J.M.G. Le Clézio - Ourania (Folio, 2006) ***

I am not sure what to think of this novel by Nobel Prize Winner Le Clézio. It starts strongly, in the prologue, somewhere in France. The rest of the novel takes place in Mexico, where the author lived for a while. The main character is a geographer, Daniel Stillitoe, who participates in a broader academic project in which archeologists take the lead. He meets a young Inuit boy, Rafael, who lives in a Utopian community. Different world views collide and none of them succeed, each already presenting the germs of destruction before they come to full fruition. 

The concept is interesting, but like so many utopian literature, also utterly boring. The personal tensions between the characters seem sought just to get some suspense in the story, which is a pretext to present world views. The ideal would be to have a perfect match between the abstract and the concrete, or to present the abstract through the struggles and dreams of the concrete, creating tension and suspense in the process, but that does not happen. There seems no obvious reason of why the main character does what he does, or why Rafael would do what he does, and why both characters would even be interested in each other. The emotional drivers seem absent. 

As much as I liked his "Ritournelle De La Faim", as nonplussed I am by this novel. 

Carson McCullers - The Member Of The Wedding (Penguin, 1947) *

Many years ago I read and liked "The Ballad Of A Sad Café" by Carson McCullers. I liked her voice of the narrative, its southern US climate and the sympathy for the characters. This novel I did not manage to finish. It was too friendly, too sweet, too much lacking in suspense. Maybe because I am not a little girl and maybe because I do not have an older brother who will get married, it was difficult for me to relate to the story, but I assume that a good author would manage to write something appealing to audience wider than the main character's situation. 

Why would I continue reading if it does not resonate with me at all? I have dozens of other books waiting to be read. Onward and forward. 

Dave deBronkart - Let Patients Help (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)

This book was recommended to me 'professionally', as I'm working as a volunteer patient advocate, including the improvement of listening to the patient voice during consultations with medical teams. 

The gives an easy to read overview of where the patient voice can bring value to the healthcare debate. As a patient advocate, I applaude the initiative and the informal way things are presented. However, the focus is primarily on the input from the individual patient, whereas we are trying to get the voice of all patients with a specific disease to work in an organised and systematic way with key stakeholders in order to improve services and outcomes. 

Much needs to be done, and the inventory of this book can function as a starting point. 

Roberto Bolaño - Cowboy Graves (Penguin, 2021) ***

 When Chilean author Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, he left behind his computers with lots of files of unpublished material. Some of those were just scraps of ideas and concepts, several were short stories or novellas that could be published as they were. Over the last years, several of these files have been prepared for publication, including the three novellas in this compilation: "Cowboy Graves", "French Comedy of Horrors", and "Fatherland". Based on the dates of the files, the first must have been written between 1995 and 1998, the second just before his death in 2003, and the last one around 1993. 

There are no surprises in the three novellas: the writing is fast-paced, Arturo Belano is the author's alter ego in the stories, which deal with writing poetry, politics and the revolution, with sentences full of uncertainty about things that happened or what may have motivated actions in the past. At the same time, the stories are full of concrete everyday activities, with a sense of mystery and humour about it, and the unpredictability of what may come next. 

Like in his other books, there is a wonderful admiration of poets and people who want to improve the world, all this written with a deep authenticity and openness of mind, lightfooted and full of the pleasure of writing. 

Fans of Bolaño should definitely seek this book out - even if it does not bring anything new - just for the joy of reading, while people less accustomed to his work, may want to start with "The Savage Detectives" or "2666". 

Georges Perec - Les Revenentes (Juillard, 1997 - originally 1972) ***½

We already loved "La Disparition" (translated in English as "A Void"), Perec's novel in which something has mysteriously disappeared, perplexing the characters and making them look for this 'present absence'. The book is written without the vowel "e", which leads to weird sentences at time, considering how omnipresent the letter "e" is in French. 

With "Les Revenentes" he does the exact opposite, writing a novel in which the only vowel is an "e", which makes it almost impossible to translate into any other language, but even the French original remains a feat of concentrated creativity. Sure, he tweaks the rules a little bit - for instance the "u" can be dropped when used after a "q" - but that does not diminish the effort it must have taken. 

The story itself is a wonderful romp of Berber rebels, criminals, the selling of stolen gems, and perverted clerics who all end up in a great orgy which would be considered pornographic by all standards except maybe in this situation of exaggerated story-telling. 

Perec loved language, as he again testifies here. There is fun in every word, in every turn of phrase, there is pleasure in the effort itself. And even if it's showing off his skills, that is not the main thing. It's all about the joy of language, including the weird twists of sentences and probably of the story too that comes with the possibly toughest stylistic restriction that an author can impose upon himself. 

It leads to sentences such as this one, which made me laugh out loud: 

"Cependent, le chef des rebelles berbères, Mehmet ben Berek, enlève Thérèse Merelbeke et l'emmène en jeep dens le bled. René, désesperé, redescend prestement et presse Leclerc de rechercher les rebelles. Mets le chef reste ferme et prétend que Thérèse est décédée!".

or some more: 

"Bérengère de Bremen-Brévent (B de BB, elle est célèbre, tel BB) entreprend de vendre ses perles et se sert de l'entregent de l'Evêqe d'Exeter, Serge Merelbeke, leqel, en être pervers et dégénéré, ne rêve qe sexe, de fesses et dérèglements". 

... and this for 138 pages long, and as you can notice, some words are a little changed, but overall the effort is quite strong. Perec is as a consequence also possibly the only author who wrote two novels with not one word in common.  

The book has also been translated into English as "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" in the compilation "Three" from 2004.

In the total oeuvre of Perec, the real masterpiece to look for is "La Vie: Mode d'Emploi", which goes beyond his obsession with language, style and form into a bigger picture narrative of a more realistic nature, even if most the characters have their own obsessions. 

Julia Galef - The Scout Mindset (Piatkus, 2021) ***

This book has nothing to do with the "boy scouts", but the scout refers to the one finding the right way to your destination.  She puts them in the opposite space as "the soldier", who will do anything to claim he's right, in full disregard for the facts and logic. The author, Julia Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She holds a BA in statistics from Columbia University. "The organization also gives workshops to train people to internalize and use strategies based on the principles of rationality on a more regular basis to improve their reasoning and decision-making skills and achieve goals" (according to Wikipedia).

Galef presents a number of situations, games and tests to help you overcome the traditional flaws of insufficient facts to decide, too narrow perspectives, insufficient self-awareness, prejudice, etc. She presents the different tests more as a do-it-yourself guide to personal improvement rather than a more scientific overview of what can be done to overcome the current societal problems that we encounter daily on Twitter or other social media. I do believe that most readers interested in the topic will already know - and hopefully apply - the content of the book. On the downside, it is a sometimes arbitrary list of tests and ideas, without a comprehensive overview of the biological, psychological, social, cultural and historical reasons why we reason as we do. Many of the flaws in our reasoning also have a positive purpose (such as fast generalisations). She also does not pay enough attention to probability and logic, which seem to me quite essential to make decisions when facts are scarce or fully present. It is written with best of intentions, but sometimes the approach is too much addressed to younger audiences. 

The topic is possibly the most important topic to be written about. This book is not very scientific but its easy access may be a good educational tool, especially for young people. 

The Rough Guide To Cult Fiction (Haymarket, 2005) ***

An overview of Cult Fiction, whatever that means. The introduction defines: "The term "cult fiction" implies lengthy and irrational devotion probably, though not necessarily, by an ardent minority, to an author or a book. A work that is reread over and over". But even that is not a clear definition. They add it could be due to the life of the author (short, controversial) or not. You could say that anyone whose work is compulsory reading at school cannot be "cult", but the book contains JD Salinger, Truman Capote and William Golding. It is very anglo-saxon in perspective, even if some French authors are included: Sartre, Camus, Perec, Saint-Exupéry, some Japanese such as Mishima and Murakami, etc. The scope is wide, and much more popular than the word 'cult' implies. 

Luckily the authors don't take themselves too seriously. Special attention is given to artists with one 'cult' novel, in the "Isolation Ward", although to have Roberto Bolaño in that list is somewhat peculiar, considering his vast output, and special attention is given to Graphic Novels, which is even entirely American in nature, as if there were no great graphic novels from Europe and South America. 

Anyway, it's a nice little book to browse through. Even if most names are known, and possibly not much new is to be learned, you can still find some suprises. 

Damon Galgut - The Promise (Chatto & Windus, 2021) ****

"The Promise" is an excellent book. It has been widely acclaimed and translated. I've been impressed by the number of people whom I have met who were reading it, so I assume there's not much need to further promote it. 

Galgut describes the lives of a family over a few decades, with constantly shifting perspectives among the characters, as if they passed on the third person narrative like relay runners, with the omniscient narrator holding it all together. 

The title refers to the promise made by the just deceased mother of the family to the black maid who worked on their farm and helped raised the children to receive a plot of land with a cabin as her own property. Now that the mother is dead, the father and the other members of the family are not inclined to deliver on this promise. The strongest voice in the book is that of Amor, the youngest daughter, who is the strongest proponent of living up to the promise, resulting in conflict with the rest of the family, or at best total indifference. 

Galgut's writing, his style as much as his sense of composition, is excellent, and he manages to convey a deep sense of humanity - from deep anger to subtle tenderness - and the internal and external struggles they lead to. 

Easy to recommend. 

Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2016) *****

I was more than impressed by Henrich's other, more recent work - The Weirdest People In The World - that I went back to his successful earlier book "The Secret Of Our Success". Henrich is an anthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. 

In this book, Henrich explains how nature and nurture are in fact meaningless concepts, since humans have evolved, also genetically as the result of cultural evolution, and we have changed nature around us as well. We depend on our cumulative culture for survival, we need to live in cooperative groups, using allo-parenting, the division of labour and information, and on our communicative abilities to be what we are today: a biological anomaly, a new kind of animal. The chronological concept that we are developed in nature, and then later developed our culture is an erroneous one: our culture affects our genes and our genes affect our culture: both co-evolve, and are still co-evolving. Henrich provides numerous examples from biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics, economics, history and anthropology to build his convincing case. 

We are a cultural species, whether we want to or not, and understanding this, will help us understand the perspectives of others even better. We are not determined once and for all. Henrich ends his book with eight insights that will help this understanding and paving the way for future research and human progress.  Especially his examples related to language, communication, cooperation and collective brains show how collaborative and communal efforts have led to benefits for us all. Henrich gives examples of how highly intelligent and resourceful explorers did not manage to survive in difficult situations (from the arctic to the Australian desert), despite their brains and technology, while local indigenous people did. They lacked the collective intelligence of the local tribes. 

Henrich's sweeping picture of humanity is well-substantiated and easy to read. For instance, his example that humans can outrun quadrupeds in terms of endurance, and have done so daily as hunters, for the simple reason of using gourds of water they took with them to compensate for sweating and dehydration. The cultural invention compensates for the natural deficit, turning it into an advantage, and thus better chance of survival. 

It's a humbling and insightful book, well-written and compelling. Henrich concludes:

‘To move forward in our quest to better understand human life, we need to embrace a new kind of evolutionary science, one that focuses on the rich interaction and co-evolution of psychology, culture, biology, history, and genes. The scientific road is largely untravelled, and no doubt many obstacles and pitfalls lie ahead, but it promises an exciting journey into unexplored intellectual territories, as we seek to understand a new kind of animal.’

Claire-Louise Bennett - Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape, 2021) **

This is possibly the most hyped book of the year. Claire-Louise Bennett describes her main character's situation in an "out of breath" style, with endless repetitions, short bursts of sentences barely qualifying for their definition, in an internal monologue of irritating and often nonsensical emphatic use of repetitions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Repetitions. As much as the writing irritates, like a first year student in creative writing finding a personal voice, the content has not much to offer either, except an endless list of literary name-dropping of literary icons, as a self-obsessed and immature effort to lift herself by her bootstraps, without actually getting anywhere. 

Maybe all this sounds a little too harsh, but I guess that readers need to be warned too when they risk wasting their precious time. 

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme (Gallimard, 2021) ****

In "Le Fils De L'Homme", Del Amo describes the lives of a mother and young boy whose father returns after many years only to drag them to his mountain cabin where they continue to live in perfect isolation and also desolation. 

The father is unpredictable, jealous, erratic, violent and on the verge of madness. The mother is powerless, anxious, loving,  terrified ... and pregnant. The boy oscillates between both parents, happy to be taken for an adult when he gets shooting lessons, feeling lost when he cannot make sense of what's happening with the adults and their environment. 

Del Amo's characters are poor, also in their strength to make something of their lives. The mother reads popular romance novels in order to escape from her dreary reality. The father relives the situation he was brought up in by his own father, an equally violent despot. Both are gentle with the boy, loving even, even if both are too tied up in their own problems to really give him the environment that he needs. 

Del Amo describes and brings to live the terrifying emotions of anonymous characters, in whose situation we are dropped with direct experience of every minute action that each of them makes, full of physical power and virtuose language, and further strengthened by the use of the simple present, which gives the reader to be part of the action as it unfolds in all its dramatic and tragic plot. I am used to read in French, I hear French all the time, but I must admit that many phrases contain words that I now read for the first time. His language is rich, but his style is direct, including in the dialogues. 

The novel is a kind of update of Greek tragedy. Even if the end was not predicted (by Cassandra or some character), every reader knows from the start that things will not end well. The fact that the characters don't have names even strengthens the abstract theme of returning generational violence. It is Del Amo's strength that he made his descriptions tangibly concrete to make us live the experience. 

Highly recommended!

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes (Philippe Rey, 2021) ****

Mystery novel, political novel, humanistic novel, crime novel, sociological novel, a novel about literature ... "La Plus Secrère Mémoire des Hommes" has many levels at which it can be read. 

On the surface, it's a search for a book written in 1938 "Le Labyrinthe De L'Inhumain" (the labyrinth of the inhuman), which was acclaimed as written by the "Rimbaud nègre", an African with the writing skills of one of France's most revered authors. The author, T.C. Elimane, completely vanished from the earth, as the copies of the books were taken from bookshops and destroyed, based on the accusation of plagiarism. 

A young writer from Senegal, Diégane Latyr Faye, the main character, tries to reconstruct what happened, based on publications and people who knew the author, and he comes across even more mysteries, in the sense that every one who ever read the book, has died from unnatural causes. 

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was not known to me, and it is thanks to his winning of the Prix Goncourt that he came to my attention. Sometimes literary prizes are indeed deserved, as is the case here. His writing is entertaining, making this novel as full as suspense as a crime novel, even if the greater theme is about literature and culture, about cross-cultural interaction and adoption, about skills and appreciation. The novel is also about living true to your beliefs, and the fact that a very promising author disappeared from the world in order not to give in to the forces of expectation and society, is also a very modern one. But it also touches on the quality of life versus personal gain, of rationality versus a more mystic appreciation of our world. And despite all these abstract themes, woven together in a tight fabric of stylistically refined text, the characters remain human, with their desires, fears, conflicts and expectations. 

We are spoiled this year with great novels. This one is surely among them. 

Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife (OneWorld, 2020) ****

One of the weird aspects of having received a catholic education and weekly mass, is the amount of fabulation you are being served by the myths of the religion that have actually no real presence in the Bible, be it the Old or New Testament. And then especially about what most people would consider the core beliefs of the religion: there is such a thing like heaven and hell where life after death awaits us, the former for the good people, the latter for the bad. There is even no mention of the "devil" or "satan" in the Bible either. 

Several years ago I read Alan F. Segal's "Life After Death", a very erudite book that gives a history of the concept of heaven and hell, of resurrection and the way they were build up over the centuries after christianity started to get traction. The Church had endless discussions about the form and shape of our eternal soul, material or immaterial, with senses or without senses, recognisable or not. One question was not addressed by Segal, namely at what precise moment the dead would go to heaven, immediately after their death, or at the end of times, when the Final Judgment happens. 

Theologian Bart Ehrman answers this question luckily in his new book "Heaven And Hell". Like Segal, he gives a sweeping and well-documented overview of what the Bible actually says about the afterlife, and how the notions we know today have come into existence. He starts very early on, with the Gilgamesh epos, the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, the gospels, including all the apocryphical gospels that were eventually not included in the canon, as well as later versions that show the various thoughts about what life after death could mean, including by Church fathers such as Augustinus and Tertullianus. 

Thanks to the digital availability of the ancient books on internet, I once made my own calculations based on semantic analysis of the Old & New Testament. Words like "hell" or "purgatory" are never used in the bible, and the concept of "eternal life" gets zero mentions in the Old Testament and 33 in the New, of which 16 in the gospel of John, but he primarily referred to the end times, when the kingdom of god came to earth, and not the other way round that we would go to heaven.  It must be clear that if these are really core beliefs of original christianity, they would appear much more often than is the case now. Ehrman manages to explain all this with the source material at hand. 

This is obligatory reading for anybody interested in religion, both believers and non-believers. 

Books of the Year 2021

I spent a great deal of my time this year re-reading my favorite comic books (by Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Blain), and watching a lot of television series (possibly too many). 

That is why my focus on reading was more directed towards non-fiction, mostly about the situation of our human species, in the universe, in our history, our interactions, our society. 

Two books really stood out for me: Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People In The World", about what historical aspects - including the church's prohibition to marry first cousins - created a drive toward innovation and democracy in Western Europe in the past 700 years. The second is Francesca Stavrakopoulou's "God, An Anatomy", in which she details all the body parts of god based on biblical and other ancient texts, helping us interpret some of the strange sayings in the bible, and to understand its origins from other and earlier religions. Both books show an incredible knowledge of the subject matter, inventive insights and craftfully written. 

I also enjoyed "Metazoa", a book that explores the level of consciousness among living things, from the simplest to the most complex. 

Non-fiction

1. Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People In The World (Allan Lane, 2020) ***** 
2. Francesca Stavrakopoulou - God - An Anatomy (Picador, 2021) ***** 
3. Peter Godfrey-Smith - Metazoa - Animal Minds And The Birth Of Consciousness (William Collins, 2020) ****½ 
4. Francis Fukuyama - Identity - Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (Profile Books, 2019) **** 
5. Michio Kaku - The God Equation - The Quest For A Theory Of Everything (Allen Lane, 2021) **** 
6. Rebecca Wragg Sykes - Kindred - Neanderthal Live, Love, Death And Art (Bloomsbury, 2020) **** 
7. Martin Amis - Inside Story (Jonathan Cape, 2020) **** 
8. Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland (Allan Lane, 2021) **** 
9. Anil Seth - Being You - A New Science Of Consciousness (Faber & Faber, 2021) **** 
10. Sarah Rose Cavanagh - Hivemind - The New Science Of Tribalism in our Divided World (Orion Spring, 2019) *** 
11. Heidi J. Larson - Stuck  "How Vaccine Rumors Start - And Why They Don't Go Away"(Oxford University Press, 2020) ***½ 
12. Ronald F. Inglehart - Cultural Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 2018) ***½ 
13. Brian Clegg - Dark Matter & Dark Energy (Icon Books, 2019) ***

Fiction

1. Salman Rushdie - Quichotte (Penguin, 2019) **** 
2. Mario Vargas Llosa - Harsh Times (Faber, 2021) ***½ 
3. Fiona Mozley - Elmet (John Murray, 2018) ***½ 
4. Kent Haruf - Plainsong (Picador, 1999) *** 
5. Tim Winton - That Eye The Sky (Penguin, 1986) *** 
6. Yasser Abdel Hafez - The Book Of Safety (Hoopoe, 2013) **½ 
7. Julian Barnes - The Only Story (Penguin, 2018) ** 
8. Ocean Vuong - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019) ** 
9. Denis Johnson - The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden (Vintage, 2018) * 

Mario Vargas Llosa - Harsh Times (Faber, 2021) ***½

Last year I almost wrote that it was time for Mario Vargas Llosa (born in 1936) to stop writing, disappointed as I was with "The Neighborhood". 

It's good that he did not stop yet. "Harsh Times" is definitely not among his best novels, but it is much better than most novels being published today. The book describes the first free democratic elections in Guatemala in the early 50s and the machinations by the banana company United Fruit, the big landowners and the United States to topple the regime and to re-install the dictatorship of before. In the full Cold War of the times, the United States and the CIA created the communist presence in Central America (is the subtext in this narrative). Countries and peoples that were opposed to the dictatorship of the big landowners were immediately classified as communist and driven into the hands of the Soviet Union. It shows with lots of details of real historic figures how things happened and with which results. 

Vargas Llosa writes the book from different perspectives, with a strong narrative around 'Miss Guatemala', Marta Borrero, the wife of the President Carlos Castillo Armas, who fled the country after his assasination in 1957. Armas was brought to power in 1954  after an invasion by the "Liberation Army", supported by some neighbouring countries (Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic) and the United States. His democratically elected predecessor President Arbenz, was forced to abdicate, but Castillo Armas brutal regime (that included the exclusion from voting by illiterate people or 2/3 of the population) was also not deliving everything the very rich expected, including his initiative for big companies to pay taxes. 

The other parallel narrative is focused on Johnny Abbes García, the Dominican intelligence officer who sets up the whole murder of Castillo Armas. 

Like in many other novels ("Conversations in the Cathedral"), Vargas Llosa intertwines narrative times and parallel situations, which require attentive reading to keep track of what is happening. The political novel is not new to him, and the novel comes close to "The Feast Of The Goat", which is a real masterpiece. "Harsh Times" does not come close to both these novels, but it is more than worth reading. 

Vargas Llosa gives a different interpretation of what might have happened during the assassination of Castillo Armas. The official viewpoint is that he was shot twice by a leftist guard who committed suicide right after. Vargas Llosa goes for the version that the assassination was orchestrated by the United States and the Dominican Republic. 

The topic of the book is quite timely, because it appears that the foreing policy of the United States has still not learned from the situation, also in recent times, with Afghanistan as the best example. 

Kent Haruf - Plainsong (Picador, 1999) ***

You can only admire the humanity of this book. It describes the lives of several families living in the town of Holt, Colorado. One story is about two boys growing up with their father and increasingly absent mother. The other is about the teenage girl getting pregnant and deciding to keep the baby. 

Haruf tells the story with a lot of compassion, bringing to life the confusion and self-determination of adolescents, not knowing where to go or what to do, but at the same time feeling old enough to make major decisions. 

It is sweet, but not essential. 

Ron Newby - Tribalism - An Existential Threat To Humanity (Lulu, 2020) *

"Tribalism" is a collection of insights on the broad topic of human evolution leading up to today's global challenges. It is bacly written, badly published, possibly not even corrected for mistakes ... and if you want to see the picture that illustrates the text, you get the full URL so you can check yourself on Wikipedia. 

The book goes into a lot of detail on irrelevant facts that have nothing to do with 'tribalism'. I can understand that Newby is shocked in a way by the upcoming nationalism and tribal ingroup behaviour, but his book does not shed light on the problem itself, let alone on the solutions. 

The topic obviously deserves better. 

Salman Rushdie - Quichote (Penguin, 2019) ****

This book by Salman Rushdie is easy to recommend. He takes on the story of Don Quichotte and wonderfully transforms it to the current madness of our world, exemplified (and amplified) by the United States. Apart from the high level of readibility of this novel, there are so many layers in the book that it is also a very intellectual pleasure. Don Quichotte was the first novel in the strictest sense, revealing the stupidity and otherworldly character of medieval chivalric romances. Rushdie takes on this aspect by doing the same with our capitalist world that is dominated by greed and entertainment. 

The main character does not even exist. He is the fictitious character in the book written by one of the other characters in the book: an Indian spy-novel author who is trying to come to terms with his past and family, especially his estranged son and sister. To make matters even more complicated, Quichotte creates his own Sancho Panza as a magic creation of his own imagination, a son that he never had, and amazingly enough, this creation of the imagination starts living his own life in the book, dissociating himself fully from his "father". 

The modern Quichotte is of course no longer influenced by chivalric romances but by trash TV. 

It is a book about everything in our modern world: globalisation, racism, capitalism, religion*, TV, pharmaceuticals and the opioid crisis, nationalism and in the process he shows his credits to world literature: Alice in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Pinocchio, Lolita, ...

The writing is excellent, but even more impressive is the carefully structured fabric of all the different stories gradually unfolding, with situations and dialogues that encourage to keep reading. 

On top of that, the characters are real, rounded characters, with their flaws, their evolution, with challenges to overcome and with gradually new perspectives and emotions on things. Even if the novel is very political and intellectual in its concept, Rushdie also manages to make the emotional connection between characters and reader. 

*"God, Sancho decided, was the Clint Eastwood 'Man With No Name' type. Didn't talk a whole lot, kept his thoughts to himself, and every so often he was the high-plain drifter riding into town chewing on a cigar and sending everybody straight to hell". 

Sarah Rose Cavanagh - Hivemind - The New Science Of Tribalism in our Divided World (Orion Spring, 2019) ***

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a professor of psychology at the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, Massachusetts. 

"Hivemind" explores the concept of how groups can think and act with a collective consciousness, and she starts with the example of the beehive. She then moves on to see which type of 'neural synchrony' also exist in humans, and apparently close friends and romantic lovers show reaction similarities in fMRI scans. 

She takes a look at how in our current society, the traditional cohesion makes place for new human hives, through the use of social media (and its resulting fragmentation, and often radicalisation of viewpoints) and the increase of nationalism and conflict. She ends her book with seven lessons to be learned from bees and to be transposed to our society: and many of them appear to be obvious: use social media for connection, embrace the power of the collective, but temper it with dissent and innovation, regulate your emotions, build more inclusive ingroups (we are more bonobo than chimp), listen to people's stories, build and support architectures of serendipity. 

She brings an interesting perspective on the big debate about nationalism and group mentality.

Francis Fukuyama - Identity - Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (Profile Books, 2019)

World-renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama became famous with his book "The End Of History". In my quest for understanding nationalism and tribal responses to things happening in society, I have read a number of books on the topic, including this one. 

He starts with the ancient greeks, with Plato and Socrates, coining the term "megalothymia", the desire to be recognised as superior, usually used by the elite in predemocratice societies. The term 'isothymia' would be the desire to be recognised as being equal, which has been a noble goal for democratic societies, even if not yet achieved. But people want to have some pride and dignity. The American declaration of independence asserts that "all men are created equal", but the discussion remain about the qualifier "all men". Does that include women, slaves, workers, immigrants, ...

He gives a big picture of how people need identities, but can be part of different groups. He recommends that basic democratic rights and citizenship are based on a "creedal identity", next to a more cultural, ethnic and religious identity. This "creedal" identity is based on the core values of a liberal democracy in terms of pluralism, voting, justice, respect ... The danger is the upcoming nationalist movements in many countries, which may lead to autocracy, dictatorship and intolerance to minorities. It creates a conflict which makes the opposing parties even more strongly convinced of their own identity. He advocates for a new contract between citizens and the state, and this interestingly also includes the secularisation of education. 

Fukuyama is a sharp analyst, and despite his start with the ancient Greeks, his book is full of modern day examples, too many to mention, but relevant to sharpen our own thinking.