Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring (Profile Books, 2021) ****

South African neuroscientist Mark Solms takes a deep dive into our consciousness with the aim to determine its mechanism, and especially the relationship between the fysiological workings of our body and the elusive and abstract notion of consciousness. 

Interestingly enough, Solms is willing to go back to Freud and find aspects in his theories that my still be valid today. He also likes the reports of individual patients to present what they feel. It gives a different perspective to the more academic approach of the cognitive scientist or neuroscientist. He mentions the value of Oliver Sack's books and reports of all the individual cases that he worked on: "enlightening insights into neuropsychological disorders from the perspective of being a neurological patient" (p.14 - Solm's emphasis). As a patient advocate, I can only applaud this insight, and it's one that we as patient advocates have been fighting for for years. 

Solms makes the useful distinction between affects, emotions and feelings. 

"Let me be absolutely clear about what I mean by the term 'feeling': I mean that aspect of an emotion (or any affect) that you feel. I mean the feeling itself. If you do not feel something, it is not feeling" (p. 87)" in reaction to psychologists who claim that some feelings may be unconscious. 

Where I agree with him is on this: "The extent to which the empiricist philosophers and their scientific heirs, the behaviourists and cognitive scientists, ignored feeling is astonishing" (p. 88), as I already mentioned in several book reviews on cognitive science. 

"(...) feelings are always conscious, without exception. That is not to say that all the need-regulating mechanisms in the brain are conscious, but that is my point: it makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.   

Different things call for different names, and the difference between felt and unfelt needs makes it necessary to introduce a terminological distinction. 'Needs' are different from 'affects'. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermo­regulation and glucose metabolism. These are called 'vegetative' functions, and with a good reason: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic 'reflex'. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt" (p. 99)

" (...) human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They, too, are ultimately 'error' signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you. 

There is unfortunately no generally agreed upon classification of affects in current neuropsychology. I have drawn a distinction between bodily and emotional affects, but such sharp demarca­tions do not exist in nature. In drawing this line, I am following Jaak Panksepp's taxonomy, which is widely - but not universally - accepted. He further divided bodily affects, of which there are a great variety, into interoceptive ('homeostatic') and exteroceptive ('sensory') subtypes. Hunger and thirst, for example, are homeo­static affects, whereas pain, surprise and disgust are sensory ones.,,. So, to be clear, according to Panksepp there are three types of affect: homeostatic and sensory ones (both of which are bodily) and emotional ones (which involve the body but cannot be described as 'bodily' in any simple sense). Think, for example, of missing your brother, which is an emotional state; it is not bodily in the same way that hunger and pain are" (p. 102)

Solms then resorts to physics in an attempt to solve the 'hard problem', the actual transition between fysiological and biological phenomena into the level of immaterial consciousness, especially the laws of thermodynamics and the minimisation of free energy, with concepts of order and entropy. 

"(...)the great mystery of this conjunction - the mystery of how subjective experience fits into the fabric of the physical universe - could be solved only if we reduce physiological and psychological phenomena alike to their underlying mechanistic causes. These causes were to be revealed at a depth of abstraction that only physics could provide."(p.191)

The whole concept can be quantified by linking laws of probability with the use of energy. You become conscious only of things that deserve to get the energy needed for the active participation of the agent.

He also refers to the fact that the real brain area of consciousness is in our most animal part of the brain, which also drives our basic emotions of fear and lust, of fight or flight. 

" (...) consciousness ultimately arises not in the cortex, the seat of advanced intelligence, but in the more primitive brainstem, where basic emotions begin. The fundamental form of consciousness is not something cognitive, like vision; rather, it is something affective. In that sense, and that sense alone, Chalmers was right to imply that consciousness is not a cognitive function: the primary function of consciousness is not perceiving or remembering or comprehend­ing but feeling. How can the function of feeling go on 'in the dark', without any feeling? We can legitimately ask why vision is accompa­nied by experience. Vision does not require consciousness, and neither does any other cognitive process. But feeling does." (p. 265)

I think Solms goes a little too far in his theories on 'artificial sentience', as if human consciousness could be replicated with the right conditions in a machine. The immense complexity of our human biology can still not be replicated by any mechanical context, not by a long stretch. 

I also miss a little bit the effect of the brain creating a narrative of self, the sentiment of being an individual 'I', by assempling all the different conscious sensory perceptions and emotions into a coherent narrative that reinforces consciousness of the self. 

Solms makes his case very eloquently, using a lot of cross-scientific references and insights that are not always easy to follow for the lay person. But his approach is just a theory, he admits himself in all humility, explicitly saying that he may be wrong, but it's still more than worth to further investigate. Especially his claim that consciousness can be measured both in qualitative and quantitative terms requires some further work. It's one thing to claim it, it's still another to demonstrate it. 

That being said, it's a fascinating approach to the core concepts of the cause of consciousness, and one of the more plausible that I've read about in the last few years. 

Robert K. Massie - Catherine The Great (Head Of Zeus, 2011) ****

Last year I watched the television series "The Great", of which the latest Season 3 has just finished, with Elle Fanning as Catherine The Great, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband Peter. The series is possibly one of the most politically incorrect series ever to appear on television, but among the funniest you are likely to watch. It is presented as "an occasionally true story". Reason enough to check out the real life to find out what's actually true in the series. 

The book "Catherine The Great, Portrait Of A Woman" gives a substantial insight in the life of one of Russia's greatest leaders, a woman who against all odds had the character and the courage to go against the system and introduce some of the basic concepts of the Enlightenment into the Russia of the 18th Century. 

As a 16-year old German princess, she was married to the Peter, the heir to the Russian throne, and selected by Empress Elisabeth and her entourage in order to create a better alliance between Prussia and Russia, with the implicit understanding that she would generate off-spring for the imperial family. 

Her husband Peter was in reality also the somewhat immature and childish character that the series depicts. Their marriage was never consummated because Peter was not sexually interested in Catherine. Both had lovers. Catherine indeed staged a coup against her husband. Intellectually - she was an avid reader - superior to him and most other courtiers, she built alliances with other leaders against Peter. In 1762 she became Empress of Russia, setting up a lot of reforms in education, public health, serfdom, culture and arts. 

She wrote her own epithaph

HERE LIES CATHERINE THE SECOND

Born in Stettin on April 21, 1729.

In the year 1744, she went to Russia to marry Peter III

At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth, and the nation. She neglected nothing in trying to achieve this. Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books. 

When she came to the throne of Russia she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty, and prosperity to her subjects.

She forgave easily and hated no one. She was good­-natured, easy-going, tolerant, understanding, and of a happy disposition. She had a republican spirit and a kind heart. 

She was sociable by nature.

She made many friends.

She took pleasure in her work.

She lved the arts.

The biography itself is phenomenal, as is the Empress herself. One of the major surprises of reading her real life events, is that many of the stories and plots in the television series are not too far from the truth. 

I can recommend both to the readers of this blog.  

Thomas Erikson - Surrounded By Idiots (Penguin, 2019) ***

A gift from my daughter, possibly because I'm always complaining about the idiocy of people in politics, journalism, industry, unions, social services, in shops, public transport, sports, on the street or just anywhere. 

I am not sure if the gesture is an insult, a real attempt to educate me, or a joke, or possibly some of all this together. 

Erikson's book is an approach to classify people based on their temperament, giving colours to the four major categories. In reality all four are present in all of us, but not to the same degree, and the categories may differ depending on the context. 

I am not a behavioural scientist so it's hard to assess the value of Erikson's analysis, but I have come across it during my career in industry, and I am usually red/yellow/blue/green. The fine thing about Erikson's book is that he also describes how each behavioural type is seen by the others. The real value is to understand that you have to communicate in a very different way to people depending on their type. From a management perspective, your team should be in balance, with the different types present. 

No single colour is either positive or negative. They can be both as the picture below describes. 

I can only recommend that you do it for yourself. It will give you great insights into who you are and how you behave towards other people, and how they potentially see you. 

Edmund De Waal - Letters To Camondo (Vintage, 2021) ****

Artist, porcelain potter and author Edmund De Waal is easy to recommend. His style of pottery is as vulnerable and aesthetic and economic as his writings. I truly appreciated his "The Hare With Amber Eyes", in which a collection of Japanese netsuke provide the reason to re-create his family history - the Ephrussi - with the background of European history. 

He uses the same technique in "Letters To Camondo", with the additional challenge of writing letters to the former owner of the house he is visiting. The house - now a museum - belonged to Count Moïse de Camondo, and is a few doors away from the house of the Ephrussi, the forebears of De Waal. De Waal's letters provide short reflections on the objects in the museum, but also of documents he found in the archives in the attic. 

He talks to Camondo as if he has become a friend across the boundaries of time and even death, yet because of the research on the house and its inhabitants, also an intimate new relationship. The fact of writing letters, makes the whole approach more creative, more emotional, and allows to have different letters of different topics, with the family history slowly unwinding in the background. As a reader, you feel like an intruder in other people's lives, yet De Waal's contemporary reflections, his admiration, surprise and philosophical thoughts are possibly closer to the reader of today than to the addressee of the letters, which opens another option of companionship, the reader sides with the writer of the letters, seeing things with the eyes of a visual artist who sees and appreciates things that would escape us (or at least me). Here is one short letter as an example of this. 

"Cher Monsieur, 

A quick note about colour.

It is early summer so I sit on the steps leading down to the garden and this is where I start. 

On colour: vibrant. 

Achille Duchene designs your gardens for you. They are restrained and expensive and so are the colours. Privet is planted on the boundary of the park to hide the park keepers' kiosk. In the autumn of 1913 you ask your gardeners to plant 2,400 different­coloured pansies, tufted pansies, brown wall flowers and double­flowered yellow marigolds, 'Zurich' sage and stock, large-flowered pelargoniums, four different kinds of geranium and eight varieties of begonia. This is a proper parterre: a Persian carpet to catch sight of from the windows of the salon des Huet. 

On colour: pastoral. 

I've moved to the salon des Huet. It is a gorgeous cadenced room constructed to show seven canvases by Jean-Baptiste Huet depicting the love affair of a shepherd and shepherdess. 

There is a particular moment in late afternoon. It is summer and it is the country and it is warm and so the shepherdess has sat down and leans against the declivity of a bank or the stump of a tree and looks up into the branches and the sheep rest too and so does her dog. The light is blue. There are birds that have flown from some service du dejeuner, a dove or two. Her dress falls open of course. The colour of the roses and her mouth. A blue ribbon round her wrist. 

On colour: unchanging. 

I'm finally in the porcelain room. The colour of porcelain stays the same. It will not fade, or suffer from damp. You can break it but you cannot destroy it. That is why the world is full of shards, fragments of colour." 

We follow the history of the jewish family from the late 19th Century to the second World War and beyond, with all the turmoils, tragedies and anti-semitic horror between the 'affaire Dreyfuss' and Nazism.

Like many rich jews at that time, they did everything to become very French, to assimilate, to endorse modern art, to become more French than the French themselves. The melancholy of the visit and the letters is also a long accusation of human nature, that despite all the efforts, despite all the good works and being part of the community, this 'otherness' that is not visible or harmful, will still be a pretext for others to do harm.  

It's a subtle, precious book, written by a person with a great eye for small details, and a great heart for the big picture. 

With thanks to Luc who suggested this book to me. Read his Dutch review on Goodreads. 

Andrew Doig - This Mortal Coil - A History Of Death (Bloomsbury, 2022) ***

Andrew Doig is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Manchester. He studied Natural Science and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Biochemistry at Stanford University Medical School. He became a lecturer in Manchester in 1994, where he has been ever since. In "This Mortal Coil", he gives an overview of how disease resulting in death impacted society throughout the ages. It is not about how people perceived death or how the concept of death changed throughout history. The subtitle would have been more accurate if it had been "The History of Medicine". 

The book's title comes from the famous Hamlet speech of "To Be or Not To Be", “What dreames may come, When we haue shufflel'd off this mortall coile, Must giue vs pawse.”

Doig is a scientist, not a historian, but that shows more in the second part of the book. The first part gives overviews of what people died from, based on the first epidemiological data, however basic they may have been, and with the sometimes impossible challenge to understand what the actual disease was in today's jargon. He also gives an overview of how the science evolved, how disease was looked upon, but also the first breakthroughs in medicine itself. The essence of the following story was known to me, but not with this much detail. 

"In 1796 a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes came to Edward Jenner, a country doctor from Gloucestershire, with a rash on her right hand. Sarah told Jenner that one of her Gloucester cows called Blossom had recently been infected with cowpox. Jenner knew that milkmaids often developed blisters on their hands after working with cow udders that were infected with cowpox. Sarah had most pustules on the part of her hand that handled Blossom's udder.6 It was widely believed that milkmaids never got smallpox due to exposure to cowpox, but Jenner resolved to test the old wives' tale directly. He extracted some pus from the blisters on Sarah's hands, which he proceeded to inject into eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener, giving him a mild case of cowpox. Phipps was then deliberately injected with smallpox on multiple occasions. Fortunately, he was unharmed. 

Jenner followed up this promising result on a hundred other children and himself, again with complete success. In 1798, Jenner published his findings in a book entitled An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolae Vaccinae6 and named his procedure 'vaccination', after the Latin word for cow: vacca."

Vaccination became a major advance in the decrease of mortality, together with better hygiene and sanitation.  

As another striking example of the progress we made, he also explains how the Chamberlen family kept their invention of the forceps a secret, despite the fact that it saved the lives of many babies and their mothers during childbirth. One interesting story about hygiene in this context is the death rate in the two maternities in Vienna in 1846, one led by physicians, the other by midwives. The former had a 10% death rate, the latter only 4%. The explanation was that the physicians training their students also performed autopsies in between deliveries, without washing hands or sterilising equipment. 

He also emphasises other important factors such as nutrition and the necessary intake of nutrients for cognition, growth and avoiding diseases. Many diseases could be prevented and treated globally by very cheap solutions that are currently not high on the public health agenda. This is not only the case in developing countries, but in my personal opinion also very much the case in our current medical practice even in the richest countries. 

He also expands on the value of the scientific method, with James Lind doing control studies to compare the nutrition of sailors who suffered from scurvy and those who didn't, or John Snow who did one of the first epidemiological studies on cholera in London. 

The book ends with the big health challenges of our time, including the latest high level insights into medical science and its possible solutions. 

Doig's book is well-written, educational and entertaining at the same time. 

Jonathan Rauch - The Constitution Of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021) ***

Jonathan Rauch is a senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an American think tank focused on social sciences and economics, and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. 

The topic of the book is of the highest importance today. Society should not be governed by untruths and by ignorance, if if that is today more the rule than the exception. 

Rauch presents two core rules, wich he further elaborates with more distinct categories and examples. 

"Liberal science's distinc­tive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conver­sation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are 

• The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else's fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others' errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.
• The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based."

I do believe that at times he does not go deep enough in his reasoning, especially when knowledge is the basis for policy-making. You need knowledge and expert opinions up to the level when political choices have to made that reside in the ambiguity, uncertainty or need for prioritisation between conflicting choices. A "reality-based community" as he describes it, will still need to make decisions that are beyond truth and knowledge, because only the future can tell wether a decision was right or not, meaning that it needs to measure its impact, and accept to change course if the decisions do not lead to the expected result. In politics today, we rarely go to that level: political parties usually just adapt the narrative. 

I also disagree with his statement that "Some militant secularists insist that faith and science are bound to be enemies: that in effect, the Consitution of Knowledge cannot tolerate rivals. But that rigid view is wrong. The Constituion of Knowledge needs supremacy in the realm of public knowledge, but not in the realm of private belief." I may be a 'militant secularist', but for good reasons. The topic of his book needs to be part of education. Every schoolchild should learn how truth can be achieved, how the scientific method works, how important doubt and uncertainty are, how valuable observation, measurement and course-correction are. These important notions are incompatible with religious education, as I experienced during my years in catholic schools, or what we witness now in schools with religious students who reject the concept of the origin of the universe and evolution. You cannot push religion back to the privacy of the home, when society is still full of it. How can you believe one thing in private, and then defend truth in public? It simply does not work that way: either you stand by your beliefs all the time or are willing to subject everything to rules of knowledge. You cannot have it both ways. 

Otherwise, Rauch's book gives a good overview of what I think most rationalists already think today. He does not come with very new ideas, but he has the merit to have placed them in context. Anything that advocates for truth and knowledge is welcome in our sad times. 

Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards (Swift Press, 2023) ***½

Bret Eaton Ellis does not write much. This is only his only his eighth novel in thirty-seven years, and thirteen years after his previous "Imperial Bedrooms", but it's been worth the wait. Like with his successful "American Psycho", he takes us back to the West Coast in the eighties, telling the story of privileged and wealthy white young people, who lack nothing, who are apparently interested in nothing except sex, drugs and partying. 

The narrator is called 'Bret' who is also trying to become a writer, giving the novel a tinge of reality. And I can assume that many of the partying and relationship issues described as the background of the story are part of Easton Ellis's real experience, which gives the novel a strong realistic value. The story is moved forward by a mysterious killer, the Trawler, who has killed several young women over the past years. 

Bret becomes convinced that the new kid on the block, Robert Mallory, has something to hide, and finds some troubling coincidences between Mallory's presence in LA and the crimes. On the other hand, we also see that Bret is jealous of the new guy, because his handsomeness and easy-going nature appeals to his own closest friends. 

These are seventeen-year-olds with all the means and the hormones and the world opening up for them, with basically nothing else to do than to explore what they can do. This leads to lots of superficial relationships, hard-to-manage emotions, lack of clarity on each other's intentions, betrayals, disappointments and rejections, as well as gay and hetero trials. As a social criticism it is strong. 

This lack of emotional and relational clarity is further exacerbated by the crimes who happen in the background really, and Bret tries to see something coherent in it which he cannot convey to his friends, who do not really see things the same way or believe him. 

The drinks and the drugs make things even more hazy, and seemingly insurmountable. Bret's (and everyone's?) loneliness and sense of despair is high. 

""You don't look like you're having fun," she said. And then, "But you never really do."  

"That's not ... true," I started. "Debbie, I ... "

I don't know what I was going to confess--certainly nothing about her dad, because whatever happened with Terry had nothing to do with her or anything else, and this was true of Ryan Vaughn and Matt Kellner as well. I just wanted to explain myself in some vague way that Debbie Schaffer could grasp and finally understand that I never wanted to hurt her - just like Ryan Vaughn didn't want to hurt me­ - and that I was as lost as anyone she knew and this was fucking me up and that she deserved so much better than this seventeen-year-old zombie who was pretending to be someone he wasn't. But I couldn't form the words because I saw a future that seemed even more deso­late than the present I was trapped in if I admitted any of this."

I know the novel has received mixed reviews, but I'm more on the positive side. Easton Ellis manages to keep up the pace of the story, to re-create a social context that comes to life with vivid dialogues and good descriptions of the psychology of young people. It can also be seen as a quest for and questioning of the truth, and how narratives can distort the truth or create a false truth just by being coherent. 

The novel's ambiguity is also one of its greatest strengths. 

George Saunders - Liberation Day (Bloomsbury, 2022) ***

"Liberation Day" is a collection of short stories, in which Saunders takes the fact of being human to the boundaries of ethics and technology, with a stylistic creativity that gives each story its own voice and level of mystery. 

The title story is about a number of humans who have been re-programmed to become Speakers or Singers for the privileged house owners where they are tied to the wall in the entertainment room. Even if fully programmed - including boundless docility and admiration for their owners - the narrator still manages to have some basic conscious reflections - including on the concept of sexual arousal. The story is weird, the context extreme, the reality a far-away possibility of shaping human behaviour to the need and desires of 'the few'. 

In another story - Elliott Spencer - the language is limited to words, simple thoughts and concept that gradually turn into more mature sentences as the subjects in the story get better educated. It requires effort - and sometimes patience - from the reader to understand what is happening, with the unusual language slowly becoming the idiom that programmes the reader as well. 

Not everything works, but that does not really matter. These are exercises in style, trying new linguistic forms to suit the stories' science-fiction like situations, but this futuristic vision has less to do with technology or science than with human nature, its absurd existence, its unpredictable and predictable actions. 

It doesn't come close in quality to "Lincoln In The Bardo", but readers who are in for something new, will certainly enjoy this. 

Colm Tóibín - The Magician (Penguin, 2021) **½

Most novels I've read by Tóibín get their quality from the author's wonderful capacity of describing subtle emotional and relational developments in the lead characters, as in "The Testament Of Mary", "Brooklyn" or "Nora Webster". In "The Magician", his approach is different. He tells the story of the life of Thomas Mann, the German Nobel Prize Winner of literature and author of iconic novels such as "Death in Venice", "The Magic Mountain" and "The Buddenbrooks", but instead of using his successful stylistic narrator skills, Tóibín takes a more distant approach, describing and fictionalising the life of his main character. 

But that's a wrong characterisation: Thomas Mann is barely present in the novel, as if he's the absent person in his own biography. The various members of his family are far more present than Mann himself: his brother Heinrich, his mother Julia, his wife Katia, his wife's brother Klaus, his children Erika and Klaus. The background of the rise of nazism in Germany, the wars, the life and power of the elites and the rich are well depicted and give a great view of the context at that time, including the differences in political opinions within the same family. While brother Heinrich takes a very clear communist viewpoint, Thomas again is more reserved, apparently afraid to pronounce himself, more protective of his family and his literature. 

It is of course the choice of any author to switch styles, tone and approach with each novel. The distant style used here somehow blocked my own entry in the novel as a reader: I was watching it from the outside, instead of living it from the inside. And I doubt that this could have the idea from the beginning. 

Tim Winton - The Shepherd's Hut (Picador, 2018) ****

 

I think this is the sixth novel I read by Tim Winton and it's an easy one to recommend. 

It's the story of an adolescent who runs away from home after both his parents died, to find refuge in the outback, and encountering a kind of elderly hermit living in a shack in the middle of nowhere. Both men have nowhere to go, and secrets they do not wish to share. 

The novel brings to live the hesitant exploration of human nature through two individuals who met by chance. As usual, Winton's style and tone are amazing: told in the language of the boy, direct, like a long internal monologue, describing with feeling and anger every single thing he does or sees or is the victim of. This lyrical power is sustained throughout the novel, and drives the limited action. Nothing much happens and yet it is a page-turner. 

"Mum said school mighta been different for me if I only give a damn. Maybe it was wasted on me like the teachers said. I didn't have any philosophy in me then, so I didn't know what to listen for .. Most of it was pointless crap. Don't reckon I met a single wise person all the years I stayed but like I say, I wasn't paying close attention. And the thing is I miss it a bit. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say. I didn't know what I was, what I could do. Except the lame things I did do. But shit was always being done to me, every single day, and sooner or later you figure you should be the one doing unto others. So by Year Four kids were scared of me. And I spose I liked that. By the time I got to Dally District High they thought I was a psycho. Which suited me fine." 

Winton's main characters are usually young people with limited power and in vulnerable situations, struggling to find their place in their community and the world.  The world is a harsh and cruel place, but with space for feelings, and deep spiritual questions too. 

Recommended!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In spite of his excellence

If he would see a penis in a palm tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books of the Year 2022

I read 33 books this year, some astonishingly good, with a very clear winner in the "Fiction" list, Olga Tokarczuk's "The Books Of Jacob", an absolute masterpiece of modern literature, one that is beyond category and a must-read. The winner in the non-fiction list Joseph Henrich's "The Secret Of Our Success", a fascinating book about the interaction between nature and culture, and how the distinction has become irrelevant in humans because of their mutual influence. The fiction list contains for once some more French books, but that is the result of the holidays in France. 

Not all the books on the list date from this year, of course, as we did some catch-up reading too. 

Fiction

1. Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob *****
2. Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World *****
3. Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain ****½
4. Damon Galgut - The Promise ****
5. Fernanda Melchior - Paradais ****
6. HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness ****
7. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes ****
8. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme ****
9. Hervé Le Tellier - L'Anomalie ****
10. Georges Perec - Les Revenentes ***½

Non-Fiction

1. Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success *****
2. Nicholas A. Christakis - Blueprint - The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society ****½
3. Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail  ****½
4. David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything ****½
5. Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife ****
6. Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist ****
7. Steven Pinker - Rationality ***½
8. Oded Galor - The Journey Of Humanity ***½
9. Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren ***
10. Russell Blackford - The Tyranny Of Opinion ***

Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail (Profile Books, 2012) ****

"Why Nations Fail" is "brilliant in its simplicity" we read on the cover, and in a way this is a good description of this excellent book, even if this 500-page book is more complex and richer than the quote might suggest. 

Acemoglu is Professor of Economics at MIT, and James Robinson a Political Scientist and Economist at Harvard University. 

Their core message is simple: 'inclusive institutions' such as democracy and citizen participation in decision-making lead to prosperity, whereas 'extractive institutions' in which the elites rule with autocracy, poverty is the eventual result. They give good examples of situations where culture is identical, but the political organisation of the country leads to different outcomes. One is the town of Nogales, divided by the border between Mexico and the United States, which results in a totally different level of prosperity for its inhabitants on both sides. Another example is the divide between North-Korea and South-Korea, in which the former is led with dictatorial rule, and where, despite the ruler's rhetoric, only the elites experience prosperity, and in which the former, thanks to its democratic institutions, have economic growth, creative enterpreneurship, global trade and prosperity. 

Yet other factors play a role too, such as centralised government which can ensure longer term stability, rule of law and other aspects of organising society. In fact, you need both to be really prosperous, as history shows. He gives examples of highly succesful increases in production when centralised government takes over (as with the Bushong in pre-colonial Congo or with the early Soviet-Union), but this is doomed to fail in the context of an 'extractive economy', where the wealth is distributed very unequally. 

They counter the wrong assumption that economic wealth is the result of cultural, geographic, or meterological differences. 

Both authors give a myriad of examples throughout history - the importance of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution - and geographically, with a lot of attention to the United Kingdom, but also covering the entire globe, with attention to South-America, the Middle-East, Africa and Asia. 

Another aspect is the need for 'creative destruction', a term once coined by Joseph Shumpeter, in order to make change possible. You need different voices, different perspectives, and especially new and disruptive technologies to change the current state. 

What both authors write does not come as a real surprise. We all know that people are better of in democracies than in dicatorships. We also see that wealth is better distributed in democracies than in autocratic states. The value of the book is that they provide the framework for it, and with lots of evidence. Now that the patterns are clear, the only depressing conclusion is - of course - that there is no clear recipe to move from an 'extractive' situation, where the elite oppress the masses, and possess all the wealth of the country, to an 'inclusive' state, where democracy and rule-of-law reign. 

The book is not really an eye-opener, but it substantiates what many already assumed. We can only with that its content can be read more widely across the world, and do its tiny part in educating people to fight autocratic and theocratic regimes, allowing people to choose their own destiny. 

HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness (Design Studio Press, 2020) ****

Despite having a - very selective - interest in good science fiction and horror movies, I never read anything by HP Lovecraft, one of the fathers of science fiction horror writing. The story "On The Mountains Of Madness" dates back to 1931, and gives the report by one of the scientists participating in an antarctic expedition, and discovering an ancient civilization that actually largely predates even mammal evolution. 

The novella is reprinted here in its full length - this is not really a graphic novel in the strictest sense - and illustrated with the spectacular drawings by French artist François Baranger, who is a concept designer for movies and games. When my wife first saw the drawings from a distance, she thought they were photographs, and I think that is not only because of the detail of the drawings, but also because of the amazing play with light, darkness and shadows. 

It reflects the story well in that respect. The Antarctic expedition ventures in this world of light with ice and snow landscapes with a sun that does not set, with a scientific mindset that is all for observation and academic clarity and that is suddenly confronted with the impossible, with the irrational, with darkness, mystery, evil and death. 

As said, it is the first time I read anything by Lovecraft and I understand now what the attraction is. The novella is written in the first person, as a journal or report of a scientific expedition that nobody will believe. Lovecraft's style is at the same time full of scientific facts, and minute observations (biology, physics, meteorology, archeology, architecture, ...) while at the same time full of subjective emotions about what he and his colleagues are witnessing, ranging from admiration, wonder, suprise, dread and existential angst. The ancient creatures they encounter are referenced from the mythology that Lovecraft created in other novels before this one. 

The most stunning feature of his writing is his capacity to create a universe without so much as a plot. Nothing much happens, apart from encountering something that defies reason. At the same time, your eyes can relish the fantastic drawings, whose lines of inspiration are each time written in italic in the text, so that you know what it actually refers to (although that is not so difficult to assess). 

Both the writing and the illustrations together make this an unforgettable reading experience. 

Fernanda Melchior - Paradais (Fitzcarraldo, 2022) ****

One more success novel published by Fitzcarraldo, and their blue covers come as a quality label for good literature. 

"Paradais" by Fernanda Melchior clearly fits in this list. It is the story of two boys, one rich and one poor. The former, Franco or Fatboy, lives in a luxury gated compound with shared swimming pool, and is very much in love with the wife of the neighbours, and the latter, Polo, is the pool boy and gardener's assistant. Both live in completely different worlds, but they share the adolescent's anger, uncertainty, lust and black-and-white vision of the world. They want to move forward, have their endeavours rewarded, to be taken seriously, to be men, to be recognised, to do meaningful things. In their free time, they make schemes to achieve their material goals: sex and money, inspired by the alcohol they steal from Fatboy's family. 

Fernanda Melchior deals with her story brilliantly. Because you can anticipate how it is going to end, like any Greek tragedy, but still the story is captivating, and despite the evil intents, despite the foul language and brutal fantasies of the two boys, you empathise with them, with their situation, their rejection, and you want them somehow to succeed, even if you know that's impossible, and even if you know that it would be morally rejectable. 

She writes like the boys testoron rages through their bodies, full of energy, with no pause, with no moment of relief, just the endless need to move the narrative forward through intense dialogues, raging interior monologues complaining about the cruelty of other people and the world, and fantasies, dreams and more fantasies. 

Judge for yourself: 

"That was the kind of grief Polo woke up to each day, before the sun had even appeared at the window, just as the neighbour's cockerel was clearing its throat to com­ pete with his mother's phone alarm. Polo would grumble and toss and turn on the floor, on the sweat-soaked petate, his mouth dry, his eyes glued together with sleep and his temples throbbing with the headache that now never went away, no matter how many Alka-Seltzers he drank. He would aim to get up and out as early as he could - Lord knows he tried to avoid his mother's sermons - but she al­ ways got their first, when he was still on the floor battling his exhaustion, and she would launch straight in: wasn't he ashamed, crawling home in the middle of the night and creeping in to his own house like a thief, and all for a piss­ up! Don't lie to me, you little creep, don't you dare lie to your mother! I can smell the stench of booze on you from here, you useless drunk! It's only Wednesday and you're already out getting leathered, just look at the state of your face. Seriously, who do you think you are, Leopoldo? Who the hell do you think you are, you little shit?
There wasn't a day Polo didn't ask himself the same thing, every morning, with a bread roll and a mug of luke­ warm coffee in his belly, which, on a good day, he would manage to reach the bridge without chucking up, his overalls laundered but still grubby thanks to Zorayda's in­ept hands, his face dripping with sweat and the salty wind spray that he pedalled against on his way to Paradais. Who was he, really? A little shit, his mother would say. But her little shit, at the end of the day, the 'little miracle' of the girl who got shafted yet still worked her way up in the world. He had her thick lips, the same amber eyes and wiry hair that went coppery in the sun's rays, and now he too was at the service of the same family of sharks. The muchacho as the residents called him, that's who he was: the lawn waterer, the tree pruner, the turd scooper, the car washer. the chump who appeared the second those assholes whis­ tled for him: the dogsbody. How had he sunk so low? he asked himself, without an answer. And how the fuck was he going to get out of there? Again, he didn't know. He had nothing, not a single thing to call his own. Even his salary went straight into his mother's pocket, every last peso, exactly as she'd dictated: Polo owed her, to make up for his colossal fuck-up, the opportunity he'd gone and pissed down the drain. Now it was his turn to work like a bitch, to follow Urquiza's ridiculous orders; his turn to sleep on the floor like a filthy animal while the money he earned went towards paying off his mother's countless debts and feeding the baby growing inside Zorayda's hor­ rendous belly, while that slob spent her days lounging on the rocking chair, watching cartoons - with the fan on, of course - instead of taking care of the house and cooking their meals, as they'd agreed. From the start he'd tried to reason with his mother, make her see how unfair it all was: first, it wasn't his fault his cousin couldn't keep her legs shut. Why did he have to give her his bed and sleep on the floor, on the hard concrete floor with only a thin petate under his aching body and a rolled up old t-shirt for a pillow? Why didn't they send Zorayda packing instead? She was a total pain in the ass, a freeloader, a conniving bitch who felt no shame waddling around town with a gut like a pregnant cow as if she'd been blessed with that 'little miracle' who could belong to just about any guy in town, genuinely any of them; if only Polo's mother would listen to the shit people said about her, how the little prick tease would fool around with the bus drivers, the delivery guys who stopped by Dona Pacha's store on Tuesdays, the loan sharks who passed through town on their way to Pado de Toro, and even with the boys who delivered tortillas on their mopeds, there wasn't a single one of them she hadn't rolled about with on the mucky floors of truck cabins, or on the back seats of cars, or standing bent over like a bitch in heat behind the storage rooms and animal sheds, or wherever the urge happened to take her. Why didn't his mother leave her to sort out her own shit? The little skank had asked for it. Why didn't she send Zorayda back to the aunts in Mina, let them clean up her mess? But his mother wouldn't hear it. (p. 41-42)

Every sentence is full of rebellious anger, of revolt, of lack of perspective, lack of understanding and dreams, opportunities, and fantasies being blocked and stopped. 

It's not a long story, only 118 pages in this edition, but a real joy to read. 

Her longer novel "Hurricane Season" is said to be even better. Can't wait to get my copy of this one too. 

Ottessa Moshfegh - Lapvona (Jonathan Cape, 2022) **½

I liked the basic storyline when I read the inside cover of the book. I like its cover art and its publishing quality. 

The story takes place in medieval times, in a fictive town. This level of abstraction brings us to a more symbolic plane in which the events could reflect today's society. And to a larg extent it is. The lead character, Marek, is a deformed boy who lives with his father outside the borders of the town, but with some contacts within the town, especially the son of the lord of the castle, Villiam, who is a ruthless ruler who couldn't care less about the drought that hits the land and impoverishes all his serfs, and who is aided by Barnabas, the priest. 

Religion and power rule, and the characters in the book try to live despite this unholy alliance. Despite some strange plot twists, the characters remain rather flat, with little opportunity to really feel empathy with them. They act, they do things, but you never really get under their skin, as is often the case in literature from the Middle Ages, but then at least the author could have used more stylistical technique to recreate the literary context about which she writes, but she doesn't. I will not disclose the ending, in case you might still be interested to read the book, but that too is disappointing. None of the characters are interesting, the story meanders too much, and there is not much joy to be had from the writing itself, and in the end, what is the moral of the tale ... I am not sure there is one. 

Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren (Omniboek, 2021) ***

 It's interesting to understand the quirks of history. Why did some people and tribes continue to exist, and why did others vanish? And how did they vanish. In English the book is called "Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World". It's furthermore a nice publication, that I could not resist to buy when I saw it in the bookstore. There are full-page maps for each tribe, with nice pictures of archeological finds and other visuals. 

The book covers a wide time span, from 2700 BCE to 550 CE, and includes overview of fourty different tribes, some of which are known, such as the Amorites, or Hethites, the Philistines or the Medes, some are less known, such as the Bactrians or the Catuvellauni. 

It's more a reference manual than a book you would actually read from A to Z even if I did that. The summary is short for each tribe, but well documented. Although I think it is bizarre that often the Bible is mentioned as the reference, without actually emphasising that the Bible is not a reliable source of historic information, as if it was one more factual source next to academic archeological or historical findings. 

That being said, it is instructive and broadens our perpsective on history. 

Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular (Vintage, 2021) ***½

Any new Murakami book is a treat, even the ones that are less ambitious than his greater works, such as this one, a collection of eight short stories bundled together with no intrinsic relationship, except that all stories are written in the first person singular, and possibly Murakami's voice is more personal and the topics closer to his real life, or at least they could be. 

Like in all Murakami stories, something unusual happens to ordinary people in ordinary settings. The atmosphere is friendly, intimate even, but alienating. For instance, in "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova", the narrator explains that - in his youth - he wrote a review of a Charlie Parker album that did not exist. Until so many years later he finds a copy of exactly that album in a jazz record shop in New York. Murakami's love for music, and then especially jazz and classical music is omnipresent in the book, and one story is about a Beatles album. 

The weirdest story is possibly about a speaking monkey (no spoiler alert - the story basically begins with this), and even if this is highly unusual, as the narrator will tell you, it also appears not to be surprising or disturbing either. The narrator and the monkey have long conversations. The actual unexpected event happens later in the story (and I won't tell you that). 

It is fun, it is deep too, despite the mundane and ordinary contexts. The stories are about 'what makes life' and 'what choices do I make in life' and 'who am I actually in this weird place'. Murakami's light and elegant style, his repetitive presentations of options to be decided, are actual challenges for the rationality of our thoughts, about probabilities and plausible things. He makes us wonder why things - and people and animals - are what the are and what they might mean to us (or him, as an individual). And by doing this, he is also sufficiently the literary craftsman to make it captivating, to keep the attention going, putting the reader for the dilemma to speed up things to know what's going to happen next, or to read very slowly and relish his beautiful dialogues and sentences. 

It is surely not one of his major works, more a kind of in-between publication, but any Murakami fan will enjoy this one too. 

Allaa As Aswany - The Yacoubian Building (Harper, 2007) ***

The Egyptian author, Allaa As Aswany, is an dentist by training, educated in Chicago where he lived for seventeen years, is possibly better known as a political commentator and founder of a political party. His articles have appeared in numerous international newspapers. 

In "The Yacoubian Building", he describes Egyptian society in a form of satire. All characters live in this building - that actually exists on 34, Talaat Harb Street in Cairo - and have completely different backgrounds and levels of wealth. There are servants, officers, an editor-in-chief of a French-speaking newspaper, a very wealthy business man, a lawyer, a poor young woman, a wealthy ageing playboy and his dominant sister, the son of the doorkeeper, a Christian shirtmaker, the corrupt secretary of the Patriotic Party. 

All the characters interact because they live or work in the same building (some in luxurious appartments, some on sheds on the roof). The characters are relatively 'flat' in the sense that they do not really evolve in the course of the novel, and many of them are of course caricatures of the groups they represent. 

The novel itself is not of high literary value in my humble opinion, but its real power lies in As Aswany's courage to address topics are that are rarely addressed in Egyptian or even Arabic literature: sexual abuse of women and homosexuality. He also tackles the hypocrisy of those with power and education, and his compassion for the people with limited perspectives on life are not new to Arabic literature, yet they reach a quite essential level in "The Yacoubian Building". 

In short, it's interesting but not great. I can applaud his courage to denounce social injustice. 

If you have not read anything by an Egyptian author, I can recommend to start with Naguib Mahfouz and Nawal El Sadawi. 

Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World (Pushkin, 2019) *****

Please read this: 

"In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. "An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane," a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war."

 Or this: 

"The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, and who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shock waves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Like the night gardener, when Grothendieck turned forty, he left his house, his family and his friends, and lived like a monk, holed up in the Pyrenees. It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup."

Two random pieces of text, extracts of this amazing book - part literature, part science, part biography, part history - that brings us five stories - five texts if you want - on topics that are related to science. Labatut's texts are little symphonies of factoids, linked together in an incredibly powerful prose, balanced, surprising, disciplined and at the same time luxurious and fast. 

The first extract above comes from the first story, "Prussian Blue", the history of cyanide. German scientist Fritz Haber managed to extract nitrogen from the air, which was used afterwards on a commercial scale as fertiliser, savings millions of lives, yet he also upgraded it to develop Zyklon B, the gas that killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. The first story is also 99% fact according to the author. 

As we move forward, the reality of the historical figures become more literary, with fiction starting to creep in, in the form of dreams, unwritten thoughts by the scientists, dialogues that never happened. 

The other stories are all about the real boundaries of science, the tipping point of understanding, but also the tipping point of some dark and unfathomable danger that could wipe out mankind. 

In the second story, the mathematician and soldier Karl Schwarzschild solved the field equations in the theory of general relativity in 1915, and writes this to Albert Einstein from the front, but when Einstein answers, the soldier is already dead.

The third story is about the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and the German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. The mathematic challenges and the discoveries by both men of course elude me, as they do with possibly 99% of all mathematicians, but the story is about what Grothendieck discovered at the heart of mathematics and never wanted to discuss, terrified by the horrors his findings might cause.

Of course we also have the fight between Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg over the right perspective on quantum physics. They too fundamentally changed our view of reality, while at the same time also providing the physical insights that led to nuclear weapons.

Labatut said in an interview that "This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits". 

This is a work of fiction, but based on some of the most advanced and terrifying scientific discoveries. 

Labatut's prose and writing skills make this an exceptional reading experience. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough.