The Voynich Manuscript (Yale University Press, 2016) *****

The world is strange and full of coincidences. Earlier this year I read "Solenoid" in which the narrator refers to Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole, who is the author of the novel "The Gadfly", which is an impactful book in the narrator's life (p. 161). Later this year, I read "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, in which the following lines are written: "Mrs Bevel had terrible handwriting". "We call them the Voynich Manuscripts", says the youngest of the three with a mysterious giggle. Librarian jokes." (p. 254). I'm usually a fast reader who does not dwell too long on details such as this one, but somehow it struck a chord in my memory. So my curiosity was raised, and I found this wonderful book with the complete content of "The Voynich Manuscript", with essays by scholars on what has been discovered about it over the centuries. 

It's fascinating and a mystery. The manuscript dates from the early XVth Century, and is written in an unknown language for its entire 230 pages. The book contains many drawings of bathing women, unknown plants, astronomical drawings. The book has circulated through the libraries of Emperors, the Vatican and the polymath Athanasius Kircher. It was bought by the Polish antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1907, whose name remained attached to the manuscript. Today it is kept in the library of Yale University in the United States. 

A fascinating book that is impossible to read, but a pleasure to skim through. Many scholars throughout the centuries have thought that it was written in some kind of code, yet it has not yet revealed any indicators to crack the code. If it is not a code, then who in his right mind would write such a long manuscript in an invented and unreadable language? It sounds totally insane, yet it might be the case. My initial personal interpretation was that the original author deliberately wrote it to deceive people and to create a mystery. There are far too many repetitions of the same words in the text to make it real (as in the example below). The same can be said for the capital letter at the beginning of many words: they are almost always the same, as if all words in this mysterious language would start with only a limited number of letters. Just have a look for yourself on the one page here below. 

The book comes with a number of essays at the back by scholars in various disciplines. Unfortunately, it did not include a linguistic analysis of the frequency of the words, which in my opinion should be the real standard to evaluate whether the writing is fake or not. The reasoning is that a fake language would show anomalies in the frequency of both letters and words that normal texts would not have. 

I did come across some interesting articles in this respect which did not find any abnormalities in the "Voynich" language compared to other existing languages, which should confirm its authenticity as a real (underlying) language (Colin Layfield et al. Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript, Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, 2020, and Montemurro MA, Zanette DH. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLoS One. 2013). 

Anyway, this should not spoil the fun. We love books, and this is a great publication with every single page of the original manuscript reproduced, including the covers and the spine. You won't understand a word of it. 

Enjoy!

Virginie Despantes - Vernon Subutex 3 (Grasset, 2017) ****

I finished the last part of the Vernon Subutex trilogy this summer, in which the situation escalates. The group of homeless people led by Vernon continues to organise 'convergences', evenings of discussion and dance in complete darkness, like rave parties but then so special that you get into a trance without even taking any drugs or alcohol. 

"A présent, il (Vernon) jouit d'un confort qui n'est pas materiel - ils dorment dans des maisons vides, quand il ya des maisons, rarement chauffees, ils s'installent à côté de sources quand il n'y a pas l' eau courante et font des toilettes a l' extérieur par moins sept, ils mangent dans des gamelles - et pourtant ils vivent dans le luxe. Ils sont convaincus de partager une expérience à part, une extra ball que la vie ne leur devait pas, quelque chose d' octroyé, de magique. Et il ne veut pas que ça s'arrête". 

Meanwhile, this sense of bliss is in stark contrast with the lives of some other characters, the vengeful Dopalet who will release a wave of terror on the innocent. He represents the rich French, or the middle class French, who believe they only have rights and no duties, who become increasingly right wing and frustrated with life and society, and who also exemplifies the current waves of hate and anger that ripple through French society, feelings that have become totally acceptable now to articulate, leading even to the joy of ventilating anger and rage.

"Il sent monter en lui une haine abjecte et il est étonné de sa vigueur. Probablement le retour du refoulé ... Le plus gênant, c'est le plaisir qu'il ressent quand cette haine le tra­verse. Il sent qu'il se connecte à une énergie du terroir, qu' on lui a interdite pendant de trop longues décennies - une énergie frarnçaise, patriote, puissante et riche. Il est conscient de la monstruosité de ces pensées. Il a cinquante ans, toute sa vie on lui a répété qu'il ne fallait pas les autoriser".

Like in the previous books, each chapter is written from the perspective of one character, and Despentes describes every feeling, thought and action by this character full of cynicism, self-delusion, sarcasm and toxicity. In a way, it couldn't be more French than this. They curse, they rant, they feel misunderstood, they complain about their fate, about society, about everybody else, about everything actually. 

"Sylvie n' avait jamais organisé de soirée chez elle. Par honte. Parce que c'etait un petit appartement ordinaire, sans aucun cachet, bas de plafond. Parce qu' elle y avait empilé les trois meubles qui tenaient. Que la rue était moche, sans charme, que l' entrée sentait la soupe aux légumes, la nourriture de pauvre. Que le dealeur du sixième bloquait la porte et que les toxicos pissaient contre l' ascenseur. Elle avait laissé entrer Olga qui squattait le sofa. Elle savait qu'Olga ne verrait rien de tout ça. Elle est habituée. A ses yeux, cette merde immonde, c' est la vie normale."

The story itself only transpires through these personal rantings by the characters. Vernon himself is but a character in the background, the red thread around which everything revolves, but who is surprisingly absent as a voice in the story. Despentes is ruthless for her characters but at the same time, she brings them to live like real life persons, with their petty thoughts, the little problems of daily life, while at the same time reflecting on society, or even taking the reader by surprise, or by commenting as an omniscient author, breaking the narrow perspective of the characters depicted. 

"Il vomissaient partout sur le camp, avec une belle énergie de soûlards"

"L'intelligence est utile pour justifier les décisions, après coup. On l'utilise pour se raconter une histoire plausible. On fait semblant, d'y voir clair, d'être cohérent. Mais la vérité, c'est qu'on agit sans réfléchir. C'est tout."

It is also a book of human terror, of brutal violence and the absolute lack of empathy. I thought the second volume of the trilogy was not as good as the first one, and I wasn't sure whether to even start on this one, but it is even better than the first book. It is well-written, with a strong pace, wonderful direct language and her vitriolic pen. 

It is the "condition humaine", it is about the deep anger among so many people that society is unfair with little justice, but especially the other humans, to quote Sartre "L'enfer, c'est les autres". Within this gigantic societal terror, there are some real humans, with good feelings of tenderness and respect, so fragile in this violent environment. 

"Cette merde immonde, c' est la vie normale." (This squalid pile of shit is just normal life).

Siddharta Mukherjee - The Song Of The Cell (Penguin, 2022) ****½

Siddharta Mukherjee is a biologist, physician, researcher (Stanford, Oxford, Harvard) and author of the very popular science books "The Emperor Of All Maladies" (on cancer) and "The Gene". With his latest book - The Song Of The Cell - he takes us along for a journey into the human body to find out how our cells work together to give our body all its functions and possibilities. 

His way of presenting this is fascinating: he does this step by step, each time with some personal stories to illustrate, and always by honouring the researchers who discovered the functions he described, including what they looked like, what they struggled with (or even literally killed each other for), yet all this focused on the incredible variety and functions of cells we have in our bodies, and how they have evolved from their original egg cell to become hyperspecialised in some organ or circulating through the body. Bone cells, blood cells, brain cells, liver cells, pancreatic cells, and the zillion of other cells are presented, and how they interact, how our immune cells do their work (or not) ... and all that without going into too much technical details of biology or biochemistry or even physics. 

His biological overview is also a historical one, showing the immense progress we have made in the last decades, almost exponentially, considering how little we knew a century ago, and how we even knew less for thousands of years before. 

In his exploration of the cells in our body, and the clear explanation of all that is currently known, he leaves a lot of space for the unknown, for the deeper mysteries and areas for further discovery and research. 

Near the end of the book, he gives this summary which describes it well: 

"We are built of uni­tary blocks-extraordinarily diverse in shape, size, and function, but uni­tary nonetheless. 

Why? The answers can only be speculative. Because, in biology, it is easier to evolve complex organisms out of unitary blocks by permuting and combining them into different organ systems, enabling each to have a spe­cialized function while retaining features that are common across all cells (metabolism, waste-disposal, protein synthesis). A heart cell, a neuron, a pancreatic cell, and a kidney cell rely on these commonalties: mitochondria to generate energy, a lipid membrane to define its boundaries, ribosomes to synthesize its proteins, the ER and Golgi to export proteins, membrane­spanning pores to let signals in and out, a nucleus to house its genome. And yet, 'despite the commonalities, they are functionally diverse. A heart cell uses mitochondrial energy to contract and act as a pump. A beta cell in the pancreas uses that energy to synthesize and export the hormone in­sulin. A kidney cell uses membrane-spanning channels to regulate salt. A neuron uses a different set of membrane channels to send signals that en­able sensation, sentience, and consciousness. Think of the number of dif­ferent architectures you can build with a thousand differently shaped Lego blocks. 

Or perhaps we might reframe the answer in evolutionary terms. Recall that unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular organisms-not once, but many independent times. The driving forces that goaded that evolu­tion, we think, were the capacity to escape predation, the ability to compete more effectively for scarce resources, and to conserve energy by specializa­tion and diversification. Unitary blocks-cells-found mechanisms to achieve this specialization and diversification by combining common pro­grams (metabolism, protein synthesis, waste disposal) with specialized pro­grams ( contractility in the case of muscle cells, or insulin-secreting capacity in pancreatic beta cells). Cells coalesced, repurposed, diversified-and con­quered."

 As a physician, he not only talks about how our cells do work, but also what happens when they are out of control, when our immune system starts attacking our own body, when pancreatic cells malfunction and lead to diabetes, how cancer cells never stop growing. He is proud of the achievements, but also humble in his realisation that there is still a gigantic amount of discoveries to be made. 

"When the comprehensive list of genes that drive the growth of cancer cells were first identified in the mid-2000s, there was an exuberance that we had unlocked the key to cures for cancer.  

"You have a leukemia that has mutations in Tet2, DNMT3a, and SF3bl;' I would tell a bewildered patient. I would look at her triumphantly, as if I'd solved the Sunday crossword puzile. 

She would look at me as if I was from Mars. 

And then she would ask the simplest question: "So, does that mean that you know the drugs that are going to cure me?" 

"Yes. Soon;' I would say, with exuberance. For the linear narrative ran thus: isolate the cancer cells, find the altered genes; match it with medicines that target those genes, and kill the cancer without harming the host. 

Not that I believe that he said this to a patient in real life, but it illustrates the realisation that there is still a lot of work to be done. Biology and medical science have barely scratched the surface of what could be achieved. 

The topic of the book is one with many wonders, and the deep insight that our life on earth is truly exceptional and precious, incredibly difficult to understand and incredibly complex and fascinating. Mukherjee is a wonderful guide, and the amazing thing is that he finds the time to even write this kind of book despite all his other work as a physician and top-researcher. We can only be grateful that he shares his knowledge and enthusiasm with us. 

Georgi Gospodinov - Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) ****

The great thing about literature is that it is not bound by any rules (in spite of all the 'creative writing' courses), and that it has the flexibility to ignore even basic concepts such as characters and plot. This may sound like a recipe for failure, but in rare situations also for success. 

Gospodinov invites us - readers - to join him in his almost personal musings on the value of time - past, present and future - and our human interaction with it, both personal and historical. 

From the start he invents his alter ego Gaustine, who works with patients suffering from dementia, and to help them, he re-creates the decade in which the patients feel most comfortable, by redecorating the floor of his dementia center in the style of the fifities, sixties or seventies. His correspondence and meetings with Gaustine allow him to tell the story and the memories of some of the patients. 

One specific one is the former Bulgarian dissident, who has now meetings with the state security agent who surveiled him, to hear how his former life was. Like many of the other stories, Gospodinov takes the opportunity to attack the former communist system, and the attitudes and politics of his country. 

Next to some of the staf in the dementia center, a second big part of the book takes the choice for the ideal decade to a political level, and all European member states organise referendums amon their citizens to have them choose the ideal decade that should be re-created, resulting in some weird choices and the rise of political factions such as the Bulgarians who want to move back to communism and those who want to go back to the times of heroic nationalist uprisings. 

Yet these big schematic and often abstract concepts in the book are just anchor points for the author to muse about time, with some nostalgia about his childhood years, and the material world in which he lived, and taking things to a more philosophical level, allowing himself the freedom - and that's the great thing about literature - to present some absurd and even irrational ideas. 

"Perhaps due to the whole stress of finding a car to drive my mother to the hospi­tal, my father withdrew all of the family savings, took out a loan, and bought a used Warszawa, which dramatically increased the per capita percentage of personal automobiles in the village. The Warszawa was a powerful, corpulent, and booming car, not like that red Pontiac, and according to one neighbor the military kept tabs on them, so in case of a mobilization any Warszawa would be nationalized, some light artillery mounted on the roof, which would automatically turn it into a little tank and the driver into a tank driver. This had my father very worried, since it was already May '68, spring had sprung in Prague, and that very same neighbor (agent or joker, we never did figure that out) said that we'd have to go free our Czech brothers. Free them from who? my father asked naively. What do you mean from who, from their own selves, the neighbor replied and my father could already envision himself set­ting out for Prague in his mobilized Warszawa". 

Or one more excerpt to give you an idea of how reality leads to insightful concepts:  

"I passed through the little park in front of St. Sofia and came out behind the statue of Tsar Samuel that had been erected a few years ago. The sculptor had put two little LED lights in the eyes, to the horror of passersby and cats. Thank God the lights burned out after two months and nobody had bothered to change them. 

If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone. That which destroys it will also protect it. In apathetic and lazy nations, nei­ther kitsch nor evil can win out for long, because they take effort and upkeep. That was my optimistic theory, but a little voice inside my head kept saying: When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard". 

 And one more:

"Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don't clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child. Sud­denly those games of Borges's, which you loved so much in your youth, those doubling games, become real, they happen to you yourself. What was once a metaphor has now become an illness, to turn Sontag on her head. There are no longer any metaphors here, as G. had said, when we met for the first time and discussed the death of mayflies at the end of the day. Here you really are no longer sure which side of history you're on. Here 'I' becomes the most meaningless word, an empty shell that the waves roll along the shore. 

The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave. 

The angel of those who leave and the angel of those who are left - sometimes one and the same ... "

Gospodinov's style is cynical and light at the same time. He can have the gentle phrasing and moments of surprise that remind me of Seebald, or absurd concepts that remind me of Borges, but these are just references. As said, don't expect a novel with characters and a plot, but what you get instead is possibly even more meaningful and entertaining: musings and creative thoughts on inescapable time, the monster that devours humans and civilisations.  

Alejandro Zambra - Bonsai (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022) ****

Bonsai is a wonderful and short story of two young Chilean people, Julio and Emilia, who meet each other, have a relationship, then drift apart again. Emilia dies and Julio lives on. That is already written in the first sentence: 

"In the end she dies and he is alone, although really he had been alone for some years before her death, before Emilia's death."

Julio and Emilia are students of literature, so references abound, especially Proust, but also Mishima, Perec, Carver. The novel is short, but every sentence is a little gem of economic writing: precise, surprising, evocative. 

"One fine or perhaps very bad day, chance led them to the pages of The Book of Fantasy edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. After envisioning crypts and doorless houses, after taking in­Yentory of the traits of unnameable ghosts, they landed on 'Tantalia', a short story by Macedonio Fernandez that affected them deeply. 

'Tantalia' is the tale of a couple who decide to buy a lit­tle plant to keep as a symbol of the love that binds them. Too late, they realize that if the plant dies, the love that binds them will die too. And since the love that binds them is immense and they aren't willing to sacrifice it for anything, they decide to lose the plant amid a crowd of identical plants. Then comes the desolation, the tragedy of knowing that now they can never find it again. "

 It's a story of vulnerability, nostalgia and loss. It is less about love or sentimentality. It's also a story about creating and shaping. Julio wants to write a novel, but ends up by writing a fake translation of a novel by someone else, and their relationship is being shaped like a little bonsai, it is not the real thing - love - but its minor format, easier to deal with, easier to shape. 

"The end of this story should give us hope, but it does not."

The story is precious, like language and words are precious. Zambra demonstrates again that 'less is more'.  

Ian McEwan - Lessons (Jonathan Cape, 2022) ***

In the aftermath of the second world war, Roland Baines is sent to boarding school in England. Despite his young age, he starts a sexual relationship with his much older piano teacher. We follow Baines' throughout his life, his marriage, his son, his wife's disappearance, the relationship with his in-laws, his new partner in life, until his old age. 

His personal life happens against the background of the history of the 20th century - from the Second World War to the Suez and Cuban Missile Crises, from Tchernobyl and the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic and climate change - which shapes Baines' life as much as his own willingness to shape his own life. 

This is a McEwan novel, so almost by definition it is easy to recommend. The language, the style, the composition, the pace ... are all controlled, carefully crafted and precise. 

But maybe the time span is too long, and Baines' life moves too fast to allow for the typical in-depth psychological approach that we are used from other McEwan novels and plays. Even if you can sympathise with the main characters, you do not have the time to grow into them, because they've already stepped up to another phase in their life. 

It's a too distant depiction of the actual traumatising events Roland Baines has been subjected to. 

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer - Alkibiades (De Arbeiderspers, 2023) ***

Dit is een boek waar ik echt naar uitkeek. Als een fan van de Oude Grieken, van het ontstaan van onze democratie en van groot belang voor onze hedendaagse geschiedenis. 

Het was een beetje een ontgoocheling. Niets dan bewondering voor het monikkenwerk van Pfeijffer om dit tijdsgewricht in de Griekse geschiedenis opnieuw tot leven te wekken: de Peloponnesiche Oorlog tussen Sparta en Athene. Het boek is lijvig, zo'n 940 bladzijden waarvan met 140 noten en bronnen, voornamelijk van de Griekse geschiedschrijvers Xenophon en Thucydides. Het moet een gigantische klus geweest zijn om het complexe leven van Alkibiades te reconstrueren uit zoveel oorspronkelijk bronmateriaal. 

Pfeijffer gebruikt ook grotendeels het taalgebruik en de redenaarskunst van die tijd: het boek is door Alkibiades zelf geschreven aan de 'mannen van Athene', en krijgt hierdoor een iets afstandelijker en politieke kleur: hij moet overtuigen. 

Naast de beschrijving van etteloze veldslagen en zeeslagen, worden we ook getracteerd op lange redevoeringen over de verschillende staatsvormen en hun voor- en nadelen, en filosofische bespiegelingen (Alkibiades was een leerling en vriend van Socrates). 

Pfeijffers keuze van benadering en stijl wringt met onze hedendaagse verwachtingen van een hoofdfiguur die worstelt met ethische keuzes, met hoge ambities en een gebrek aan erkenning, met trouw en ontrouw, met verraad en bewust opportunisme, met meteloze rijkdom en plotse berooidheid. Zijn liefde voor zijn eerste vrouw (en haar vroegtijdige dood) en voor zijn kinderen zijn in de roman slechts kleine rimpels in de woeste zee. Waar je als hedendaagse lezer mee in het perspectief en het bewustzijn van de ik-persoon wil duiken en kunnen meeleven met wat hij meemaakt, zowel psychologisch als fysiek, is dit door Pfeijffers benadering van ondergeschikt belang. 

Alkibiades was heel rijk én heel knap. Hij won de Olympische spelen in het wagenrennen. Hij was pleegzoon van Perikles, leerling van Socrates, hij wilde de leider van Athene worden, maar door zijn arrogantie en gebrek aan respect is hij moeten vluchten, en koos hij de kant van aartsvijand Sparta, waarna hij opnieuw op de vlucht mocht en zijn heil zocht bij de Perzische satraap, om dan uiteindelijk toch opnieuw de kant van Athene te kiezen. Hij werd beschouwd als verrader en heiligschenner, maar ook als leidersfiguur en oorlogsheld, als ideoloog en democraat. Doorheen zijn eigen teksten is hij soms nederig en soms niet, maar of dit doorleefde gevoelens zijn of rethorische knepen om zijn luisteraars te overtuigen, weten we niet. Van buitenaf kan je hem best zien als een gefortuneerd opportunist, die geen moer gaf om zijn liefdes, zijn kinderen of zijn land, maar enkel aan zichzelf dacht, en al de rest was hieraan ondergeschikt. 

Die tegenstellingen, en waarschijnlijk ook die interne worsteling had eigenlijk de essentie van de roman kunnen en moeten uitmaken. Het is alsof Pfeijffer zich verliest in eindeloos historisch materiaal, in plaats van te focussen op de essentie van zijn hoofdpersonage. Het herscheppen van de hele context van die tijd, met alle namen, genealogieën, steden, gerechten is fenomenaal, maar het gaat allemaal ten koste van de essentie. 

Het laatste boek, Boek XII, is niet langer door Alkibiades verteld, maar door zijn laatste vrouwelijke partner Timandra, met wie hij was gevlucht en die erbij was toen hij uiteindelijk werd vermoord. Haar verhaal is eigenlijk het beste van alle.

Ik raad iedereen aan om dit boek te lezen, want het is interessant, niet alleen als historisch verslag, maar ook als spiegel voor onze tijd door de hele discussie over het belang en de grenzen van onze democratie, en iets dat zeker tot nadenken stemt. Alleen schiet het literair iets tekort. 

Eric Reinhardt - L' Amour Et Les Forêts (Gallimard, 2014) **

Despite the various awards this novel received (Roman des Etudiants France Culture - Télérama 2015, Prix Renaudots des Lycéens 2014, Prix Roman France Télévisions 2014), I did not like it. It's the story of Bénédicte Ombredanne, a young woman, who is physically abused by her husband. In the first chapter she tells her story to Eric Reinhardt himself, as if the situation is taken as a real life testimony. In the following chapters the perspective and narrator change. 

Even if you sympathise with the main character, and even if you agree that household violence is a societal issue that needs to be addressed, you still need the writing skills to bring it to life and make literature with it, which is not the case here. The story is far too wordy, with too many unnecessary details and descriptions, with a pointless voyeurism of sexuality, and too little stylistic and emotional power. 

Enough said.

Salman Rushdie - Victory City (Jonathan Cape, 2023) ***

Salman Rushdie keeps writing. That is the good news after the attack he suffered last year. And Salman Rushdie keeps re-inventing himself in the process. Fantasy and mythical contexts have always been present in his novels - think of Midnight's Children for instance - but with Victory City he goes all the way into a fantasy world, where magic seeds can create a whole city, where people live and deal with each other like gods, demons and figures from legends. 

Of course the whole story is an allegory for today's world, with its sectarian perspectives, its power-hungry politicians, its bellicose leaders ... The downside of the fantasy characters is that they are too far removed from the real world that it is hard to empathise with any of them. They are puppets in a puppet show, which you watch from a distance, and you are watching a plot that really could go into any direction: with fantasy everything is possible, with no recourse to an internal logic or necessity. 

This is not my cup of tea. It is well written, for sure, but the universe created by Rushdie does not resonate with me. I hope it will resonate with you. 

Mircea Cărtărescu - Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2023) ****½

"Solenoid" is a bizarre book, voluminous, single-voiced, mad, complex, holding the middle between a HP Lovecraft science fiction horror and an existential nightmare. Even if the book is already the author's fifteenth novel, it has a level of naivety and immaturity in its writing (or in the voice of its narrator?) that makes it feel like an authentic, but equally insane endeavour. 

The story is about a Romanian teacher, unhappy in the school where he works, single, tormented and suddenly on the brink of disclosing a technological mystery that is hidden in the dark city of Bucharest. The city stands as a kind of allegory for the world, with the technological mystery under the city potentially referring to the mysteries of the universe. The novel branches out in different directions, like a Pynchon novel (especially "Gravity's Rainbow" comes to mind), with side-stories on the Voynich manuscript, on the Gadfly, on Nicola Tesla and George Boole.

Even if no time is specified, the book describes a dark and somber life under the communist dictatorship of Ceaucescu, in which people are trapped in the city with no hope of escape. Writing and art are a way of escape, of getting out of the darkness, a hidden door to another universe. 

"I would like this text to be that kind of a page, one of the billions of human skins covered by infected, suppurating letters, bound in the book of the horror of living. Anonymous like all the others. Because my anomalies, however unusual they are, do not overshadow the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh. And the one thing I want you to read on my skin, you, who will never read it, is a single cry, repeated page after page: "Leave! Run away! Remember you are not from here!" But I am not writing for someone to read me, I am writing to try to understand what is happening to me, what labyrinth I am in, whose test I am subject to, and how I can answer to get out whole. Writing about my past and my anomalies and my translucid life, which reveals a motionless architecture, I try to make out the rules of this game, to distin­guish the signs, to put them together and to figure out where they are point­ing, so I can go in that direction. No book has any meaning if it is not a Gospel. A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all won­derful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan." (p. 211)

Bucharest stands for human existence, its narrow place in time and space: 

"I live inside my skull, my world extends as far as its porous, yellow walls, and it consists, almost entirely, of a floating Bucharest, carved in there like the temples chiseled into the pink cliffs at Petra. Stuck like a fibroma to my menin­ges, at the far edge of my left temporal lobe, is Voila. The rest is ghostly spec­ulation, the science of reflection and refraction through translucid media. My world is Bucharest, the saddest city on the face of the earth, but at the same time, the only true one. In contrast to all the other cities I've been told exist­although it is absurd to believe in Beirut, where you'll never go-Bucharest is the product of a gigantic mind; it appeared all at once, the result of a sin­gle person's attempt to produce the only city that can say something about humanity. Like Saint Petersburg and Brasilia, Bucharest has no history, it only mimics history. The legendary architect of the city pondered the best way for an urban agglomeration to reflect, most truly and most deeply, humanity's ter­rible fate, the grand tragedy and everlasting disappointment of our tribe. The constructor of Bucharest planned it all as it appears today, with every build­ing, every empty lot, every interior, every twilight reflection in the circular windows in the middle of the timeworn pediments. His genius was to build a city already in ruin, the only city where people should live." (p245)

And the individual's chance of escape is almost impossible: 

"Enfin, I sometimes think that, by digging my escape tunnel for decades on end, throwing behind me, like a metaphysical mole, cubic meters of earth, I will finally reach, like an unhappy and hirsute Abbe Faria, not a godly exterior space under infinite skies, but his cell, just as suffocating, just as infested with the smell of spoiled cabbage, as claustrophobic, and as buried in the core of the giant fortress as my own. There won't be anything we can do, other than hug and cry, and then rot, two skel­etons embracing in decomposed rags, like the dried fly husks and legs in spi­derwebs. All the difference between success and failure, life and art, edifices and ruins, light and dark-annihilated by exterminating time, time that takes no prisoners." (p.434) 

Literature as we know it, is likely to fail, unless it also takes up some other dimension:  

"What I am writ­ing here, evening after evening, in my house in the center of my city, of my uni­verse, of my world, is an anti-book, the forever obscure work of an anti-author. I am no one and I will stay that way, I am alone and there's no cure for being alone"(p 492)

"''Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair. I can't respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable. I don't want to paint miniature Tuileries Gardens on the bulging walls, and I don't want to paint the barrel in the corner some particular shade of pink. I want to see the circus horsewoman as she is: tubercular and flea-in­fested, sleeping with anyone who gives her a glass of absinthe. I want to be able to see the grates on the high transom, through which no sunray falls to destroy the vision. I want to understand my situation lucidly and cynically. We are all prisoners inside multiple concentric prisons. I am the prisoner of my mind, which is the prisoner of my body, which is the prisoner of the world." (p. 546)

But somewhere, somehow, out of this ominous and dreary existence, hope is possible:  

"He will be able to raise me from the dead, because he will see that in the future, I will be raised from the dead by him. For him, my world will be eternally frozen, without freedom of movement or con­science, without free will-the most inhumane of oubliettes a sadistic and perverse demon could imagine. He will see me closed within the amber of my destiny, locked in my own statue, a living mind in an eternally paralyzed body, like those inside a photo or a film where, no matter how often you see them, nothing new ever happens. It is the frightening world you must escape, the tomb where you rot while living, the chrysalis from which you must break out to become a butterfly. 

For this to happen, a crack must appear somewhere in the block of amber that encases you. A defect in the machinery of statistical predictions. The coin falls almost half the time on one side and almost half the time on the other. But it is not a disk with only two sides, rather, it is a very short cylinder, hiding another dimension between its faces, hiding its thickness, slight but not com­pletely negligible. Every few thousand or tens of thousands of tosses, the coin lands on its edge, even on a surface as uniform as endless marble. It stays there, standing up, after it twists and turns a while, clinking against the soft surface, fighting against all the statistical demons. Sometimes, very rarely, you wres­tle with the angel and emerge unscathed. All our hopes hang from this impos­sibility, this crack in the world's enamel, otherwise so unforgivingly uniform. Whenever we flip a coin, we hope it will land on its edge. Irina, like all the other children that come into the world from love and chance, are the cruel, blind coin landing on its edge, impossibilities becoming realities, miracles that prove escape is possible. Encrusted within the amber of the big Irina, little Irina is already there, she already devours her mother from within, like an ich­neumon larva, and, in six months, she will emerge triumphant, tender, and sweet, with shining eyes, leaving big Irina behind like a snake shedding its skin. This is the story of our people: women coming out of women coming out of women coming out of women, in a chain of explosions of life and beauty, but also of endless cruelty. It is an uninterrupted line of goddesses with two faces: one of a child regarding the future, the other of an old woman, wearing a tragic mask, rent and bleeding from parturition, who strains to read our fortune in the stains of our aleatory past." (p.595)

"Solenoid" is a huge book, both voluminous as meaningful. The writing is ambitious, with a very baroque and often bombastic style, but it is sustained, relevant and powerful. It brings literature to another dimension of writing, more than a therapeutic, also an existential necessity, a radical re-invention of the novel. Cărtărescu's single focused writing, the composed voice of his lead charachter is as mad as the world he describes, yet it is also heart-rending and deep. It somehow reduces other novels I read this year into small-town petty endeavours. 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading and allow yourself to be swallowed up by his universe and the mesmerising journey Cărtărescu takes you on. 

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!