Books of the Year 2025

Of the 58 books that I read this year, these are the ones in my best of the best list. People ask me sometimes where I find the time to read so much. The answer is organisation, daily reading and little sleep. As usual, it's hard to make a top-10 list, and I can accept that other books could have figured in the list too. But with awarding both Javier Marías and Peter Frankopan in the top spot, I have not taken any risks. Both their books are brilliant. 

Fiction

1. Javier Marías - Tomás Nevinson  *****
2. Mircea Cărtărescu - Theodoros  *****
3. Nino Haratischwili - The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia ****½
4. Kaveh Akbar - Martyr! ****½
5. Vincent Delecroix - Naufrage ****½
6. Álvaro Enrigue - You Dreamed Of Empires ****
7. Elif Shafak - There Are Rivers In The Sky  ****
8. Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume  ****
9. Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place For Shady People  ****
10. Antonio Muñoz Molina - Your Steps On The Stairs ****

I must admit that the winner dates from last year, but I hope to be forgiven for this. 

Other 4-star novels that did not make the top-10 are by Ian McEwan, Andrew Miller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Christian Kracht. 

I also read some older work by W.G. Sebald : The Rings Of Saturn, which should be on many reading lists, and also Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, but they are not so recent. 

I still have a pile of books to be read, here next to me, incluing Thomas Pynchon, Olga Ravn, Richard Flannagan, David Szalay, ...

Non-Fiction

1. Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story  *****
2. Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing  *****
3. Richard Dawkins - The Genetic Book Of The Dead ****½
4. Julian Baggini - How To Think Like A Philosopher  ****½
5. Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes To Me  ****
6. Peter J. Hotez - The Deadly Rise Of Anti-Science ****
7. Timothy Snyder - On Freedom ****
8. Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics  ****
9. Philipp Blom - Nature's Mutiny ****
10. Richard Whatmore - The End Of Enlightenment  ****

In the non-fiction category, Peter Frankopan's book is the true winner and recommended to everyone. I bought the book in paperback, and I'm thinking of buying the hard cover version. 

There is again a lot to read in various disciplines. The highest quality publication in terms of production is the book by Dawkins, beautifully illustrated and on heavy glossy paper. The most suprising and most literary non-fiction book is Arundhati Roy's autobiography. 

Ian McEwan - What We Can Now (Random House, 2025) ****

"Our myopic little company. How hard to see straight when we felt so much" says one of the characters in the book. And that's the magic of Ian McEwan's novel "What We Can Now". The book consists of two large parts. The first one takes place in 2119, when the British Isles are largely inundated by the rising tide of the oceans, and many cities are no longer accessible because deep under the waterline. It is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor who tries to find the only version of a poem by Francis Blundy, a unique poem called A Corona for Vivien, his wife, which he gave to her for her 50th birthday in 2014. Because he recited the peom in the company of friends, they know what the poem contained, even if no copy was ever shared, yet everyone agreed that it was the most wonderful and visionary text, deeply emotional and relevant for the world. 

"The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato's cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. Any upstart version was a relegation to the abject humdrum real. My guess is that if ever the one true scroll were to be found, the excitement would not spread far beyond academia. Compressed diction, challenging imagery, the 'artful braiding within its pentameters of iambs and trochees' - H. Kitchener - and all the other demands of serious poetry would ensure the Corona's death before a larger public.

The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them." (p. 107)

In the second part, the actual situation in 2014 is described. To avoid spoilers, I will not continue writing, yet I think the title already gives some hint that there are things we can now and things we can't. Even in our own time, many people have their little secrets and private friendships and liaisons that nobody knows about, or even ideas and priniciples. How difficult can it be to recreate something that happened more than a century ago. 

McEwan is again a master of his trade, creating round characters in complex emotional relations with each other. But the novel is also about literature, about its impact, its quality and relevance, as it is a bleak picture of our human future. To give you an idea, by 2119 the United States is run by Warlords fighting each other, and Nigeria is the economic and technological hot spot of the remaining world. 

Happy reading!

 

Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing (Riverrun, 2024) *****

It's no surprise that this excellent book received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.

The author juxtaposes the lives of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist George-Louis de Buffon, two men who happened to be born in 1707 and competed to write the catalogue of all living things. The Bible mentions 120 animal species, so both authors tried to list animals, plants and other living things. Linnaeus sets his taxonomy in rigorous categories, static or never-chaning in his opinion, whereas Buffon has a more evolutionary perspective, and in this sense a precursor to scientists of the 19th Century like Wallace and Darwin.

Next to the rivalry itself, Roberts also goes into the right level of detail to give the public and especially the official reaction of the church against the work of both men. 

"Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon's assertion "that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter." The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls. so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other" (p. 144-145)

Linnaeus also classified human beings according to race with caucasians at the top of the hierarchy and black people at the bottom, a justification for institutionalised racism for many years to come, whereas Buffon also had different opinions. 

"Buffon had his working definition. The essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. "The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial," he concluded. "The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock". In sum, reproduction was proof that 

'there was originally but one species, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent diverse changes from the influence of the climate, food, mode of living, epidemical distempers, and the intermixture of individuals ... that at first these alterations were less conspicuous, and confined to individuals; that afterwards, from continued action, they formed specific varieties; that these varieties have been perpetuated from generation to generation" (p.183-184)

It is fascinating to see how reason, logic and science manage to revolutionise ancient thinking and stereotypes, how observation and deductive reasoning could overcome ignorance, and even anticipate scientific insights that we only achieved two centuries later. Buffon's 'moule intérieur' or internal matrix is nothing else than our genetic code. 

"Just as species passed from existence, he concluded that they must come into existence as well, throughout the expanse of time. In 1753, the fourth volume of Histoire Naturelle had contained Buffon's observation that while humans and horses were greatly dissimilar from each other in outward appearances, the horse's hoof contained the same inventory of bones as the human hand. This was a "hidden resemblance" that evaded Linnaeus's systematics entirely, and which to Buffon "seems to indicate that in creating these animals the supreme Being wished to employ one idea, and to vary it at the same time in all possible ways."

Buffon thought that these resemblances were more than coincidences. If his postulated shaping internal matrix (moule intérieur) could account for individual variations within species, might it not also be responsible for even larger, inheritable changes? Such changes might accumulate, to the degree that they added up to an entirely new species.(p. 198)

He was also visionary enough to see that humanity was able to create much and advance technologically, but also that our own destruction and environmental damage was a possible consequence: 

"In The Epochs of Nature, the 1774 essay both included in Histoire Naturelle and published as a stand-alone volume, Buffon had argued that human-driven environmental change had proceeded to the point that it represented the "seventh and last epoch, when the power of man has assisted that of Nature." This power, he concluded, was not universally positive. "The most despicable condition of the human species is not that of the savage," he wrote,

but that of those nations that are a quarter policed, which have always been the real curse of human nature, and which civilized peoples still have trouble to contain today. They have, as we have said, ravaged the first happy land, they tore out the seeds of contentment ... Cast your eyes on the annals of all the peoples, you will count there twenty centuries of desolation for a few years of peace and repose". (p.353)

Jason Roberts has not only written a wonderful overview of the biological classification of nature in line with the great encyclopedists of the 18th century, but he has positioned it by showing two entirely different approaches to the subject by two fascinating characters, adding tremendous amounts of facts and events that make this a very readible and entertaining read. 

It's not only about two men with differing views, it's about the approach to science in general, and how evidence, facts, methodology and logic are the way forward. 

Brilliant! 

Mircea Cărtărescu - Theodoros (De Bezige Bij, 2025) *****

Van Cartarescu hadden we twee jaar geleden "Solenoid" al gelezen, een donker, ambitieus, bombastisch en bizar verhaal over een leraar in een mythisch Boekarest. Nu is er deze turf in Nederlandse vertaling. Voor het Engels moeten we nog enkele jaren wachten, maar de vertaling door Jan Willem Bos is absoluut schitterend, om vingers en duimen van af te likken, en dat heeft niet alleen te maken met de kracht van het origineel. 

Het verhaal is eenvoudig: een jongeling van lage afkomst uit Roemenië in de tweede helft van de 19e eeuw heeft de ambitie of zijn idolen Alexander de Grote en Napoleon Bonaparte te evenaren. Tegelijk jaagt hij zijn geliefde Stamatina na, die bij de elite van het land behoort. Hij wordt piraat in de Middellandse Zee, wisselt van identiteit met een Ethiopische jongen en wordt uiteindelijk Keizer van Ethiopië. Om dit te bereiken, zijn alle middelen goed: brutaal moorddadig geweld, vleierij, leugens, manipulatie, oorlog, ... zowat elke zonde gekend door de mensheid begaat hij, maar anderzijds wordt hij gedreven door een naïeve ambitie en liefde, zijn geloof en zijn verlangen om de bijbelse Ark van het Eeuwigdurend Verbond te vinden, en houdt hij zijn moeder via leugenachtige briefwisseling braaf op de hoogte van zijn successen. Nu ja, zo eenvoudig is die plot niet. Dit alles is fictie natuurlijk, ware het niet dat Teodoros laveert tussen mensen en feiten uit de geschiedenis van die periode die echt allen hebben bestaan, hoe ongeloofwaardig ze ook zijn, zoals Joshua Abraham Norton, de zelfverklaarde keizer van de Verenigde Staten. 

Dit is een boek om te lezen met de mobiel bij de hand om alle achtergrondverhalen te lezen van de (rand)figuren in de plot of om meer te weten over de historische context. En alle weetjes - hoe onwaarschijnlijk ook - die het verhaal opluisteren, blijken nog te kloppen ook. Maar zo schiet het lezen ook niet op, zeker niet omdat er zowat op elk blad een Nederlands woord verschijnt dat ik voor de eerste keer hoor of toch nog even wil opzoeken. Wat is een 'palikaar', een 'scolopender', 'bojaar', 'barkas', ' of 'archont', ‘opank’ of 'incubus'? 

Als het verhaal al exuberant is, dan is de stijl dat zeker, met hele lange zinnen, met veel adjectieven en bijzinnen, die lezen als een Latijnse vertaling, en het strekt Cărtărescu tot eer dat hij elke zin met dezelfde ambachtelijke kracht weet neer te zetten, met aandacht voor elk woord, voor elke nuance, en dezelfde inspanning volhoudt tot de laatste zin, 650 bladzijden later. 

Dit is een boek dat velen moeilijk zullen vinden, omdat het zo bombastisch is, zo ambitieus om de hele complexiteit van het mens-zijn, goed en kwaad, religie en macht, wereldpolitiek, mythologie en geschiedenis met elkaar te laten botsen in één lang coherent verhaal dat wordt gedreven door ambitie en waanzin, tot op het eind, dat alle verwachtingen overtreft en dat absoluut uniek is in de geschiedenis van de literatuur, er zo ver over dat ik het hier niet ga of zelfs kan verklappen. 

Dit boek is een feest. 

Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes To Me (Penguin, 2025) ****

It is rare for an autobiography to be so stylistically real literature. We all know the author from her magnificent "The God Of Small Things", a little gem, a little masterpiece that I can only recommend. 

In her autobiography, Arundhati Roy describes the painful relationship she - and her brother - had with her mother, a dominant, demanding, ruthless person who at the same time managed against all odds to build a local school, in a very inclusive way for all children in the village to get an education. Her two children are treated worse by her than the other children, because she wants to avoid the criticism of favouring her own. Roy hates and loves her mother at the same time. 

She also describes her departure from home, her penniless life in Delhi, her contacts with friends, artists, moviemakers and other characters of interest. A lot happens, and her life is as good as the plot of any novel: with hardship and luck, with love and loss, with a regained connection with her father after he abandoned them decades earlier, the success of her novel, the damaging of her reputation and accusation of communism and terrorism. 

There's a lot of therapeutic literature dealing with mother-daughter relationships, but this book is of a totally different level, not only because of its scope - the recent history of India - but also because of its literary value. Roy is an absolutely excellent writer, someone who masters her language to deliver something exquisite. 

"All through school I did consistently badly in English language and literature. I never understood the rules. Mrs Roy would slash through my little essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like Horrible. Nonsense. She was right - they were complete and utter rubbish. Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. By mine' I don't mean mother tongue, and by 'language' I don't mean English, Hindi or Malayalam, I mean a writer's language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it.

And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the-predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream." (p.145)

Enjoy!

Andrew Miller - The Land in Winter (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025) ****

Two neighbouring couples - a young family doctor and his wife, and a young new farmer and his wife - live through a long winter in a village somewhere in England. Interestingly, the two women - Irene and Rita - have no real activity and begin a friendship, and both happen to be pregnant. Eric, the doctor, has a mistress, and Bill, the farmer, has ambitious plans for a much bigger farm, even if he can't even run the small farm he has today. 

Miller describes, develops these lives of very normal people in all their nuance and complexity of interaction without judgment or stereotyping. His prose is absolutely exquisite, well-balanced in terms of plot development and equal attention to the four protagonists and their personal issues and struggles with each other and the many other characters. The timing is right after World War II, still present as the background for people to recover, to think about building new lives, a new world after the horrors. 

Miller is not a very adventurous from an artistic perspective: his approach fits within the boundaries of established literature, controlled, well-crafted, with genuine feeling for his characters, and of a superb quality. 

Lucretius - The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics, 2015) ****

Sometime in at the beginning of the first Century BC, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote his "Rerum Naturae", a lengthy poem on the nature of things, as its title suggests. It hails back to the teachings of Greek philosopher Democritos (c. 460 – c. 370 BC) who claimed that reality existed of atoms, tiny particles that interact with each other and together create the different forms of matter, life and even mind. Lucretius adds the thoughts of Epicurus, another Greek philosopher (341–270 BC) who "asserted that philosophy's purpose is to attain as well as to help others attain tranquil lives, characterized by freedom from fear and the absence of pain" (Wikipedia). In this context, deities are no longer necessary to explain reality, and hence there is no need for humans to live in fear and terror for the gods. 

The entire book was originally written as a poem, despite its abstract content. The English translation follows this approach, with rhymes and all, a true feat of the translator, for a book of close to 400 pages. The reading is still relatively easy, with the biggest hurdle of its lack of structure, build-up and endless repetitions.  In any case it's not a book that you read in one go. 

The poem disappeared from sight until one copy was found in 1417 by Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini, who probably found the poem in the Benedictine library at Fulda, Germany. I can recommend "The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt for readers who would like to know more about the impact of Poggio's discovery on philosophy, and also in the broader context of enlightenment and humanism in Sarah Bakewell's "Humanly Possible". 

By any measure, even after thousands of years, Lucretius still reads like a modern-day person. It is astonishing how many obscure ideas have flourished in the intervening time, and even more so that most people are still living in "this dread, these shadows of the mind": 

"This dread, these shadows of the mind, must thus be swept away 

Not by rays of the sun nor by the brilliant beams of day, 

But by observing Nature and her laws. And this will lay 

The warp out for us — her first principle: that nothing's brought

Forth by any supernatural power out of naught.

For certainly all men are in the clutches of a dread - 

Beholding many things take place in heaven overhead 

Or here on earth whose causes they can't fathom, they assign

The explanation for these happenings to powers divine.

Nothing can be made from nothing - once we see that's so, 

Already we are on the way to what we want to know:

What can things be fashioned from? And how is it, without 

The machinations of the gods, all things can come about?" (p.10-11)

And one of many passages on the atoms themselves: 

"Then furthermore, since when we peer at objects, there must be
An ultimate, smallest point which is the smallest we can see,
So also in things, there is a smallest point beneath our sight, 

And this contains no parts, being of a stuff so slight, 

It is the smallest stuff of all. And it can never start 

To exist as something separate, because it's always part 

Of something else, primal and indivisible. The way 

Matter is composed is from such parts in tight array.

And since they can't exist alone, then they must closely cling

To the atom, and cannot be torn away by anything.

Atoms therefore are a pure and simple solidness,

Made of those smallest parts cohering tightly in a mass.

Atoms aren't assemblages made out of parts; they get 

Their might from their eternal singleness. Nature won't let 

Anything be wrenched from them, or any dwindlings, 

But keeps them in one piece preserved to be the seeds of things." (p.38)

And of course, when thinking things through, there is no immortal soul since our mind is the result of the physical activity of our body and our senses. 

"As it creeps across the other members. And thus because the spirit
Is divided up and does not, when it leaves the body, clear it 

All in one piece, then it is mortal too. If you should think 

The spirit has the ability to retract itself and shrink 

Into a single spot and pull its particles together 

And so withdraw sensation from one limb after another, 

Consider that the place in which the spirit then condenses 

Should have, by rights, a corresponding heightening of the senses;

But seeing that there's no such place, again I must declare, 

It perishes, being torn to shreds and scattered to the air.

And even if, just for the sake of argument, I grant 

That spirit can be concentrated (though in truth it can't) 

In the flesh of those who leave the Light by dying bit by bit - 

The spirit's mortality is something you must still admit.

For whether the spirit perishes abroad, for winds to scatter,

Or shrinks up in a ball and goes inert, it does not matter - 

Either way, sensation fails the man on every side, 

And everywhere there's less and less life in him to abide." (p. 139)

So mind requires the body - the actual man - in the same way
In order to exist, because the flesh contains the mind - 

The body being, as it were, a vessel of a kind - 

Or maybe there's some other metaphor that makes it plainer,

Since mind and flesh are closer bound than contents and container. (p. 140)

 Highly recommended. 

Vincenzo Latronico - Perfection (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) **½

Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin in 2010. They are both freelancers, earning their keep by designing websites and other digital tools. They go to art galleries, they go to parties, they frequent other expats living in the city. Nothing is fixed, and everything is volatile: spaces, friendships, love. Despite all their comfort and being 'cool young people', there is not much focus or aspiration in their life. They drift on the waves of the expat and cultural events in the city. 

Anna and Tom also do not have proper characters. They are almost always described by Latronico in the plural: they do this and they do that. Only exceptionally do Anna and Tom do or think something differently, yet that is very rare. 

Latronico's novel is more a criticism on modern society, about the 'hollowness' of life, its lack of purpose and meaning. Latronico’s book is modelled closely on Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, "Things: A Story of the Sixties" , which I have not read. I am a big fan of Perec, yet Latronico does not even come close in general terms. 

Ayşegül Savaş - Long Distance (Scribner, 2025) **½

In "Long Distance", Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş brings us thirteen short stories about the lives of educated female expats in various cities in Europe - as she is herself, and so is my daughter-in-law. She writes with a lot of compassion, psychological insights in relationships and tenderness in a style that is both elegant and descriptive. But the problems these educated female expats encounter are almost limited to relational aspects, and this gives the whole book a very 'bourgeois' feel, if I can use this terrible word. I am not moved by their problems and issues and relationships, but possibly that says more about my lack of relating to the characters than to Savaş's writing. 

This is not my subject.

Ali Smith - Gliff (Penguin, 2024) **½

In a not too distant future, two children are confronted with the new toxic world people live in: a confrontation between the "haves and the have-nots", and they are forced to move, without parents even if they somehow hope to reconnect with their mother. 

They encounter different people, find shelter in an abandoned house, meet a horse that they keep. In the second part of the book we are a few years later when the young adults are working in a factory. Their situation has changed, yet not ideal yet. They are tiny cogs in a capitalist machine. 

The novel is not bad, but not very interesting either. We - at least I - are not moved by the protagonists, who are equally victim of the author's obsession with semantics and politics, just cogs in her narrative too. She tries to give her novel a specific voice stylistically, yet it does not add much to the story itself or to the creative entertainment readers expect. 

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. 

Elizabeth Strout - Tell Me Everything (Penguin, 2024) **

In the village of Crosby, Maine, some characters that we already know from earlier novels by Elizabeth Strout meet: the author Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge. Lucy features in "My Name Is Lucy Barton" (2016), "Anything Is Possible" (2017), "Oh William!" (2021), "Lucy By the Sea" (2022). Olive Kitteridge features in "Olive Kitteridge" (2008).

The main character is Bob Burgess - who is one of the lead characters in "The Burgess Boys" (2013) - an elderly lawyer who gets involved in defending a man accused of having murdered his mother. Despite this, barely anything happens in the novel. People feel some affection for each other or not, they are afraid to speak up their mind, everything appears to be normal, they talk, they eat, they chat, they visit each other. They are all elderly and their pace is slow. They tell each other stories about other people to fill their days. 

The whole point of the story is that "people will be people, with their ups and downs, their good and bad features". And Bob Burgess might be the most boring character ever invented. It is a quaint, petty bourgeois story that quietly babbles along without anything happening to create tension, except for Bob's feeling for Lucy that he never reveals. In the realm of unspoken feelings, Ian McEwan's "Atonement" demonstrates what can be achieved on the subject. This does not even come close in terms of tension or intensity. 

Hiromi Kawakami - Under The Eye Of The Big Bird (Granta, 2025) ***

In some far away time in the future, the human race is close to extinction. People are getting cloned, and educated and somehow supervised by AI generated "mothers" and "watchers". The cloning has been going on for thousands of years, and some clones surprisingly keep the memories of their original genetic line. 

Kawakami plays with this far-away vision to create characters living through this period, with either the clones, or the AI-led individuals acting as the narrator of the short stories. These are all somehow connected, something which is gradually revealed as we become more familiar with the names. 

The view of the narrators on the human race is not very generous. 

"As a species, we simply don't have what it takes, "Jakob had said. His voice sounded strained (...) "The decline of humankind can't be stopped, - not by you, not by me, not by anyone on this planet. None of us has the power", he said. "We were supposed to be so much more than this." (p. 83)

"All right. Well, the humans died out. It was always going to be a matter of time, of course, before they went extinct. (...) The humans kept doing the same things: loving one another, hating one another, fighting one another ... You'd think they might have come up with something else to try, but no matter how many times they went around, they couldn't seem to change course." (p. 252)

Kawakami gives a coherent picture of this distant future and all her stories are quite focused, often unexpected in the sense that you can only figure out gradually what the context is, and to which group the narrator belongs. On the other hand, her literary qualities are too narrow to make the characters come to live. The whole focus of the stories is on the science fiction, not on the emotional power or plot tension as you might expect. 

One character - someone living with several identical clones - says 

"I have considered the word you use about me: boring. Is it boring not to have a personality? I spent a few hundred years on this question. The results, however, were inconclusive." (p. 231)

And that's a little bit my own appreciation of this novel. It gives an interesting perspective from a very distant future, but it could have done with more of today's literary basics. 

Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics (Yale, 2025) ****

In one of the first chapters of this book, the story is told about Greeks in the 5th Century BC who consulted the oracle of Delphi to appease the god Apollo after the plague rampaged across the country. The oracle said that "in order to assuage the god, they should double the size of Apollo's altar, an ornate then-foot-high cube. That didn't sound very difficult to do. Double the cube? How hard could it be? (...). This problem, known as the Delian problem, 'rested on how to find the cube root of 2, and was eventually proven - not until the 19th Century - to be an impossible task using only Euclydian tools of geometry available in the fifth century". (p. 31). 

This little example illustrates the book well. It's a historical overview of new challenges and solutions in mathematics from the earliest ages to today. Math was definitely not my thing in school, and I only realised that integrals could be used to calculate volumes when on the exam we had to calculate the volume of a flat tyre. I never knew what it was actually used for. In retrospect, a lot of math could have been made more attractive by using some of the challenges in this book. It requires some basic knowledge of math, but not exceptionally so. 

The example also demonstrates the weird thing that is relatively unique to mathematics: on a very abstract form, there are many riddles that have no other apparent function or relationship with reality other than keep very smart minds busy for centuries, yet other times, the link with reality becomes obviously clear, and most of our current technology would not be possible without it. 

Lawrence takes us step by step through the creative processes of mathematical geniuses who solved ancient and new problems with sometimes completely creative approaches, opening new vistas for other scientists to go even a step further. This includes the amazingly long time it took to have a symbol for zero or for the equation, things which are so obvious today. 

Maybe in stark contrast to other sciences, discoveries in math have usually been the result of the stubborn passion of individuals to find solutions for mind-boggling problems. I have used the approach of Kepler in some of my presentations: to make people understand that the earth is revolving around the moon, he forced his audiences to imagine they were looking at the earth from the moon, which gave a totally different perspective on how the planets rotated. This sudden change in perspective clarified everything. 

From the early use of numbers to calculating in 24 dimensions, her story is accessible as it is fascinating. Her explanations and examples are sufficiently well explained for non-mathematicians to also enjoy the book, even if many will have trouble understanding how you can work in 4 or 5 dimensions, let alone in 24, but yes, today's math is capable of that. 

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place For Shady People (Granta, 2024) ****

What a wonderful book! So well written, so real and human in its starting situation, so supernatural in its always surprising plot ending. In this collection of twelve short stories, Mariana Enriquez tells us about the lives of ordinary people, usually women who are confronted with everyday problems or issues, but they always come with a twist. Her stories are realistic, and often it's hard to tell whether the supernatural events that take place are literally true or whether they are just imagined by the protagonists who are pushed beyond the limit of their rational powers. 

The supernatural is eery, but not always malicious. It's a presence, or even just the possibility of a presence. In one story an obese girl gets dumped by her parents in their motherland Argentina - where almost all the stories take place - with her aunt and cousin who are the main characters. The obese girl gets literally touched by ghosts who manage to sexually satisfy her. The imprints of their hands are visible on her skin: "If only you could see it: there are fingers that press her body. There are hands that squeeze her breasts! Invisible hands!"

Yet the style of writing is very direct, very concrete, situational, with a tone of voice by the narrator that is often sarcastic and even cynical, commenting and judging about other people, about injustice and lack of understanding. The "horror" or "ghost stories" description of her art should not a deterrent not to read her work. These are not fantasy novels or horror stories in the traditional sense. 

It's really well written, entertaining and surprising. That's all we hope for!

Christoph Ransmayr - The Last World (Grove Press, 1990) ***½

The title of "The Last World" describes a dystopian situation, at the outskirts of society, in an unspecified time, a kind of mixture of an early 20th century period (microphones exist) yet coupled with the reign of Emperor Augustus of Rome (65 BC- 14 AD), who banned the famous poet Ovid to Tomis in current-day Romania, because of a "poem and a secret". The poem was the erotic "Ars Amatoria", and the secret was the Ovid had witnessed something that could embarass or undermine the authority of Augustus.

In this novel, a Roman man, called Cotta arrives in Tomi, looking for the exiled poet. It is unclear why he is looking for the poet, and very soon he gets caught up in the lives of the people living in the small seaside town. Most people get affected by some strange events, literally taken from Ovid's own stories in the "Metamorphosis", a book with poems about people who become animals, or plants, or even rocks. 

Ransmayr's story is dark, uneven and dystopian. Many of the joylike and even fun aspects of Ovid's poetry remain totally absent in his worldview. The characters do not really come to life. Cotta's personality remains vague, unpredictable and without any sense of direction. Even if he is in Tomi to look for Ovid, he does not appear to be very persistent. The real protagonist are the people of Tomi collectively, which gives a strange sense of distance, more like a historian narrating the fate of the village than a real literary author describes the emotional depth of individuals in their relationship to each other or the world. 

The people are all like jetsam and flotsam, washed on the shores of the town, with no real lives, perspectives or future plans. 

"... along the coast of Tomi all biographies were alike in one point at least: whoever made a home in the ruins, caves, and weather-beaten stone houses of Tomi had come here as a stranger from somewhere else. With the exception of a few grubby, raggletail kids, there was no one in Tomi who had lived here since birth, no one who had not been tossed up on this coast as a refugee or an exile after a long, roundabout journey. To hear Fama talk, the town of iron was moribund, little more than a camp for transients, for people who landed here at the end of an unhappy chain of events and reversals of fortune and lived here among the ruins as if in a penal colony, until time or chance freed them from this wilderness or they simply vanished, (...) like so many others who had shown up here at some point, camped in the debris for a while, and then disappeared" (p. 195). 

Despite the strong unity of style and voice, the novel lacks gripping moments, or for the reader to be truly dragged into the lives of the characters. It is worth reading, but not the masterpiece that some claim it to be.