Edward Gorey - The Gashlycrumb Tinies (Harper Collins, 1991) ****

As a grandfather, my worst nightmare is that something might happen to my innocent grandchildren, conscious of the many perils, dangers, risks and other hazards they can be exposed to, or unwittingly venture into. 

American illustrator and author Edward Gorey published the alphabet book on this very subject, with an untimely end to each child's life for each letter of the alphabet. It is morbid, it is sick, yet it is also funny, and definitely not a children's book. Here are some examples. 

For every letter, a child becomes the victim of life. The text is short, and its steady rhythm page after page reads like an inevitability of fate. The black ink drawings are equally exquisite and powerful. 

It dates from the sixties, and in its brutal and sarcastic dark humour is much ahead of its time, when everything appeared to be basking in sunlight. Life is brutal. Let's face reality. 

Alvaro Enrigue - Now I Surrender (Penguin Random House, 2026) *****

This is without a doubt one of my favourite books of the year. I loved last year's "I Dream Of Empires" , a novel about the Aztec empire in Mexico, with its fascinating mix of history and fantasy, a recipe that Enrigue further exploits and expands in "Now I Surrender", the title referring to the the words spoken by Apache warrior Geronimo before he accepted his captivity. 

The story starts with a woman fleeing the raid on the ranch where she lives, and the ensuing posse trying to find her back and return her to civilisation. It develops as part Western and real history. Many of the characters are fictional, yet when reading with the internet nearby, many of the characters also appear to be real historic figures, and the entire background is real: the battle between Mexico and the United States for the geography of Sonora, Chihuaha, Arizona and New Mexico. 

In the more Western style (or spagetti western, or even in the vein of Thomas Pynchon): 

"He was therefore unprepared for the vision he encountered before dawn on the following day: a nun in habit, veil, and rosary, wrapped in a swashbuckler's cape out of Spanish farce and draped in a car­tridge belt with a massive U.S.-made revolver hanging at her left hip. I'm left-handed, don't you know, mi general, she said when she saw Zuloaga's jaw drop. The officer just nodded, thinking: pinche god­damned Chihuahua, as he clapped his hat back on his head, mur­muring that she could call him José Maria. Perfect, she said, and you can call me Sister or Elvis, my stage name." (p. 63)

"They made a timid fire while it was still light. On the prairie, any fire that hadn't burned down to embers by night was a call to attack. Elvira and El Marquez sang a duet as Corredor cooked up a calabaza stew. Watching them from a safe distance, Zuloaga thought they might be the most ridiculous band of irregulars in the entire history of the state of Chihuahua, but they had an impressive ability to enjoy whatever came along. Maybe that would be the key to getting through this with minimal losses." (p.93)

And this against a historical backdrop of real people and real authors, including this unlikely John Bourke, who indeed published a book on poop in different cultures! 

"JOHN G. BOURKE, OF THE 3RD CAVALRY, Fort Craig, New Mexico, wasn't a bad guy. Born in Philadelphia of Irish immigrants, he left home at sixteen to enlist in the Northern Army during the Civil War be-cause he hated slavery. When the war was over, he asked to be posted to the Southwest: its long history and native culture were of genuine interest to him. He reached the rank of captain under the command of General George Crook in the 1870s. Among other roles, he served as press attaché for the 3rd Cavalry. He could write very well. Bourke was present during the Sierra Madre campaign ending with Geronimo's surrender at Canon de los Embudos. In addition to being a competent soldier and a compulsive diarist, he was an amateur ethnologist, sometimes a great one. He wrote a humorless but brilliant volume on poop and pee called 'Scatologic Rites of All Nations'.  

Lately, I've been translating a few chapters of his notes on George Crook's 1883 campaign, published by the University of Nebraska as 'An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre'. 

About the Chiricahuas, for example, he has this to say: "An artist, possibly, would object to many of them as undersized, but in all other respects they would satisfy every requirement of anatomical criticism. Their chests were broad, deep, and full; shoulders perfectly straight; limbs well-proportioned, strong, and muscular, without a suggestion of undue heaviness; hands and feet small and tapered but wiry; heads well-shaped, and countenances often lit up with a pleasant, good­natured expression, which would be more constant, perhaps, were it not for the savage, untamed cast imparted by the loose, disheveled gypsy locks of raven black, held away from the face by a broad, flat band of scarlet cloth. Their eyes were bright, clear, and bold, fre­quently expressive of the greatest good humor and satisfaction."  

Bourke's admiration for the Apaches was monolithically solid, but his manner of describing the Mexicans in his diary - he speaks of my people as a nation of miserable beasts - is particularly noxious and grating. 

I won't prolong the life of his prejudices by transporting them into these notes, but I wonder whether prejudices are unavoidable no mat­ter how we train our sensibilities. I wonder whether I myself am cruel in my descriptions of white Protestants. To lift up one thing is to tear down another, and one must remain vigilant, I suppose. 

Bourke wasn't a terrible person. Probably he was simply trying· to justify to himself his participation in an illegal military operation in Mexico. (p. 68)

Enrigue is on the side of justice and respect. He shows that there is a totally different perspective - from the Mexican and Apache side - on the conquest of these territories, and on the extermination of the native Americans than the ones described in most history books. Despite the fun and the exaggerations, his story is basically a very sad one, with lots of cruelties on all the different sides, with loyalties and betrayals, agreements and deceptions, including within the same camp, where the ones who achieved results were not actually credited for it. 

"At the ranch, Gatewood was waiting for us, and so was a mule train sent from the detachment at Fort Bowie with a load of clean, pressed uniforms. General Miles's secretary had sent them so that at the surrender the general's men would be attired in a form befitting the occasion. As I watched my travel companions opening sacks of clothing like children opening birthday presents, I re􀀙lized some­thing about gringos, something we Mexicans always realize too late: we're the suckers. The Yankees had put one over on us. This was a show, a vaudeville act. They would convince their people via the press that they had fought a war and won it. And meanwhile we, the ones who had actually won it, would be left picking our noses." (p.355)

"Now I Surrender" transcends the boundaries of the novel and the history book, joining forces for a more compelling and entertaining, yet not less serious book. 

A joy to read, a pleasure to check all his source material. Enrigue is a brilliant novelist. 

A triumph! 

Marie Ndiaye - The Witch (MacLehose, 2026) ****

Marie Ndiaye is a celebrated French novelist and linguist. She was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina in 2001 for Rosie Carpe, and in 2009 received France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, for Three Strong Women.

The Witch follows Lucie, an unassuming witch who hopes to pass her modest magical abilities on to her two daughters. Yet her greatest challenge lies elsewhere. Convinced that her own happiness depends on reconciling her estranged parents, she devotes herself to a quest that gradually consumes her.

At its heart, The Witch is a novel about the disintegration of family relationships. The supernatural enters the story almost imperceptibly—less as fantasy than as an entirely natural extension of everyday life. These magical elements illuminate the underlying strangeness of reality itself. The novel's gently parodic tone, its fleeting moments of fantasy, and their equally effortless disappearance suggest that life is itself dreamlike: ordinary precisely because of its peculiarities. In Ndiaye's world, people transform into birds or snails with startling ease, as though reflecting the lightness or heaviness of their emotional lives. Her prose is graceful and understated, standing in striking contrast to the often dark, inscrutable relationships between her characters.

I came across the English translation of The Witch and bought it before realising it had originally been written in French. Had I known, I would have bought the French edition instead.

Andrew O'Hagan - Caledonian Road (Faber & Faber, 2025) ***

"Caledonian Road" is a carefully crafted and entertaining novel about the downfall of its main character, Campbell Flynn, art historian and married into a wealthy aristocratic family. The book has a list of the 62 characters appearing in the novel at the very beginning, as in a dramatic play, and this is useful to keep track of all the networks of plots and subplots that connect all these individuals: academics, businessmen, rappers, con men, computer nerds, a columnist, a DJ, a therapist, blacks and whites, rich and poor, and all scheming to get something better from life, to achieve, attain or obtain something. 

It's not high literature, but it's entertaining enough for a summer holiday. 

Gaëlle Bélem - Sud Sauvage (Gallimard, 2025) ****

Gaëlle Bélem is a French author from Réunion, which she left at the age of seventeen. In Sud Sauvage, she brings together a collection of short stories set in either Réunion or mainland France, each steeped in an eerie atmosphere where the line between reality and nightmare is never quite clear. A mysterious creature watches you every night. Thousands of enslaved people have vanished without a trace. A mother and daughter have only days left to live. Light pours from an abandoned house. One Sunday morning, a man discovers seven severed heads.

Each story is a finely crafted gem—beautifully written, perfectly paced, and infused with Bélem's evident delight in storytelling. She taps into our deepest fears of the unknown, creating tales that feel both hauntingly plausible and profoundly unsettling.

Highly recommended.

David Szalay - Flesh (Penguin Random House, 2025) ***

We follow Istvan, the story's main character, from his isolated and psychologically vulnerable youth in Hungary to his isolated situation as an adult in the UK. As a boy, he has a sexual relationship with an older woman, and he ends up in youth detention. As an adult, he has become a security guard for a very wealthy British couple. Life happens to Istvan. He is drifting on his own life, moving from one context into another as if he has no free will. He has no opinions on things, and when asked how he feels about anything, the most common answer you get is: "it's OK". I did not count the number of words, but I guess "Okay" is possibly the most used word in any dialogue he is engaged in. 

As it happens, he starts a sexual relationship with the wife of the couple, again, more as an instrument to pleasure her than a deliberate choice for him. He undergoes anything that happens and he's fine with it. 

The reviewer of the Guardian describes the book as "Stylistically, Flesh is all bone" (Keiran Goddard
Thu 6 Mar 2025), which is an apt observation. The sentences are short, almost as in a children's book, in a systematic subject-verb-object structure, with few subordinate sentences or embellishments. The dialogues too, are just lists of sentences uttered by the characters, without comments or descriptions. 

The novel won the Booker Prize 2025, which is a good reference, but I think better novels were written last year. 

Agnieszka Szpila - Hexes Of The Deadwood Forest (Footnote, 2026) **

As you can read on the cover, one of my favourite authors described this novel as "a torpedo of a book", which led me to purchase it, intrigued by its title and my current reading on the history of witch hunts in the middle ages and early modern times.

The plot is sufficiently bizarre to have captured my interest: a Polish oil company CEO, in a strange delusional moment films herself having sex with a tree, after which she goes back in time to meet some of her ancestors who created a feminist and ecologist religion and congregation, called "The Earthen Ones", who fight the patriarchy. 

This plot could have been interesting material for a good story, yet Szpila uses her talent to keep breaking taboos like an adolescent with limited discipline. She is apparently herself fascinated by the 'religion' she creates, which is never a good basis for literature. She calls her own novel 'post-porn', whatever that means. 

The case for feminism and ecology deserves better than this puerile fantasy. 

Alberts Bels - The Cage (Peter Owens, 1990) ***

Presented as one of the must-reads of Latvian literature, I found a copy, with a blank cover, and printed by Amazon! "The Cage" is the story of a man, a loyal husband, who suddenly disappears after having visited his parents in the country. Nobody has heard anything about him. So the police, represented by inspector Valdis Strūga, start investigating. His job "was concerned with the weaknesses and deficiencies of human nature and with gaining a better understanding of these weaknesses and deficiencies" (p.9), and that's exactly how the investigation proceeds. All the characters among Edmunds Bērzs's acquaintances are contacted, and they all share "weaknesses and deficiencies" to the extent that we kind of understand that they all live in their own personal cage, self-created or imposed on them. The initial narrator perspective of the inspector, shifts to each character separately resulting in a kaleidoscope of perspectives and opinions. 

It's not a masterpiece, but it's interesting to read. Nothing exceptional, but entertaining. 

Jonas Hassen Khemiri - The Sisters (Sceptre, 2025) **

One more of this praised novels. I read more than 200 of the 638 pages, and in retrospect I admire my persistency to have read that far into the novel. It describes the lives of three sisters, seen from the perspective of the narrator, a young man who is infatuated with one of the sisters. 

The sisters have three different characters yet none of them really exceptional. The story itself is bland, without suspense and without any literary merit. All characters share the same multicultural background, and that was the main reason why I gave it a try, yet also that aspect remains relatively shallow in its possible developments. 

Maybe if the story and the writing had been a lot tighter (reducing with 400 pages?), there might have been some value in the novel. 

Again, my own personal and very subjective appreciation. 

Fausta Cialente - A Very Cold World (Transit Books, 2026) **

Hailed as an Italian classic that is finally translated into English, I wonder what all the hype is about. The story is about a disrupted family after the second world war, living in a flat in Milan, with women of three generations, and men missing as a result of divorce or as war casualties.

Basically nothing happens, at least not in the first fifty pages, after which I put the book away. It's boring, the dialogues and the characters are bourgeois and uninteresting. 

My time is too valuable for this. There are better things on my reading pile. 

Books of the Year 2025

Of the 58 books that I read this year, these are the ones in my best of the best list. People ask me sometimes where I find the time to read so much. The answer is organisation, daily reading and little sleep. As usual, it's hard to make a top-10 list, and I can accept that other books could have figured in the list too. But with awarding both Javier Marías and Peter Frankopan in the top spot, I have not taken any risks. Both their books are brilliant. 

Fiction

1. Javier Marías - Tomás Nevinson  *****
2. Mircea Cărtărescu - Theodoros  *****
3. Nino Haratischwili - The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia ****½
4. Kaveh Akbar - Martyr! ****½
5. Vincent Delecroix - Naufrage ****½
6. Álvaro Enrigue - You Dreamed Of Empires ****
7. Elif Shafak - There Are Rivers In The Sky  ****
8. Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume  ****
9. Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place For Shady People  ****
10. Antonio Muñoz Molina - Your Steps On The Stairs ****

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

1. Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story  *****
2. Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing  *****
3. Richard Dawkins - The Genetic Book Of The Dead ****½
4. Julian Baggini - How To Think Like A Philosopher  ****½
5. Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes To Me  ****
6. Peter J. Hotez - The Deadly Rise Of Anti-Science ****
7. Timothy Snyder - On Freedom ****
8. Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics  ****
9. Philipp Blom - Nature's Mutiny ****
10. Richard Whatmore - The End Of Enlightenment  ****

In the non-fiction category, Peter Frankopan's book is the true winner and recommended to everyone. I bought the book in paperback, and I'm thinking of buying the hard cover version. 

There is again a lot to read in various disciplines. The highest quality publication in terms of production is the book by Dawkins, beautifully illustrated and on heavy glossy paper. The most suprising and most literary non-fiction book is Arundhati Roy's autobiography. 

Ian McEwan - What We Can Now (Random House, 2025) ****

"Our myopic little company. How hard to see straight when we felt so much" says one of the characters in the book. And that's the magic of Ian McEwan's novel "What We Can Now". The book consists of two large parts. The first one takes place in 2119, when the British Isles are largely inundated by the rising tide of the oceans, and many cities are no longer accessible because deep under the waterline. It is narrated by Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor who tries to find the only version of a poem by Francis Blundy, a unique poem called A Corona for Vivien, his wife, which he gave to her for her 50th birthday in 2014. Because he recited the peom in the company of friends, they know what the poem contained, even if no copy was ever shared, yet everyone agreed that it was the most wonderful and visionary text, deeply emotional and relevant for the world. 

"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!

 

Jason Roberts - Every Living Thing (Riverrun, 2024) *****

It's no surprise that this excellent book received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.

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)

Linnaeus also classified human beings according to race with caucasians at the top of the hierarchy and black people at the bottom, a justification for institutionalised racism for many years to come, whereas Buffon also had different opinions. 

"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)

It is fascinating to see how reason, logic and science manage to revolutionise ancient thinking and stereotypes, how observation and deductive reasoning could overcome ignorance, and even anticipate scientific insights that we only achieved two centuries later. Buffon's 'moule intérieur' or internal matrix is nothing else than our genetic code. 

"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! 

Mircea Cărtărescu - Theodoros (De Bezige Bij, 2025) *****

Van Cartarescu hadden we twee jaar geleden "Solenoid" al gelezen, een donker, ambitieus, bombastisch en bizar verhaal over een leraar in een mythisch Boekarest. Nu is er deze turf in Nederlandse vertaling. Voor het Engels moeten we nog enkele jaren wachten, maar de vertaling door Jan Willem Bos is absoluut schitterend, om vingers en duimen van af te likken, en dat heeft niet alleen te maken met de kracht van het origineel. 

Het verhaal is eenvoudig: een jongeling van lage afkomst uit Roemenië in de tweede helft van de 19e eeuw heeft de ambitie of zijn idolen Alexander de Grote en Napoleon Bonaparte te evenaren. Tegelijk jaagt hij zijn geliefde Stamatina na, die bij de elite van het land behoort. Hij wordt piraat in de Middellandse Zee, wisselt van identiteit met een Ethiopische jongen en wordt uiteindelijk Keizer van Ethiopië. Om dit te bereiken, zijn alle middelen goed: brutaal moorddadig geweld, vleierij, leugens, manipulatie, oorlog, ... zowat elke zonde gekend door de mensheid begaat hij, maar anderzijds wordt hij gedreven door een naïeve ambitie en liefde, zijn geloof en zijn verlangen om de bijbelse Ark van het Eeuwigdurend Verbond te vinden, en houdt hij zijn moeder via leugenachtige briefwisseling braaf op de hoogte van zijn successen. Nu ja, zo eenvoudig is die plot niet. Dit alles is fictie natuurlijk, ware het niet dat Teodoros laveert tussen mensen en feiten uit de geschiedenis van die periode die echt allen hebben bestaan, hoe ongeloofwaardig ze ook zijn, zoals Joshua Abraham Norton, de zelfverklaarde keizer van de Verenigde Staten. 

Dit is een boek om te lezen met de mobiel bij de hand om alle achtergrondverhalen te lezen van de (rand)figuren in de plot of om meer te weten over de historische context. En alle weetjes - hoe onwaarschijnlijk ook - die het verhaal opluisteren, blijken nog te kloppen ook. Maar zo schiet het lezen ook niet op, zeker niet omdat er zowat op elk blad een Nederlands woord verschijnt dat ik voor de eerste keer hoor of toch nog even wil opzoeken. Wat is een 'palikaar', een 'scolopender', 'bojaar', 'barkas', ' of 'archont', ‘opank’ of 'incubus'? 

Als het verhaal al exuberant is, dan is de stijl dat zeker, met hele lange zinnen, met veel adjectieven en bijzinnen, die lezen als een Latijnse vertaling, en het strekt Cărtărescu tot eer dat hij elke zin met dezelfde ambachtelijke kracht weet neer te zetten, met aandacht voor elk woord, voor elke nuance, en dezelfde inspanning volhoudt tot de laatste zin, 650 bladzijden later. 

Dit is een boek dat velen moeilijk zullen vinden, omdat het zo bombastisch is, zo ambitieus om de hele complexiteit van het mens-zijn, goed en kwaad, religie en macht, wereldpolitiek, mythologie en geschiedenis met elkaar te laten botsen in één lang coherent verhaal dat wordt gedreven door ambitie en waanzin, tot op het eind, dat alle verwachtingen overtreft en dat absoluut uniek is in de geschiedenis van de literatuur, er zo ver over dat ik het hier niet ga of zelfs kan verklappen. 

Dit boek is een feest. 

Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes To Me (Penguin, 2025) ****

It is rare for an autobiography to be so stylistically real literature. We all know the author from her magnificent "The God Of Small Things", a little gem, a little masterpiece that I can only recommend. 

In her autobiography, Arundhati Roy describes the painful relationship she - and her brother - had with her mother, a dominant, demanding, ruthless person who at the same time managed against all odds to build a local school, in a very inclusive way for all children in the village to get an education. Her two children are treated worse by her than the other children, because she wants to avoid the criticism of favouring her own. Roy hates and loves her mother at the same time. 

She also describes her departure from home, her penniless life in Delhi, her contacts with friends, artists, moviemakers and other characters of interest. A lot happens, and her life is as good as the plot of any novel: with hardship and luck, with love and loss, with a regained connection with her father after he abandoned them decades earlier, the success of her novel, the damaging of her reputation and accusation of communism and terrorism. 

There's a lot of therapeutic literature dealing with mother-daughter relationships, but this book is of a totally different level, not only because of its scope - the recent history of India - but also because of its literary value. Roy is an absolutely excellent writer, someone who masters her language to deliver something exquisite. 

"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)

Enjoy!

Andrew Miller - The Land in Winter (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025) ****

Two neighbouring couples - a young family doctor and his wife, and a young new farmer and his wife - live through a long winter in a village somewhere in England. Interestingly, the two women - Irene and Rita - have no real activity and begin a friendship, and both happen to be pregnant. Eric, the doctor, has a mistress, and Bill, the farmer, has ambitious plans for a much bigger farm, even if he can't even run the small farm he has today. 

Miller describes, develops these lives of very normal people in all their nuance and complexity of interaction without judgment or stereotyping. His prose is absolutely exquisite, well-balanced in terms of plot development and equal attention to the four protagonists and their personal issues and struggles with each other and the many other characters. The timing is right after World War II, still present as the background for people to recover, to think about building new lives, a new world after the horrors. 

Miller is not a very adventurous from an artistic perspective: his approach fits within the boundaries of established literature, controlled, well-crafted, with genuine feeling for his characters, and of a superb quality. 

Lucretius - The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics, 2015) ****

Sometime in at the beginning of the first Century BC, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote his "Rerum Naturae", a lengthy poem on the nature of things, as its title suggests. It hails back to the teachings of Greek philosopher Democritos (c. 460 – c. 370 BC) who claimed that reality existed of atoms, tiny particles that interact with each other and together create the different forms of matter, life and even mind. Lucretius adds the thoughts of Epicurus, another Greek philosopher (341–270 BC) who "asserted that philosophy's purpose is to attain as well as to help others attain tranquil lives, characterized by freedom from fear and the absence of pain" (Wikipedia). In this context, deities are no longer necessary to explain reality, and hence there is no need for humans to live in fear and terror for the gods. 

The entire book was originally written as a poem, despite its abstract content. The English translation follows this approach, with rhymes and all, a true feat of the translator, for a book of close to 400 pages. The reading is still relatively easy, with the biggest hurdle of its lack of structure, build-up and endless repetitions.  In any case it's not a book that you read in one go. 

The poem disappeared from sight until one copy was found in 1417 by Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini, who probably found the poem in the Benedictine library at Fulda, Germany. I can recommend "The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt for readers who would like to know more about the impact of Poggio's discovery on philosophy, and also in the broader context of enlightenment and humanism in Sarah Bakewell's "Humanly Possible". 

By any measure, even after thousands of years, Lucretius still reads like a modern-day person. It is astonishing how many obscure ideas have flourished in the intervening time, and even more so that most people are still living in "this dread, these shadows of the mind": 

"This dread, these shadows of the mind, must thus be swept away 

Not by rays of the sun nor by the brilliant beams of day, 

But by observing Nature and her laws. And this will lay 

The warp out for us — her first principle: that nothing's brought

Forth 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 overhead 

Or here on earth whose causes they can't fathom, they assign

The 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, without 

The 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 start 

To exist as something separate, because it's always part 

Of something else, primal and indivisible. The way 

Matter is composed is from such parts in tight array.

And since they can't exist alone, then they must closely cling

To 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 get 

Their might from their eternal singleness. Nature won't let 

Anything be wrenched from them, or any dwindlings, 

But keeps them in one piece preserved to be the seeds of things." (p.38)

And of course, when thinking things through, there is no immortal soul since our mind is the result of the physical activity of our body and our senses. 

"As it creeps across the other members. And thus because the spirit
Is divided up and does not, when it leaves the body, clear it 

All in one piece, then it is mortal too. If you should think 

The spirit has the ability to retract itself and shrink 

Into a single spot and pull its particles together 

And so withdraw sensation from one limb after another, 

Consider that the place in which the spirit then condenses 

Should 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 grant 

That 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. 

Vincenzo Latronico - Perfection (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) **½

Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin in 2010. They are both freelancers, earning their keep by designing websites and other digital tools. They go to art galleries, they go to parties, they frequent other expats living in the city. Nothing is fixed, and everything is volatile: spaces, friendships, love. Despite all their comfort and being 'cool young people', there is not much focus or aspiration in their life. They drift on the waves of the expat and cultural events in the city. 

Anna and Tom also do not have proper characters. They are almost always described by Latronico in the plural: they do this and they do that. Only exceptionally do Anna and Tom do or think something differently, yet that is very rare. 

Latronico's novel is more a criticism on modern society, about the 'hollowness' of life, its lack of purpose and meaning. Latronico’s book is modelled closely on Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, "Things: A Story of the Sixties" , which I have not read. I am a big fan of Perec, yet Latronico does not even come close in general terms. 

Ayşegül Savaş - Long Distance (Scribner, 2025) **½

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.

Ali Smith - Gliff (Penguin, 2024) **½

In a not too distant future, two children are confronted with the new toxic world people live in: a confrontation between the "haves and the have-nots", and they are forced to move, without parents even if they somehow hope to reconnect with their mother. 

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.