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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or also 

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

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

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

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

"Whoa." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't miss it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book can be ordered here. 

Original excerpts:  

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

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

Banu Mushtaq - Heart Lamp (And Other Stories, 2025) ***½

Banu Mushtaq is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language. She describes in this collection of twelve stories, the daily struggles of muslim women in their families and community, especially in the context of male dominance and religious hypocrisy. Her characters are taken from life itself, imperfect, with lots of selfishness, powerlessness, ignorance, short-sightedness and kindness at the same time. Many characters - especially the men - sacrifice their feelings and duties for greed and societal respect. Women are usually the victims of the whims of the men: cheap labour, no decision-making power, excluded and subordinate. Banu Mushtaq's story may seem exaggerated at times, but they crystallise in their tight plots a lot of human suffering and a rare insight behind the walls of the houses of the Indian muslim community. She is quite daring at times, which unsurprisingly has led to demands for censorship. Material possession drives all other values. 

"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. 

Octavia E. Butler - Parable Of The Sower (Headline Publishing, 1993) ***

It's an older book that I was advised to read in the context of the current situation in the United States. With "Parable Of The Sower", Octavia Butler wrote a dark dystopian novel, about the US West Coast in some distant future, namely the period between 2024 and 2027. The world has collapsed as the consequence of climate change, corporate greed and social inequality. The main character, Lauren Olamina lives with other people in a fortifide compound, protecting themselves from gangs who own the streets. The people have no revenue, no income, no future. Life is bleak. Events make Lauren leave her place in the hope of finding something better elsewhere, but at the risk of being killed in the process, yet staying where she lives does not offer better perspectives: 

"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)

Because of her capacity to feel, she is also generous towards other people, but always in a context of suspicion caution. She joins forces with some other young people of her compound, they encounter other lone travellers on the way, or groups they have to avoid or team up with or fight with. It's a long journey north, into the unknown. Other people are the biggest danger, but also a necessity to become stronger as a group. 

"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) ****

If there is one topic of interest for all of us, is the rise of anti-science. Out of the political frustration and dissatisfaction with their fate, many people have huddled together in a weird movement that rejects reason, science, evidence and even education. They seem tired to be on the wrong side of rationality, hence they accept any theory to feel equal to people who completed higher studies and have acquired some intellectual expertise, whether in medicine, chemistry, biology or engineering. 

Peter J Hotez is clearly a true expert. He is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical diseasecontrol. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. He also serves as a University Professor of Biology at Baylor University.

He is also very active on X (Twitter) to keep advocating for evidence-based medicine, crusading against anti-scientists on a daily basis, and risking his own life and that of his family in the process. 

In this book he gives an overview of the rise of anti-science in the world, and how it has become its own kind of business, generating huge amounts of money for snake oil salesmen. 

With the appointmentof Robert Kennedy Junior as Health Secretary in the United States, it appears that the battle for reason and evidence has been lost, with all results already showing in terms of the spread of measles, small pox and other infectious diseases in the United States. I only hope people will soon realise why experts and expertise is highly needed. 

I selected some related excerpts from his book, showing the way forward not only for the scientific community but for all of us to ensure that people get the right information and are not the victims of selfish conmen. 

"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) ****

The great thing about this novel is that it's very original and memorable. The main character, Tara Selter is caught in a kind of time warp, endlessly imprisoned in the 18th of November. As time progresses, she always returns to the same day, forever. How this could have happened is unclear, and whether there's a way out, is equally unclear. Because she has already lived through the same day so often when the book begins - 122 times - she can generally predict what will happen, when it will rain, when the neighbour will walk the dog, what her husband Thomas will say. Luckily she has some freedom of movement and freedom of choice so that she can move through this day with some slight alterations. 

Of course she can discuss this with her husband, but the next day, he will have completely forgotten about it, starting anew on the same day. Sometimes she gets through to him, when showing evidence of her incredible predicament: 

"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)

The only challenge for Tara is that she gets older, instead of being renewed each morning. Her body is affected by time as can be expected in linear time: hair turning grey, skin starting to wrinkle, etc. Strangely enough, the question that I would have raised does not seem to enter her mind: is there another Tara whose life continues after November 18? Is this cyclical day just an anomaly for one part of her that gets trapped when another part just moves on? Is there even a day as November 19 for everyone else, or has time stopped on this day for everyone? Maybe these questions will get answered in the next six volumes of this story. 

Balle writes well, and despite the dozens and dozens of repetitive days that she describes, the text is well-balanced, with new little facts making the text interesting and captivating at the same time. I'm not sure whether I will read the full septology, but the first book was very enjoyable. 

Ota Pavel - How I Came To Know Fish (Penguin Classics, 2025) ***

Ota Pavel was a Czech author who died in 1972 at the age of 42. His father was jewish and his mother Christian. His father and two brothers were captured by the Nazis in the second World War imprisoned in concentration camps, from which all three returned alive after the war. The second determining fact about Pavel's life was his bipolar disorder, which resulted in him setting fire to a farm in Innsbrück during the Winter Olympics which he was attending as a sports journalist, his formal profession. 

"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..."

His third determining fact is his love of fishing and fish, which is the red line in this small book (126 pages) of fourteen short stories. At the beginning I wondered whether this would be something for me, because his fishing expeditions to the local ponds are described with lots of passion, but it's not a subject that interests me at all. Yet gradually, you come to appreciate the quality of his autobiographical writing, and especially the small family, somewhere in Czechoslovakia minding its own business, yet seriously impacted by life and especially the foreign power of Germany. He describes how a platoon of singing German soldiers destroyed the local pond, making fishing impossible. 

"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

António Lobo Antunes is one of Portugal's most celebrated authors, and this book is his masterpiece, now available in English. I am really in two minds about the novel. It is well-written and very creative in its approach, but it's far too long for the writing style he has adopted. I am used to read difficult or very long books (thinkg of "Gravity's Rainbow", or "2666"), but here I dropped out after more than 200 pages, with almost another 400 still to read. 

The book describes the last three days of a young woman, who reflects, and who reconstructs the events leading up to these days in the past decades of her life, not by actually describing the events, but by indirectly recreating them in an endless stream of consciousness of her own thoughts (now or some other time) and the verbatim comments of other characters, mostly without reference about who is actually speaking. The effect of this style is quite desorienting and requires a lot of attention of the reader. 

"- It's a pinky, what a relief

inattentive 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 man

forget-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 collection

Senhor Manelinho' s wife pointing out my father to a customer browsing magazines

-He was a perfect man

now 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 already

ready 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 animals

and even training it like the animals, which was his case, God knows, Senhor Manelinho stabbing his chest

-I have two plastic veins

not 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, partner

and my father going up the street with us holding on to the sides of the buildings" (p. 255)

Other authors have used the same technique - such as Mario Vargas Llosa in "Conversation in the Cathedral" - but never in such an obscure and hard to grasp way. The whole world become almost intangible and abstract, despite the very concrete action. The world is a little beyond understanding, and can only be reached by adding layers of memories, fragments of sentences and quick observations followed by emotional responses. Nothing happens, or nothing definite happens. In this respect, the reading experience is quite exceptional, but it requires true courage to read it till the end. It's great, but too long. Or maybe that is also a point he wants to make. You just don't know. 

Greet De Cock & Philippe Meersseman - Grenzen Aan Genezen (Lannoo Campus, 2024) ***

In dit zeer relevante boek stellen verpleegkundige Greet De Cock en arts Philippe Meersseman terecht de vraag waar de grenzen liggen van onze zorg. Hun bekommernis komt vooral van hun ervaringen met patiënten die ten allen koste behandeld blijven, zelfs al is de levenskwaliteit of de overlevingskans van deze mensen na behandeling zeer laag. We hebben naar aanleiding van de lancering van dit boek een gesprek gehad met een tiental specialisten vanuit verschillende stakeholdergroepen, uiteraard inclusief beide auteurs. 

Als we alleen naar de cijfers kijken, dan blijkt de toekomst er niet rooskleurig uit te zien: "Tegen 2050 zal het aantal 80-plussers verdubbelen. Dat is een stijging van 640.000 in 2024 naar 1,2 miljoen over 25 jaar. Samen met de leeftijd nemen ook de chronische gezondheidsproblemen toe. Van de huidige 80-plussers heeft bijvoorbeeld 20% dementie, bij 90-plussers is dat dubbel zoveel. In 2023 zijn er in Vlaanderen ongeveer 130.000 mensen met dementie, in 2040 zal hun aantal toegenomen zijn tot 190.000". 

Tijdens onze discussie kwamen we al snel tot de vaststelling dat verschillenden onder ons begrepen hadden dat de auteurs wensten dat mensen na een bepaalde leeftijd niet meer behandeld zouden moeten worden, wat duidelijk niet hun insteek is. Het gaat wel om het correct te kunnen inschatten wat de mogelijkheden zijn van een individu na behandeling, en welke begeleiding mensen zouden moeten kunnen krijgen, zowal qua correcte informatie, als bij ondersteuning bij een keuze voor al dan niet verder behandelen. 

Ze geven heel veel voorbeelden in hun boek, en ik veronderstel dat elke lezer er nog tientallen kan aan toevoegen. Mijn schoonmoeder heeft voor euthanasie gekozen nadat bij haar abdominale kanker was vastgesteld. Het was een impactvolle maar waardige en zinvolle keuze van haar. Mijn schoonvader heeft de ziekte van Parkinson en hij wil dood, maar is onvoldoende wilsbekwaam. Dus blijft hij maar in het systeem zitten (driedubbele bekkenbreuk na val, incontinent, verschillende opnames in verschillende ziekenhuizen, waar hij agressief wordt, dan naar een WZC waar hij diep ongelukkig is, nu terug thuis maar met permanente begeleiding en zorg wat ook niet langer mogelijk is). En mijn moeder van 91 is nog in goede gezondheid, en heeft vorig jaar beslist te stoppen met tennissen omdat ze er uiteindelijk toch moe werd als ze match speelde. Ze woont alleen, rijdt nog met de auto, doet nog vlot alle administratie voor zichzelf, en bereddert zich prima. 

Er zijn geen goede antwoorden. Elk individu is anders. Maar als iemand die veel met patiënten bezig is als vertegenwoordiger van enkele organisaties, vind ik wel dat de mogelijkheid tot keuze van euthanasie sterk moet uitgebreid worden. Ik heb de mensonwaardige aftakeling gezien bij mijn eigen vader, en nu bij mijn schoonvader. Hoeveel leed kan worden bespaard, hoeveel leed kan de directe familie worden bespaard, en hoeveel capaciteit verkwisten we in onze zorg aan mensen die niet meer willen leven, maar buiten de wettelijk toegelaten criteria vallen voor euthanasie. We moeten dit debat als samenleving durven aangaan. Vandaar dat dit boek een goede insteek geeft. 

Welke politici durven dit debat mee aangaan? 

Vincenzo De Meulenaere - Coudenberg (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2025) ****

In "Coudenberg" brengt geschiedkundige Vincenzo De Meulenaere het kasteel van Coudenberg weer tot leven. Op de "mons frigidus" zoals de heuvel in het oude Brussel ooit heette, werd in de tiende eeuw een versterking (castrum) gebouwd, die gaandeweg uitgroeide tot het koninklijk paleis voor vele koningen uit onze geschiedenis, om dan te worden vernietigd door een grote brand in de nacht van 3 op 4 februari 1731. De oorzaak hiervan is onbekend, maar het betekende het einde van het paleis, dat nog lang als een ruïne bleef bestaan tot het uiteindelijk in 1774 met de grond gelijk werd gemaakt. 

Vandaag zijn enkele ruïnes van dat paleis nog te bezichtigen onder het Koningsplein in Brussel. Het Koninklijk Paleis staat eigenlijk op dezelfde plek vandaag. Het Coudenbergpaleis heeft een gigantische geschiedenis gekend, en ongeveer al wie ooit macht had in Europa, van de vroege middeleeuwen tot de 18e Eeuw heeft er zijn intrek genomen of is er te gast geweest. Het is de verdienste van De Meulenaere om dit op een heel overzichtelijke en frisse manier weer tot leven te roepen, met veel aandacht voor anecdotes en zin voor detail. Het zijn vaak dezelfde hoofdfiguren als in "De Boergondiërs" van Bart Van Loo, maar hier geconcentreerd op een enkele plek. 

Als Brusselaar vind ik het fantastisch dat hier zoveel aandacht aan wordt geschonken, maar ik denk dat elke Belg verrast zal zijn dat een dergelijk paleis volledig verdwenen is. Ik heb ook in Tervuren gewoond, waar ook een gigantisch kasteel stond aan de vijvers, maar dat ook totaal is verdwenen, en ongeveer in dezelfde periode ook uitgroeide van een kasteel tot een paleis. 

De Meulenaere schrijft met veel liefde en belangstelling voor zijn onderwerp, wat het lezen ook de moeite waard maakt. Op het eind van het boek worden nog enkele kleurplaten weergegeven van schilderijen over het paleis en zijn protagonisten op verschillende tijdstippen. Van mij hadden dat er gerust veel meer mogen zijn, omdat het visuele natuurlijk ook zijn aantrekkingskracht heeft, maar ik weet dat het niet altijd eenvoudig is om reproductierechten te krijgen voor publicaties. 

Wie van onze vaderlandse geschiedenis houdt en van onze hoofdstad moet dit boek zeker lezen. Een aanrader. 

Vincent Delecroix - Naufrage (Gaillimard, 2023) ****½

In November 2021, when a migrant boat sank in the English Channel, twenty-seven people died. Despite their numerous calls for help, the surveillance centre failed to send help. Inspired by this real event, Vincent Delecroix's novel, a work of pure fiction, raises the question of evil and collective responsibility, by imagining the portrait of an operator at the centre who may also have been shipwrecked that night.

The whole weight of the migration crisis is put on the shoulders of the narrator, a telephone operator in France who somehow completely misjudged the calls for help coming in. She gets interviewed by her superiors and by the police to understand what truly happened. She gets accused with all the wrongs of this world, including racism, extremism, lack of human compassion. Throughout the dialogues and plot all other possible causes for the death of these people are included: the lack of democracy and prosperity in the countries from which these migrants fled in the first place, the lack of political will by France and the UK to help solve the problems in the countries of origin, the lack of adequate support in the country in which they arrive or pass through, the suboptimal control of small boats leaving the continent to the UK,  the lack of insight by the people themselves to step into ramshackle boats with too many other people,the lack of agreements on when the French or when the UK coast guards have responsibility to answer emergency calls, etc. The whole world fails, and basically everyone is to blame, yet the young woman gets grilled by the media and her direct environment. 

The novel power is to have crystalised this broad sense of guilt on this one individual, whose knowledge and training are clearly suboptimal. Instead of looking for solutions or showing empathy with the victims of the boat incident, one single individual gets all the blame. Delecroix holds a mirror to society and to the reader. Despite the programmatic and political character of the book, it is sufficiently well written to sympathise and sometimes despise the narrator. She is not perfect, for sure, and that is of course the power of the ambiguity that Delecroix creates. 

Colm Tóibín - Long Island (Picador, 2024) ***½

In "Long Island", the story of Eilis, the main character from Tóibín's earlier novel "Brooklyn", picks up again some twenty years later. She lives in the same neighbourhood as the Italian family of her husband Tony, with two grown-up children. When she finds out that her husband has made a child with another woman, and that the husband of that woman wants to dump the baby on her, Ellis needs time to think and get her life back together. She takes a long trip back to Ireland, to visit her mother in the company of her children. Also in Ireland, things are more complicated and stressful than anticipated. 

Tóibín is an excellent writer, which he demonstrates here again. The story has a good pace, the characters are well-rounded and nuanced, the plot twist and situations interesting. It's entertaining and easy to read, but it lacks the power and emotional devastation of some of his other novels. It is moving, but not gripping like som of his other work. 
 

Christian Kracht - Eurotrash (Serpent's Tale, 2024) ****

The cover and the title of the book are somewhat deceptive. Yes, the story takes place in Switzerland, and it relates the story of a middle-aged Swiss man who picks up his mother for a trip around the country. The narrator - called Christian Kracht, so I assume it's somewhat autobiographical - has a hate/love relationship with his mother, not only due to the wealth that his (grand)-parents gathered, partly due to sympathy and collaboration with the Nazi's. He has no qualms about emptying his mother's bank account, and to use it on a spending spree on their road trip. His mother has been in psychatric care for a large part of her older life, and the trip acts as an endeavour to come to terms with his past as well as to reconcile with his mother before she will die. Furthermore, she has a stoma pouch which leads to further complications. 

The story is cynical and funny, primarily because the mother has her own kind of personality: direct, smart and brutal. A woman who no longer cares what people think of her. She drinks what she wants whenever she wants, and self-medicates at her heart's content. In the process of re-builing the mother-son relationship, the story gives a broad cultural picture of our times: novels, politics, economic inequality, the power of the media (his fater worked for Axel Springer of the publishing company with the same name).

The power balance between both characters shifts as the story unfolds. His initiative and relative dominance over his mother gradually shifts, and she takes gradually more control. She is not entirely who he thinks she is, and that is possibly one of the best parts of the book, next to the fact that it is very well written. It's also tightly composed, entertaining as well as relevant. 

 

Julian Baggini - How To Think Like A Philosopher (Granta, 2024) ****½

Excellent book on the clarity of thinking for philosophers. The title is somewhat misleading, in the sense that it gives the false impression that the book is addressed to a lay audience wishing to think like a philosopher, whereas the book is more written for philosphers or aspirant philosophers than for lay audiences. The content could be of interest to all of us in our daily lives, yet the book itself is full of references to philosophers and today's - mainly anglosaxon - community of philosophy, and as such primarily addressed to insiders of that community. 

His thoughts are refreshing, and especially on how to use philosophy in our everyday world, asking the right questions, making the goals of thought more important than the formal logic underlying it (which has of course its own limits), discussing things to come closer to the truth instead of winning the argument, being generous with your feelings when people make judgments because they may have formulated things not correctly, ...

I am happy that he makes a reference to Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", the book about which I wrote my Master's degree dissertation, and I agree that this book is much better than Pirsig's next book "Lila: an Inquiry into Morals". 

One of the more surprising facts in the book is the isolation of the philosopher in his or her thinking. He compares this to the more collective thinking in the East vs the "isolated islands" that individuals represent in the West. This may be true for philosophy, but in most other disciplines, whether research or corporate decision-making, collective reasoning with clear processes requiring expert input from various disciplines is the standard. It is odd that philosophy remains a kind of individual sport instead of a team sport.

I also like his balanced views on how to think: 

"Both gratuitious iconoclasm and slavish conformity are to be avoided. Just as we need to relinquish a sense of ownership of our ideas, we need to give up misguided feelings of loyalty to a particular thinker, theory or school. We need to be non-partisan. Reasoning well is not about taking sides". (p. 219)

At the end of the book, he adds a number of essential points: Attend, Clarify, Deconstruct, Connect. I give you a short view on "Clarify", because I think it essential to understand the value of uncertainty in the context of rational thought: 

"Time and again we find that the yearning for certainties, for universal validity, for principles that will cover all eventualities, turns out to be quixotic. Take the philosophy of science. Pretty much every scientist agrees that no description of 'the scientific method' captures all that scientists actually do. 'I'm sceptical that there can ever be a complete overarching theory [of sci­entific method] simply because science is about rationality,' says physicist Alan Sokal. 'Rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances - how can you possibly codify that?' Philosophers who believe they can fully prescribe the scientific method fail to recognise that 'the world is just extremely com- plicated.' They project their ways of thinking on to scientists so there is 'too much formal logic and too little reasoning that is close to what scientists actually do in practice'. Some are disappointed that a rational life leaves so much uncertain and so many loose ends. The dream of enlightenment turns out to be the reality of a bit less darkness. But disillusion is often the result of starting out expecting too much. A. C. Grayling says there is often a false assumption that 'If reason was so wonderful, things should be perfect.' No wonder that "hen things evidently aren't perfect, the conclusion drawn is that reason is not so wonderful" (p. 262)

One thing that disturbs me in his book, is the author's own prejudices and generalisations about industry. Without any evidence, he puts all pharmaceutical and food companies in the same basket of intentionally lying and robbing people of their money. Why this sloppy approach when he is so rigorous and open-minded on other topics? 

But let me end with a positive note. Almost everything Baggini writes and discusses is both excellent and useful. As he writes, thinging correctly is hard work: 

"If this sounds like hard work, that's because it is. Rigorous thinking is largely a matter of effort and application. We have evolved to be 'cognitive misers' using as little mental energy as we need to get us the next meal and the next offspring. It's easier not to think and if we must, it's more fun if we do so lacka­daisically, tossing off opinions around a boozy dinner table or spitting out hot takes on social media. No one is blameless, but there is an important difference between those who strive to do better and those who don't, those who push their intelligence to the limits and those who stay within them." (p. 277)

... and this makes his book all the more relevant. He summarises the key take-aways after every chapter, which makes it easy to return to when needed. Because everything he writes is so relevant for our daily struggles and the many mistakes in clear thinking we encounter in science, in policy-making, in journalism and other societal activities that it would be absolutely fantastic to write the same material for the lay person, and to integrate it in the curriculum of secondary schools. 

Elif Shafak - There Are Rivers In The Sky (Penguin, 2025) ****

Elif Shafak gets better by each book. "There Are Rivers In The Sky" brings the triple story over time and geography: Mesopotamia/Iraq/Turkey and London. The album starts in the realm of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian emperor, educated and cruel. A rare cuneiform lapis lazuli tablet and a raindrop are the recurring motives or red thread throughout the lives of the three protagonists: Arthur, living in the 19th Century, is a very poor and very intelligent young man, and his promise is luckily noticed by an archeologist of the British Museum. Narin, a young Yazidi girl, living with her father and grandmother near the Tigris on the border between Turkey and Iraq. Zaleekha, a young woman living in London in 2018, a hydrologist researcher who just separated from her husband. 

The waters of the sky, the Thames and the Tigris are recurring motives in the book, unifying the stories of the three protagonists, as is the lapis lazuli tablet with text from the Gilgamesh epic, and the 'lamassus', the huge sculptures that represent human, bird and lion. 

Elif Shafak's writing is brilliant, and alternates between epic descriptions, situational dialogue, historical/cultural facts and little pieces of wisdom or smart descriptions. 

The book starts like this, and it immediately made me laughing out loud for the beauty of the writing, the imagery and the epic value of nature. A majestic opening. 

"It is an early-summer afternoon in Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. A strange, sullen silence has settled on the city: the birds have not sung since the dawn; the butterflies and dragon­flies have gone into hiding; the frogs have abandone_d their breeding grounds; the geese have fallen quiet, sensing danger. Even the sheep have been muted, urinating frequently, overcome by fear. The air smells different - a sharp, salty scent. All day, dark shadows have been amassing on the horizon, like an enemy army that has set up camp, gathering force. They look remarkably still and calm from a distance, but that is an optical illusion, a trick of the eye: the clouds are rolling steadily closer, propelled by a forceful wind, determined to drench the world and shape it anew. In this region where the summers are long and scorching, the rivers mercurial and unforgiv­ing, and the memory of the last flood not yet washed away, water is both the harbinger of life and the messenger of death" (p. 3)

Likewise, this introduction to the Thames was also worth mentioning: 

"Winter arrives early in London this year, and once it presents itself it does not wish to leave. (...) Ready for the cold spell, caterpillars and frogs gently allow themselves to freeze, content not to thaw until next spring. Prayers and profanities, as soon as they leave their speaker's mouths, form into icicles that dangle from the bare branches of trees. They tinkle sometimes in the wind, - a light, loose, jingling sound" (p. 20). 

The whole book is about the triangle of Arthur pulling himself up, despite all the odds against him, to become an explorer and archeologist, the devastating story of Narin, who wants to live and whose life is in danger for the simple reason that she is a Yazidi girl. And Zaleekha who is uncertain, who lives between worlds, torn between the Middle-East and the West, struggling with her identity, her family, her future and her feelings.  

"She was silent when she should have spoken; she spoke when she should have been silent. Either way, guilt is her most loyal companion" (p. 205)

I'll give some more excerpts, starting with the most gruesome: the horror of humanity which is omnipresent in the novel. It is a dialogue between young Narin and her grandmother: 

"'Well, this-world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I'm afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best stu­dents are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.' 

 'Why so much hatred towards us?' 

'Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire - because they want to have them in their possession. It's all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It's all out of fear! Then there is the third kind - when people hate those they have hurt. 

But why?' 

'Because the tree remembers what the axe forgets.' 

'What does that mean?' 

'It means it's not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed. For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors. Since time immemorial, the Yazidis have been mis­understood, maligned, mistreated. Ours is a history of pain and persecution. Seventy-two times we have been massacred. The Tigris turned red with our blood, the soil dried up with our grief­and they still haven't finished hating us.' (p. 43)

Or the following: 

"Remember though, what defies comprehension isn't the mysteries of the world, but the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other". (p. 222) 

Shafak's nature is alive, even the immaterial things: the stones speak, water has memory, the same drop of water falls on the heads of different characters.  

  "For too long the Londoners have been saying that the river is a silent murderer. But Arthur understands that it is, actually, the other way round. It is humans who are killing the water" (p. 158)

"It scares Arthur, travelling by river (on the Tigris). The vessel sways, its timbers creaking under the pressure, and it unsettles him, the velocity of the flow, foaming with wrath. Along the way he spots destitute villages. Poverty has a topography all of its own. It rises from the ribs of the earth, stretching its naked limbs against the sky, its features dry and gaunt, sore to the touch. Poverty is a nation with no borders, and he is no foreigner in it but a native son." (p. 312)

Despite all the horror of humanity, there is hope: the individuals who manage to rise above their situation, despite their limitations and their vulnerabilities. But they are kind and generous, which gives us a feeling that not everything is lost, that there are possibilities for better, even in small efforts.  

"Grandma loves the strong tea from Russia, which she drinks with a cube of sugar squeezed between her teeth. She says if you drink tea this way, the words you speak will be sweeter" (p. 140)

It's an excellent book, one that I loved reading: smart, entertaining, captivating, and highly relevant for our time. If I have to give to things that I liked less, these two come to mind. First, the stylistic power of her writing diminishes as the novel progresses, not unlike her previous novel. Second, the little recurring motives are a little too programmatic and gimmicky for me. 

Yet I can highly recommend it.