Fiction
I must admit that the winner dates from last year, but I hope to be forgiven for this.
Other 4-star novels that did not make the top-10 are by Ian McEwan, Andrew Miller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Christian Kracht.
I also read some older work by W.G. Sebald : The Rings Of Saturn, which should be on many reading lists, and also Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, but they are not so recent.
I still have a pile of books to be read, here next to me, incluing Thomas Pynchon, Olga Ravn, Richard Flannagan, David Szalay, ...Non-Fiction
"The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato's cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. Any upstart version was a relegation to the abject humdrum real. My guess is that if ever the one true scroll were to be found, the excitement would not spread far beyond academia. Compressed diction, challenging imagery, the 'artful braiding within its pentameters of iambs and trochees' - H. Kitchener - and all the other demands of serious poetry would ensure the Corona's death before a larger public.
The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them." (p. 107)
In the second part, the actual situation in 2014 is described. To avoid spoilers, I will not continue writing, yet I think the title already gives some hint that there are things we can now and things we can't. Even in our own time, many people have their little secrets and private friendships and liaisons that nobody knows about, or even ideas and priniciples. How difficult can it be to recreate something that happened more than a century ago.
McEwan is again a master of his trade, creating round characters in complex emotional relations with each other. But the novel is also about literature, about its impact, its quality and relevance, as it is a bleak picture of our human future. To give you an idea, by 2119 the United States is run by Warlords fighting each other, and Nigeria is the economic and technological hot spot of the remaining world.
Happy reading!
The author juxtaposes the lives of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist George-Louis de Buffon, two men who happened to be born in 1707 and competed to write the catalogue of all living things. The Bible mentions 120 animal species, so both authors tried to list animals, plants and other living things. Linnaeus sets his taxonomy in rigorous categories, static or never-chaning in his opinion, whereas Buffon has a more evolutionary perspective, and in this sense a precursor to scientists of the 19th Century like Wallace and Darwin.
Next to the rivalry itself, Roberts also goes into the right level of detail to give the public and especially the official reaction of the church against the work of both men.
"Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon's assertion "that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter." The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls. so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other" (p. 144-145)
"Buffon had his working definition. The essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. "The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial," he concluded. "The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock". In sum, reproduction was proof that
'there was originally but one species, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent diverse changes from the influence of the climate, food, mode of living, epidemical distempers, and the intermixture of individuals ... that at first these alterations were less conspicuous, and confined to individuals; that afterwards, from continued action, they formed specific varieties; that these varieties have been perpetuated from generation to generation" (p.183-184)
"Just as species passed from existence, he concluded that they must come into existence as well, throughout the expanse of time. In 1753, the fourth volume of Histoire Naturelle had contained Buffon's observation that while humans and horses were greatly dissimilar from each other in outward appearances, the horse's hoof contained the same inventory of bones as the human hand. This was a "hidden resemblance" that evaded Linnaeus's systematics entirely, and which to Buffon "seems to indicate that in creating these animals the supreme Being wished to employ one idea, and to vary it at the same time in all possible ways."
Buffon thought that these resemblances were more than coincidences. If his postulated shaping internal matrix (moule intérieur) could account for individual variations within species, might it not also be responsible for even larger, inheritable changes? Such changes might accumulate, to the degree that they added up to an entirely new species.(p. 198)
He was also visionary enough to see that humanity was able to create much and advance technologically, but also that our own destruction and environmental damage was a possible consequence:
"In The Epochs of Nature, the 1774 essay both included in Histoire Naturelle and published as a stand-alone volume, Buffon had argued that human-driven environmental change had proceeded to the point that it represented the "seventh and last epoch, when the power of man has assisted that of Nature." This power, he concluded, was not universally positive. "The most despicable condition of the human species is not that of the savage," he wrote,
but that of those nations that are a quarter policed, which have always been the real curse of human nature, and which civilized peoples still have trouble to contain today. They have, as we have said, ravaged the first happy land, they tore out the seeds of contentment ... Cast your eyes on the annals of all the peoples, you will count there twenty centuries of desolation for a few years of peace and repose". (p.353)
Jason Roberts has not only written a wonderful overview of the biological classification of nature in line with the great encyclopedists of the 18th century, but he has positioned it by showing two entirely different approaches to the subject by two fascinating characters, adding tremendous amounts of facts and events that make this a very readible and entertaining read.
It's not only about two men with differing views, it's about the approach to science in general, and how evidence, facts, methodology and logic are the way forward.
Brilliant!
"All through school I did consistently badly in English language and literature. I never understood the rules. Mrs Roy would slash through my little essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like Horrible. Nonsense. She was right - they were complete and utter rubbish. Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. By mine' I don't mean mother tongue, and by 'language' I don't mean English, Hindi or Malayalam, I mean a writer's language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it.And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the-predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream." (p.145)
"This dread, these shadows of the mind, must thus be swept awayNot by rays of the sun nor by the brilliant beams of day,But by observing Nature and her laws. And this will layThe warp out for us — her first principle: that nothing's broughtForth by any supernatural power out of naught.For certainly all men are in the clutches of a dread -Beholding many things take place in heaven overheadOr here on earth whose causes they can't fathom, they assignThe explanation for these happenings to powers divine.Nothing can be made from nothing - once we see that's so,Already we are on the way to what we want to know:What can things be fashioned from? And how is it, withoutThe machinations of the gods, all things can come about?" (p.10-11)
And one of many passages on the atoms themselves:
"Then furthermore, since when we peer at objects, there must be
An ultimate, smallest point which is the smallest we can see,
So also in things, there is a smallest point beneath our sight,And this contains no parts, being of a stuff so slight,It is the smallest stuff of all. And it can never startTo exist as something separate, because it's always partOf something else, primal and indivisible. The wayMatter is composed is from such parts in tight array.And since they can't exist alone, then they must closely clingTo the atom, and cannot be torn away by anything.Atoms therefore are a pure and simple solidness,Made of those smallest parts cohering tightly in a mass.Atoms aren't assemblages made out of parts; they getTheir might from their eternal singleness. Nature won't letAnything be wrenched from them, or any dwindlings,But keeps them in one piece preserved to be the seeds of things." (p.38)
"As it creeps across the other members. And thus because the spirit
Is divided up and does not, when it leaves the body, clear itAll in one piece, then it is mortal too. If you should thinkThe spirit has the ability to retract itself and shrinkInto a single spot and pull its particles togetherAnd so withdraw sensation from one limb after another,Consider that the place in which the spirit then condensesShould have, by rights, a corresponding heightening of the senses;But seeing that there's no such place, again I must declare,It perishes, being torn to shreds and scattered to the air.And even if, just for the sake of argument, I grantThat spirit can be concentrated (though in truth it can't)In the flesh of those who leave the Light by dying bit by bit -The spirit's mortality is something you must still admit.For whether the spirit perishes abroad, for winds to scatter,Or shrinks up in a ball and goes inert, it does not matter -Either way, sensation fails the man on every side,And everywhere there's less and less life in him to abide." (p. 139)
So mind requires the body - the actual man - in the same way
In order to exist, because the flesh contains the mind -The body being, as it were, a vessel of a kind -Or maybe there's some other metaphor that makes it plainer,Since mind and flesh are closer bound than contents and container. (p. 140)
Highly recommended.
In "Long Distance", Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş brings us thirteen short stories about the lives of educated female expats in various cities in Europe - as she is herself, and so is my daughter-in-law. She writes with a lot of compassion, psychological insights in relationships and tenderness in a style that is both elegant and descriptive. But the problems these educated female expats encounter are almost limited to relational aspects, and this gives the whole book a very 'bourgeois' feel, if I can use this terrible word. I am not moved by their problems and issues and relationships, but possibly that says more about my lack of relating to the characters than to Savaş's writing.
This is not my subject.
They encounter different people, find shelter in an abandoned house, meet a horse that they keep. In the second part of the book we are a few years later when the young adults are working in a factory. Their situation has changed, yet not ideal yet. They are tiny cogs in a capitalist machine.
The novel is not bad, but not very interesting either. We - at least I - are not moved by the protagonists, who are equally victim of the author's obsession with semantics and politics, just cogs in her narrative too. She tries to give her novel a specific voice stylistically, yet it does not add much to the story itself or to the creative entertainment readers expect.
De tekst van de auteur boeit me minder, maar ik denk dat dit nu eenmaal een verplicht nummertje is om al deze werken aan elkaar te praten. Maar het visuele zegt meer dan de woorden.
" And so I stood there as if frozen to the spot, before the little goddess for whom my father had erected a throne. We had gambled away our future before it had even begun. We had cheated this little madonna of her future, too. We were all lying to her. We let her study Hölderlin while we hurled grenades and set all that was beautiful on fire, while the people who were supposed to protect us preyed upon us, and sold freedom for five thousand dollars. I was ashamed, and couldn't bear being exposed to that open, questioning gaze.(p. 293)
"The realization hit me like a bolt of lightning. We weren't going to escape. We were caught between the shooting and the growling, beneath the only cone of light in the city, in a country that didn't exist, not anymore, or not yet, because there was no better version of us, because we were the people we were— with our guns, with the saved-up money in a coat pocket, with our messiah on our breast, with our will to survive, and our fear ofadmitting that we had unlearned our desperately longed-for and hard-won freedom, like a foreign language you've had no opportunity to speak for decades. We were caught in an endless cycle of repetition". (p. 305)
"There is no meaning anywhere, in anything. We're the ones who give meaning to ourselves and the things we do. We give meaning to the person we love." (p. 534)
"In Georgian, it has an idiosyncratic name that always snagged my attention: Jesus's tears. So I was all the more surprised to discover that, in German, this plant is known as Judas penny. I couldn't decide whether to choose the Georgian name or the German. Were they Jesus's tears, shed when he learned that one of his disciples had, as he prophesied, betrayed him, or were they that same disciple's traitorous pieces of silver? Which story most deserves to be told, that of the betrayed, or the betrayer?" (589)
"It was only after voicing this thought that I realized it: maybe that was why I liked to be close to him. I enjoyed the sense that, with him, I had the freedom not to be the Keto I thought Ihad to be. I was free of myself. He saw me as I would like to see myself." (p.535)
"For the first time in Western history, scholars and administrators began to think methodically about the structures and possibilities of their society and its economy without relying on biblical injunctions, their logical arguments by the doctors of the Church, or even the comparatively liberating philosophy of classical antiquity. Instead, they began to form their theories out of perceived current earthly needs such as money for the soldiers, for instance and on the immediate material givens: geographical, demographic, and economic realities. They were leaving the Middle Ages behind and preparing the ground for what would eventually be called the Enlightenment." (p. 131)
"The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: 'As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious." Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it, or whose exceptional personal qualities enabled them to use it well." (p. 134)
"But if all knowledge comes from the senses, what about knowing things that do not reveal themselves to our senses? Impossible, judged the priest, taking sides in this debate. Nothing can be known without sensory experience, not even God. Especially not God. Descartes' attempt to prove, through logic, the existence of a being beyond sensory perception, crumbled under the beam of Gassendi's analysis. You can believe whatever you like, the priest implied, but you can only know something if you can or could experience it through your physical perception." (p. 168)
Leading some pages later to the observation that "Nothing is certain, we have no access to a transcendental truth. We are alone" (p. 173).
The book is extremely well written, and as you might have understood, more about philosophy and the way learned people started looking at nature, than about the science of the Little Ice Age as a natural phenomenon.
"Liberal democracy is not, as many of Hegel's latter-day disciples would have us believe, a necessary consequence of historical progress. Instead, it is a largely accidental, contingent, and vulnerable historical experiment with an open outcome, revealed by recent developments to be in present danger of being subverted, ignored, left to atrophy, or eliminated completely. Democracy was born out ideas first broadly debated during the Little Ice Age. It could easily die or be hollowed out to a mere façade during our own era of climate change, as living conditions for ordinary people become harsher and the very rich take more power for themselves." (p. 283)
The story is simple. A retired husband and his dog are waiting for his wife, after they moved from New York to Lisbon. She's a brain scientist and is still at an international conference. He prepares the flat for her arrival, making sure every aspect of the place is welcoming and familiar. The background is climate change and its devastating results on society. His thoughts are constantly with her. His every move, his every decision is about her imminent arrival. Like climate change itself, you see barely anything happening at all in the novel, but that is - as said - an illusion. It's repetitive, very detailed, very loving, only things are not as they seem. Readers who appreciate W.G. Sebald will also like to read Muñoz Molina.
The novel is also about solitude, memory and perception. The slow pace of the story is highly enjoyable because of Muñoz Molina's precise style and the warmth of the narrator's feelings for his wife. Apart from the terrible happenings in society, he withdraws from the world and its symbolic center - New York - to a place somewhere on the edge - an old neighbourhood in Lisbon. His cocooning in the warmth of marital love is a kind of weapon against the horror of politics and nature. He is waiting in his flat, and switching channels on TV, giving him a high level picture of the outside world.
"Nuclear-armed. satraps, would-be dictators and genociders, purveyors of corruption and hatred, apocalyptic heirs to Lex Luthor and Doctor No. I see images of devastating hurricanes and Pacific islands being swallowed by rising seas. I see a procession of thousands of refugees flooding the highways and overflowing border checkpoints and wanting to reach the United States like a pilgrim nation crossing the desert. I see young deer in the American forests staggering and falling to the ground in agony because each one has its blood sucked from it by more than fifty thousand ticks, which multiply limitlessly now that the winters are not cold enough to wipe them out. I see seabeds depleted by creatures as hardy and fertile as ticks, green crabs, "the cockroaches of the sea," says an announcer who has just come out of the water and taken off his scuba mask. Green crabs are so tough that they can survive up to an hour without oxygen. They are voracious predators that thrive on the same things that harm other species: higher sea temperatures and the lack of oxygen. They open the rocky shells of oysters with their pincers. They work in groups and attack lobsters much larger than themselves. When they've devoured all their prey, they begin to devour each other. I change the channel, and a Turkish news program in English says that the Saudi government assassins in charge of executing the journalist Khashoggi began to cut him up with an electric saw while he was still alive." (p. 266)
The horror of our modern era.
The narrator entertains you - while waiting - about the works in his flat and the handyman Alexis who seems to be everywhere, about other loners in history such as Admiral Byrd who survived alone on the Arctic for six months, or Captain Nemo, or Robinson Crusoe, or even Montaigne in his tower, reading books, about what he understands from her brain science.
I can only encourage readers to keep reading and to stay attentive to what is actually happening. I have read some reviews of this novels, but I cannot divulge what clearly others have missed. I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading. I can only recommend this novel highly, and encourage you to read it till the end.
In the village of Crosby, Maine, some characters that we already know from earlier novels by Elizabeth Strout meet: the author Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge. Lucy features in "My Name Is Lucy Barton" (2016), "Anything Is Possible" (2017), "Oh William!" (2021), "Lucy By the Sea" (2022). Olive Kitteridge features in "Olive Kitteridge" (2008).
The main character is Bob Burgess - who is one of the lead characters in "The Burgess Boys" (2013) - an elderly lawyer who gets involved in defending a man accused of having murdered his mother. Despite this, barely anything happens in the novel. People feel some affection for each other or not, they are afraid to speak up their mind, everything appears to be normal, they talk, they eat, they chat, they visit each other. They are all elderly and their pace is slow. They tell each other stories about other people to fill their days.
The whole point of the story is that "people will be people, with their ups and downs, their good and bad features". And Bob Burgess might be the most boring character ever invented. It is a quaint, petty bourgeois story that quietly babbles along without anything happening to create tension, except for Bob's feeling for Lucy that he never reveals. In the realm of unspoken feelings, Ian McEwan's "Atonement" demonstrates what can be achieved on the subject. This does not even come close in terms of tension or intensity.
Kawakami plays with this far-away vision to create characters living through this period, with either the clones, or the AI-led individuals acting as the narrator of the short stories. These are all somehow connected, something which is gradually revealed as we become more familiar with the names.
The view of the narrators on the human race is not very generous.
"As a species, we simply don't have what it takes, "Jakob had said. His voice sounded strained (...) "The decline of humankind can't be stopped, - not by you, not by me, not by anyone on this planet. None of us has the power", he said. "We were supposed to be so much more than this." (p. 83)
"All right. Well, the humans died out. It was always going to be a matter of time, of course, before they went extinct. (...) The humans kept doing the same things: loving one another, hating one another, fighting one another ... You'd think they might have come up with something else to try, but no matter how many times they went around, they couldn't seem to change course." (p. 252)
Kawakami gives a coherent picture of this distant future and all her stories are quite focused, often unexpected in the sense that you can only figure out gradually what the context is, and to which group the narrator belongs. On the other hand, her literary qualities are too narrow to make the characters come to live. The whole focus of the stories is on the science fiction, not on the emotional power or plot tension as you might expect.
One character - someone living with several identical clones - says
"I have considered the word you use about me: boring. Is it boring not to have a personality? I spent a few hundred years on this question. The results, however, were inconclusive." (p. 231)
And that's a little bit my own appreciation of this novel. It gives an interesting perspective from a very distant future, but it could have done with more of today's literary basics.
The supernatural is eery, but not always malicious. It's a presence, or even just the possibility of a presence. In one story an obese girl gets dumped by her parents in their motherland Argentina - where almost all the stories take place - with her aunt and cousin who are the main characters. The obese girl gets literally touched by ghosts who manage to sexually satisfy her. The imprints of their hands are visible on her skin: "If only you could see it: there are fingers that press her body. There are hands that squeeze her breasts! Invisible hands!"
Yet the style of writing is very direct, very concrete, situational, with a tone of voice by the narrator that is often sarcastic and even cynical, commenting and judging about other people, about injustice and lack of understanding. The "horror" or "ghost stories" description of her art should not a deterrent not to read her work. These are not fantasy novels or horror stories in the traditional sense.
It's really well written, entertaining and surprising. That's all we hope for!
