Mario Vargas Llosa - The Neighborhood (Faber & Faber, 2018) **

Really? OK - I am a little disappointed by this novel, maybe because I expect more from Mario Vargas Llosa. "The Neighborhood" reads like a fast written novel, maybe required by a publisher, but with no big ideas, no real plot, no artistic project ...

A businessman gets blackmailed by a magazine editor. His wife has a sexual relationship with his friend's wife. The magazine editor gets killed. Who did it? 

True, there is some criticism on the totalitarian regime in Peru, and there is some attacks on the hypocrisy of the wealthier classes and on the sensationalism of the tabloid press, and the uncomfortable symbiosis of power, wealth and journalism. 

Yet the characters are uninteresting, the sex is cheap, the writing too much done on automatic pilot. 

Quickly written, quickly read. A novel you expect from a beginner, but from Vargas Llosa?

Pascal Boyer - Minds Make Societies (Yale University Press, 2018) ****

 In stark contrast to pop-scientists such as Yuval Noah Harari, there are also real scientists who think and substantiate their thoughts with references and facts. Evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer is such a scientist, and in "Minds Make Societies", he tries to create a framework from which to evaluate how science can get a grasp on the complex and ever-changing nature of our societies, by integrating knowledge from a variety of scientific disciplines. 

He asks the critical questions:

1. What is the root of group conflict? 

2. What is information for?

3. Why are there religions? 

4. What is the natural family? 

5. How can societies be just? 

6. Can human minds understand societies? 

Boyer looks at the framework to reconcile different disciplines by giving examples of why this is needed to fully grasp the reality we observe. He is also cognizant of the need to identify our own biases and perspectives while doing so, and humble enough to recognise that we are only at the very beginning of understanding the processes that determine such a complex subject matter as societal evolution. 

The challenge of real scientific thought is that it is very difficult to translate into a narrative that gets understanding among larger groups of readers. Harari has all the answers and that possibly sells better than Boyer who has all the questions, but chances are that only the latter is in a scientifically credible position. 

Ingrid D. Rowland - Giordano Bruno - Philosopher, Heretic (University Of Chicago, 2008) ****

In the list of "thinkers who matter in the history of mankind", Italian monk and free-thinker Giordano Bruno requires a top spot, not only because of the quality of his thinking, but also because of the courage he showed to fight the system of belief to which he actually belonged. 

Eventually he was burned at the stake for heresy at the hands of the inquisition. 

Rowland recreates his life in vivid prose, extremely well documented and with lots of excerpts from the original texts by Bruno himself or other contemporaries. 

Bruno received a good education, with an interest in "natural philosophy" as it was called then: mathematics, astronomy. Quite rapidly after his formal education ended, he had to flee Naples. To a certain extent he reminds me of Voltaire, an eternal rebel, relishing in the quality of his own sharpness of thought, that pierces through the inconsistencies and irrational framework of thought of the establishment, but then going a step further and publicly mocking these, becoming the first victim of this insolent behaviour. 

Bruno becomes a wandering monk (in France, England, Germany) and teacher, first living in monasteries, then later at universities and at the courts of dukes and kings. He developed a technique to memorise events and texts, which he taught in schools, but he also turned this into a performance, reciting long texts by heart, to the pleasure of the artistocracy. 

He was invited to the court of Venice in 1592, and was arrested by the inquisition in 1593. His trial lasted seven years, after which he was burned at the stake for heresy. 

Bruno claimed that the earth was not the center of the universe. He claimed that the universe was infinite. He claimed that stars were nothing else than suns, each with their own solar system of planets. He even mentioned that it is not impossible that on some of these planets intelligent beings may live. He denounced the holy trinity and the many saints. 

In contrast to what many believe, Bruno was not convicted for his scientific beliefs, but rather for his religious positions. 

When sentenced he said "You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it". 

 

Louis de Bernières - The Autumn Of The Ace (Harvill Secker, 2020) *

 Can it be that an author's writing completely deteriorates with the passing of time? Or is it the loyal reader who becomes more critical and difficult over time? 

I enjoyed the following novels by de Bernières: 

1. The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990)
2. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991)
3. The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992)
4. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994)
5. Red Dog (2001)
6. Birds Without Wings (2004)
7. A Partisan's Daughter (2008)

I thought they were funny, well written, interesting, original and often moving, with interesting characters, carefully crafted plots, creative and entertaining. Not "high" literature, but fun to read. 

In 2015, he published "The Dust That Falls From Dreams", which I found utterly boring. But OK, that may happen. So, full of enthusiasm I bought his latest novel, "The Autumn Of The Ace", which is as bad as the previous ones. The novel is situated in the same family and it has all the same problems as the previous ones: totally uninteresting characters, no plot, shallow human sentiments, no tension, no real development, dialogues for which a first year student of creative writing would get bad notes (use dialogues to illustrate the relationship between the speakers, not to share background information to the reader), etc, etc. 

I read 150 pages of the 310, and it might be that by some miracle the rest of the book is good, but the chances are slim. 

Disappointing and sad. 

Anne Applebaum - Twilight Of Democracy (Allen Lane, 2020) ***½

 I saw an interview with Anne Applebaum on CNN earlier this year, discussing the attitude of Republicans towards the importance of facts and the antics of Donald Trump. She is a Republican, but then one who has lived abroad, one who is well-read and open to different perspectives. In "The Twilight Of Democracy", she tells her personal story as an American expat living in Poland and the UK. In her direct environment, she notices the shift among her friends to consolidate power by changing the judiciary and the media, trends which are entirely anti-democratic but clearly supported by the new conservative fractions of nationalists and the extreme right. 

She asks the right questions about how a democratic society can protect itself from anti-democratic forces who manipulate the system so that they can take advantage of democracy. To her credit she does not have final answers. She denounces the lying and the liars, the stifling of rational debate, the lack of respect for people with different opinions, the brutal power politics and the deliberate undermining of the foundations of democracy. To her credit she rather loses friends than her principles. Her insider stories about meetings, dinners and parties with the political elite in Europe are interesting. 

For liberals, like myself, her discourse appears obvious, and I often wondered why she called herself a republican, and now, I can only hope that she will have more credibility among her fellow republicans and be read. 

Erik Martens - De Boerenkrijg in Brabant (1798-1799) (De Krijger, 2005) **½

 At the end of the 18th century, the "Belgian" population organised the resistance against the French occupation, and farmers took up the few arms they had to fight the famous and all-powerful French army. 

This insurrection is called "de Boerenkrijg" - the revolt of the farmers. This revolt has become part of Belgian historical mythology, with its legends and heroes, and hard to assess what was actually true or what became a convenient patriotic narrative in the last two centuries. This was even more accentuated by the catholic church who supported the insurrection against the pagan French revolution. 

This book gives an inventory of reports at national or municipal level of events that took place during that period. Court documents, policy documents, political documents. It offers material by date and by place in the province of Brabant, where Brussels was originally located (not that Brussels was moved, but Brussels eventually became a separate political jurisdiction). 

The fight started because of the French war against the Austrians who were then ruling the "Netherlands", which included Belgium. The Austrians did not really put up a fight and were no match for the French. Both armies did not have the logistics we have today, so they survived by looting the local inhabitants. When these used weapons to respond, entire villages were killed and burned. 

Because the book is just an inventory, it does not make for easy reading. It's a case of "you can't see the wood for the trees", because chronology and geographical events do not follow a single narrative. It's a shocking moment in our history, and it possibly deserves a more powerful narrative. At least Martens managed to get all the ingredients together to write that story. 

Michael S.A. Graziano - Rethinking Consciousness (WW Norton, 2019) ***

 Understanding our human consciousness remains one of the toughest scientific nuts to crack. Graziano takes a very optimistic and mechanical view of our consciousness. He claims that in theory it would be possible to recreate consciousness with the right ingredients available: attention, attention schema, content. 

Graziano acknowledges that the hardest part to resolve is emotions. And that is possibly also the weakness of his approach and ambition, including uploading consciousness into a machine. Apart from the question how useful, wishful or interesting this would be, who would actually want this? 

His engineering approach to consciousness may lead to some interesting conceptual questions and challenges, but it brings us back to square one. "The single most important change that I can see - the watershed moment in the history of our species - is the moment people understand consciousness. Once we understand it from a pragmatic, engineering point of view, then a remarkable future becomes possible. In that future, mind is something precious, something to be nurtured, grown, and then saved, something that can be lifted from the original biological platform and migrated, duplicated, branched, maintained indefinitely, and even possibly merged with other minds". 

How horrifying! Does that mean that this mind is completely devoid of sensual pleasure, no bodily contacts, no cuddling of a grandchild, no intimacy, not even a hug, let alone sex, no enjoyment of music, literature, paintings? No enjoyment of food, smell, sports? What is a mind without a body? Who would want to be locked up in a computer or even in a robot? Would we not need a physical 'self' to be able to form this attention schema, to have a mental concept of ourselves? How can this be without a body? 

I may have more questions than answers after reading Graziano's book, but it's still worth reading, if only to challenge our current thinking and to project a vision of the future, even if it sounds horrifying. 

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld - De Avond Is Een Ongemak (Atlas Contact, 2018) ****

 I am not very interested in Dutch literature because of too many disappointments. If the world is my place, and my language one of the tiniest language groups in this world, what are the chances to have the best literature coming from this tiny language group? Like with all statistics, the chances are smaller than when you read English or Spanish novels. Quality is somehow the result of quantity, whether you like that or not. 

When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize this year with The Discomfort of Evening, I had to review my position. The novel tells the story of a young girl whose brother has just died. This affects the whole family of very religious farmers, who each try to deal with this loss in their own way. The environment is full of tension, hypocrisy and lack of empathy, even if all characters in the novel are described with compassion. Her craving for love and physical contact is only responded by a rigid and suffocating environment. 

Not only the subject matter, but also the language and the stylistic power of the novel makes it worthwhile literature. The child absorbs information from her teachers, brother, sister and family, while misinterpreting this information or combining it in sometimes strange reasonings, even if plausible when seen through the eyes of a child. The paragraph below illustrates this well. 

In short, an emotionally compelling, well written and captivating novel. 

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.