William A. Galston - Anger, Fear, Domination (Columbia University Press, 2025) ****

This is without a doubt one of the most interesting books I read about politics recently and possibly also the shortest. Despite its spectacular - and somewhat cheap - cover and title, the content is actually very scientific and deep. William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

He gives an overview on the emotions that drive human behaviour, and voting more specifically, highlighting that rationality and facts are less important factors. Galston posits that in threatening times, passions such as fear, humiliation, and resentment are more reliable motivators for voting or violence than empathy or solidarity. 

We are of course aware that Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic used this rethoric to strengthen their grip on the populace, but increasingly the same tactics find their way into the political speech and speeches of the West, with Donald Trump and his administration being the best example of this. He compares this rhethoric to the speeches of FDR, Obama and other democratic leaders, who tried - or try? - to create a common future vision based on trust and facts, which are of course the first victims today:

"The truncation of trust in our time coincides with the dimin­ished role of persuasion through logic and evidence. Partisan polarization is part of the reason: to the extent that partisan affiliation shapes citizens' views, the space for persuasion narrows. Also at work is the much-discussed splitting of Americans into different epistemic communities with distinctive beliefs about what is true and false. Absent shared frames of reference and a commonly acknowledged pool of facts among citizens, rational persuasion collapses. The pathologies of our time - the selective suppression of information, the deliberate creation of conspiracy theories, the dissemination of outright lies - make a bad situa­tion worse. We are relearning the sad lesson of the years between the two world wars: no matter the truth of the claim, repetition can be the mother of persuasion." (p. 114)

This also means that we need to take public sentiment seriously by addressing the genuine concerns people face, as well as the fears they carry. 

In my view, it has become increasingly rare to find politicians who can articulate the bigger picture—leaders who draw on evidence to present a compelling vision of the future, grounded in collaboration, shared values, respect, and the creation of lasting value. It is far easier to appeal to our baser instincts: to frame politics as "us versus them," to fuel anger and distrust, and to exploit territorialism and discrimination.

Galston writes with remarkable clarity, developing his arguments in a way that is both accessible and intellectually rigorous. His analysis is well substantiated, thoughtful, and ultimately wise.

Highly recommended!

 

Edward Gorey - The Gashlycrumb Tinies (Harper Collins, 1991) ****

As a grandfather, my worst nightmare is that something might happen to my innocent grandchildren, conscious of the many perils, dangers, risks and other hazards they can be exposed to, or unwittingly venture into. 

American illustrator and author Edward Gorey published the alphabet book on this very subject, with an untimely end to each child's life for each letter of the alphabet. It is morbid, it is sick, yet it is also funny, and definitely not a children's book. Here are some examples. 

For every letter, a child becomes the victim of life. The text is short, and its steady rhythm page after page reads like an inevitability of fate. The black ink drawings are equally exquisite and powerful. 

It dates from the sixties, and in its brutal and sarcastic dark humour is much ahead of its time, when everything appeared to be basking in sunlight. Life is brutal. Let's face reality. 

Alvaro Enrigue - Now I Surrender (Penguin Random House, 2026) *****

This is without a doubt one of my favourite books of the year. I loved last year's "I Dream Of Empires" , a novel about the Aztec empire in Mexico, with its fascinating mix of history and fantasy, a recipe that Enrigue further exploits and expands in "Now I Surrender", the title referring to the the words spoken by Apache warrior Geronimo before he accepted his captivity. 

The story starts with a woman fleeing the raid on the ranch where she lives, and the ensuing posse trying to find her back and return her to civilisation. It develops as part Western and real history. Many of the characters are fictional, yet when reading with the internet nearby, many of the characters also appear to be real historic figures, and the entire background is real: the battle between Mexico and the United States for the geography of Sonora, Chihuaha, Arizona and New Mexico. 

In the more Western style (or spagetti western, or even in the vein of Thomas Pynchon): 

"He was therefore unprepared for the vision he encountered before dawn on the following day: a nun in habit, veil, and rosary, wrapped in a swashbuckler's cape out of Spanish farce and draped in a car­tridge belt with a massive U.S.-made revolver hanging at her left hip. I'm left-handed, don't you know, mi general, she said when she saw Zuloaga's jaw drop. The officer just nodded, thinking: pinche god­damned Chihuahua, as he clapped his hat back on his head, mur­muring that she could call him José Maria. Perfect, she said, and you can call me Sister or Elvis, my stage name." (p. 63)

"They made a timid fire while it was still light. On the prairie, any fire that hadn't burned down to embers by night was a call to attack. Elvira and El Marquez sang a duet as Corredor cooked up a calabaza stew. Watching them from a safe distance, Zuloaga thought they might be the most ridiculous band of irregulars in the entire history of the state of Chihuahua, but they had an impressive ability to enjoy whatever came along. Maybe that would be the key to getting through this with minimal losses." (p.93)

And this against a historical backdrop of real people and real authors, including this unlikely John Bourke, who indeed published a book on poop in different cultures! 

"JOHN G. BOURKE, OF THE 3RD CAVALRY, Fort Craig, New Mexico, wasn't a bad guy. Born in Philadelphia of Irish immigrants, he left home at sixteen to enlist in the Northern Army during the Civil War be-cause he hated slavery. When the war was over, he asked to be posted to the Southwest: its long history and native culture were of genuine interest to him. He reached the rank of captain under the command of General George Crook in the 1870s. Among other roles, he served as press attaché for the 3rd Cavalry. He could write very well. Bourke was present during the Sierra Madre campaign ending with Geronimo's surrender at Canon de los Embudos. In addition to being a competent soldier and a compulsive diarist, he was an amateur ethnologist, sometimes a great one. He wrote a humorless but brilliant volume on poop and pee called 'Scatologic Rites of All Nations'.  

Lately, I've been translating a few chapters of his notes on George Crook's 1883 campaign, published by the University of Nebraska as 'An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre'. 

About the Chiricahuas, for example, he has this to say: "An artist, possibly, would object to many of them as undersized, but in all other respects they would satisfy every requirement of anatomical criticism. Their chests were broad, deep, and full; shoulders perfectly straight; limbs well-proportioned, strong, and muscular, without a suggestion of undue heaviness; hands and feet small and tapered but wiry; heads well-shaped, and countenances often lit up with a pleasant, good­natured expression, which would be more constant, perhaps, were it not for the savage, untamed cast imparted by the loose, disheveled gypsy locks of raven black, held away from the face by a broad, flat band of scarlet cloth. Their eyes were bright, clear, and bold, fre­quently expressive of the greatest good humor and satisfaction."  

Bourke's admiration for the Apaches was monolithically solid, but his manner of describing the Mexicans in his diary - he speaks of my people as a nation of miserable beasts - is particularly noxious and grating. 

I won't prolong the life of his prejudices by transporting them into these notes, but I wonder whether prejudices are unavoidable no mat­ter how we train our sensibilities. I wonder whether I myself am cruel in my descriptions of white Protestants. To lift up one thing is to tear down another, and one must remain vigilant, I suppose. 

Bourke wasn't a terrible person. Probably he was simply trying· to justify to himself his participation in an illegal military operation in Mexico. (p. 68)

Enrigue is on the side of justice and respect. He shows that there is a totally different perspective - from the Mexican and Apache side - on the conquest of these territories, and on the extermination of the native Americans than the ones described in most history books. Despite the fun and the exaggerations, his story is basically a very sad one, with lots of cruelties on all the different sides, with loyalties and betrayals, agreements and deceptions, including within the same camp, where the ones who achieved results were not actually credited for it. 

"At the ranch, Gatewood was waiting for us, and so was a mule train sent from the detachment at Fort Bowie with a load of clean, pressed uniforms. General Miles's secretary had sent them so that at the surrender the general's men would be attired in a form befitting the occasion. As I watched my travel companions opening sacks of clothing like children opening birthday presents, I re􀀙lized some­thing about gringos, something we Mexicans always realize too late: we're the suckers. The Yankees had put one over on us. This was a show, a vaudeville act. They would convince their people via the press that they had fought a war and won it. And meanwhile we, the ones who had actually won it, would be left picking our noses." (p.355)

"Now I Surrender" transcends the boundaries of the novel and the history book, joining forces for a more compelling and entertaining, yet not less serious book. 

A joy to read, a pleasure to check all his source material. Enrigue is a brilliant novelist. 

A triumph! 

Marie Ndiaye - The Witch (MacLehose, 2026) ****

Marie Ndiaye is a celebrated French novelist and linguist. She was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina in 2001 for Rosie Carpe, and in 2009 received France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, for Three Strong Women.

The Witch follows Lucie, an unassuming witch who hopes to pass her modest magical abilities on to her two daughters. Yet her greatest challenge lies elsewhere. Convinced that her own happiness depends on reconciling her estranged parents, she devotes herself to a quest that gradually consumes her.

At its heart, The Witch is a novel about the disintegration of family relationships. The supernatural enters the story almost imperceptibly—less as fantasy than as an entirely natural extension of everyday life. These magical elements illuminate the underlying strangeness of reality itself. The novel's gently parodic tone, its fleeting moments of fantasy, and their equally effortless disappearance suggest that life is itself dreamlike: ordinary precisely because of its peculiarities. In Ndiaye's world, people transform into birds or snails with startling ease, as though reflecting the lightness or heaviness of their emotional lives. Her prose is graceful and understated, standing in striking contrast to the often dark, inscrutable relationships between her characters.

I came across the English translation of The Witch and bought it before realising it had originally been written in French. Had I known, I would have bought the French edition instead.

Andrew O'Hagan - Caledonian Road (Faber & Faber, 2025) ***

"Caledonian Road" is a carefully crafted and entertaining novel about the downfall of its main character, Campbell Flynn, art historian and married into a wealthy aristocratic family. The book has a list of the 62 characters appearing in the novel at the very beginning, as in a dramatic play, and this is useful to keep track of all the networks of plots and subplots that connect all these individuals: academics, businessmen, rappers, con men, computer nerds, a columnist, a DJ, a therapist, blacks and whites, rich and poor, and all scheming to get something better from life, to achieve, attain or obtain something. 

It's not high literature, but it's entertaining enough for a summer holiday. 

Gaëlle Bélem - Sud Sauvage (Gallimard, 2025) ****

Gaëlle Bélem is a French author from Réunion, which she left at the age of seventeen. In Sud Sauvage, she brings together a collection of short stories set in either Réunion or mainland France, each steeped in an eerie atmosphere where the line between reality and nightmare is never quite clear. A mysterious creature watches you every night. Thousands of enslaved people have vanished without a trace. A mother and daughter have only days left to live. Light pours from an abandoned house. One Sunday morning, a man discovers seven severed heads.

Each story is a finely crafted gem—beautifully written, perfectly paced, and infused with Bélem's evident delight in storytelling. She taps into our deepest fears of the unknown, creating tales that feel both hauntingly plausible and profoundly unsettling.

Highly recommended.

David Szalay - Flesh (Penguin Random House, 2025) ***

We follow Istvan, the story's main character, from his isolated and psychologically vulnerable youth in Hungary to his isolated situation as an adult in the UK. As a boy, he has a sexual relationship with an older woman, and he ends up in youth detention. As an adult, he has become a security guard for a very wealthy British couple. Life happens to Istvan. He is drifting on his own life, moving from one context into another as if he has no free will. He has no opinions on things, and when asked how he feels about anything, the most common answer you get is: "it's OK". I did not count the number of words, but I guess "Okay" is possibly the most used word in any dialogue he is engaged in. 

As it happens, he starts a sexual relationship with the wife of the couple, again, more as an instrument to pleasure her than a deliberate choice for him. He undergoes anything that happens and he's fine with it. 

The reviewer of the Guardian describes the book as "Stylistically, Flesh is all bone" (Keiran Goddard
Thu 6 Mar 2025), which is an apt observation. The sentences are short, almost as in a children's book, in a systematic subject-verb-object structure, with few subordinate sentences or embellishments. The dialogues too, are just lists of sentences uttered by the characters, without comments or descriptions. 

The novel won the Booker Prize 2025, which is a good reference, but I think better novels were written last year. 

Agnieszka Szpila - Hexes Of The Deadwood Forest (Footnote, 2026) **

As you can read on the cover, one of my favourite authors described this novel as "a torpedo of a book", which led me to purchase it, intrigued by its title and my current reading on the history of witch hunts in the middle ages and early modern times.

The plot is sufficiently bizarre to have captured my interest: a Polish oil company CEO, in a strange delusional moment films herself having sex with a tree, after which she goes back in time to meet some of her ancestors who created a feminist and ecologist religion and congregation, called "The Earthen Ones", who fight the patriarchy. 

This plot could have been interesting material for a good story, yet Szpila uses her talent to keep breaking taboos like an adolescent with limited discipline. She is apparently herself fascinated by the 'religion' she creates, which is never a good basis for literature. She calls her own novel 'post-porn', whatever that means. 

The case for feminism and ecology deserves better than this puerile fantasy. 

Alberts Bels - The Cage (Peter Owens, 1990) ***

Presented as one of the must-reads of Latvian literature, I found a copy, with a blank cover, and printed by Amazon! "The Cage" is the story of a man, a loyal husband, who suddenly disappears after having visited his parents in the country. Nobody has heard anything about him. So the police, represented by inspector Valdis Strūga, start investigating. His job "was concerned with the weaknesses and deficiencies of human nature and with gaining a better understanding of these weaknesses and deficiencies" (p.9), and that's exactly how the investigation proceeds. All the characters among Edmunds Bērzs's acquaintances are contacted, and they all share "weaknesses and deficiencies" to the extent that we kind of understand that they all live in their own personal cage, self-created or imposed on them. The initial narrator perspective of the inspector, shifts to each character separately resulting in a kaleidoscope of perspectives and opinions. 

It's not a masterpiece, but it's interesting to read. Nothing exceptional, but entertaining. 

Jonas Hassen Khemiri - The Sisters (Sceptre, 2025) **

One more of this praised novels. I read more than 200 of the 638 pages, and in retrospect I admire my persistency to have read that far into the novel. It describes the lives of three sisters, seen from the perspective of the narrator, a young man who is infatuated with one of the sisters. 

The sisters have three different characters yet none of them really exceptional. The story itself is bland, without suspense and without any literary merit. All characters share the same multicultural background, and that was the main reason why I gave it a try, yet also that aspect remains relatively shallow in its possible developments. 

Maybe if the story and the writing had been a lot tighter (reducing with 400 pages?), there might have been some value in the novel. 

Again, my own personal and very subjective appreciation. 

Fausta Cialente - A Very Cold World (Transit Books, 2026) **

Hailed as an Italian classic that is finally translated into English, I wonder what all the hype is about. The story is about a disrupted family after the second world war, living in a flat in Milan, with women of three generations, and men missing as a result of divorce or as war casualties.

Basically nothing happens, at least not in the first fifty pages, after which I put the book away. It's boring, the dialogues and the characters are bourgeois and uninteresting. 

My time is too valuable for this. There are better things on my reading pile.