Dan Sperber - Explaining Culture (Blackwell, 1996) ***

 If anything needs to be taught in schools, it's cognitive science. Why do we think what we think? And how do we think what we think? What and who influences our thinking and how can we make sure that we can get to the truth or a correct observation and interpretation without being biased by the filters of our eduction, context and culture? 

Anthropologist Dan Sperber tries to provide answers by first making the distinctions between different categories of representation: public representations, mental representations and cultural representations. He tries to bridge anthropology with psychology to really understand how our mind acts in a cultural context. 

He expands on the epidemiology of beliefs, and how they spread, after which he tackles the issue of cultural evolution and beliefs. 

Sperber's book is very theoretical and abstract, and it dates from 1996. Cognitive science has evolved over the last decades, and I'm sure many of his thoughts have been confirmed in the meantime, and some possibly challenged. Despite this, the questions he raises and the theory he advances are more than worth reading and will shed some light on how we live our daily lives in a cultural environment. 

Gilbert Sinoué - Averroès ou Le Secrétaire Du Diable (J'ai Lu, 2017) **½

 Gilbert Sinoué re-tells the life of the great Averroes, partly in his own name, partly from the perspective of later times and geographies: Paris, London, Florence. Even if the skeleton of the philosopher's life is presented, the narrative around it is fictional. I had expected a biography, but it wasn't. 

Nevertheless, his life is worth remembering and his influence on modern thinking should not be underestimated: he was one of the first people who publicly wrote and defended that if observation and facts, reason and logic where in contradiction with the holy Qu'ran or other holy scriptures, that this observation deserves priority over the holy texts. He was a strong supporter of Aristoteles and a reputable scholar and jurist. He advocated against literal interpretation of the Qu'ran and against new radicalism trends in Islam. 

Not surprisingly, he was also condemned later on by the catholic Church. 

An intereting book, but I hope to find a more historical biography of the scholar. 

Stephen Fry - Heroes (Penguin, 2018) ***

 In "Mythos", Stephen Fry re-created the world of the Greek gods in his easy to read prose. Now he treats us to "Heroes", the more human life of mortals who become demi-gods, who challenge gods, who suffer endless punishment for acting against the gods. 

Of course we all know Hercules, Oedipos, Orpheus, Perseus and Theseus. But what about Bellerophon, or Atalanta? And do we know all the works of Hercules? 

It is nice and easy to read, often with funny footnotes and comments. This book was read in my garden in summer during the corona lockdown. A good companion. 

Carlo Rovelli - Anaximander (Westholm, 2007) ****

 In the list of thinkers who shaped our world of today, Anaximander should be high in the rankings. According to physicist Carlo Rovelli for the simple reason that he put forth the statement that all things have a reason in nature. He described how clouds are formed from heating up water and how clouds that cool down start raining, replenishing the rivers and oceans that can evaporate again. Before Anaximander, all natural events were the result of the interference of gods: Poseidon, Zeus, Athena, ...

Even more, by tracking the trajectories of stars across the sky, he came to the astonishing conclusion that the earth is not "down here" and the stars "up there", but that the earth is floating in space, and that all planets and stars are revolving around us. This explained why the sun and the moon disappear only to re-appear again on the other side with such fixed regularity. 

Of course we know little about Anaximander himself - his pupil Thales of Miletus is probably better known - but Rovelli uses his revolutionary approach to describe the value and the history of scientific thought up until today. Especially today, religious bigotry, conspiracy theories and intentional obfuscation of the facts for political gain requires a good understanding of science. Today, scientific thought has never been so widespread, but technology also allows the dumbest superstitions to get traction across the world. 

His conclusions are worth repeating. 

Olga Tokarczuk - Primeval And Other Times (Twisted Spoon, 2010) ***½

Since I read "Flights" by Olga Tokarczuk, I've become an addict to her writing. In "Primeval" and other times, she leads us to a small village and its many characters, all the subjects of the different stories of the village. There are no real protagonists, except maybe the village itself. 

Like in "Flights", she philosophises once in a while as on the nature of God in the page copied below. She loves the changes of perspective. She loves challenging existing thoughts and approaches It makes her literature all the richer and unique. 

She treats all her characters with understanding and compassion, despite all their human shortcomings and sometimes not so nice intentions. 

A pleasure to read. 

 

Sorj Chalandon - Profession Du Père (Livre De Poche, 2015) ****

 If there's an easy novel to recommend, it is this one. Told by a body whose father claims to be a spy as a pretext to cover his abnormal way of life, the poverty and his radical opinions. The boy is asked by his father to keep his profession a secret for the outside world, but is kept informed about the challenges he faces. 

Chalandron writes about the mindset of the boy, the narrator of the story, with incredible conviction and precision, creating a kind of horrifying psychological environment that we as adult readers understand all too easily for its deception, its violence and manipulation, but for the boy in his gullible adoration for his father it is all reality. 

Things move further into madness when the father instructs the boy to become part of his plan to kill General De Gaulle because of his Algeria policy. 

Chalandon's writing is direct, with lots of dialogue between the father and the son, and simple story-telling when the boy narrates his situation. At the same time the story is compelling and captivating. It is terrifying and very sad at the same time. 

Edward J. Watts - Hypatia (Oxford University Press, 2017) ***

 In my journey of reading about thinkers who mattered in history, I had to read the biography of Hypatia, the Alexandran mathematician and philosopher of the 4th century CE who was eventually killed by a christian mob. 

With the limited information we have about her, Watts reconstructs her life using the scaffolds of her pupils' texts. The Egyptian philosopher has often been the subject of myth, because she was a woman, because she was the victim of religious fanaticism. A movie has been made about her life, "Agora", by the great Alejandro Amenábar, but I can only recommend not to watch it, it's that bad. 

Watts tries to take away the myth first, before trying to capture what she actually was: a highly educated woman whose primary work was to update Ptolemy's "Almagest", his treatise on the movement of the planets. 

 Despite all the numerous sources Watts mentions, it appears to be really hard to understand what her own teachings weren. The scaffolding used by Watts get more attention than the subject of his story. But maybe that's as far as he or anyone can go to reconstruct the life of someone who lived so long ago. 

Natsu Miyashita - The Forest Of Wool And Steel (Penguin, 2020) **

A young man is fascinated by the sound of a piano when it is being tuned by a master tuner and he starts as an apprentice, without actually knowing how to play the piano. His tuning journey leads him and his bosses to meet interesting musicians and situations. It is a story into the power of sound and the quality of sound, acting as a red thread to learn about life itself. 

The story is friendly, sensitive and warm, but totally uneventful. Some will call it the perfect antidote to the stress of everyday life, a reflection on purity and beauty. But you need much better writing skills and a stronger story to make this interesting. 

 

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt - Madame Pylinska Et Le Secret De Chopin (Albin Michel, 2018) ****

 "Madame Pylinska ..." is a novella about a young man who wants to learn how to play the piano, because he wants to understand Chopin. His teacher, Madama Pylinska, is a very demanding and excentric character, who wants her student to understand life before he even touches a key of the keyboard. 

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a wonderful stylist and his narrative of this story is brilliant: interesting, funny , light-hearted and very human. Of course the piano lessons are a metaphor for learning about life, about trying to understand feelings and by the effort of deep listening to nature and to other people, to understand the initial sentiments that created the music, and about how to make sure music continues to convey that initial sentiment. 

Music is not about notes, just like life is not about the superficial things we see. Schmitt takes us all to a much deeper and more meaningful level without moralising or too much philosophising. His wonderful story carries all that weight. 

Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police (Harvill Secker, 2019) **

 It sounded interesting when I read the back cover in the book store. It appeared to be interesting in the first chapter. Then I completely lost interest. 

The story takes place in an unknown future, when a dictatorship subjects the people to forgetting what happened in the past. The concept is not bad, but then of course you have to turn this concept into a story that captures the attention and that raises the core message - let's not forget our past - into something more compelling and interesting. 

Julian Barnes - The Man In The Red Coat (Jonathan Cape, 2019) *****

 "The Man In The Red Coat" is one of the best books that I've read in many years. It crosses the border between history and literature. The history part describes the live of Samuel Pozzi, a gynaecologist, doctor and free thinker whose portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent as "the man with the red coat". The literary part of the book is the writing of Barnes, his style, his composition, his personal opinions about what is happening. He does not take a historic distance to describe and recreate the lives of the doctor and his lovers, acquaintances and society. He comments on it, feels compassion, feels empathy. Barnes acts like a guide who takes us by the hand to come and see what happened there in France and London at the end of the 19th Century, he shows us around, explaining the strange customs some people had, explaining how politics, medicine and journalism worked in these days. 

This is and has been Barnes's area of expertise. As a true scholar of Gustave Flaubert, Barnes knows this period very well, and especially the links between England and France, and especially London and Paris. 

Barnes' description of Pozzi's life is more entertaining and captivating than many novels, while at the same time being very erudite. We can only smile now at the lack of medical knowledge our ancestors or be shocked with horror at the practices they subjected their patients to, but at the same time, this is the period when hygiene became important, when Joseph Lister raised the importance of wound desinfection, resulting in an increase in surgical possibilities. 

At the same time, all these people are humans, wealthy and living in a decadent period, when the morals of the church were being challenged, when people starting living their sexuality differently and without hiding their relations with men or women. 

Barnes must have read thousands of documents in order to puzzle back the lives of all these people with such precision and interest, into a narrative that is never once boring or disorganised or unbalanced. He keeps the content, the interest and the pace in perfect harmony. 

His writing skills and discipline of composition are mind-boggling. 

Richard Dawkins - Outgrowing God (Penguin, 2020) ***

 If anything, biologist Richard Dawkins has managed to bring the debate about religion to a different level, and often even instigating a debate that most intellectuals shy away from with the simple pretext that they respect other people's opinion and that religion is not really their area of interest: science is, knowledge is. 

It is to Dawkins' credit that he leads the debate to the observation that religion stands in the way of true knowledge, and that its stories, narratives, beliefs and moral teachings are more a handy self-delusion than a useful instrument to live your life by. 

In "Outgrowing God", he continues his in the same vein as in all his other books. His approach now is to lead believers step by step and with the tools of reason and science to an aspired concession that indeed, any religious belief is actually silly and more grounded in cultural and social frameworks than in actual reality. 

Of course, the risk of such an effort is that the only people reading the book are already convinced before reading the book, and not many believers will even touch his texts, let alone be persuaded by them. 

Despite this fact of potential ineffectiveness, it remains a worthwhile read, if only for the non-believer to wonder again at the fascinating world we live in, and to have some more arguments and insights when discussing this directly with believers - but of course in a friendly and respectful manner. 

J.M. Coetzee - The Death Of Jesus (Harvill Secker, 2020) & J.M. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus (Vintage, 2016) ****

 Several years ago I was very positive about Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus". "The Schooldays of Jesus" and "The Death of Jesus" are the two sequels to complete the trilogy. 

The life of the young David continues with his so-called parents Simon and Inès in the city of Estrella, in a fictional Latin American country in a distant future. It's not science fiction, because there is clearly no technological difference with our world of today, yet society is different. A little out of kilter, with generous and friendly people surrounding the young family. 

Young David continues to be stubborn, intelligent and unpredictable in the questions he asks and in the irrational requests he makes. He wants to create his own life, and goes to a dance school. Again, the school is not entirely normal and is run by a bizarre and friendly couple. I will not tell the rest of the story but it is more than worth reading. 

Coetzee manages to create a strange universe which is entirely plausible but at the same time eery and ominous. Nothing appears to be real yet he never goes into areas that you could describe as "fantasy" or "extra-ordinary". 

At the same time he forces us to reflect on our world, and to challenge our way of thinking and our perspective on things. Simon's rational 'common sense' has to constantly fight the irrational approach of young David, even if Simon often has to concede that he does not have the answer himself to David's unrelentless questioning. Instead of Simon's more scientific approach to understanding truth and reality, David's approach is one of experience, where knowledge is not acquired but revealed, as by a flash of insight, of art and of physical effort.

In this trilogy, Coetzee also writes a very captivating story, well written, deep and sensitive. 

Elif Shafak - 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World (Penguin, 2020) ***

A prostitute is murdered in Istanbul. Even if she is dead, her mind has still some 10 minutes and 38 seconds to contemplate the story of her life because it his completely extinguished. The angle of attack is good. The life of Leila is described with energy, compassion, humour and with a strong stylistic voice. It reminds a little bit of the sweeping language of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: impossible families, strange and suffocating superstitions, rebels and conservatives, but all described with character and interest. In the first part of the book the "told time" is much longer than the "tell time". 

Unfortunately, Shafak does not manage to keep the same level of writing throughout the book. The sweeping tale becomes a boring description of how her friends unearth her body after her fast burial by the city authorities. The whole last section of the book is an anticlimax. The "told time" and the "tell time" coincide, and the writing reports the events of the moment, of the story, and lose the grand voice of the beginning. 

And that's a pity, because her writing is highly enjoyable. 

Lisa Huissoon - Alle Mensen Die Ik Ken (Arbeiderspers, 2020) ***

 In haar debuutroman werkt schrijfster Lisa Huissoon obsessioneel-compulsief door de namen van alle mensen die ze kent, zoals de titel doet vermoeden. Een inventaris van namen met telkens een feitelijke duiding: een docent, een vakantievriend, een familielid. Een psycholoog zou dit oplijsten wijten aan een drang om controle te krijgen op een chaotische omgeving, en haar boek ligt dan ook in de lijn van de lijstjes van de Franse schrijver George Pérec. 

Jammer genoeg heeft Huissoon niet de energie van een Pérec om dit ook tot in het waanzinnige door te trekken. Slechts enkele van de meer dan tweeduizend namen krijgen enige tekst ter verduidelijking. Als je alle teksten optelt, kom je waarschijnlijk slechts tot een boekje van twintig bladzijden. 

Wat ze over die mensen vertelt is vaak anecdotisch of zelfs nog minder: een visuele herinnering van iets in de marge van een ontmoeting, een minuscuul detail dat een relatie typeert, een onverwacht perspectief, of zelfs iets totaal irrelevants. 

Ze schrijft goed, heel goed zelfs. Vlot, creatief, verrassend. 

Het had wat meer mogen zijn. 

Javier Mariás - Berta Isla (Hamish, 2018) ****½

Berta Isla is a young Spanish woman who marries Tomas Nevinson, a young Spanish-British man who gets recruited - against his will - by MI6. Because of his perfect language skills, his job is to translate messages by the secret service but gradually he gets recruited to do real spy work. Berta is not allowed to ask him any questions, because it may endanger both their lives and the life of their young son. Tomas has to be abroad a lot of the time, and as time moves forward, he disappears for longer stretches of time. Berta stays at home in Madrid, worried about her young husband and especially about the life of their son, since she feels very threatened by the occasional visit of men whose real intentions she cannot fathom, but it is clear that they are not friendly.

Javier Marías is the omnisicient narrator in the first two chapters, who tells the story from the perspective of Tomas.

In the third chapter, the perspective changes and Berta Isla becomes the narrator, and the subject of her narration is about uncertainty, about what we can know, about what is visible or not, about truth and deception, about following one's heart when there is no longer and present object for that love.

In chapter seven and eight, the omniscient narrator takes over again for the resolution.

Like the other novels by Marías, the lyrical sentences are long, exploring the different conflicting feelings and interpretations that events may lead to, with even more explorations of the ensuing possibilities or needs for action or inaction, resulting in a very realistic depiction of the human psyche in all its hesitating and wavering nature. As usual, and despite the harshness of the plot, the coercion, the absence, the threat of violence, a deep sense of melancholy and sadness permeate the entire story.

Some might find Marías long-winded, but I think his style is utterly enjoyable, and a real treat.

Highly recommended!

Books of the Year 2019

In the first part of the year, I was still deeply immersed in Voltaire and Emilie du Châtelet, which meant that I spent a lot of time reading biographies and original material by both 18th Century geniuses, including browsing and reading through most of their digitally available material.

Then I read a few novels which were written against the backdrop of espionage, and totally by coincidence: Berta Isla, Sweet Tooth and Warlight. I thought I had read everything by Milan Kundera, but I still found a little gem that was re-issued in English translation this year, together with some more books and poems by Roberto Bolaño. A lot of new books, both fiction and non-fiction, were quite disappointing.

Interestingly enough, some of the best books were suggested by Amazon, based on my previous purchases, rather than by literary reviews on newspapers and magazines.

And I did not manage to read everything I wanted. The new novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julian Barnes and Laszlo Krasznahorkai are waiting. I only read 42 books this year, which means that almost half of those books end up in my two books-of-the-year lists, which is of course a little strange. Maybe I should make it two lists of five books each.

The finest novel I read this year is Javier Mariás "Berta Isla", a real work of art, offering an excellent combination of smart plot and beautiful style. The non-fiction book of the year goes to Maria Popova for her astonishing book "Figuring", which describes the evolution of intellectual progress over the last three centuries through the lives of six giants of science, journalism and art.

Top-10 Fiction

1. Javier Mariás - Berta Isla ****½ 
2. Laszlo Krasznahorkai - The World Goes On ****½ 
3. Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth  **** 
4. Michael Ondaatje - Warlight  **** 
5. Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead **** 
6. Milan Kundera - Let The Old Dead Make Room For The Young Dead **** 
7. Haruki Murakami - Killing Commendatore  **** 
8. Roberto Bolaño - The Spirit Of Science Fiction ***½
9. Michael Chabon - Pops  ***½
10. Virginie Despentes - Vernon Subutex  ***½ 

Top-10 Non-Fiction

1. Maria Popova - Figuring ****½ 
2. Barbara Tversky - Mind In Motion  ****
3. Peter Pomerantsev - This Is Not Propaganda  **** 
4. Maarten Boudry - Waarom De Wereld Niet Naar De Knoppen Gaat **** 
Judith P. Zinsser - Emilie du Châtelet, Daring Genius Of The Enlightenment ****
5. Stephen Hawking - Brief Answers To Big Questions  ***½ 
6. Brian Cox - Forces Of Nature ***
7. Anthony Gottlieb - The Dream Of Enlightenment ***
8. David Bodanis - Passionate Minds - The Great Enlightenment Love Affair  ***
9. Annaka Harris - Conscious **½ 
10. Anton Jäger - Kleine Anti-Geschiedenis Van Het Populisme **½ 

Barbara Tversky - Mind In Motion (Basic Books, 2019) ****

Barbara Tversky is a cognitive scientist, wife to the late Amos Tversky whose research with Daniel Kahneman is possibly better known. But Barbara Tversky's work in the area of the spatial aspects of cognition is highly original and of equal importance. In "Mind in Motion" she explains in lay language the current state of affairs in her research, with the obvious additions of what other, and more recent, research has unveiled.

She explains why and how front/back, left/right and upside/down perspectives may impact our way of perceiving reality and how we think. She shows how errors of perception arise because of these perspectives. For instance: most people will misjudge distances, overestimating what is close by and underestimating what is far away, which corresponds with discerning details or not. Extrapolating, you could see how that level of perception also impacts how we judge cultures that are far away from us: they are all the same, while people living close by all have different identities.

She shows how our own body perception impacts the way we see, or how the use of our hands, gestures but also drawings help in having different approaches to understanding reality or by turning our intuitions into concepts and thoughts.

She builds her narrative around the Nine Laws Of Cognition:

1. There are no benefits without costs
2. Action molds perception
3. Feeling comes first
4. The mind can override perception
5. Cognition mirrors perception
6. Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought
7. The mind fills in missing information
8. When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it into the world
9. We organise the stuff in the world the way we organise stuff in the mind.

Like with all recent work on cognitive science, a simpler version of these findings should be compulsory teaching in every school in the world. With a better understanding of the mechanism underlying our thinking, I am convinced the world will be a better place. 

Even if many chapters are very descriptive and not all findings are immediately surprising or unsettling (less than in Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast And Slow"), it is a must read for anybody interested in the workings of our mind. 

Michael Ondaatje - Warlight (Penguin, 2018) ****

This is the story of two children, Nathaniel and Rachel, brother and sister, who grow up as orphans when their parents suddenly abandon them when they're young adolescents. They grow up under the supervision of a shade figure, named The Moth, who looks after them initially from a distance, but gradually the two children get mixed up in the criminal activities of the gang The Moth belongs to.

In the second part of the book, Nathaniel is older and tries to put all the missing pieces back together, including the fact that his mother had been a spy, and even many of the facts and events do not make sense yet, he's trying to turn everything into an understandable and coherent story.

"If you grow up with uncertainty you deal with poeple only on a daily basis, but to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with you must or should remember about them. You are on your own. So it took me a long time to rely on the past, and reconstruct how to interpret it. There was no consistency in how I recalled behaviour. I had spent most of my youth balancing, keeping afloat".

Life is like a puzzle, with many pieces that do not fit together, and with many pieces missing.

The writing is good, the story captivating and memorable, the characters interesting and unusual, the atmosphere coherent and kept throughout the book.

A good read.

Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth (Vintage, 2013) ****

Serena Frome is an intelligent, educated and cultivated person, who gets hired to join MI5 as the result of a love affair with her history teacher. She is confronted with two love stories that form the plot lines of the novel. The first one is with her former history teacher, who suddenly dumps her and disappears, the second one with a young and promising novelist who gets recruited by Serena to offer some counterforce against the communist influence in British literature.

McEwan is his own brilliant self. Through the very personal and emotional narrative by Serena, who sees and understands only half of what is happening, McEwan tells a tale of post-Cold War Britain and the place of literature and desinformation in global politics, while at the same keeping us captivated with a detective story about the mysterious disappearance of her former professor, and on top of this all some essential questions are asked about moral principles and ethics, as in who's on the good side of history and how far can an individual go to without being compromised, and even deeper: what if love and ethics collude?

The novel is - as can expected - carefully crafted, well-structured and very entertaining. Serena is real-life person, with her skills and flaws, uncertainties and strong character, some moral flexibility but with principles. And it is through the contradictions of her character that we can also perceive the different sides of our own world: its truth and deception, and apparent truths which had been lies and guaranteed lies which appear to have some truth in them.