the cells in our body, and the clear explanation of all that is currently known, he leaves a lot of space for the unknown, for the deeper mysteries and areas for further discovery and research. 

Near the end of the book, he gives this summary which describes it well: 

"We are built of uni­tary blocks-extraordinarily diverse in shape, size, and function, but uni­tary nonetheless. 

Why? The answers can only be speculative. Because, in biology, it is easier to evolve complex organisms out of unitary blocks by permuting and combining them into different organ systems, enabling each to have a spe­cialized function while retaining features that are common across all cells (metabolism, waste-disposal, protein synthesis). A heart cell, a neuron, a pancreatic cell, and a kidney cell rely on these commonalties: mitochondria to generate energy, a lipid membrane to define its boundaries, ribosomes to synthesize its proteins, the ER and Golgi to export proteins, membrane­spanning pores to let signals in and out, a nucleus to house its genome. And yet, 'despite the commonalities, they are functionally diverse. A heart cell uses mitochondrial energy to contract and act as a pump. A beta cell in the pancreas uses that energy to synthesize and export the hormone in­sulin. A kidney cell uses membrane-spanning channels to regulate salt. A neuron uses a different set of membrane channels to send signals that en­able sensation, sentience, and consciousness. Think of the number of dif­ferent architectures you can build with a thousand differently shaped Lego blocks. 

Or perhaps we might reframe the answer in evolutionary terms. Recall that unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular organisms-not once, but many independent times. The driving forces that goaded that evolu­tion, we think, were the capacity to escape predation, the ability to compete more effectively for scarce resources, and to conserve energy by specializa­tion and diversification. Unitary blocks-cells-found mechanisms to achieve this specialization and diversification by combining common pro­grams (metabolism, protein synthesis, waste disposal) with specialized pro­grams ( contractility in the case of muscle cells, or insulin-secreting capacity in pancreatic beta cells). Cells coalesced, repurposed, diversified-and con­quered."

 As a physician, he not only talks about how our cells do work, but also what happens when they are out of control, when our immune system starts attacking our own body, when pancreatic cells malfunction and lead to diabetes, how cancer cells never stop growing. He is proud of the achievements, but also humble in his realisation that there is still a gigantic amount of discoveries to be made. 

"When the comprehensive list of genes that drive the growth of cancer cells were first identified in the mid-2000s, there was an exuberance that we had unlocked the key to cures for cancer.  

"You have a leukemia that has mutations in Tet2, DNMT3a, and SF3bl;' I would tell a bewildered patient. I would look at her triumphantly, as if I'd solved the Sunday crossword puzile. 

She would look at me as if I was from Mars. 

And then she would ask the simplest question: "So, does that mean that you know the drugs that are going to cure me?" 

"Yes. Soon;' I would say, with exuberance. For the linear narrative ran thus: isolate the cancer cells, find the altered genes; match it with medicines that target those genes, and kill the cancer without harming the host. 

Not that I believe that he said this to a patient in real life, but it illustrates the realisation that there is still a lot of work to be done. Biology and medical science have barely scratched the surface of what could be achieved. 

The topic of the book is one with many wonders, and the deep insight that our life on earth is truly exceptional and precious, incredibly difficult to understand and incredibly complex and fascinating. Mukherjee is a wonderful guide, and the amazing thing is that he finds the time to even write this kind of book despite all his other work as a physician and top-researcher. We can only be grateful that he shares his knowledge and enthusiasm with us.