Haruki Murakami - Men Without Women (Harvill Secker, 2017) ****

Is there anything like Murakami? No, there is nothing like Murakami. Whether in novels or in seven short stories, as is the case here, he keeps amazing us. As much by his writing skills and style - well-paced, easy to read - as for his humanity and the sympathy he shows for his characters, and his very special twist of mind to present things in a slightly different way than you would expect. Even after all these years, that's what keeps surprising, that's what keeps his novels interesting, and his stories a pleasure to read.

In this book, Murakami offers us seven short stories, all conceptually linked because the main character is each time a lonely man. They live normal lives. Then something happens. In the interaction with other people, something goes wrong. They try to redress the situation, by taking unusual actions, or revenge, or only by wondering what to do about it.

As with most Murakami novels, the whole world is one of small wonders. The wonders of the ordinary. In their dialogues, the characters often ask very open questions to each other. They are curious, but in a friendly way, really willing to understand what's happening. Interestingly enough, often the answers remain vague and mysterious.

Just one example: in one story, a young man, Kino, owns a bar, where jazz music is played (something Murakami himself did for a while). One of his most loyal customers, the quiet man Kamita comes up to him.

"Mr Kino", Kamita said rather formally, after he'd paid his bill. "I find it regrettable that it's come to this". 
"Come to this?" Kino repeated. 
"That you will have to close the bar. Even if only temporarily". 
Kino stared at Kamita, not knowing how to respond. 
Close the bar? 
Kamita glanced around the deserted bar, then turned back to Kino. "You haven't quite grasped what I'm saying, have you?"
"I don't think I have"
"I really liked this bar a lot", Kamita said, as if confiding in him. "It was quiet, so I could read, and I enjoyed the music. I was very happy when you opened the bar here. Unfortunately though, there are some things missing". 
"Missing?" Kino said. He had no idea what this could mean. All he could picture was a teacup with a tiny chip in its rim. 
"That gray cat won't be coming back", Kamita said. 
"For the time being, at least". 
"Because this place is missing something?"
Kamita didn't reply. 
Kino followed Kamita's gaze, and looked carefully around the bar, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He did, though, get a sense that the place felt emptier than ever, lacking vitality and color. Something beyond the usual, just-closed-for-the-night feeling. 

Roles are turned around, questions are asked, normalcy turns to strangeness.

A little gem. As so often with Murakami. I've read everything by him, yet he keeps surprising. Just by being himself.

Beau Lotto - Deviate - The Science of Seeing Differently (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2017) ***

Beau Lotto is an American neuroscientist, active in London, and the founder of the Lab of Misfits, a studio that creates unique real-world ‘experiential-experiments’ that places the public at the centre of the process of discovery.

In this book, Lotto starts with a deep dive in how we perceive things, and specifically colour, and how our brain creates these perceptions often more based on how brain functions than how reality really is. It is only when we become aware that we see things that aren't there, and we don't see things that are there, that we can start opening our mind to new possibilities. Humans did not evolve to see reality, but to survive. Yet now, we have to challenge our brain. We have to open it, with the right approaches, to mold it to have more neural connections. We need more contexts, different environments and experiences. We need to be incentivised to imagine things. We need methods to go beyond the narrow confines of our current perspectives. That's why we have to deviate. To be more open, more creative, more innovative, more connected.

If it all sounds a little new-agey, it's maybe because it is. The book is also written in the same style, with the lay-out aiding to challenge the reader (sometimes written upside down, sometimes graphically, sometimes ...).

In fact, there's nothing much new to read here for anybody who's read some works on how the brain works. But for the general audience, it's a good introduction. The only downside is that Lotto seems to have all the answers. Instead of all the right questions.

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind (Vintage, 2011) **

I should warn you. This is not a history book. It is a pamphlet. A 500-page pamphlet. Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, professor of History at Jerusalem University has a point to make. And he makes it over a lengthy volume. He may have a point. He may be right. Only, he never gives any evidence for it. And that's a pity.

It starts well, with the facts about our origins on this globe. No real new insights are produced, but it's a nice overview of how humans created communities, dispersed, made myths, and procreated. Then, somehow, historical facts start to disappear for the bigger narrative that Harari has in mind. My first question mark appears on page 122 when he starts discussing the lack of equality of all humans, in my opinion making an error of logic by comparing biological differences with social hierarchy. Question marks start filling the margins as of Part Three - The Unification of Humankind. Harari just makes one claim after the other. For instance, he writes "Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality". Says who? What are the facts underlying this claim? It's not mentioned. It's never mentioned.

Or : "We should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief". Hu? Why? Where is the evidence? .... but then at the end of the next page he comes with what might be a possible reason : "The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the tradition Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls". It is hard to find where this claim comes from and what the basis is of thoughts like this one.

I think he's also wrong when he compares the way the rich spend their money now and in the Middle Ages, without understanding that in those times "power" was generated by having vasals in geographic regions that were under submission. Today, "power", is no longer determined by conquering land, but by having influence in political circles. Because the underlying power-generation is different, so does the spending of wealth. And in a very bizarre way, he sees the evolution from absolute power of monarchs as a better alternative than the current capitalist version of investing in projects that offer a return on the capital invested. It's never made clear why that should be worse. In my opinion, it's a form of emancipation from archaic powers. It's not too difficult to turn the argument around in the other direction.

Gradually, it becomes clear where his sentiments are lying. Capitalism, liberalism, social humanism, communism, consumerism ... all 'isms' are being attacked, often with bizarre statements such as "Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a good thing". What does that sentence even mean? Is there a "Consumerism manifesto" which makes this statement? Or is it a definition? Unfortunately, the more the book evolves, the more such empty statements are made, and the more the pamphlet nature of the "history of humankind" drives the fact-based history away.

He gives the following example of an advertising text for a snack called Health Treats :
"Health Treats offer lots of grains, fruits and nuts for an experience that combines taste, pleasure and health. For an enjoyable treat in the middle of the day, suitable for a healthy life style. A real treat with the wonderful taste of more" ... and then Harari reacts to it : "Throughout most of history, people were likely to have been repelled rather than attracted by such a text. They would have branded it as selfish, decadent and morally corrupt". Really? My first reaction is to wonder what he gets so excited about, but then you wonder what his evidence is, and why? Why does he need to articulate his personal opinion by forcing "people throughout most of history" to accept it, like any populist politician would do.

His ranting against the consumerist-capitalist ideology keeps getting stronger and stronger, and evidence and facts completely disappear. It's no longer termed an ideology even (if that ever was the case in the first place) and it now becomes a religion. "The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions - and buy more and more". If you thought you were reading a "brief history of humankind", you'll be disappointed.

"All of the upheavals (of history) are dwarfed by the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market". Again, says who? Where is the evidence? Is this happening all over the world? Last time I checked, there are still families, and most people still think their families and friends are the most important things in life, much more than the state (not trusted according to most opinion polls) and the market. What makes him make claims like this?

In short, the title is misleading. It starts with history, and it ends as moralistic personal view on society. In creating his view, Harari works from extremes, as if the value of a democratic society with liberal ideas and state-governed services does not work. His attacks are against ideologies, not against realities. You can agree with some of Harari's viewpoints, as do I. That's not the problem at all. The problem is that his book is as cleverly sold as the Health Treats that he so rejects on grounds of moral corruption. And that is not good. It gives the surface intellectual a quick snack to satisfy the demand for something meaningful, but like the Health Treats, it is quickly digested with little nutritional value.

Don De Lillo - Zero K (Picador, 2016) ***

This is a bad novel and a good novel. It is boring and fascinating. The narrator visits a remote compound in the desert where people go to die. He gets shown around by guides, he meets his father and his wife. She is planning to "die", and to have her body preserved through cryogenesis until new treatments become available. The first part of the book is a description of this utopian/dystopian environment where rich people can get the best possible self-chosen temporary death. It reminds me of the early utopian novels, in which basically nothing happens, apart from a picture of a possible new world, with lots of attention to technology, interactions with humans, and how the consequences are thought through. It is pretty boring stuff, with uninteresting characters, no plot and no sense of purpose or direction.

Part Two of the novel is completely different. Different in tone, different in subject, different in emotional weight, different in writing style. It's the story of the narrator's relationship with Emma, a teacher who adopted a boy who is now fourteen years old and difficult. She is alone to raise the child after her divorce. Suddenly the world has become real, recognisable, human. Like the other characters, the narrator's world is full of questions. Life is difficult. There are no easy answers for the minor and major dilemmas we face every day. Where in the first part of the book, he is guided by an almost cult-like organisation that has all the answers - except survival - the second is more open-ended. My question is : could Part Two stand on its own? Would it be a good read if I recommended that you do not read Part One?

Give it a try.

Manu Larcenet - Le Rapport de Brodeck 1/2 & 2/2 (Dargaud, 2017) ****

 Als fan van stripverhalen, zou ik nog een blog kunnen beginnen, maar dat laten we voorlopig maar achterwege. Vandaar deze ene bespreking van een "stripverhaal" in deze literatuurrubriek.

We hebben "Le Rapport De Brodeck" van Philippe Claudel al enkele jaren geleden besproken en geprezen: een heel donker verhaal over verraad, loyauteit en angst. Het is nu in een grafische roman omgezet door de Franse striptekenaar Manu Larcenet, die we kennen van strips als "De Dagelijkse Worsteling" (echt niet mijn ding) of als mede-illustrator van de Donjon-reeks.

In de twee volumes van Le Rapport De Brodeck overtreft hij zichzelf. Hij brengt de roman tot leven zoals het zelden is gebeurd. Zijn stijl is uiterst fijn en grof tegelijk, met veel zin voor de kleinste details, die sterk contrasteren met de ruwheid en het gebrek van harmonische vormgeving van de gezichten. De waarheidsgetrouwheid waarmee dieren worden afgebeeld wordt omgezet in verwrongen en duistere overdrijving wanneer mensen worden afgebeeld. Het geheel is somber, ijselijk, dreigend. Elke tekening verdient aandacht. Hij slaagt er ook in om bladzijden zonder tekst te hebben, met een bijna cinematografisch beeldvorming van landschappen en het dorp, maar ook van gebeurtenissen in het dorp zelf.

Hij heeft ook de structuur van de roman van Claudel gerespecteerd, door de huidige tijd te doorweven met flashbacks uit verschillende tijdsmomenten.

Het geheel is verbluffend. Een klein meesterwerk van de "graphic novel". Niet te missen.

Richard Dawkins - Silence In The Soul (Bantam Press, 2017) **

"Science In The Soul" is a compilation of speeches that biologist and atheism advocate Richard Dawkins has given over the years, and at very diverse occasions and on a variety of topics.

Needless to say, they are all about biology, Darwin, science and religion, including his usual attacks on intelligent design and other non-scientific aberrations.

Interesting to read, but it gives the impression that the publisher needed some more revenue from a best-selling author. Most of the texts do not add anything to Dawkins's other books.

Darren Oldridge - The Devil, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) ***

There is no mythical figure more interesting in the history of mankind than the devil himself, the dark one, the evil one. Understanding the creation of the figure and his transformation over the ages is the subject of this little book, just over one hundred pages (without bibliography, notes and index).

The complexity and the ambiguity of the devil was already clear to me as an 8-year old, who was punished in my catholic school for claiming that the devil was actually God's servant instead of enemy, with the argument that if he was God's enemy, he would not punish the wicked ones in hell, but rather set them free again, just to counter God's plans. If what the religion teacher said was right, and the devil would help to keep sinners burn in hell for ever, he was nothing less than God's accomplice.

And that's partly how the figure evolved, as the fallen angels in the jewish texts of the 3rd and 2nd Century BC, and later introduced as God's opponent and evil enemy in the New Testament. Apart from some possible references in the books of the Old Testament, the devil hardly appears at all. He reached the status we currently attribute to him only with the Book of Revelation, written in the second century CE. Some early views even claim the concept of Jesus giving his life for our sins, is part of a deal with the devil. He offers himself to the devil, so as to liberate the rest of humanity.

The visual figure of the devil was further refined based on more eastern mythology of demons and other descriptions. But even then, deep into the middle ages, there was still a concensus among theologists that the devil needed a proxy body to interact with humans. There was less concensus about whether the devil could create offspring with humans. The concept of human evil was definitely placed outside of a person's will, and were, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas nothing less than the devil interfering with the body fluids of a person, in this way creating the wrong mental images and urges, "sometimes in those asleep, sometimes in those awake".

If nothing else, Oldridge's book is exactly what it says it is: a short introduction to the idea of the devil, and for a general and interested audience, it serves its purpose.

Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind (Penguin, 2012) ***½

American cultural and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" has become a standard in moral and political psychology. Haidt describes how - in the context of politcal thought and morality - judgments are made intuitively, with reason serving as the rationale to describe our judgment 'a posteriori', and not the other way round. We only appear to be rational beings when judging, in reality our judgment is made on the basis of a number of personal, emotional and group influences.

He gives a lot of examples of psychological tests in which the participants gave justifications for their behaviour afterwards, not based on reason. He explains that our social world is "Glauconian", named after the brother of Plato, who argued that people behave morally or just, only because they are kept in check by the social group to which they belong, by appearances and reputation.

Haidt guides us through the implications of cultural bias to assess morality, and he explains how we need to expand our typically liberal view of morality with the broader moral base that many cultures across the world have.

He breaks them down into five categories

1. the Care/Harm foundation
2. the Faith/Cheating foundation
3. the Loyalty/Betrayal foundation
4. the Authority/Subversion foundation
5. the Sanctity/Degradation foundation

... in which the first two are typically the strongest among liberal voters and the latter three more dominant among conservative voters. If you want to know where you are positioned, you can do the test yourself on his website.

Here are my test results, high scores on care and fairness, low scores on loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

But of course that's not the point of the book, even if every participant adds new data to his survey. Haidt's insights and approach shed some light on how our world functions today. Indeed, the question of moral choices is one of everyday politics and debates. Understanding why choices are made, and understanding the dynamics behind them are critical. What he does not do in the book is to dig a level deeper, namely to assess the psychology of the people who make these moral choices. Are there any common traits among these five foundations (insecurity, fear, dominance, control, ...).

One aspect of Haidt's approach is that it predicted the chances of Trump to win the presidential election. For the simple reason that all democrats always have a discourse that is focused on care and fairness, yet it totally ignores the three other foundational elements. The Republican party has invested more in topics such as loyalty to "our country", to "our religion", to "our sexual ethics", etc.

Food for thought ...

Julian Baggini - A Short History Of Truth (Quercus, 2017) ***

Julian Baggini is the founding editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. He has a PhD on the philosophy of personal identity and is the author, co-author or editor of over twenty books.

In "A Short History Of Truth", he touches in a very light and welcoming style the different types of truth that exist out there, including the truths that are claimed to be eternal, authoritative, esoteric, reasoned, empirical, creative, relative, powerful, moral or holistic. He explains all of them with their inherent challenges and paradoxes, the way they have been used and abused. All this in about 100 pages of easy to read philosophy. 

Getting to know the truth is a question of attitude. "Establishing the truth requires epistemic virtues like modesty, scepticism, openness to other perspectives, a spirit of collective enquiry, a readiness to confront power, a desire to create better truths, a willingness to let our morals be guided by the facts". 

It sounds so simple, this question of attitude. If it is so simple, why is it so difficult?

David Wootton - The Invention Of Science (Penguin, 2015) ****

David Wootton's "The Invention of Science", has a very appropriate subtitle: "A New History of The Scientific Revolution".

Wootton is a professor of history at the University of York, who has done a lot of actual research by reading the old manuscripts first-hand, which allows him to come with very detailed accounts of how scientists since the renaissance thought about their world they gradually started discovering, but at the same time he has this broad sweeping vision of discoveries and evolutions in a variety of disciplines to give the big picture as well.

He starts by explaining how until 1492, the year of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, every intellectual was of the opinion that everything there was to know, was actually already captured in the scriptures and in the texts of the ancient Greeks, with Aristotle as their number one source. Intellectual work was often limited to understanding these texts better, or interpreting them differently. Columbus's discovery came as a shock, because it was evidence that the world was a different place than actually thought, and that not everything was already written. It even changed the concept of time and the concept of progress, since many medieval people, did not consider the Romans or the ancient Greeks as more technologically backward. They were just people living at another time, just as they were living in another place. The idea that new technology could improve things, was not very high on the agenda.

And actually, many of the new discoveries came from the mundane and military. Telescopes evolved from monoculars to watch ships, physics partly evolved from calculating the ballistic trajectory of cannon balls, how double bookkeeping changed the way to represent data, etc. Brahe, Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno, Newton, ... of course all come into the picture, in a way that is both known and new, because Wootton expertly describes what these great scientists thought and felt about their own discoveries, how they struggled, also internally, with the shifting reference frameworks to look at reality.

He expands quite a lot on the simple aspect of using "fact" as evidence, a concept which was totally alien to the world before the early 'modern age'. He describes how experiments were made to test the validity of theoretical assumptions, again something that shattered the words in the books of for instance Galenus. Observation and testing suddenly got valued, and the first experiments with the vaccuum paved the way to create the barometer.

Obviously all this is further increased through the creation of scientific communities, who no longer only needed to write letters to each other, but who, thanks to the invention of the printing press, could share their insights more broadly, generating interest and inviting in comments from many more people to collectively move a better understanding forward. Despite this, the time frame within which new discoveries were accepted as scientific evidence could take and did take much more time than it does today. For instance, Newton's 'Principia' on his discovery of gravity, was first published in 1687, but resistance against his findings continued until the 1740s by other eminent intellectuals such as Huygens and Leibniz.

It's a long book, 570 pages with another 200 of notes, bibliography and index, but amazingly interesting and well written. Wootton knows so many little details about the tests, the personal opinions of the scientists to make it read like a novel. He is also a master in explaining the other side of rational thinking, that was equally part of the world in which science evolved: astrology, alchemy and witchcraft, and other bizarre theories about how our body and our world function.

It is only through this lens that Wootton offers us that we can really understand what progress actually means, and how our current world view has struggled to emancipate itself from the obscure, bizarre, dangerous and sometimes funny worldviews of the past.

A book to read when you have lots of time.

Carlo Rovelli - Reality Is Not What It Seems (Penguin, 2017) ****

In this great book, physicist Carlo Rovelli explains what we know about reality, and how it can be interpreted. It's a wonderful journey into the nature of science itself, about what we know and don't know, and about what we can know. In our universe there are one billion galaxies with each around 1 billion stars, and our world is just one planet of those stars. In the middle of our galaxy, there is a black hole that is one million times the size of our sun, and that swallows up entire "solar systems" like a whale eats little fish (I checked this, and they do eat small fish, and not only plankton, which I thought).

He gives an overview of a number of theories that are currently used to describe the facts and findings of modern physics. What comes out loud and clear is that our universe is finite.

Rovelli gives a historic overview of theories about our world, and how they involved over time. He does this in a very readable and accessible way, often using anecdotes and discussions from the life of the physicists who shaped our current thinking.

Rovelli ends the book with some musings on the nature of science. He says that the only thing that's infinite is our ignorance. And that's maybe a good thing too. "Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It's reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely this openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available."

There is a lot we don't know yet. And that's a message which still offers mystery and humility.

Lawrence Krauss - A Universe From Nothing (Simon & Schuster, 2012) ****

Why is there something rather than nothing? The major question that has been driving philosophical thought and theology for thousands of years.

Lawrence Krauss tries to give a glimpse of what might look like an answer. And if anybody can know, it's him. With degrees of physics of MIT and Harvard, he is now professor of cosmology at the University of Arizona.

He gives many examples of things that come to existence from nothing, which is really common at the level of the smallest components of our quantum world. And because the big universe out there is only an assembly of these small particles, there is no need for a cause to exist. That is just the way it is. "Ultimately, this question may not be more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue".

Obviously, before getting there, Krauss takes us on an interesting - and often personal - journey, creating a big picture of insights from quantum physics to the consequences of this weird world for a better understanding of our universe. He explains it in a layman's language, without any need for prior understanding of mathematics or physics. Nevertheless, it remains quite a feat to grasp the latest theories, for the simple reason that it's impossible for us to picture them with our macro-world perspective. How can you understand what a "multiverse" might look like. Or how can you understand a closed universe, one in which if you could see far enough, you would be looking at the back of your own head? How can you understand anti-matter?

One thing is certain for him. Even if we do not understand all aspects of our world and universe, there is no need for a "god" to have created it. There is not only no need for it, it would make the whole even more complex and more unlikely.

Interesting reading if you're interested in the most profound question of our existence.

Robert Hazen - The Story Of Earth (Penguin, 2012) ****

This is nothing less than amazing. Mineralogist Robert Hazen explains the painstaking effort of collecting rocks and minerals, and then painstakingly analysing them all under a mass spectrometer and then cataloguing them and organising them and thinking about what it all might mean. Thousands and thousands of pieces of rock from all over the world. What you can do with it sounds simple, to reconstruct the history of the earth, the full 4.5 billion years it exists. You get a wonderful chronological journey from day one till now and with some wise words for the future to conclude.

Everything that ever happened on our planet of any significance is captured in the minerals around us: the chemical properties of basic elements, the level of oxygen in the air, the eruptions, the collisions, the moving of the continents, the arrival of life, the state of the atmosphere, the change in the magnetic field of the earth, the brutal differences in temperature, etc, etc.

It is nothing but spectacular, and sure the object itself is incredible, but how Hazen writes with passion about his field of study is equallly amazing, with the right level of explanation to make it understable for non-geologists but I guess that specialists will also find it rewarding to read about their subject in layman's language.

Fascinating!

... and then you wonder about the morons who think the earth is 6,000 years old. How is it possible that major scientific work never reaches the masses?

Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Reputations (Bloomsbury, 2016) ****

Javier Mallarino is a celebrated political cartoonist who survived his criticism of corrupt politicians and the pressure from dictatorship and of the publications he worked for. He meets a young woman, Samanta Leal, who used to be his daughters friend when they were kids. She forces him to think back about an even that happened twenty-five years earlier, during a party at the cartoonist's home.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez weaves the remembering and the present into a fine, subtle and sensitive texture of questioning of his own achievements, the power of the media, the abuse of power, the fragility of life, and the shifting perspectives between being prey or predator.

His style is an interesting mixture of Milan Kundera (the questions, the distant observation of his characters, ...) and Javier Marias (the long sentences, the shifting interior musings, ...) and both trying to come to grips with a reality that is hard to understand and fathom, while at the same time very recognisable and intimate.

A really strong novel, written with a wonderful sense of composition, sensitive characters and wit.

Michael Chabon - Moonglow (4th Estate, 2016) ****

Every new Michael Chabon novel is one to look out for, as was this one. He is without a doubt one of the best stylists in American literature, with a wonderful sense of humour, greatly influenced by comic book and other adventures in novels such as "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", and the incredible "Gentlemen Of The Road".

With Moonglow, he moves into new territory for him, namely the life of his grandparents, as told by his grandfather on his deathbed, and at the same time the story of the weight of being jewish.

His grandfather was a rocket engineer and one of the first people to have entered Nordhausen at the end of the Second World War, the place where the V-2 rockets were being produced. Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" comes to mind, and is even mentioned several times in the novel, but apart from the historical context, there is no other comparison. Chabon's prose is direct, precise, unusually without any demonstration of stylistic prowess, almost as the chronicler of events, even if once in a while you can read wonderful sentences such as "got his grandfather so drunk that he was able to directly experience, if not communicate, some of the unlikelier effects on time and space called for by Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity"

Yet he goes further, much further, actually reconstructing the lives of his grandparents - and parents - by adding a strong dose of fiction of their daily lives, the conversations, the details of clothing, behaviour and thoughts that no person could ever remember, let alone fully recount during the last days of one's lives. This creates an almost obscene intimacy, by putting yourself in the position of these people you probably knew so well, including the sexual longing and sexual acts.

The book is as much about the grandfather's fight and moral concerns about German rocket scientist Werner von Braun and his gang, who participated in the US space programmes, and even more about his grandmother, a French jewish refugee, an actress with a great joie-de-vivre, and independent thoughts and action, who increasingly becomes the victim of schizophrenia. It is about his grandfather's attempt to build a new relationship after his grandmother has died.

Both grandparents are damaged goods, yet they try to live together as almost totally opposing forces: he is the principled engineer with a strong sense of ethics, who even spends a year in prison for an impulsive physical attack on his employer, she is the artist, the beautiful woman who lives in a world of fantasy and fear, using tarot cards with her grandson. Despite the differences between them, there is love and deep respect, even if they are fully aware of each other's shortcomings.

The whole novel is pieced together in a very non-chronological form, with memories, pictures and additional detail provided by his mother as elements to reconstruct something that will always be a little less than what it was, yet paradoxically, it's the novelists fictitious additions that make the people come to live, and maybe even make it bigger and more moving than it actually was.

Peter Stanford - The Devil - A Biography (Arrow, 2003) ***

A fascinating history of the Evil One, the demon, and it is surprising that Satan only appears in the Old Testament in the Book of Job as a real person - in contrast to the other mentions of 'stn' or the fallen angel or demon in a limited number of passages elsewhere in the Old Testament.

There was not much place for the Evil One in the Old Testament, since God himself was portrayed as booth good and evil, merciful and vengeful. It is only in the New Testament that he becomes a real character, albeit still a vague presence.

Gradually, over the centuries, he started collecting physical characteristics, to become the horned figure we see in horror movies, with influences from other religions and popular folk tales. No depiction of him even exists before the sixth century. And in popular beliefs, strongly influenced by the church, he became a real presence in people's everyday life over the centuries, and now gradually being reduced back to the fantasy figure he always was to the realm of fiction and movies.

It is fascinating to read how he has been used over the centuries, how he instilled fears in uneducated populations. In sermons some hundred years ago, he was still often mentioned in Europe. I think he has even completely disappeared from all sermons these days in Europe, with the exception maybe of some maverick extremists.

Everything he every embodied, has now been reduced to our human psyche (the internal evil) and to chance happenings (earthquakes, floods). There seems to be no need anymore to blame a distinct person to create and organise all that's unwelcome in society.

Etienne Vermeersch - Over God (Vrijdag, 2016) ***

Van de weinige intellectuelen die ons land rijk is, denk ik dat ik vooral voor Etienne Vermeersch de grootste achting heb. Hij durft niet alleen standpunten innemen, maar hij slaagt er ook in om die helder te onderbouwen, met tegelijk een goede tegenargumentatie voor alle punten die zijn betoog zouden kunnen tegenspreken. In televisiedebatten heeft hij alle standpunten van zijn tegenstanders al grondig overwogen voor hij naar de studio kwam. Dat maakt hem zo sterk. Hij kent alle andere standpunten al, vaak zelfs beter dan degenen die ze uiten. In "Over God" leren we niets nieuws (ik toch niet), maar het korte boekje geeft wel een zeer goed overzicht van de verschillende argumenten die god kunnen reduceren waar hij thuishoort: in het domein van de fictie.

Vermeersch toont aan dat het bestaan van een god op basis van rationele grond niet kan. Maar dat hadden we al begrepen voor we begonnen te lezen.

Jan-Werner Müller - What Is Populism? (Penn, 2016) ***

Jan-Werner Müller is professor of politics at Princeton University. In this short book (approx. 100 pages), he describes populism in one of the best, concise and balanced reviews I've read on the subject.

He describes what populism is and stands for, in its many forms: the only true representative of "the people", the true representatives of moral values, against the immoral elites, against the establishment, waging an apocalyptic war against the secret and oppressing forces. Their enemies are the press, intellectuals and civil society.

He explains how populism is created by the strong democratic deficit of open debate and the rule of technocrats whose language not only doesn not appeal to the general population, but which is also not directed to them. Specifically in the US, the economic interests of a significant part of the population is underrepresented in Washington.

When populists gain power, they will, interestingly enough, not bring politics "closer to the people" or even reasserting popular sovereignty.

He mentions a number of solutions, which is of course a much more open and public debate on the topics that are on people's minds, including a good democratic representation (but not through referenda!).

Julian Barnes - The Noise Of Time (Vintage, 2016) *****

One of the best books of the year, easy to recommend in these political turbulent times. The time is only different, somewhere in the middle of Soviet reign in Moscow, and composer Dmitri Shostakovitch is in the clutches of the Power. His opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" was described as "muddle instead of music" as a means to put the composer under pressure and to denounce colleagues who were conspiring against the system. Luckily for him, his interrogator himself becomes the victim of the purges that are going on.

The theme is about the balance between authentic artistry and survival, between coming up for your ideas and ideals, while trying to stay alive in a very hostile environment. He yields and stays true to himself. Barnes' account of the composer's life is built around memories of situations, not always chronologically, nor even logically, but as little vignettes that gradually present his feelings, his remorse, his doubts, his moral musings, placed in the context of history.

It is a novel about the individual survival within the system he abhors. It is about authenticity and untruth, the constant lies by the Power, the propaganda and their so-called moral superiority ... and later the fact that becomes a puppet for the Soviet system, and tries to avoid it. Shostakovitch is not a hero in the traditional sense, and even the very concept of "hero" gets undermined: "But these heroes, these martyrs, whose death often gave a double satisfaction - to the tyrant who ordered it, and to watching nations who wished to sympathise and yet feel superior - they did not die alone. Many around them would be destroyed as a result of their heroism. And therefore it was not simple, even when it was clear".

His only heroism is to be true to himself and his music: to create something that would survive him, the music that would say everything there is to tell, that is more and better than dying as a martyr, but also this comes at a price:" 'He could not live with himself'. It was just a phrase, but an exact one. Under the pressure of the Power, the self cracks and splits. The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that is too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they - he - once fitted together."

This novel is brilliant because of its style, its composition, its tone and lack of answers, its sensitive rendering of internal and external struggles, its historical value and insight in human nature.

Exquisite.

Barbara Tuchman - The March Of Folly (Abacus, 1984) *****

Finally, after all these years, I've read the history book that was highly popular during my early twenties. And it matches all the expectations.

What is the March of Folly - it is the stupidity of those in power to create their own downfall when all the indicators demonstrate what is going to happen. Despite all the warnings, including from friends and close allies and counselors and advisors, the men in power still decide to move forward with their mad schemes, which will enexorably to their dawnfall.

The theme is the legend of the Trojan Horse, pulled inside Troy when filled with Greek soldiers who come out at night to open the gates so that the army can invade the city after so many years of battle. Did not all the Trojans warn not to bring the horse into the city? Yes, of course, but when stupidity reigns, it will not listen to reason.

The other historic moments to illustrate the March of Folly are the catholic popes of the 15th and early 16th century, who rule like modern day dictators, unhindered by any moral or ethical considerations, but lusting for sex, money and power. Instead of making the church more powerful, the exact opposite happened, and half of Europe turned its back on catholicism.

The second historic moment is how the Brits lost America as its land across the ocean. Tuchman describes in detail how stupidity and ignorance were the key characteristics of the politics in London at that time. "The attitude was a sense of superiority so dense as to be inpenetrable ... the (successive) ministries went through a full decade of mounting conflict with the colonies without any of them sending a representative, much less a minster, across the Atlantic to make acquaintance, to discuss, to find out what was spoiling, even endangering, the relationship and how it might be better managed".

The last example is about the United States' desperate attempts to win the Vietnam war, and when everybody saw the stupidity of what was happening, the needless bloodshed, the hundreds of thousands of victims, the United States government still kept moving forward to an inevitable loss. As the French General Leclerc said to his political advisor prior to the war 'it would take 500,000 men to do it, and even then it could not be done'. The amount of men sacrificed was indeed an underestimation.

In the current world, with other madmen ruling the world: Trump and Putin for the major powers, and many other of a minor order, yet equally mad, such as Erdogan, Duterte, Maduro, Kabila, Mugabe, to name just a few, the book remains a strongly recommended read.

Listen to these sentences, "When private interest is placed before public interests, and private ambition, greed and the bewitchment of exercising power determine policy, the public interest necessarily loses" or "Personal self-interest belongs to every time and becomes folly when it dominates government" or "Their three outstanding attitudes - obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status - are persistent aspects of folly" and know they refer to the popes of the 15th century, they are still equally valid for many of the rulers of today.

And as a final comment: this history book reads like a novel. She writes with passion, not hiding her own opinion. In that sense it's more of a pamphlet, albeit a hefty one, but one that is crammed with facts as it should be for a well-researched history book. Of course you know what's going to happen, and the fact that the cases are so extreme, the stupidity so overwhelming, the human cost so high, make the novel all the more important today.