Richard Flanagan - Question 7 (Alfred A Knopf, 2024) *****

If there's an absolute must-read for this year, it's this book which defies classification. Part autobiography, part history, part an ethical treatise, part about literature itself, it's first and foremost a formidable work of literature, even if it's not fiction. Flanagan tells his own personal story about living in Tasmania, about growing up with a hearing impairment, making people think he was retarded, but a disability which led him to cherish the written language as a means of communications. It's also a brutal attack on Western 'civilisation' that exterminated the original population of Tasmania, mirrored by the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as this other horror of human invention. 

The title refers to a story by Chekhov, highlighting the absurdity of asking the wrong questions: 

"One of Chekhov's earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov's question 7 is typical: 

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came 

that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other? That's question 7. (p. 24)

 On the value of writing: 

"That's what I couldn't see then that I see now, that though it happened then it's still happening now and it won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can't be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?" (p. 99)

On the future of our world: 

"In any case, what remains will be a wet gravel desert amidst which will be found impoundments of dead water, ash heaps and tailings dams, charred tree stumps and open-cut holes, rusting derricks and cranes and ancillary structures, bricks and corro where women once washed in the incessant rain and the cold, so much detritus mirrored in dark, toxic puddles oozing heavy metals and acid and poisons. But of that annihilated civilisation: nothing.  

A masked owl, the last of its kind, its riddling face outlined with a heart and bisected by a murderer's beak, will spread its ermine spotted wings and leave the last tree, searching for a home now gone forever, chittering an imminent oblivion. 

We will have arrived back on Wells's time traveller's dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains. Nothing." (p. 149)

On his hearing impairment: 

"And now it is not Ratty or Peter, nor Cisco and Pancho, but me and my sister and most of all my mother and father who briefly shape out of the static and rain only to recede back into vaporous memory when I reach out for them. It remains for me to invent what has happened in order to hold them close a little longer. But almost immediately everything starts crumbling into confusions that muddle sweet, salted roast mutton scraps on buttery toast we ate for Sunday breakfast with a spoon of foul-tasting grenadine-coloured medicine for worms that our mother chased us around the house trying to get us to swallow; the joys of childhood with the growing pain and bewilderment of those years as my deafness grew worse, as people became harder to comprehend, and I struggled to be understood with my increasingly poor language. Only when we moved to Hobart was my condition correctly diagnosed and my hearing rectified with a series of minor operations. Without Rosebery, without its alcoholic doctor who failed to diagnose my condition leading to compounding complications, I would never have known that strange nether world of isolation and pain I did in those years of deafness, when slowly I gathered that people thought I was simple." (p.180)

On the atrocity of the Tasmanian genocide: 

"The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ''of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans - a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians." ''We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. 'Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,' said he, 'and begin laying about them here!''' 

In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit ''Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (p. 220)

But the real reason of all the subjects, is the power of literature: the curious link between the book "War of the Worlds" by HG Wells to nuclear physics and to the atom bomb. 

"I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world. 

Without Rebecca West's kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells's book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terri­fied and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them." (p 237, 238)

Flanagan has achieved something truly exceptional. A wake-up call for humanity - one more. It deserves to be read very widely. 

Brilliant!

Charles Freeman - The Awakening (Head of Zeus, 2020) *****

This is one of those monumental works on the history of thought that anyone with an interest in the subject should read. Freeman is a well-known author of works on history, such as "The Closing of the Western Mind" (2005). In "The Awakening", he describes how the Western Mind opened to extract itself from religious thought, dogma and superstition, to be replaced by doubt, questioning, evidence and facts, and the development of the scientific method in parallel with the rise of democratic thought and structures. 

Yet he starts by describing the darkness from which we started, including the bizarre religious concept that god has a full insight of every feeling and every thought of every individual at any moment: a terrifying concept that already convinced me as a child that I would never ever be allowed to heaven. 

"If human beings are inherently sinful, as Augustine taught, there had to be definition of what was sinful and what was not. St John Cassian, who is credited with bringing the ideals and practices of eastern monasticism to the West, outlined eight vices in his influential Institutes, among them any expression of sexuality. It is interesting that in addition to fornication, self-glorification and avarice, Cassian includes what he considers unhealthy moods such as sadness and apathy (acedia). In the Irish Church, the clergy used Penitentials, handbooks that listed sins and the correct penance for each one. Crucially, as Augustine had already argued, the inner mind became accessible to God. 'Let us consider how severe a judge is coming; who will judge not only our evil deeds but our every thought,' preached Pope Gregory the Great. This was a psychological transformation of enormous importance. Nothing was invisible to God. Furthermore, the church itself defined what was sinful or not. The opportunities to manipu­late its control over its congregations were magnified. No ancient religion had enjoyed this power and its appearance marks a revo­lutionary development in the history of European thought. The Christian was required to live in a permanent state of alert, some­thing unknown in the classical world". (p. 70)

This was further reinforced with the obligation to confess. 

"Prominent was the council's requirement that the faithful had to take communion once a year and also make a confession. This was, as one medievalist has described it, 'perhaps the most impor­tant legislative act in the history of the Church'. The dialogue between confessor and sinner forced the individual to search his or her own conscience, discuss the nature of their intentions and so the extent to which they should take personal responsibility for their guilt. The distinguished German historian Johannes Fried argues that 'the history of the psyche and human attitudes, and hence the entire history of the West, was profoundly affected by this change.' This may be too sweeping an assessment and assumes that the medieval mind was ready to he so subservient. Even so, taking personal responsibility for one's guilt was only part of the impact of the church's teaching on the probability of damnation at the Last Judgement. (p. 97)

Luckily, the religious dogma and often bizarre practices and behaviour (see first paragraph below) gradually started to crack by the insights and courage of individuals, even from within the Church. 

"As far back as the second century the earliest 'Latin' theologian, Tertullian, from Carthage in North Africa, had asked the question 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic; and dialectic compo­sition. We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.' Instead, one should simply be receptive to God's word, a view that was often repeated by the Church Fathers. Gregory the Great's saying that 'Faith has no merit for which human reason offers proof' sug­gested that praise should be given to those who do not question, a view that has persisted in the Catholic Church throughout its his­tory. lntrusion into faith was, in Bernard's (of Clerveaux) graphic phrase, simply 'tearing out the guts of God's secrets' and in a specific condemna­tion of Abelard, he protested, 'Let him who scanned the Heavens go down into the depths of Hell'. Offering his mind directly to the heavens, Bernard valued the Virgin Macy as an intercessor with Christ and even reported that once when he was ill a statue of the Virgin came alive and offered her breasts for him to suck healing milk" (p. 112)

"In Sic et Non Abelard hit on the original - if provocative idea of quoting the Church Fathers on specific theological issues, some 158 of them, so that one could see that they often contradicted each other. Although Abelard stated that much could be resolved by a careful analysis of the language of different texts, it was inevitable that readers would be unsettled by this presentat·ion of opposing views. Abelard did not seem to care. Doubting was healthy in itself, as he put it in the Prologue to Sic et Non: 'For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning and in a state of questioning we arrive at the truth.' He went on to sug­gest that anyone, not just experienced theologians, could grapple with the issues of logic in Christian doctrine. This was bound to offend conservatives who argued that doctrine was coherent and beyond challenge, esp·ecially by the ordinary faithful. Even if the importance of this approach was not grasped at the time, Abelard's championing of doubt was an important moment in the awakening of the western mind. Progress in knowledge is impos­sible if conventional thinking is never doubted."(p. 107)

Gradually, reason and democracy join hands and become part of the system. The Magna Carta is a prime example of this. 

"In Plantagenet England a constitutional conflict between the barons and King John resulted in the remarkable Magna Carta of 1215, which is still recognized today in English law as a fundamental statement of liberty from arbitrary rule. Its original Larin title, Magna Carta Libertatum ('The Great Charter of Liberties') pro­claims its purpose. The personal and political freedoms it listed applied not only to the barons but to all freeborn men and to cities, notably London. There were now to be limits on royal authority, extraordinary taxes were only to be raised with the approval of 'the general council of the kingdom' (the word par­liamentum appears for the first time only in 1237), and the barons would be able to supervise the actions of the king. One of its most famous articles, Clause 39, stated that 'no free man shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or exiled or injured in any way ... except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. Rights of the individual to inheritance and chattels were also protected." (p. 140)

In short, this book is highly recommended to understand the incredible struggle that Western civilisation has fought to emancipate itself from theocracy and dictatorship. Today, the most prosperous countries in the World, happen also to be the ones with the best democratic systems, the best education and the least percentage of believers. To me the recipe is clear, yet the dark forces of zealots, oligarchs and theocrats are still very much alive, including in the West.

"The issue that weighs on anyone who sees the importance of fostering tolerance, accepting that science has achieved more for the welfare of humanity than institutional religion, and being open to more profound thinking about the human condition' is that these values are still under threat 300 years later. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama was seriously mistaken in assuming that liberal democracy had triumphed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and that a high point of civilization had been reached. Every passing year seems to throw further doubt on this assessment. It is all the more vital to learn how painful was the birth of such values and how vulnerable their survival. But it is also right to applaud the cultural riches that they have provided. I do think I am justified in describing the long centuries from the fall of the Roman empire to 1700 as a process, often fitful and haphazard, of an 'awakening of the Western mind'.

Here are some more worthwhile excerpts, yet I recommend to buy and read the whole book. 

"Between 750 and 900 they translated most of the known works of Aristotle into Arabic. Aristotle was particu­larly valuable because he looked at a question from all angles and emphasized that issues were up for discussion that could only be resolved through reason. This led to sophisticated debates on the relationships between philosophy and theology and an awareness of the key issues in ethics and the sciences. Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna (980-1037) was an intellectual superstar. (...) His Metaphysics, which arrived in the west at much the same time, was a massive commentary on the works of Aristotle that reinterpreted them to present a coherent system of Avicenna's own making. In the words of the contemporary scholar Peter Adamson: Avicenna went out of his way to be innovative, deliberately overthrowing centuries of tradition to forge a new and distinctive philosophy. This was an essential step forward if the scattered and hetero­geneous works of the great Greek philosopher were to be at all comprehensible, but Avicenna went beyond Aristotle in provid­ing original arguments for the nature of the existence of God. This made his works relevant for some western theologians but infuriated others who felt that Aristotle's texts were too authoritative to be tampered with. Aristotle's authority was further enhanced by Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averroes (1126-98), from Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, where he practised as a judge. He was also the court physician to the Almohad caliphate, but his real passion was philosophy. Like Abelard, he came under pressure from conservative theologians for his insistence that theology and philosophy could be used equally as alternative and perhaps divergent approaches to finding the truth (what Averroes termed the 'double truth'). There was always the fear, and it would return in the Paris schools of theology; that philosophy, based on pagan Greek sources, would overthrow theological orthodoxy (whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian), but Averroes, like Abelard, did not believe that it should do so. He admired Avicenna but felt that he had been too radical in diverting from Aristotle's original works. These were the gold standard, 'the highest truth, since his spirit was the highest point of the human spirit - it is justly said that he was created and delivered to us by the providence of God, so that we may come to know everything that can be known'.(p. 145)

In 268 Aquinas returned to Paris to find that a number of the arts teachers had gone further than he had, in preferring Aristotle's views on the soul and the eternity of the world over orthodox Christianity. The two most prominent were masters of arts, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They relied so heavily on the Islamic Averroes' adulation of Aristotle that they are known as the Latin Averroists. While they accepted Christian teaching, their support for Aristotelian philosophy as a means of finding the truth was so enthusiastic that it was as if they were ignoring theology. So they argued that God could not do something that Aristotle had shown to be physically impossible. One example was that God could not move the cosmos in a straight line as this would leave a vacuum, and Aristotle had taught (erro­neously, as would later be discovered) that a vacuum could not exist. This contrasted with the orthodox Christian view that God could do anything short of a logical contradiction.

"Marsilius, however, rejects 'natural' hier­archies, in particular the concept that good birth is related to the ability to govern. Within the next few years many of Marsilius's ideas were supported by the lawyer Bartolus da Sassoferrato,(...). Bartolus was as concerned as Marsilius was with the internecine disputes between and within the Italian cities. The two agreed that the sovereignty of the people can never be alienated and that religion should be kept separate from politics. This approach was to prove especially fruitful. In their own time it provided a riposte to those who wished to retain the authority of the Church over secular rulers. Not since the era of the Roman empire had anyone reflected as probingly and effectively as this on the ways in which the citizenry (though only males) as a whole could he involved in government. The influence of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the harmonious order of the city through the collective, and natural, will of the citizens to achieve civil happiness, is clear."

"Petrarch never overcame his detestation of the scholastic obsession with Aristotle. He was responsible for coining the term 'Dark Ages' to describe the medieval period he believed he was still living in following the extinction of the 'light' of classical antiquity. Several of his works dwell on how the moral corruption of his age allowed a lust for wealth to transcend spiritual values. He believed he was restoring the light and continuously harked baek in his writings ro the superiority of Rome. (...) Petrarch championed tolerance, echoing ancient beliefs when he noted that 'many can be forced to confess, but not to believe. No liberty is gre-ater than the liberty to think. As I claim it for myself, so I do not deny it for others ... I am unwilling to be the judge of the human conscience which is something hidden and deep.' This acceptance of intellectual diversity was an important moment in Renaissance thought. It ensured that humanism was never a homogenous movement : rather, it opened up intense debates on 'the condition of man'.

"(Gentili) recognized that there had to be some basis for evolving the rules governing their relationships, but in a falous saying - silete theologi in munere alieno - ' Silence theologian, in matters that do not concern you' - he insisted that theology must be kept out of it. Where Gentili and his followers differed from the theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, was in assuming that natural law was not necessarily to be interpreted as having been founded by God. (...) For Gentili, a legal system needed to be based, pragmatically, on the actual practice of civi­lized nations. Religion was a private matter between individuals and their God. What was important for Gentili was to find a way in which traditional natural law, 'the set of principles that are true for all peoples at all times' and which regulate the desire to live in a peaceful and rational social order, could be incorporated into the law of nations."

"Philosophically, Grotius made an impo·rtant contribution to the concept of natural law. While he was prepared to accept that natural law might show the will of God, he claimed (controver­sially for many of his contemporaries) that its precepts would hold true even if God did not exist. Natural law is so intrinsic to human existence that even God cannot change it. 'Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not equal four, so he cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be n.t evil.' As a result Grotius has been seen by some as marking a new beginning in moral philosophy, 'th.e secularization of virtue'. He narrowed the precepts of natural law down to two: the right of self-pres­ervation and the right to live socially with others."

"In the Novum Organon, Bacon elaborates on what he calls the 'idols', the hindrances that come between the mind and reality. The senses, he says, are always unreliable: we can be led astray by information that conforms with what we already believe and we can easily be swayed by the opinions of the marketplace. It is important to separate scientific knowledge from theological belief, which is based on textual authority rather than material evidence. Ultimately, however, there was a place for God in Bacon's system: certain knowledge could be found in 'the true signatures and marks set upon the works of [divine] creation as they are found in nature... all knowledge appeareth to be a plant of God's own planting'. The trick was to mend 'the cracked mirror; of the mind so as to distinguish what God had actually created from what were vain imaginings. (...) Once sufficient material has been gathered to form the basis of a reasonable hypothesis, the hypothesis itself has to be tested. For Bacon, it was as important to find evidence to refute it as it was to find evidence to confirm it. This was one of Bacon's most important contributions to scientific method."

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! 

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. 

Javier Marías - Tomás Nevinson (Penguin, 2024) *****

Another brilliant book by Javier Marías, his last and final novel before his death last year. Marías's prose will not be to everyone's liking: it is slow, repetitive, with a lot of rephrasing, and re-thinking the same topics and issues, looking at them from different sides and perspectives, sometimes touching on something concrete and actionable, but more often than not remaining vague and tentative, approaching reality with a default position of uncertainty and a wide array of possibilities, both as explanations of the past as well as options for the future. 

The lead character is Tomás Nevinson, who we already met in his "Berta Isla" novel, a British/Spanish undercover agent, who gets recruited again by MI6 to go back in service and leave his job at the British embassy in Madrid. His role is to become a teacher in the Basque Region, with the goal to eliminate a female ETA terrorist. The problem is that three women living in the city could be the terrorist, and could also be none of them. Nevinson has to find out and kill the right one. The British secret service gives him the ultimatum that if he is not able to kill the right one, as a measure of precaution all three will be killed. 

Javier Marías's slow prose considers and reconsiders the options, the moral and ethical aspects of his situation and role, he tries to uncover the real truth behind the deceptive characters of the three women, as a kind of mirror for his own duplicity, wondering what is real and what is false, what is truthful or fake. It is also a psychological thriller, deeply carving into the weird situation of the protagonist to act full-time as a fake person, pretending to be what he is not, living the life of a non-existent person with the sole purpose of killing someone else. This duality is what his supervisor uses as the argument to lure him back into the service: to be part of some of the bigger geopolitical happenings, or to be outside of this, and be considered as a nobody who's no longer part of the system. If he wants to be part of the system, he has to relinquish his real self and live the unreal life of teacher Miguel Centurión. He is the non-existent Somebody or the existent Nobody. Either way, he is trapped. 

"'After having been Someone,' he added, 'it's very difficult to go back to being no one. Even if that Someone was invisible and almost no one would recognize him" (p. 51)

This requires of course to be able to disappear in one life, and to create another, fictitious one, with all its challenges: 

"Any­one in hiding, though, if she's smart, must appear to be the opposite of - or as far removed from - what she was and possibly still is. I know from personal experience how difficult this is, and I have, on occasion, allowed my real or my old me to resurface, or have some­times aroused suspicions by not totally rejecting the old me: one's natural tendency is to discourage or avert misfortunes when what you should be doing is fomenting and even precipitating them." (p. 249) 

The reason and the motivation for all these actions is of course to eliminate evil. 

'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious ... It can turn into fanaticism at the speed of light .. .' Now his tone was part assertive, part recollective. 'That's why those attitudes are so dangerous, because they're hard to stop. Before you know it, they've spread like wildfire. That was one of the very first things we were taught, that you need to spot the initial symptoms and nip them in the bud. (...) 'Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious,' he said, complet­ing the list. 

I remembered that list very well, I had all too often found out how very accurate it was. People adopt a faith and grow, first, very ser­ious, then very solemn. They start to believe everything their faith embraces and involves, and then they become stupid. If contradicted, they fly into a rage, they won't accept you calling them stupid or challenging what has suddenly become their all-in-all and their raison d'etre. From that point on, they develop a purely defensive, irrational hatred of anyone who doesn't share their fanaticism. And they treat anyone who openly opposes it with great cruelty. Once they discover cruelty, they embrace it and pass it on to others, and it takes a long time for them to grow weary of putting their cruelty into practice" (p. 104)

The narrator tries to look at his choice to eliminate the alleged terrorist from all possible angles, trying to justify, to rationalise and to question the approach at the same time. 

"They had chosen to help the people they were helping or hide the people they were hid­ing, or serve the cause they were serving and to dedicate themselves to whatever they were dedicated to, although they had sometimes been duped or hypnotized into doing so, as had many inexperienced men. The woman I was charged with uncovering and identifying in that town in the north-west, whichever one of the three she turned out to be, had been responsible for massacres and should pay for that. Or if not 'should', it would be appropriate that she did. Or if not 'appropriate', since she no longer presented any danger and had turned around her unhappy life, it would be best to interrupt that life just in case, and because we were by our nature avengers. If we weren't, who would be, in this forgetful world?  

Tupra was right: hatred was an emotion unknown to us, but we were the archive; the record, the ones who never forgot what every­one else forgets out of weariness or so as not to wallow in bitterness. I don't know if he realized it, but the words he had spoken made us - with all our human, mortal limitations - rather like the God of all those past centuries of belief, or should that be credulity: the God who retained and stored away everything in his motley, moveless time, in which nothing was new or old, remote or recent. 'For us, what happened ten years ago is yesterday or even today, and is hap­pening right now.' This is how that God - now outmoded, but very much a force to be reckoned with for most of recorded history-must have regarded everything. That's why he forgave nothing, for that really wasn't in his remit, for in his eyes no crime has an expiry date or grows less heinous, they are all simultaneous, and all persist. There was, though, another motive behind my decision to return to active service, to accept this mission: the only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and centre, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched. 

Terrorist organizations cannot give in voluntarily, because if they do, an abyss opens up before them, they see themselves retrospect­ively and are horrified by their annulment, and therefore their ruin. The serial killer keeps adding to his series of murders because that's the only way he can avoid looking back to the days when he was still innocent and without stain, the only way he can have meaning. To do otherwise would be to reach Lady Macbeth's horrified realization, something almost no one is willing to do, for it requires great integ­rity, a quality that has vanished from the world: 'Nought's had, all's spent.' In other words: 'We have done infamous deeds and gained nothing.' (p. 138-139)

The undercover agent, the eliminator, has to above all these emotions, and act like a cold-blooded rational being: 

"Justice can obscure, can wrap everything in a mist as time moves on, and when it expires, it can erase and cancel out, can decree that what happened didn't hap­pen or has ceased to happen. We are neither the victims nor the family of the dead, but we are memory, those who never forget. In that sense, and only in that sense, we are like the terrorists and the mafias from whom we differ in one vital detail, as Tupra reminded me on that January day: 'They're also ahead of us when it comes to hatred. But hatred isn't our style, as you know. That's unknown ter­ritory for us.' That's true and as it should be, for we must always remain immune to the five contagions as taught to us by our former legendary instructor Redwood. 'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is con­tagious. Faith is contagious. Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious. We must avoid all five.' (p. 435).  

And what is true of the need to avoid hate, is also true for love. Tomás Nevinson may be in love with his wife, even if they are divorced, and his alter ego Miguel Centurión may become infatuated by one of his potential victims, this is indeed to be avoided, because he could kill the one he loves. 

He is of course in essence a Spanish author, often referring to Spain's dictatorial past yet linked to the situation in general today of the relationship between electorate and politicians: 

"One must never forget that Spaniards from all over Spain - even those who don't consider themselves to be Spanish - have a deep-seated tendency to elect the worst possible leaders on offer and to cheer on whatever tyrants are imposed on them, as long as they make nice promises and seem pleasant enough, even if they have lar­ceny written all over their faces and are clearly very nasty pieces of work. (p. 498)

I copied some passages that are highly abstract, yet of course the story actually consists primarily of dialogue and interaction of the many characters, their interesting pantomime of possible double roles and the hiding of reality. 

Marías's prose is an absolute delight, although I can understand that it may be too long-winded for many readers. At a certain level, you want the action to move on, but the stalling, the reflections, the analyses and the exploring of all the options is part of the mesmerising power of his style. And it is fun to read that in a book of 634 pages, the following paragraph starts a new chapter on page 532: 

"It seemed that the action, the act, the deed was getting closer. And that I would not escape. One always nurses the vain hope that some­thing will· crop up, that the sentence will be commuted ( even a prisoner on the scaffold has high hopes), that the orders will be rescinded or cancelled, that someone will back off at the final moment. And if that doesn't happen, you appreciate and treasure each day's delay, each hour's deferral, each minute of procrastin­ation, anything that allows you to keep telling yourself: 'It will be, it will be, but not yet, not yet.' (p. 532)

So, reader, beware: the book is not about the final deed. It is about the dilemmas and internal battles leading up to the deed. 

Brilliant!

Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible (Penguin, 2023) *****

When reading the short description of the book's content, I was hesitant. I am already convinced of the value of its contents. Second, I have read already so much on the subject that I wondered whether it would convey anything new. The reality of reading proved me wrong. Even if you consider yourself a 'humanist', and maybe because you are, you should read this book. It is extremely well-documented and extremely well-written. Bakewell starts the book with the 'credo' of humanism, as penned by Robert G. Ingersoll in the 19th Century: 

Happiness is the only good. 

The time to be happy is now. 

The place to be happy is here. 

The way to be happy is to make others so. 

Even if I was well aware or vaguely aware of the content of the thinkers and authors that she describes in this book, the real novelty is how these thoughts were received in society and how they evolved to become part of broader political and philosophical thinking. 

Her journey starts in the early 14th Century with the writings of Petrarch and Boccacio ("When his father contemplated training him for the church as 'a good way to get rich' it turned out he had no liking or aptitude for that either"). Both authors raided libraries to re-discover the ancient Latin authors, revived them, wrote about them. Bakewell mentioned that Bocaccio at one stage considered abandoning his literary endeavours because "a monk, Pietro Petroni of Sienna, warned him in 1632 that he would imminently die if he did not get rid of all the non-Christian books in his library and stop writing books himself. This had been revealed to him in a vision". Luckily, Petrarch used smarter arguments to convince him of the opposite: 'ignorance is not the path to virtue". He advocated for knowledge and learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas. 

We take it for granted today that we have immediate access to the works of Cicero, Epicurus, Terentius and Democritus, but that is of course not the case. Very few scholars even spoke Greek, so they had no way of understanding or valuing whatever Greek texts still existed in hidden libraries across Italy or elsewhere. The geneaology goes further: Poggio rediscovered Lucretius' "On The Nature of Things". Printing was invented and became a great power to share old and new ideas about broader groups of people. Lorenzo Valla is the next in line. 

"His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah. All these assets were necessary to Valla, because he was daring to attack one of the church's central modern claims: its justification for having complete power over all of western Europe. It could be a short step from that to questioning its other claims to authority, too, including the authority it held over peo­ple's minds. Valla seems to have been a man who had no fear and could never be persuaded to keep quiet. He traveled all over Italy, working for a series of patrons and supporters-at this point he was living in Naples-but he made enemies everywhere as well. The poet Maffeo Vegio had already warned him to seek advice before writing things that would hurt people's feelings, and generally to restrain his "intellectual violence." (p.87)

It takes courage to have intellectual curiosity, to be open to ideas that challenge beliefs and established authority: "Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life. And crucially, Valla did not merely tell people they were wrong, he gave the reasons why they were wrong" (p.93). 

On Vesalius: 

"He blamed both himself and other anatomists for having been too Galen-reliant: "I shall say noth­ing more about these others; instead I shall marvel more at my own stu­pidity and blind faith in the writings of Galen and other anatomists." He ends the section by urging students to rely on their own careful examina­tions, taking no one's word for anything, not even his own. This was a good warning, since Vesalius himself did not get every­thing right. One error was that he failed to identify the clitoris cor­rectly, misdescribing it as part of the labia. It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it ''amor Veneris, vel dulcedo" ("love of Venus, or thing of pleasure"), gave details of its role in women's sexual experiences, and remarked, "It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility." (p. 130)

On education and Erasmus schooling in a monastery: 

Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aver­sion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: "The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible." That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks' attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlight­ened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live." (p. 142) 

Other luminaries who are part of the genealogy: Pico della Mirandola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andreas Vesalius, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglas ("There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him"), Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt ("The State that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human"), Matthew Arnold. Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernest Renan, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell, ...

Bakewell is also very conscious of the value of humanism to all humans and not only to the male part of it. 

"Pericles (told) Athenian free men in 430 BCE that they are excel­lent because they are harmonious, responsible, and politically active - only to add that this does not apply to women, whose only virtue is never to be mentioned by anyone at all. That continued to be the norm for millennia: instead of the mainstream of human excellence, women were offered a rivulet of negative side virtues: modesty, silence, placidity, innocence, chastity. Each of these is characterized by the absence of some positive quality (confidence, eloquence, active responsibility, experience, and - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what the virtuous opposite of chastity is, but whatever we call it, it is surely more fun)." (p.203) 

There

"Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of ar­bitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.  The old Golden Rule, associated with several religions as well as with secular morality, has much to offer here: "Do as you would be done by." Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diver­sity: Don't do something to others if you wouldn't like it yourself. It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don't like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either. Or, as Kongzi said: "The Master's way consists of doing one's best to fulfill one's humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity." (p 218, 219)

This book is a great overview of humanist thought: inquisitive, inclusive, caring, ethical, motivated by a happiness for all, in diversity of thought and the right of each individual to personal freedom and fullfilment and happiness. For me this overview is the absolute hope and despair of humanity. Hope because it offers a clear perspective and a way of thinking, despair because over the centuries of expanded thinking on the subject, we have not moved significantly further at a global level. Our technology has advanced exponentially over the last two centuries, mainstreaming it across the globe, yet humanist thinking has despite its obvious value and benefits barely created strong understanding and use in most of the world. 

Bakewell is an excellent guide, erudite and entertaining and truly committed. 

Not to be missed. 

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) *****

This fascinating and genial book was published in 1979, when I was at university. It was a kind of a hype among my fellow-students, and even if I did not understand (or read) half of it, it opened a world, or rather a universe of thinking, while at the same time presenting it in an incredibly creative way. Earlier this year, I decided to read it in full and buy a copy. Fourty-five years later, it is still as enthralling as it was then. Hofstadter explores the boundaries of our thinking, where reason and logic meet their limits in paradoxes, contradictions, self-references and loops. The subject is about cognitive science, logic and computer sciences (and Artificial Intelligence), and he learns us how meaning and meaninglessness exist and how they come to life (or not) in abstract systems, including the human mind and the perception or delusion of the self or the "I". 

I do not think the book would have so much resonated with larger audiences or with us at that time, if it were not for the extensive illustrations of Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his impossible drawings, or the long dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, occasionally joined by the Crab, and further illustrated by analysing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and their inherent structural elements of self-reference and loops, as in the sentence sequence: 

"The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true"

The starting point of course are the theorems of German mathematician Kurt Gödel: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure(i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system" (Wikipedia)

On top of this, Hofstadter develops dozens of new ways of looking at familiar or less familiar problems of logic and computation. He creates his own different logical systems in the book to illustrate his points, to take the reader without knowledge of mathematics or the formal language of computer scientists by the hand, and explain whatever elements he wants to demonstrate. 

He describes it as follows: 

"Here one runs up against a seeming paradox. Computers by their very nature are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts. Fast though they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness. How, then, can intelligent behavior be programmed? Isn't this the most blatant of contradictions in terms? One of the major theses of this book is that it is not a contradiction at all. One of the major purposes of this book is to urge each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.  This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about." (p.26)

or:  

"No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations very flexibly; 
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; 
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; 
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; 
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them; 
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; 
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; 
• to come up with ideas which are novel. "

"This little debate shows the difficulty of trying to use logic and reasoning to defend themselves. At some point, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except loudly shouting, "I know I'm right!" Once again, we are up against the issue which Lewis Carroll so sharply set forth in his Dialogue: you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over." (p. 192)

On the origin of life:  

"A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: "How did ever get started in the first place?" It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages - but bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond our power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. The run aground on this most central of all central questions: "How did Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosome_ tRNA molecules), originate?" For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer and perhaps experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer-at least for a while". (p. 548)

 Or using nice examples to make the reading easier to digest: 

"Here is a well-known children's joke which illustrates the open-endedness of real-life situations: 

• A man took a ride in an airplane. 
• Unfortunately, he fell out. 
• Fortunately, he had a parachute on. 
• Unfortunately, it didn't work. 
• Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. 
• Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. 
• Unfortunately, he missed the haystack. 

It can be extended indefinitely. To represent this silly story in a frame­based system would be extremely complex, involving jointly activating frames for the concepts of man, airplane, exit, parachute, falling, etc., etc." (p. 675)

His ultimate endeavour is to link the world of abstract logic with the physical reality we live in, and of course especially our brain and its capacity to for abstract thought, to cross the levels set by scientific disciplines and to come to an more holistic understanding of the interactions. 

"My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between dif­ferent levels-quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. 

 This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must ring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In princi­ple, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into metamathematical state­ments. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact transla­jon point is what creates Gödel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes 'cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any expla­nation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards" (p. 709)

And of course also the existence of free will. Are we the consequence of algorithms (historical/cultural/social/genetic/contextual/...) or not. 

"One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask "Does system X make choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making "choices", I think we can shed much light on free will." (p. 711)

We will come back to this topic when reading Robert Sapolsky's "Determined". 

Even if in some respects the book is a little dated, especially when describing Artificial Intelligence or genetics, it remains one of the milestone books on cognitive science and logic, absolutely unique in terms of content and form, incredibly complex yet fun to read, even if it is impossible to understand everything, as most readers such as myself will have to confess. 

Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) *****

An insane undertaking, an incredibly ambitious project, a brilliant achievement and an exceptional read. 

Readers - exhausted, crushed, enlightened - will look at the world and history through a different lens after having read this book. Its author - Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of the equally excellent "Jerusalem, a Biography" - introduces you in a very personal way to the individuals and their families that shaped our history, from the very first days up to the corona crisis and the invasion of Ukraine. 

He describes all major civilisations from a same time perspective across the globe, bundled in chapters based on the number of inhabitants in the world. The sources used to write this book are so abundant - another 137 pages - that the actual bibliography of the book is to be found on his website instead of the book itself. 

Sebag Montefiore is a born story-teller, with an excellent feeling for keeping the reader interested in his "characters" and the great plot of history. The book starts with the story of Enheduanna, living 4,000 years ago, princess of the Akkadian empire, daughter of Sargon the Great, who wrote a sad verse of how she was raped by a raiding rebel: "he dared approach me in his lust", a vivid angle of approach to start with the history of humanity, then jumping back a few million years to prehistory to take you along on this fascinating and horrific journey. The story sets the scene for the entire book: a journalistic style of writing: direct, personal, empathic, with a great sense of using the right anecdotes and quotes to bring otherwise boring historical processes to life. 

These distant rulers whom we know - and mostly not - from our history books and history lessons, whose conquests and treaties and wars we may remember, now come to life as if you're part of the events. Sebag Montefiore offers all the personal information that no history teacher would ever (dare) serve you: the power struggles among kings, emperors and presidents, the ruthless extermination of rivals and family members, the power-hungry warlords, whose only interest is their own personal gain, honour and lust. He writes about the dynasties of ancient Egypt, China, Africa and the Americas, about siblings killing each other with cunning, lists or brute force. It seems as if the author enjoys the cruelty and the lust, as if this is a historical gossip colum, but gradually you come to understand that this was - and probably to a large extent still is - the standard practice of how countries are ruled. Human life to many of these leaders is without any value. People are just pawns on their own personal chessboard, and the colour of the pawn does not matter, whether it's the adversary's or your own. 

Here are some random examples, taken for each 100th page in the book: 

• "Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with her posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes" (p. 100)

• "Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Kliusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his 'extremely beautiful' Christian queen, and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan." (p. 200)

• "Blonde and blue-eyed with 'flowing hair and white shoulders', Wal­lada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: 'I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.' Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun.(...) Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, 'You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the ­crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.' Wallada got her revenge exposing his affairs with slave boys: 

Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

In spite of his excellence

If he would see a penis in a palm tree

He would turn into a woodpecker" (p. 300)

• (On the slave trade) "'It's not their religion but humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,' wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry's biographer. 'To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers ... ' Much of the slave trade had originally been by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families, then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning industry that would sweeten European palates and poison socie­ty for centuries. (p.400) 

• "As the Islamic millennium got closer, he (Akbar) called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read 'Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu', which would usually mean 'God is great' but could also mean 'Akbar is God', as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. (...) As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were 'a great terror ... in the city'. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya". (p.500)

• "In 1611, Artemisia Gen­tileschi, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agosti­no Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant. Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. 'E vero, e vero, e vero,' she repeated. 'It's true!' 'You're lying in your throat,' Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, but his sentence was later overturned." (p.600)

... you get the gist. Juicy stories, lots of quotes, very personal anecdotes as if you're witnessing the action yourself, and deepening the interest in these incredible amounts of characters whose names you risk to forget once the page has been turned. A quick calculation: there's an index of 37 pages with on average 40 names per page, which means that there are about 1,500 characters in the novel of our history. 

The amount of information you get to absorb is enormous, humongous, colossal, gigantic and immense. In one word: monumental. This may seem terrifying at first, but the writing is so good that you just keep reading. Our history is fascinating, gruesome, horrifying, and yes, there are major shifts in history that led to change, such as climate change, trade routes, technological inventions, and religions, but the main drivers from what we understand are the egos and personalities of individuals, most of whom seem to have considered themselves as unique, irreplacable, geniuses and even divine, while from reading the book you can only see them - with today's Western eyes - as pathological, narcissistic power-hungry megalomaniacs. 

The paradox of the book is that while it's all-encompassing, it's also intimate and personal, it's grand and detailed, it's detached with balanced observations from a political and cultural perspective yet with an often understandable and human appreciation or disapproval of the behaviours of the protagonists, making it objective and subjective at the same time. 

Simon Sebag Montefiori has been smart enough to guide us through this shocking narrative with sub-chapters that come with attractive titles that make you want to read further. In this sense, the writing is closer to journalism than to scientific historical writing. It's as entertaining as it is instructive. 

The effort to have collected all this is by itself hard to imagine, but to write it with such enthousiasm, with such sustained controlled and well-paced quality of writing till the 1262nd page is even more astonishing. 

An easy contender for the non-fiction book of the year. 

Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) *****

Some novels create an entire universe to dwell in. Books that come to mind are "Lord Of The Rings", "Les Bienveillants", or "2666". Their sheer size and the introduction to a reality about which you knew nothing before - immersing you now in full and in minute detail in an alien universe with which you gradually grow more familiar, page after page, character after character - makes this a unique and memorable reading experience. 

The author's incredible effort to create a universe, 900 pages long, full of detail and coherent, well-paced, rich in style and full of different perspectives, requires the same effort from the reader. Superficial or quick reading will not work. As the reader, you have to submit yourself to the work, become part of it to the extent that it will be high on your mind for the period it takes to read it till the end. 

The story is about the real person called Jacob Frank, who lived in Poland in the 18th Century. He was the leader of a jewish sect, and he proclaimed to be the Messiah, and he converted to the catholic faith to demonstrate that he was the bridge between all abrahamic religions. The fact that a jewish community was willing to convert to christianity obviously served the agenda of the Polish catholic church, some secular leaders, while leading to the ex-communication by the jewish community. 

I have applauded Olga Tokarczuk's writing before, especially the brilliant "Flights", which received a 5-star rating, but this novel is even better. Tokarczuk must have researched this book for many years in order to provide such a complete picture of all that happened during Jacob Frank's life, even if this novel is not a historical novel in the purest sense. It's a literary work of art, and her angle of approach is to create dozens of perspectives in the stories and the lives of the people who girate around Frank. Frank's perspective, even if he is the book's protagonist, is only given succinctly, and rarely. All information we get is indirect, which makes his presence more abstract, mythical, legendary, full of contradictions. 

It's a novel about the human condition, about people struggling with their poverty, their friendships, their beliefs, their hunger for power, their allegiances, their lusts, their love and their fears. The myriad of stories leads to a kaleidoscopic view of what actually happened, sometimes clarifying, often obfuscating. 

What makes this an absolutely brilliant novel: 

- the knowledge: as mentioned, an extremely well-researched book, full of real-life figures, but also about the little facts of life during 18th century Poland: the food, the living conditions, travel, world views, and then especially the jewish literature of Talmud, Kabbalah and Zohar. Tokarczuk does not explain or describe or educate us on all these topics. No, they are just part of the background, unexplained often but present as if a given.

 - the writing: like many good authors, the pleasure of writing is palpable in almost every sentence. Nothing is cheap or fast or hurried. Every character's story has its own style, its own approach, its own language even. Some characters only come to life through the letters they write to each other, others tell their story in the first person, some others in the third, and in some stories you get stories within stories, with diary scraps interspersing the rest of the narrative. 

- the humanity: just like in "Flights" and other novels by her, there are no real bad guys. She has a tremendous empathy for each character, understanding their motivation and behaviour, while at the same time taking a wise distance, slightly humouristic mocking over the absurdity or the all too human actions that take place. It's a book about moral choices, about indoctrination and tolerance, about open-mindedness and self-preservation, about narcissism and altruism. And to the author's credit, she does not judge, she does not take the moral highground, she leaves every character with its own beliefs, doubts and consequences. 

- the creativity: or maybe I should say the smart and intelligent way she presents things, the offering of obvious things through a different lens, including the Garcia Marquez-like magic realism of Yente, the old woman who is not dead but neither alive, who found her last resting place in a cave, and who watches everything that happens knowingly, including the thoughts and feelings of the book's characters. 

- the coherence: despite the book's length, and despite its dozens of perspectives, its geographic spread from Germany to Turkey, its chronological span over several generations, the quality of the writing is maintained till the very end, as is the perfect composition of the book. Tokarczuk does not guide the reader through her universe. You are thrown in, and like in Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to work your way through it, trying to find out what's actually happening and how or if it makes even sense. 

I could add some more categories of why this novel exceeds many of the books I've read in my life. 

It's massive, it's brilliant, it's unique. 

It's also right to give kudos for Jennifer Croft for the translation.