Sarah Elisabeth - Duistere Kunst (Librero, 2025) ***

Een kunstboek koop je zelden voor de tekst, wel voor de afbeeldingen. Dit heeft er meer dan 200, alle geïnspireerd door het macabere, het morbide, gevoed door de angst van het zijn, van het leven en de dood. Vele grote namen uit de geschiedenis komen naar voor: Goya, Dali, Magritte, Odilon Redon, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, ..., maar het leuke is dat ze naast moderne schilders worden geplaatst waar ik niet van heb gehoord, maar die echt wel de moeite zijn. Het is op zich al fijn om al die oude meesterwerken gebundeld te zien, maar het contrast en de gelijkenis met de hedendaagse werken lonen echt de moeite. 

De tekst van de auteur boeit me minder, maar ik denk dat dit nu eenmaal een verplicht nummertje is om al deze werken aan elkaar te praten. Maar het visuele zegt meer dan de woorden. 

Nino Haratischwili - The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia (Harpervia, 2025) ****½

In "The Lack of Light", Georgian author Nino Haratischwili tells the story of four friends who were in the same class in school and share the same friends in their neighbourhood in Tbilisi during the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All four girls have different and strong characters, yet they experience the same changes in society, and have a special bond that gradually gets under tension because of love, politics and crime. Dina is extraverted and dynamic, Nene is richer, with a lot of attention to fashion, Rena is more introverted and a little nerdy, and Keto, the narrator is more emotional. Their story is also the story of Georgia, the country that tries to emancipate itself, move towards democracy and Western society, yet ends up in the grips of crime gangs linked to political forces, as it happened to so many ex-Soviet states.

Even if they do not always understand each other, they have a kind of natural attraction and need to have the opinion and support of the others. Together, they feel stronger in the fast changing environment, in which their friendship will also be caught up. 

The story is told from today's perspective when three of the four women visit a photography exhibition of Dina in Brussels. They meet so many decades later, and try to regain the friendship they once had. 

Nino Haratischwili’s novel is a monumental work—spanning 717 pages—yet its fast-paced narrative and dynamic plot keep the reader engaged and eager to discover what lies ahead. Her style is direct, with lots of dialogues and emotional interactions between the characters, with a well-balanced dose of reflection by Keto, the narrator. The four girls live in a web of many other characters, with changing allegiances and friendships, violence and even murder and attempted murder. The streets of Tbilisi are full of blood in this period. 

Keto’s grandmothers are both educated women - one well-versed in French literature, the other in German - and though they constantly quarrel over politics, they are bound by a deep, mutual need for each other’s company. One day, Keto encounters one of their young pupils, perched high on a ladder in the living room - her physicist father having decided that, with the power and heating once again cut off, the air would be warmer up there than on a chair below. In Haratischwili's hands, a wonderful little image becomes symbol for the total decay of the country that just liberated itself from its Soviet yoke: 

" And so I stood there as if frozen to the spot, before the little goddess for whom my father had erected a throne. We had gambled away our future before it had even begun. We had cheated this little madonna of her future, too. We were all lying to her. We let her study Hölderlin while we hurled grenades and set all that was beautiful on fire, while the people who were supposed to protect us preyed upon us, and sold freedom for five thousand dollars. I was ashamed, and couldn't bear being exposed to that open, questioning gaze.(p. 293)

The powerlessness of the individual citizens in the great movement of history is well described in the novel. 

"The realization hit me like a bolt of lightning. We weren't going to escape. We were caught between the shooting and the growling, beneath the only cone of light in the city, in a country that didn't exist, not anymore, or not yet, because there was no better version of us, because we were the people we were— with our guns, with the saved-up money in a coat pocket, with our messiah on our breast, with our will to survive, and our fear ofadmitting that we had unlearned our desperately longed-for and hard-won freedom, like a foreign language you've had no opportunity to speak for decades. We were caught in an endless cycle of repetition". (p. 305)

Or a little further: 

"There is no meaning anywhere, in anything. We're the ones who give meaning to ourselves and the things we do. We give meaning to the person we love." (p. 534)

She makes the interesting comparison of the different names that a plant has in both German and Georgian, as a symbol of how to look at reality: 

"In Georgian, it has an idiosyncratic name that always snagged my attention: Jesus's tears. So I was all the more surprised to discover that, in German, this plant is known as Judas penny. I couldn't decide whether to choose the Georgian name or the German. Were they Jesus's tears, shed when he learned that one of his disciples had, as he prophesied, betrayed him, or were they that same disciple's traitorous pieces of silver? Which story most deserves to be told, that of the betrayed, or the betrayer?" (589)

Yet, the most important aspect of the book are the emotional relationships between the girls/women: who they are for themselves, how they interact, how they relate to each other. Also their lovers are essential. The novel is one of deep humanity, with the individuals being much more important than the political and military turmoil: 

"It was only after voicing this thought that I realized it: maybe that was why I liked to be close to him. I enjoyed the sense that, with him, I had the freedom not to be the Keto I thought Ihad to be. I was free of myself. He saw me as I would like to see myself." (p.535)

It's great, it's grand, it's aspirational, it's sweeping, it's revealing ... also for readers not interested in politics and Georgia. 

It is highly recommended reading for everyone. 

Philipp Blom - Nature's Mutiny (Picador, 2019) ****

From the end of the 16th to the mid-18th Century, the world was impacted by a Little Ice Age, for reasons still unknown. The consequences for people, nature and society were heavy: harvests did not yield any food, floods were frozen, hampering supplies, people were starving. We know this period from the many paintings of snow-covered landscapes and people ice-skating on frozen rivers. 

In this excellent historical review, German historian Philipp Blom analyses the deep impact of this moment of climate change on society, on its economy and as a consequence also on philosophy and science. 

Because of the lack of resources, the rich and powerful could no longer just grab land and levy taxes on the poor, because there was nothing to grab anymore. People in power had to think differently, on how to use the scarce resources in a much more efficient way than before: 

"For the first time in Western history, scholars and administrators began to think methodically about the structures and possibilities of  their  society and its economy without relying on biblical injunctions, their logical arguments by the doctors of the Church, or even the comparatively liberating philosophy of classical antiquity. Instead, they began to form their theories out of perceived current earthly needs such as money for the soldiers, for instance and on the immedi­ate material givens: geographical, demographic, and economic real­ities. They were leaving the Middle Ages behind and preparing the ground for what would eventually be called the Enlightenment." (p. 131)

That does not mean that wealth distribution was already on the agenda. Some thinkers were

"The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: 'As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious." Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it, or whose exceptional personal qualities enabled them to use it well." (p. 134)

Blom gives insights in the many influential thinkers of that time, most of which are known (Hobbes, Descartes, Giordano Bruno, ...), although some new and interesting figures come up, such as the Italian materialist Luciano Vanini, or the French priest and eccentric Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) who strongly believed in observation through the senses instead of dogma and abstract thinking. 

"But if all knowledge comes from the senses, what about know­ing things that do not reveal themselves to our senses? Impossible, judged the priest, taking sides in this debate. Nothing can be known without sensory experience, not even God. Especially not God. Descartes' attempt to prove, through logic, the existence of a being beyond sensory perception, crumbled under the beam of Gassen­di's analysis. You can believe whatever you like, the priest implied, but you can only know something if you can or could experience it through your physical perception." (p. 168)

 Leading some pages later to the observation that "Nothing is certain, we have no access to a transcendental truth. We are alone" (p. 173).

The book is extremely well written, and as you might have understood, more about philosophy and the way learned people started looking at nature, than about the science of the Little Ice Age as a natural phenomenon. 

The book is relevant for today's political context as well. Democracy and science are always the first victims of autocracy, religious zealotry and power-hungry tycoons; 

"Liberal democracy is not, as many of Hegel's latter-day disciples would have us believe, a necessary consequence of historical prog­ress. Instead, it is a largely accidental, contingent, and vulnerable historical experiment with an open outcome, revealed by recent developments to be in present danger of being subverted, ignored, left to atrophy, or eliminated completely. Democracy was born out ideas first broadly debated during the Little Ice Age. It could eas­ily die or be hollowed out to a mere façade during our own era of climate change, as living conditions for ordinary people become harsher and the very rich take more power for themselves." (p. 283)

I am only afraid that this message will only be read and understood by people who are already convinced, while the ones who actually need to hear it, rarely read anything longer than a post on social media. 

Yael van der Wouden - The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024) ***

Interesting that this book by a Dutch author was originally written in English, and then translated by into Dutch by translators. 

The novel brings the story of Isabel, a young single woman, living in the house of her parents on the countryside, while her two brothers live in the city. Her live changes, when Eva, the lover of her oldest brother needs a place to stay for a while. Both women are total opposites in terms of attitude, discipline and enjoyment of life. This leads to the expected frictions and tensions. Van der Wouden is an excellent writer, especially because of her good pace in releasing information about the characters, and managing the introduction of new elements that build up to unexpected plots twists. Much more is happening below the surface and revealed near the end of the novel. 

It's entertaining and interesting. 

Antonio Muñoz Molina - Your Steps On The Stairs (Other Press, 2025) ****

There is one of those visual illusion videos on internet that instruct you to watch closely and notice the changes. Even if you are highly alert to what might change, obviously nothing seems to change (because it is an illusion after all) until you compare the beginning with the end. Then you notice how much has changed, and you cannot understand that you did not notice it. The changes have been so slow as to be barely noticeable. This novel is like that. 

The story is simple. A retired husband and his dog are waiting for his wife, after they moved from New York to Lisbon. She's a brain scientist and is still at an international conference. He prepares the flat for her arrival, making sure every aspect of the place is welcoming and familiar. The background is climate change and its devastating results on society. His thoughts are constantly with her. His every move, his every decision is about her imminent arrival. Like climate change itself, you see barely anything happening at all in the novel, but that is - as said - an illusion. It's repetitive, very detailed, very loving, only things are not as they seem. Readers who appreciate W.G. Sebald will also like to read Muñoz Molina.

The novel is also about solitude, memory and perception. The slow pace of the story is highly enjoyable because of Muñoz Molina's precise style and the warmth of the narrator's feelings for his wife. Apart from the terrible happenings in society, he withdraws from the world and its symbolic center - New York - to a place somewhere on the edge - an old neighbourhood in Lisbon. His cocooning in the warmth of marital love is a kind of weapon against the horror of politics and nature. He is waiting in his flat, and switching channels on TV, giving him a high level picture of the outside world. 

"Nuclear-armed. satraps, would-be dictators and genociders, purveyors of corruption and hatred, apocalyptic heirs to Lex Luthor and Doctor No. I see images of devastating hurricanes and Pacific islands being swallowed by rising seas. I see a procession of thousands of refugees flooding the highways and over­flowing border checkpoints and wanting to reach the United States like a pilgrim nation crossing the desert. I see young deer in the American forests staggering and falling to the ground in agony because each one has its blood sucked from it by more than fifty thousand ticks, which multiply limitlessly now that the winters are not cold enough to wipe them out. I see seabeds depleted by creatures as hardy and fertile as ticks, green crabs, "the cockroaches of the sea," says an announcer who has just come out of the water and taken off his scuba mask. Green crabs are so tough that they can survive up to an hour without oxygen. They are voracious predators that thrive on the same things that harm other species: higher sea temperatures and the lack of oxygen. They open the rocky shells of oysters with their pincers. They work in groups and attack lobsters much larger than themselves. When they've devoured all their prey, they begin to de­vour each other. I change the channel, and a Turkish news program in English says that the Saudi government assassins in charge of executing the journalist Khashoggi began to cut him up with an electric saw while he was still alive." (p. 266)

The horror of our modern era. 

The narrator entertains you - while waiting - about the works in his flat and the handyman Alexis who seems to be everywhere, about other loners in history such as Admiral Byrd who survived alone on the Arctic for six months, or Captain Nemo, or Robinson Crusoe, or even Montaigne in his tower, reading books, about what he understands from her brain science. 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading and to stay attentive to what is actually happening. I have read some reviews of this novels, but I cannot divulge what clearly others have missed. I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading. I can only recommend this novel highly, and encourage you to read it till the end.