Friday, August 15, 2025
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Dream Count (Harper Collins, 2025) ****
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Stefan Larsson - The Patient Priority (McGraw-Hill, 2023) ***½
They also plead for better integration of care, by type of disease or condition, and based on solid registries.
"In the past, outcomes measures have traditionally been developed by specialty societies and, therefore, tend to focus on specific interventions or procedures. Sometimes, focusing on a specific procedure makes sense. Cataract surgery is probably the best example, because it is the only treatment for patients suffering from cataracts. But in most situations, the ideal health outcomes to track for a given condition should reflect the overall care for a patient's medical condition, in which multiple specialties are usually involved and multiple treatment options are available, so clinicians can assess the relative effectiveness of different types of treatment. Procedure-based registries have played an important role in improving hip and knee arthroplasty, but they can't really address the broader question about the optimal treatment for the underlying disease of osteoarthritis. Or consider a patient suffering from back pain: for that condition, the relevant outcomes measures should be broad enough to assess the comparative impact of, say, physical therapy versus surgery." (p.56)
This approach should look at the entire patient pathway from prevention to end of treatment. Today, care is really a step-by-step approach, with none of the steps seen as being part of a disease continuum. Obviously the reality is different, and patients also live in a world where they are confronted with other problems that does not always make treatment optimal.
"An approach to care delivery that integrates both clinical interventions along the entire treatment pathway and nonclinical interventions that encourage prevention and address the social and behavioral determinants of health is not only a more effective way to monitor and treat patients, it also allows for better coordination across multiple stakeholders and gives health systems full visibility of the system costs to make informed tradeoffs-for example, investing in preventive care to avoid high treatment costs at later points in the care-delivery value chain." (p. 74)
The Netherlands for instance, had a visionary idea, that we can fully support, based on the following four essential points. Whether this has actually been done, I have not been able to verify.
- "To reach a consensus among key stakeholders by 2022 on the outcomes to be measured for conditions representing 50% of the total disease burden, both by adapting international standards for use in the Netherlands and by developing new metrics
- To support shared decision-making on treatment choices between providers and patients, by making health information more understandable for patients, and· by equipping health professionals with the necessary skills and information to have meaningful conversations about treatment choices with their patients
- To promote the outcome-based reorganization of care delivery and reimbursement through the sharing of best practices, the development of more integrated care chains, and the encouragement of more outcome-based contracts between insurers and providers
- To facilitate better access to relevant and up-to-date outcome information, through the development of a state-of-the-art health informatics infrastructure, with the goal of making it easy for patients to report data, ensuring that data is well-organized and scalable, promoting access for all relevant parties for the purposes of benchmarking and research, and maintaining privacy and security" (p. 216)
Because of this lack of patient perspective, there is also barely any mention of patient advocacy or patient organisations in their analysis, which is disturbing to say the least. As representatives of the 'lived experience' we can advocate for better adherence, better alignment with the life goals of individuals, helping to capture patient satisfaction data, etc, etc.
That is what we are advocating for. That is where the low-hanging fruit is to be found.
W.G. Sebald - The Rings Of Saturn (Vintage, 2020) ****½
German author W.G. Sebald was also a professor of literature, and was appointed at the University of East Anglia in Norwich UK. Like his other novels "Austerlitz"(2001), "A Place In the Country" (1998), and "The Emigrants" (1992), Sebald's writing fits in a category of its own, a kind of literary non-fiction. In "The Rings Of Saturn", originally published in German in 1995, he describes a long walk along the British east coast, starting is Lowestoft, walking south to Orford, then travelling back inland to the north-west.
He marvels at the world, at people, at inventions, at nature and animals, and whatever the subject, his writing is entertaining, beautiful and very literary. And always, behind the light-footed tone, behind the apparent sometimes insignificant trivia, behind the text, there is a sense of loss, of doom, of darkness.
"Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. "What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world". (p. 19)
On the herring:
"An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness." (p. 58-59)
Yet his trivia are also fun. He knows how to take the reader by the hand, and make him/her look at things differently. He also tells for instance the story of his grandmather who kept goldfish, and who washed her each of them with soap every day, and then put them on the windowsill to let them enjoy the air a little bit, before putting them back in their aquarium. Or this description is typical of how he builds up his descriptions to a climax.
"No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour" (p. 77)
I can also appreciate his view on Belgium, yet not entirely either.
"And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere." (p. 122)
Deep down, something is indeed terribly wrong with our world, and he sees things evolving for the worst, affecting the author too.
"It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane" (p. 182)
Brilliant.
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Saou Ichikawa - Hunchback (Penguin/Viking, 2025) ***½
"Hunchback" is the story of Shaka Izawa, a woman with congenital myotubular myopathy trying to become a real woman or person despite her 'hunchback'. She is locked in her wheelchair, in need of a ventilator and she lives in a studio in a residential care home, called Ingleside, which is funded by the inheritance she had from her very wealthy and deceased parents. This is her microcosm.
To keep herself busy and to break out into the 'real' world, she writes erotic stories for young adult websites, obviously under a different name, until one of the male nurses in the hospital connects the dots.
Izawa describes in great detail the challenges of living with her disability, the risks of infection, the lungs that don't function properly, the mucus obstruct her breathing. You can only feel sympathy for her predicament and bless her that she is wealthy, because this allows her to do maybe more than more common people could have done. She studies online, like the author herself did. You cannot but admire her desire to do what normal people can, including to have sexual relationship.
The novel is tragic and fun at the same time. You can appreciate the authenticity and the candour with which Ichikawa describes her disability and her desire to be considered desirable like any other person would fee. She does not complain about her predicament. She does not make fun of her own situation. She tries to live with it, to be more than just a body in a wheelchair, to be herself, to be more than she was.
Her brutal openness alone makes this book worth reading. It's not ground-breaking stylistically but that's clearly not the purpose. It's straightforward language and narrative make it all the more accessible.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Louis de Bernières - Light over Liskeard (Vintage, 2024) **½
The main character, Q, a cryptographer working freelance for the British government to prevent hacking of the most vital computer infrastructure of the country, flees to the Cornish moors in anticipation of the IT armaggedon, when all systems will collapse because some lunatic with skills such as his own decides to do so. On the Bodmin Moor, he meets his neighbour Theo with his daughter Eva, who teaches him the skills to survive on the land. Occasionally, his young adult children Morgan and Charles come to visit, while his wife, from whom he's separating, remains in London. Because of Q's exceptional mathematical skills and high education level, he cannot be compared to any other 'prepper' or survivalist.
That is the plot. To make it a little more interesting, there are ghosts and wild animals such as lynxes and aurochs, and crazy people running around the Moor : hippies, a man waiting for the rapture, a lone man on a horse. To keep the action going, there are a number of things that happen that have nothing to do with the core story, you cannot even call them subplots. For instance, his daughter Morgan sets a number of 'asks' for her new lover before she accepts him as a lover, like a princess in fairy tales.
The chapters all have different narrators for unclear reasons, and half of the chapters can be omitted without changing anything to the story at all.
The novel lacks writing discipline, focus, and especially emotional depth. Everything that happens to the main characters remains superficial. They don't feel love, or pain, or existential angst or any other human feelings that can make literature so interesting.
Finally, there is not even a moral lesson to be learned, except that all our civilisation may be on the brink of total collapse because of a blind reliance on the internet, digital and AI. Environmentalists are systematically described as eco-fascists, while vegetarians and vegan are also not really appreciated. You would expect then that Q, the main character, shows some broader moral vision, yet he does want to create a better society, his only interest is selfish: to survive the IT Armaggedon.
You get the gist. Not really good, but if you're interested in cheap entertainment, this may be your thing.
Friday, July 25, 2025
Kaveh Akbar - Martyr! (Picador, 2024) ****½
Akbar received his bachelor's degree from Purdue, his MFA from Butler University, and his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.
"This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glinting off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn't until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apartment bathtub, everyone else's apartments would likely catch fire too." (p. 14)
He struggles with religion too, and he clearly is too well-educated and rational not to question some of the Qran's commentaries:
"Once, when I was a boy, our teacher told us the hadith of the starving man. The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, "Please help me, I'm starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don't want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering." God, in his infinite wisdom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive.
I remember thinking the story didn't make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chainreaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell." (p. 109)
He is a writer himself, a poet, struggling with language but also understanding the cultural roll of the dice about which language you speak. He does not claim any identity:
"It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn't come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one map is called Iraq and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong." (p. 125)
But language is also the only tool he has to come to grips with the world, to communicate, to express, with all its flaws and possibilities:
""I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it's damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they're supposed to. It'll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It'll never bring my mother back, you know?" (p. 185)
or also
"When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, "It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn't David." It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?" (p. 270)
""Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe-France, Italy, Belgium-and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah's architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches.""Whoa.""I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These cenruries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred". (p. 157)
These multiple shards also represents his own life: what is he in the end?
"It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discernible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death - an interval where he'd never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes, neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk or in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim." (p. 246)
"If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillhess and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity; the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself - which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.-from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams" (p. 250)
Timothy Snyder - On Freedom (Crown, 2024) ****
"The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone." (Preface)
"We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to as a positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don't think of freedom as positive, we won't even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to. Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them." (p. 31)
I like his comparison to our situation in which we are often blind for the context that we live in, the automatic responses that we have without truly understanding that there is something outside of the box that we are trapped in, like animals in a behavioural test that our current digital technology could well be:
"The first brain hack is experimental isolation, getting you alone, out of bodily contact with your fellow creatures. It generates an artificial loneliness that enables four more brain hacks, four more kinds of manipulation. In the experiments, the isolated rat or pigeon works one end of the tool but does not see its other end, nor the actions and intentions of the experimenters. We similarly set our eyes on the display of a computer or a phone. We are ignorant of what lies on the other side: the tangle of algorithms, the vacuum of purpose. Fingertips on a keyboard, we fall into a trap. We speak of "my computer" or "my phone," but these objects are not ours, any more than the lab belongs to the ratunless we figure out how they work on us." (p. 101)
The deliberate intention of people behind the scenes to create algorithms that determine your thoughts and behaviour may seem paranoid but as we're currently witnessing in real life, and many Western politicians and intelligence services seem very naive in this context:
"Our fears are cultivated to conform to what others in our categories fear. If you are a middle-aged white male and you fear exactly what other middle-aged white males fear, you have been had. When your fears are predictable, then so are you, which means that you (and your digital demographic) are ripe for manipulation. When you are predictable, you predictably bring your country down.
Conforming, you are easily led. Having withdrawn from the rugged borderland of the unpredictable into the cozy cove of your digital demographic, you await orders, or nudges. You have exposed your buttons, and you wait for them to be stroked and pushed. Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes. Unfreedom is efficient." (p. 105)
The autocrats like Putin and others are real masters at this: taking advantage of the weaknesses and isolation of individuals to rally them for a great sense of historical community:
"Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that larger forces will always bring us back to equilibrium. Politicians of eternity are real entertainers who assuage our sense of loss with an appealing tale about the past. They gain our confidence by circling us back to a mythical era when we as a nation were (supposedly) innocent. These time-looping con artists nudge us away from democracy and toward their own feeling that they should rule forever and never be sent to prison (a motive especially apparent in the case of Trump and also Benjamin Netanyahu). Deprived of historical knowledge and of the habit of ethical thinking by the politics of inevitability, we are easy marks. Rising authoritarians succeed in this century not by proposing futures but by making any conversation about them seem pointless or absurd.
"Vladimir Putin was the most important politician of eternity. His Russia drew directly from Brezhnev's 1970s, a time of nostalgia for the victory of 1945. Putin and his generation were raised with the idea that the supposed innocence of an older generation justified any action by a younger one. He looped back to Brezhnev's 1970s, and from the 1970s to an imagined 1945, and then to a baptism a thousand years before that, which supposedly joined Russia with Ukraine forever and made Russians eternally innocent. Russia was always the victim and always the victor. Russians had the right to determine whether or not Ukraine and Ukrainians existed; anyone who denied that right was an enemy. A Russian fascist tradition that spoke in just this way was discovered and celebrated." (p. 156)
Yet he is equally severe for libertarianism, where everything is left to market forces.
"According to the libertarians, the "free market" defends freedom. If the market does not defend something, it follows, that thing is not freedom. If the market does not protect a certain right, then we are expected to concede that it is not a right. When libertarians argue that markets defend freedom, they really mean that humans have a duty to defend markets. In a "free market," freedom is defined as the right of things to move around unhindered by humans, who are defined as barriers, or as entities with duties toward things. Human beings must be denied the freedom to change how capitalism works, and that denial must be labeled "freedom." Thus in a "free market," politics begins from Orwellian oppression. The "free market" only exists as a slogan covering senseless contradictions and justifying political bullying. There is no such thing as a "free market" in the world, nor can there be. Capitalism minus norms and laws is murderous conquest. If someone invades your country, seizes your house, enslaves your children, and puts your kidneys up for sale, that is the magic of the unregulated market at work. Markets cannot be free. Only people can be free. Freedom is a human value. It can be recognized and pursued only by humans. There is no substitute for freedom, no way to delegate it. The moment we delegate freedom, to the market or anything else, it becomes submission. When people surrender the word free, freedom vanishes from their lives." (p. 215)
For us Europeans, who live in a free world where we can do and act as we please, all this seems pretty obvious. My assessment is that many Americans do not understand what freedom means, and they are definitely not the Leaders of the Free World. Obama made this claim, and many presidents before him, but the US is not and has never been this Leader. I think it's up to us Europeans to step up and show to the rest of the world that real population happiness and prosperity are the result of deep democracy, with rule of law, human rights, press freedom, solidarity and a socially corrected free market.
Snyder's book gives a good analysis, food for thought and also a framework from which to design this freedom we all crave.
Jessica Au - Cold Enough For Snow (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) ***½
"I turned to my mother, who was still looking at the Monet, which happened to be one of his most famous pieces. She was swaying lightly on her feet, as if to music, or as if very tired. I said that I too sometimes did not understand what I saw in galleries, or read in books. Though I understood the pressure of feeling like you had to have a view or opinion, especially one that you could articulate clearly, which usually only came with a certain education. This, I said, allowed you to speak of history and context, and was in many ways like a foreign language. For a long time, I had believed in this language, and I had done my best to become fluent in it. But I said that sometimes, increasingly often in fact, I was beginning to feel like this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for. Sometimes, I looked at a painting and felt completely nothing. Or if had a feeling, it was only intuitive, a reaction, nothing that could be expressed in words. It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak". (p. 43)
Her writing is precise, precious even, as is the description and development of the story itself. It's not boundary-breaking but worth looking for.
Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****
"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)
Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe.
"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)
"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others.The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643).
As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse.
Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Bertrand Denzler & Frantz Loriot - Musique Improvisée et Questions Politiques (Self-Released, 2025) ***
"‘When you practise this music, you realise that being concerned solely with the process, tending towards ’without preconception‘, ideally implies that ’the music is produced solely by the relationships that are established, on the spot and throughout the piece, both between the sounds and between those who generate them", to quote what we wrote in the foreword to The Practice of Musical lmprovisation'. Now, despite the gap between music and politics, these relationships do raise questions about equality and freedom, which you say are ‘important ideas’ in anarchism. In fact, it seems to me that improvisers, because they have the possibility of doing so, establish from the outset something that evokes a ‘situation of anarchy’, by implicitly positing the freedom and equality of everyone as principles and by asserting without saying so that there are neither rulers nor ruled, neither representatives nor represented, neither God nor State and so on. So it would seem that improvising musicians are actually prepared to play the game of equality and freedom to see what happens. Rather than trying to understand the link between improvised music and anarchism [a claimed anarchism], I therefore feel that it is more effective to examine the practice of improvised music by seeing it as an attempt to establish a (musical) ‘situation of anarchy’ each time, even when the musicians present don't talk about it or think about it in these terms" (p. 35-36).
Luckily, and interestingly they also integrate the importance of listening, at least for the musicians to perform in public.
"We're self-proclaimed musicians [without any further details about our status and without worrying about whether we're going to make any money], which doesn't seem to me to be completely indefensible. We just want to make music and we want to make it ‘in public’. Because even if we are aware of the issues mentioned above, we know that the presence of flesh-and-blood listeners and the codified ritual of the concert and the utopia it evokes change the music, and that, for good and bad reasons - some of which remain mysterious - these listeners make the music more intense. The concert is open to criticism, and it would be easy to shoot it down. But thanks to this institution, we have experienced some powerful moments, both as listeners and as musicians. The concert allows us not to isolate ourselves, to shut ourselves in, to barricade ourselves, to self-segregate, to separate ourselves completely, to circulate ideas and sounds, to have experiences, and it changes our music". (p. 94)
What they fail to see in all this is the actual experience of the listener, who is forced by this music to drop his or her guard, to have an open mind and open ears, to welcome the unexpected, the undefined, and welcome novelty, even if some aspects and sounds may appear harsh or strange.
It's interesting to have this kind of questions about the music we like, and I applaud both authors for the nature and depth of their questions, their proposals for answers, while at the same time being humble enough to not to proclaim anything with certainty or in absolute terms. This short review and excerpts do not do full credit to the conversation, so I can only recommend readers who speak French to give it a try.
The book can be ordered here.
Original excerpts:
Banu Mushtaq - Heart Lamp (And Other Stories, 2025) ***½
"Material things had become priceless, and human beings worthless. Behind those material possessions, people's feelings were on sale. Things decided the relationships between small people with big shadows. A fridge had the capacity to change the life of a young bride. The different colours it came in could play Holi on her young dreams. Such possessions held a prominent spot not only in the house, but also in making life decisions. People were running, having tossed their worthiness and their relationships into the air. Tired, collapsing in exhaustion, sweating, they were running. Aha! The golden deer is more than roaming about, it is making everyone mad too. It has brought everyone under its spell. The tale of its magnetism - no one could grasp it in their hands - this was the grand mark of civilisation!" (p. 123)
The last story is a letter to God, called "Be A Woman Once, Oh Lord". By addressing God directly and reproaching him for what is happening in the world, she breaks through every convention and level of acceptability for her community.
"Whether you have time for these small problems striking my limited thoughts, whether you feel my entire life is a three-hour play, whether I seem like an actor to you, keep one thing in mind: my happiness and sadness are not borrowed. They are not to be performed. They are to be experienced. You are just a detached director. When one of your own characters assaults my mind, have you no duties as a director? Grant me one solace at least. What is my fault in all this, tell me?" (p. 203)
Her stories are at the same time revealing, interesting and audacious. Her language is full of local words that defy translation (food, religious names, clothes, ...) which gives the stories an additional strong quality and authenticity. The story-telling itself is at times meandering and less tight than we could expect from modern day writing. Whether this collection of stories deserves to win the International Booker Prize is of course another matter.
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Octavia E. Butler - Parable Of The Sower (Headline Publishing, 1993) ***
"I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I'd kill myself." (p. 82)
Lauren is also hypersensitive, and hyperemphatetic: she feels the pain of others as strong as the person she sees having pain. This makes her predicament even worse in the context of the horrors they encounter on their journey.
"He messed up our family, broke it into something less than a family. Still, I would never have wished him dead. I would never wish anyone dead in that horrible way. I think he was killed by monsters much worse than himself. It's beyond me how one human being could do that to another. If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn't do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone else's pain, -who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain? I've never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people. Failing that, I wish I could find other people who have it, and live among them. A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all." (p. 108)
"They deserve to know that I'm a sharer. For their own safety, they should know. But I've never told anyone. Sharing is a weakness, a shameful secret. A person who knows what I am can hurt me, betray me, disable me with little effort.I can't tell. Not yet. I'll have to tell soon, I know, but not yet. We're together, the three of us, but we're not a unit yet. Harry and I don't know Zahra very well, nor she us. And none of us know what will happen when we're challenged. A racist challenge might force us apart. I want to trust these people. I like them, and ... they're all I have left. But I need more time to decide. It's no small thing to commit yourself to other people." (p. 167)
She is fundamentally alone, and she concocts a kind of religion in the process, trying to have other individuals join her belief system that "god is change", "that everything is change" and even that adherents can "shape god". She calls this system Earthseed. Maybe this concept is one of the weakest points of the story, with little elaboration and just some semi poetic hymns to introduce each chapter. It's an empty shell that she proposes.
The novel is of interest because of its predictive power and the dark atmosphere.
Peter J. Hotez - The Deadly Rise Of Anti-Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) ****
"One of the most challenging aspects of confronting anti-science aggression is that those promoting its agenda have acquired wealth, power, and organization. The anti-vaccine/anti-science ecosystem now includes the most widely viewed nighttime cable news shows, far-right members of the US Congress and extremist groups, and a formidable array of contrarian intellectuals or pseudointellectuals. From my personal experience, I learned firsthand that these groups play hardball. Not only are they aggressive, but as I have tried to make clear, they do not feel compelled to be truthful. They sometimes seek to trigger waves of hate e-mails and attacks via social media.Another challenge is the simple reality that anti-science very much runs along a partisan divide. The anti-vaccine and anti-science movements are fully enmeshed in extreme conservative or far-right politics. At times, this can include extremist politics, such as when the Proud Boys and other White nationalist groups participate in anti-vaccine rallies and messaging. Therefore, combating anti-science means it is often not possible to remain politically neutral." (p. 134)"In the biomedical sciences, anti-science groups exploit to their advantage two key tactics that make it difficult for the scientific community to counter their influence. First, anti-science in America is currently spurred by a strong partisan divide, but the scientific professions remain committed to political neutrality. Next, health freedom propaganda often dismisses mainstream science as little more than science dogma perpetuated by high priests working at elite research universities or institutes. To make matters worse, the anti-science groups dominate the modern public square-the Internet and social media-knowing full well that our profession looks inward, seldom engages the public, and prefers journals and scientific conferences where we speak only to other scientists.Therefore, success in combating anti-science aggression requires that we must at some level be prepared to do battle on multiple fronts. It means that at least some biomedical scientists must show a willingness to learn and practice science communication in the public marketplace." (p. 140)"However, these actions do not address those generating the content from the far-right, the role of the disinformation dozen in monetizing the Internet, or the Russian government's weaponized health communication. Given the 20 years of relative neglect by the US government in tackling anti-science aggression, I believe we must realize that this issue goes way beyond the health sector. We need input from other branches of the federal government such as the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Justice-and even State, given the Russian involvement. We must seek ways to demonetize the use of the Internet by the disinformation dozen or halt the anti-science aggression emanating from Fox News and elected officials, but in ways that do not violate the Bill of Rights or the US Constitution. Although the health sector may not know what can and should be done to address anti-science aggression, there are those who do and who could come to the table with experiences that taught them how to combat global terrorism, cyberattacks, and nuclear proliferation. We must learn from them. Along those lines, the White House should consider establishing an interagency task force to examine such possibilities and to make recommendations for action to slow the progression of anti-science." (p. 159)
There is work to be done. We try to participate in this where possible.
An important book that should be read by everyone in politics.
Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume (Faber & Faber, 2024) ****
"And then it kicks in: the emergency response, and could tell, as I sat there in my hotel room, still dazed by having witnessed the repeated fall of a slice of bread, that that was what had happened to Thomas. I could tell by his voice. The quiet panic when he realised what had happened and his faltering attempts to come up with a reasonable explanation. It wasn't a problem with the line. It was the ground under his feet falling away, his emergency response being triggered, his first-aid box being unpacked. The door opening onto a world in which everything can be subject to change. A time falling apart, a day repeating itself, experiences disappearing from memory without a trace, dust returning to places from which one knows it had been wiped away." (p. 36)
It is clear that the absurdity of her situation quickly touches the borders of rationality, because many aspects of her life become totally contradictory and impossible. But that's part of the novel's charm: it puts us in a situation where we ourselves start thinking more deeply about time and what it actually represents. Things we have always taken for granted appear to be less so. Not that it's a lesson in physics, but it raises deep questions.
"Actually, though, we had no shortage of explanations, we had plenty of those, but explanations which could stand up to critical scrutiny and at the same time embody all our many observations, those we could not find. All our lines of enquiry came to dead ends, we explored each strand thoroughly and returned empty-handed every time. There were flaws and a lack of coherence, there were facts that didn't fit, there were contradictions and paradoxes. Every system fell apart the minute we tried to put all our data together to form a whole. There was no consistency, we could not get the facts of the day to square with certain of our theories, we could not construct coherent systems or find any pattern, and all our detailed explanations had to be rejected one after the other. Every time we came to a dead end we had to go back to the facts: Thomas was subject to the laws of forgetfulness, and I was accumulating too many days in my memory. (p. 89)
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Ota Pavel - How I Came To Know Fish (Penguin Classics, 2025) ***
"I went mad at the winter Olympics in Innsbruck. My brain got cloudy, as if a fog from the Alps had enveloped it. In that condition I came face to face with one gentleman - the Devil. He looked the part! He had hooves, fur, horns, and rotten teeth that looked hundreds of years old. With this figure in my mind I climbed the hills above Innsbruck and torched a farm building. I was convinced that only a brilliant bonfire could burn off that fog. As I was leading the cows and horses from the barn, the Austrian police arrived..."
"With hoes and spades they turned the soil so that even God wouldn't recognize it. They dynamited the pond where I used to go with the boys of Lidke, scattering its water as they scattered the church. They diverted the brook from Hrebec, and paved the roads with white marble tombstones so they could walk on the names of those who had been sleeping peacefully. And they sang and sang, stopping only to prepare more dynamite. After all, it was impossible, using only hoes and spades, to wipe out white villages from the face of the earth. The Lidke fields were all around me. Mama had worked there, and potatoes and small white flowers grew up everywhere. Potatoes even grew on the graves of executed men and boys, and when the women dug them out they resembled human hearts. That was a warning, and nobody took those potatoes home. Only the greedy Hanackova tried it, lugging a bag to her house, and she was dead within a year." (p. 99)
It's a smalltown life sucked up in the grand wheels of history. Pavel's writing does not condemn as much as describes what is happening around him, with a gentle and compassionate view, humour and a precise writing style.
If you get the chance, read it. There's lots to enjoy in these short stories.
António Lobo Antunes - Midnight Is Not For Everyone (Dalkey Archive Press, 2025) ***½
"- It's a pinky, what a reliefinattentive to the pines, from afar walking down to the kiosk where Senhor Manelinho, all flattery and friendship-Take a look at this flower of a manforget-me-nots, snapdragons, birds of paradise, at school with an atlas with all of that in pictures, the names in Portuguese and Latin below them, the Biology teacher-An endless collectionSenhor Manelinho' s wife pointing out my father to a customer browsing magazines-He was a perfect mannow deformed and red, with difficulty speaking, sentences that took time to unravel, he liberated his tongue a little in the cafe with the foosball table, thanks to the drink-I feel better alreadyready to go far if his liver gave him permission but it didn't,the rascal, the body turns against us if we trust it, Senhor Manelinho, whose heart was betraying him-You have to train them like the animalsand even training it like the animals, which was his case, God knows, Senhor Manelinho stabbing his chest-I have two plastic veinsnot in bed eighteen, in a nursing home in Coimbra, looking at lines on a display-I spent twelve days after the operation looking at that movie and stitches in his thorax patching up disasters, lunches through a straw, dinners through a straw, an Indian squeezing his sides forcing him to cough-Cough up the mucous from your lungs, partnerand my father going up the street with us holding on to the sides of the buildings" (p. 255)