Anne Applebaum - Autocracy, Inc. (Allen Lane, 2024) ****

If one book describes the strings that determine the global geopolitical powerplay, it is this one. Aptly titled, "Autocracy, Inc" it is all about the financial streams that feed the hunger and the power of autocrats around the world. Anne Applebaum explains how for instance Putin as an ex-KGB man had access to all the secret bank accounts of the Soviet regime around the world, with which opposition in local communist parties were financed, and how this network suddenly became a tool to syphon money out of the country after the Soviet Union collapsed. She explains how naive the West, and especially Germany has been with regard to deals about gas transport with Russia. She explains the deep financial connections between Russia, China, Iran and other regimes around the world, such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe. How a few elites in each of these countries sacrifice their own citizens to keep growing their personal wealth, which allows them to buy power, to oppress and manipulate their citizens. 

Informed citizens in the West are aware of these connections, often in a fragmented way, by reading news articles left and right, or by possible links that are claimed by some to exist but without clear evidence. Many of the elements in this book will not be hard news. Yet, the picture that Applebaum depicts in this book brings it all together, and provides much more. She has been a privileged journalist and historian, witnessing things first hand when she lived in Poland, and having interviewed and met many of the protagonists in the book. 

I already recommend her "The Twilight Of Democracy" when it appeared in 2020, but this one is even more relevant. It's well written, easy to read despite the many factual information that she provides. But the strongest message of the book is a wake-up call to anyone who's interested in democracy and justice and prosperity for all: if we don't realise what's happening, if we don't open our eyes and start acting to protect our Western democracies, the few countries in human history that actually generated prosperity for all citizens, we risk to be eaten from within by all the smear campaigns, polarisation campaigns, manipulation and interference campaigns that remain largely hidden but are all too present, led by the autocrats of the world who have found their common interest in destroying the liberal mind. Not to mention their funding of extremist political parties. 

The book was published before Elon Musk starts funding Trump's campaign and distributing money to his voters. I wonder what she has to say about this. 

Next to highly recommending this book, I can also recommend that you follow her on "X" and read her frequent articles in The Atlantic, including her recent podcast with Peter Pomerantzev. 

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein - Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment (William Collins, 2022) ****

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" became a global bestseller, and rightly so, even if many of the book's core positions have been challenged by some cognitive scientists. Be that as it may, the book managed to open many minds to relfect on our own inuitive way of thinking, often very fast and even subconsciously, rarely with considered and conscious rationality. Driving that message home to us humans is already a major achievement, even if I'm not too optimistic about what it actually leads to in practice. 

"Noise" will probably not be a bestseller at the same level, yet it also deserves to be read by many. The core proposition of the book is that we all have a decision-making 'bias' that is linked to our perspective, culture, education, profession, etc. This 'bias' is well understoord by anybody involved in research, in opinion-polling or other levels of understanding decision-making. At the same time there is also 'noise' in the system, a problem of the same nature that is less widely acknowledged. "Noise" is the variation in choices or decisions made based on the same data, and that demonstrate a lack of coherence within an organisation or within the same person. 

The book gives dozens and dozens of examples of for instance claims administrators in insurance companies who give entirely different sums to claimants even if the damage is the same, or judges who give totally different sentences for identical crimes, or doctors who give totally different diagnoses for the same presented symptoms by patients. The stunning factor in the given examples are not only that there is variation in their decisions, but how wide the variations can be, as from three months to three years in the context of court sentences. A even more stunning fact is the variation by one and the same individual. Kahneman and colleagues mention studies that were conducted by presenting the same cases to the same judges or doctors six months after the first evaluation. The same judges and doctors came to a completely different decision so many months later. Some of these differences may even change depending on the moment of the day. Judges are more lenient with a full stomach, and less lenient on an empty one. The same is true with doctors apparently. 

We don't want to judge judges or doctors here, but show how we all should reflect on our own inconsistencies in judgment. In that respect, this book is again an eye-opener for anyone interested in the quality of our thought processes. 

The only downside in the book is the lack of recent data to substantiate their positions. Many of the studies that I double-checked had data from the '90s. It may be that nothing has changed since then, but I think that especially in medicine, many things have changed, including better diagnostics and the use of artificial intelligence to help mitigate the problems mentioned in the book. 

Recommended reading. 

Jim Crace - Eden (Picador, 2022) ****

I'm a big fan of Jim Crace. I like his sytlistic lyricism and the cadence of his writing, as if all sentences have 'metre' like Ovid. Like in some of his other novels, there's a level of abstraction, a distance to the subject that lifts it to a higher plane than the actual plot. 

The story itself is simple: in the garden of eden (without capital), the angels make a group of - what? 50 or so? - humans work the fields and the pond so that they can have food within their totally enclosed little paradise. The humans are immortal and their lives are pure routine. Obviously there's no need for procreation, even if the two sexes are represented. They live in a friendly environment of endless repetition.  One day, one of the female humans, Tabi, decides to escape, despite the risk of mortality, disease, ageing and other threats that are said to be present outside the walls. 

"So this awkward and unnerving day subsides, al­though briefly on a calmer note. The masters can't have helped but smell the unease in the air - for everyone, not just the orchardman - since Tabi disappeared. The ground beneath even the angels' feet has quaked with the shock and disrespect of her departure and the fear of having to explain it all to the garden's lord when they next dare to visit him. They understand their workers, now fewer than fifty, are bereaved and must be reassured at once, before the imp of disobedience takes hold like some fast­growing tare; and first one, then another, then a crowd grow bold enough to think that, possibly, the world is more enticing than eternity. Then what of eden?· Those tares will multiply. Those fields and gardens will grow wild. The masters cannot tend them on their own. Those walls and barns and sacred roosts will age and crack like trees, weighed down by ivy, moss and vines, brought down by wind and time. And what of angels? Where will they take wing? (p. 16)

Tabi has other opinions. She reflects upon her fate and situation. She challenges the other humans with her blasphemic thoughts.  Unless you experience it yourself, you will never know. You just accept the narrative of somebody else. 

"It's possible, she likes to tell her brothers and her sisters, who all must have thought the same a thousand times but never dared to say so, that life beyond the palisades is paradise. And eden is a lesser place! The sermons teach the labourers inside to think that their estate is measure­less contentment and the outside world is little more than famine, pestilence and suffering. Great is their sorrow and fathomless their pain. But who's to say, unless they find out for themselves? Who's to say, indeed, that there is even death out there unless you are prepared, just once, to chance the moment and the toe? No, maybe death is a just a falsehood the lord has invented for fear of losing his labourers, she says. It's even possible his angels made it up themselves without his guidance. And what a fine deceit! If no one fears the world beyond the wall, everyone will leave. And then what will the angels do for sustenance and care? Angels are as helpless as a bush whose berries won't be picked and cooked except by human hands. A wing has never grasped a spade or worked a piece of dough or carried water from the well. They can't even lay an egg, can they? she asks, to shocked silence and then to laughter. What can an angel do without a little help, except expect to be obeyed? It's also possible, she finishes, that there is no lord above - Has anybody looked him in the face? - but only angels saying that there is. They claim to fly up to his firmament to tell him how his garden and his servants fare, when actually they only hide· behind a cloud and then return with lies to tell and further orders for us to obey. We're pinned down in our orchards and our fields, she says, for fear of someone who's not real. (p. 176-177)

Among the angels, there's is also a dissident, Jamin, whose wing is broken and who does not feel like the other angels. He hates the 'snitch' among the humans, the man who reports to the chief angel about all the misbehaviours of the humans, and his feelings become increasingly like human feelings too. 

"No, Jamin detests the go-between. It's not angelic, but he does. And he would like to see his fall from grace. He can imagine a not too distant day when the man, no longer anybody's eyes and ears, is just a common labour­er, a digger in the mud, a beast of burden in the fields, a toiler in the moil, another pair of hands who'll work his bully fingers to the bone and have to spend a so-called day of rest and recovery at the stock pond under Jamin's command. 0 how the gentle angel will torment him then. How hard he'll make him work amongst the mud and weed. He'll have him clearing stones from the deepest parts. He'll have him picking out the duckweed with his fingertips. The go-between will be as damp and lowly as a worm. It is meanly satisfying to imagine him, dangling from a master's beak, as supper for the fish" (p. 38)

 Tabi's friend Ebon wants her back, then decides to go and save her, a risky endeavour for him too, to leave the garden of eden. But the interest is ignited on the other side too, among the mortals, whose curiosity is increasing with the sudden arrival and the visibility of the angel. One of the mortals climbs on the ramparts of the garden of eden. 

"What now? His family and neighbours are asking him to describe what he can see. They've no idea what to ex­pect; but, now that they have somebody - their very first, their pioneer - up on the wall and within sight and smell and hearing of the truth, they're hoping that there is nothing they should fear. All the stories they have told themselves when they have gathered round their fires and heard the night wind beating on the barbican and shak­ing its great gates have never truly been believed but have nevertheless always had a tighter hold on them in the darkness than any daylight logic ever could. A yarn that's spun and woven out of midnight flames is always stronger than the silks of day. But standing in the shadow of the wall this morning they have their fingers crossed that fire­side stories don't come true and that the world beyond the wall will turn out to be not so very different from their own. Something dull and unremarkable would not be a surprise. After all, the great trees that reach out across the rampart are no different from the branches that reach in. The birds that come and go across the wall - the pies, the jacks, the peckers and the tits, the rooks and starlings, and the doves - are all familiar. As are the plumes of smoke when winter fires are lit." (p. 217). 

I will not disclose more about the plot, but both sides are full of disbelief about their own narratives, they are hungry for the truth. This is the universality of Crace's themes: the timeframe and geography are fabulous and fantastic, yet the humanity if all too real. His style is that of wonder and lyrical light-footedness, as if telling a fairy tale on something that happened long ago and far away. I added some long excerpts to demonstrate the wonder of his writing too. 

Enjoy!

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Living On Earth (Harper Collins, 2024) ***

This book is the follow-up of Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Metazoa", a book that I really liked for the new insights it brought to me regarding the emergence of consciousness in animals. It is the final book in the trilogy that started with "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life", which I haven't read. 

This book is less scientific and more observational, like a documentary. He describes the animals he watched under water, in the jungle, in the desert and other places, but without adding many new scientific insights, just adding additional examples and depth to what he wrote earlier. The book ends with a strong plea to safeguard the planet and its vulnerable ecosystem, a topic that we fully endorse. 

We are destroing the earth's riches and wonder and surprises. Sentient beings that took millions of years to develop, with all their skills and features of today, are being wiped out by the dumbest of all animals. We agree, of course, but I did not buy the book to confirm my opinion. 

Michael Cunningham - Day (4th Estate, 2024) **

I have not read everything by Michael Cunningham, but most of his novels: "A Home at the End of the World" (1990), "Flesh and Blood" (1995), "The Hours" (1998), "Specimen Days" (2005), "By Nightfall" (2010), "The Snow Queen" (2014), "A Wild Swan and Other Tales" (2015). His latest novel, "Day", comes nine years after the previous one, and it's possibly the least memorable of all. 

He describes the relationship and inner aspirations of a couple, Dan and Isabel, with two children before, during and after lockdown, somewhere in Brooklyn, and integrating some of their friends the wife's brother, Robbie, into the scenery. The story meanders forward. The context changes, feelings and sentiments change. Something dramatic happens, like in so many lives. It's the story you hear from so many people. And that's maybe the novels biggest problem: it's too real. Even if he brings the perspectives of all the characters separately, as a kind of kaleidoscope of views and feelings, it's too programmatic. Just like the story, the style is not exceptional either. It's in any case not at the same level of his other work. 

Aglaja Veteranyi - Waarom Het Kind In De Polenta Kookt (Oevers, 2024) ***½

De auteur, Aglaja Veteranyi, werd geboren in de Roemeens gezin van circusartiesten dat in 1967, toen ze vijf jaar was, naar het Westen vluchtte. Met haar vader, moeder en oudere zusje, trokken ze Europa, Afrika en Zuid-Ameriak rond. Het is pas als ze op haar zeventiende in Zwitserland een vaste plek kreeg dat ze heeft leren lezen en schrijven, en lid werd van een theatergezelschap in Zurich. Dit is haar eerste roman die in 1999 in het Duits verscheen en zeer goed onthaald werd. In 2002 ontnam Veteranyi haar eigen leven. 

Dat het boek vandaag eindelijk in het Nederlands verschijnt is een goede zaak. Het is een uitzonderlijk boek in vele opzichten. Het is geen echte roman met een plot, maar eerder een mijmering over het leven, vol verrassende perspectieven en inzichten, maar tegelijk ook een aaneenschakeling van korte scènes uit hun dagelijks leven, soms hards, soms grappig. Een opvallend aspect is hoe op zichzelf dit kleine gezinnetje staat. Ondanks hun permanent reizen, de wereld rond, beperkt hun wereld zich tot de woonwagen, de familiefilms die de vader maakt, de circusacts die ze moeten opvoeren. Het is alsof er buiten dit gezin amper iets bestaat. Het enige relaas van een buitenwereld is de tijdelijke kostschool waar zij en haar zusje moesten verblijven tijdens enkele jaren in Zwitserland. 

Het is een boek dat je in een ruk uitleest en dat kan op een paar uur zelfs. Toch zijn er veel passages en zinnen om even bij stil te staan. Absurde gedachten of kleine observaties die je verplichten je te verplaatsen in de jonge vrouw die dit ooit schreef. Iemand die zich losweekte van een situatie van mensen die zelf vluchtten voor een andere situatie, en die ondanks haar nieuw ontdekte mogelijkheden toch geen raad meer wist met haar bestaan. 

En die titel? Staat die 'in' daar niet teveel in? Nee, het kind is effectief aan het koken in de polenta. Het boek probeert dit gruwelijk raadsel in elk geval te beantwoorden. 

Jhumpa Lahiri - Roman Stories (Picador, 2023) **

Many years ago, I read Jhuma Lahiri's "The Interpreter of Maladies", and "The Namesake", which I liked without being too enthusiastic. I was recommended to read "Roman Stories", originally written in Italian, and translated by the author into English. As the title suggests, this is a book of short stories, all set in Rome, Italy. The protagonists in the stories are often higher educated people with children or foreigners working for those same people. The themes are often about fitting in society or not, feeling distant from the culture while trying to blend in. Topics such as latent or manifest racism appear occasionally, but it is more the perspective of the recipient that dominates the narrative. But more often than not, the dissatisfaction byt the characters is more shallow: personal and relational issues, which in my opinion are often petty and bourgeois, making me wonder at times why I would even spend time reading this. It's well written, but not stylistically exceptional or expressive. A cup of tea to drink in between. 

John Banville - The Singularities (Swift Press, 2023) ****

Many years ago I read, and re-read, Banville's trilogy "Athena", "The Book of Evidence", "Ghosts", in which the Freddy Montgomery is the lead character and a murderer. In "The Singularities" he is released from prison after his sentence, and he adopts a new name, Felix Mordaunt, revisiting the place of his youth, which is now owned by a middle-aged couple, the descendants of a well-know physicist, Adam Godley. Mordaunt is a great cynic, arrogant and vicious, always giving the impression of being a true and friendly gentleman. The Godleys have hired the services of a William Jaybee (or John Banville?) to write the biography of their diseased forebear, which entails that he also lives in the manor. Godley's ground-breaking theory in physics is that everything that exists is a kind of zero-sum game, even to the extent that ones you find an answer to one question, something else becomes obscure, making the creation of knowledge a futile endeavour. 

"True, he was as fascinated as everyone else when the Godley Interference Effect arising from the field equations of the Brahma theory - that Effect the reality of which is even still hotly contested by the determin­ists, the priests, and the simple-minded, as we all know all too well - showed that every increase in our knowledge of the nature of reality acts directly upon that reality, and that each glowing new discovery we make brings about an equal and opposite dark­ening, the punching of a hole in the wall of the great sphere that is time and space and all besides." (p.90)

This also affects Mordaunt at the start as he enters the gates of the estate. 

"As he went under the stone arch-the low, weather-worn gate had a rusted bolt but no lock-he experienced an odd effect. It was a shiver, or a kind of shimmer, as if he were not he but his own reflection passing through a flaw in a windowpane, or better say rippling over a crack in a full-length mirror. And stranger still, what emerged at the other side was not quite him, or was him but changed, being both less and more than he had been, at once diminished and at the same time somehow added to. The thing took no time at all, was over in the space of the blinking of an eye, yet the effect was palpable, and profound. Something had touched him, and left its indelible mark" (p.21)

The physical, psychological and phenomenological world are all one, and interact in mysterious ways. 

In the old house, the wife of Adam Godley is still alive, living alone in her bedroom, in the presence of her dog. It is unclear whether she suffers from memory loss, dementia or other ailments, but in any case the inspiration for wonderful lyrical paragraphs such as this one. 

"So here they are, woman and dog, the two of them, sharing the vast stillness in which the dog pants softly the way car engines used to pant, pant and shudder, when they still ran on petrol, when she was still a girl. It is as if everything everywhere has stopped, as if the earth has been abandoned. She tries to say the dog's name aloud and some sound comes out, some strangled sound that he seems to recognise, and slowly he lifts his big square head and looks at her, with a calm and disenchanted eye, telling her in a silence more eloquent than any words how it is with him, with her, with all the abounding world." (p.65)

The points of view alternate between Mordaunt and Jaybee, both presented with their respective arrogant and disrespectful view on life, harsh, selfish, with caustic thoughts written in a scathing and judgmental language. There are love affairs, there is theft, there are mysteries and documents hidden in secret cupboards. There is tension all around between the characters, their feelings and their actions. 

But be that as it may, the Brahma theory still acts on all characters, and especially on Mordaunt, as if his prison sentence had only been a kind of interval between two states in the free world, but also as a kind of hard to grasp mystical experience. 

"On that other side, everything had been different, no, everything had been nothing, everything including himself. Nothing. The experience had been, he realised, not an experience in life, and not in death, either, but an absence, an interval, a cae­sura, whatever to call it, such that the minutest particles fall into, fall out of, when they perform that famously impossible leap from one go-round to another, the riddle of which was solved and so simply by Adam Godley's interference equation. And a mark had been left on him, the indelible mark of Lazarus. The life that up to that moment had been a matter of sprawling possibilities had come suddenly to seem as narrow as the chiselled notch between the two bleak dates on a gravestone, an instant of an instant. He had died, and had lived. Impossible, and yet it had happened" (p. 241)

At the end of the novel, the couple living on the estate invite all their friends and neighbours and acquaintances to a big garden party. Mordaunt's and Jaybee's relative alienation increases. Even if both are completely different characters, they occupy some kind of mirror image of each other, different yet ressemblant. Mordaunt reflects on the guests at the party: 

"And yet how nebulous these people were, not like people at all, really, even though he was familiar with at least some of them. The high full clouds imparted to the air a silvery shine, and the figures moving in it moved vestigially, like wraiths, or like the figures crowding in the background of a dream. Their voices too sounded frail in all that space, and instead of speaking they seemed to make a kind of twittering, as a flock of birds will make, settling upon the darkling trees at eventide. Yes, the day moves on, the sunlight comes and goes, the clouds make their stately, indifferent rearrangements, and the world wanes. (p. 298)

Banville creates a very complex narrative and compositional structure, with absolutely brilliant stylistic mastery of the language, deadly in his observations of human nature, and lifting the 'murder' story to a different level, one in which philosphy and the deeper nature of world also find a place. The main character's psychological distance to his world, his sociopathy, is also the main weakness of the novel. It's hard to have any emotional connection as a reader with the characters. It's all interesting to watch, interesting to read, and you want to know how all things will unfold, yet it's hard to even care what will eventually happen to the people in the novel. Distance is both the subject of the book and its hurdle. 

Olga Tokarczuk - The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo, 2024) *****

The book ends with this "Author's Note": 

"All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors: 

Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Emile Durkheim, Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud, H. Rider Haggard, Hesiod, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Cesare Lombroso, W Somerset Maugham, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Plato, Ezra Pound, Jean Racine, Frarnçois de La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Semonides of Amorgos, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Wagner, Frank Wedekind, John Webster, Otto Weininger and William Butler Yeats."

This novel is Tokarczuk's literary game with male supremacy, toying with it, exposing it, but in her usual non-conflictual way, with a deep respect for the opponent, and even sympathy. The main character is a young Polish man, who goes to Germany to be treated for lung problems (tuberculosis), like all the other characters in the novel, to a sanatorium in Görbersdorf, now called Sokołowsko, and located in Poland, the place which inspired Thomas Mann one hundred years ago (in November 2024) to write "The Magic Mountain". Like in Mann's novel, the protagonist meets a set of characters who all represent one or the other ideology of the moment, allowing for lengthy discussions about politics and philosophy. 

But of course there is more going on. The book has many layers. It is a "horror story" as its subtitle suggests, and many other things are taking place, things that fall beyond the discussions among the men. Both cosmic events take place, as well as brutal primitive events. 

"By a twist of circumstance, as Frau Opitz's body was descending on ropes into the open grave, the exact au­tumn equinox took place, and the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the Earth. Naturally, nobody noticed this - people have more important things on their minds. But we know it." (p. 82)

 Every so often, yet sparingly, the "we" appear in the novel, described in the Cast of Characters at the beginning as the "Nameless inhabitants of the walls, floors and ceilings", beings that observe, that blend in with the background, yet are always present. The other aspect that is beyond control is brutal human nature: in the woods (outside civilisation) live the coal burners, who have made female puppets of natural materials that they can use as sex dolls. 

The main character, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, feels uncomfortable in this entire bizarre context. He is the odd one out, the neutral person all the other characters want to talk to, to convince him of their opinions, and yet he is also not what he seems. They mystery will not be revealed here, but he sheds a completely new light on the narrative. He engages with the other men, listens to them, talks to them, yet somehow feels alien to their world. 

"The funeral was brief, devoid of unnecessary words, as if it were impossible to say more about this terrible, macabre event that should be forgotten as quickly as possible. And that was what Wojnicz did - he forgot. As they were driv­ing back to the guesthouse, perversely, or mischievously perhaps, he asked Lukas and August if they believed in the immortal soul and what happened to it after death, and thus prompted a veritable pandemonium of ideas, arguments and counterarguments, quotations and refer­ences, so by the time the carriage was passing the nursing home at the start of their village, he did not know what his companions were talking about, and his only thought was of lying down in bed." (p. 82)

Women are almost absent in the novel, with a few exceptions. They are not subjects with a voice or a plot. 

"'Woman represents a bygone, inferior stage of evolu­tion, so writes Darwin, and he of all people has something to say on the matter. Woman is like .. .' - here he sought the right word - 'an evolutionary laggard. While man has gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman has stayed in her old place and does not develop. That is why a woman is often socially handicapped, incapable of cop­ing on her own, and must always be reliant on a man. She has to make an impression on him - by manipulation, by smiling. The Mona Lisa's smile symbolizes a woman's en­tire evolutionary strategy for coping with life. Which is to seduce and manipulate.' (p. 94)

The men are having a great time bouncing off abstract ideas and opinions, arguing with broad philosophical and ideological concepts, but Wojnicz is beyond this. He lives in another world, one that is not delineated by clear rules, categorisations, definitions and constraints. Here he remembers playing chess with his father when a kid. 

"Little Mieczyslaw Wojnicz understood the rules (of chess) and could foresee a lot, but to tell the truth, the game did not interest him. Making moves according to the rules and aiming to defeat your opponent seemed to him just one of the possible ways to use the pawns. He preferred to day­dream, and to see the chessboard as a space where the fates of the unfortunate pawns and other pieces were played out; he cast them as characters weaving complex webs of intrigue, either with or against each other, and linked by all sorts of relationships. He thought it a waste to limit their activity to the checkered board, to leave them to the mercy of a formal game played according to strict rules. So as soon as his father lost interest and went off to see to more important matters, Mieczys would move the chess pieces onto the steppes of the rug and the mountains of the armchair, where they saw to their own business, set off on journeys, and furnished their kitchens, houses and palaces. Finally his father's ashtray became a boat, and the pen holders were rafters' oars, while the space under­neath a chair turned into a cathedral where the wedding of the two queens, black and white, was taking place." (p. 162)

Tokarczuk herself is a majestic player with language, with character, props, sub-plots and scenes. She is the one to colour outside the lines, to use her wonderful imagination to create a special carefully constructed edifice, that you can approach from many different angles and be suprised and perplexed by the wealth of ideas and possibilities for interpretation. Wojnich's closest friend Thilo is a fan of the paintings of Herri Met de Bles, a 16th Century Flemish landscape painter, who is known for the many levels of his work. 

"How is it that from tiny strokes of a brush dipped in paint an entire world with many depths comes into being? De Bles's painting seemed fathomless - when he magni­fied it, he saw even more details, minute spots of paint, very light brushstrokes, indistinct patches and myste­rious flaws. As he wandered about the clouds, supple, rounded lines emerged from them, resembling figures, faces or wings. But when he moved down towards the vegetation, among the leaves he saw eyes and noses, bits of hands and feet, elusive bodies that existed fleetingly, only when his vision brushed against them for a single, unrepeatable moment. In the aerial castle windows, he spied the corners of chambers, and semi-transparent creatures inside them, each connected with a tragedy, a regret. Maybe Abraham's sacrifice was being performed there too, but in slightly different configurations and with different actors? De Bles's canvas seemed to be full of messages, like a detailed map using a language of simple signs that carry branching meanings, a world that proves infinite once one goes deep inside, where one keeps discovering new things" (p. 259)

 You can look at the trees and the details, but you can look at it from a further distance, and you will see something else entirely. This is Tokarczuk at play: inventive, creative, challenging the reader, throwing little hints and pieces of half-formed information, real elements (including pictures of the village and sanatorium) and wild fantasies. She is a true master, writing an entire novel with primarily male characters, yet in truth it's all about women, it's rational in the philosphical discussions, yet in truth it's about the in-between worlds that defy categorisation, that cannot be captured in words even, the world of the senses, a world that is as elusive as the narrator. It's a comedy on the surface, but a deep tragedy at the same time, a horror story. Her language is straightforward, as is her style - indeed Thomas Mann comes to mind - yet its clarity is in stark contrast with the darkness of the novel. The men all have the answers to the problems of the world, the men all believe they are in control, yet they are all ill, weak and brought together in a sanatorium in a desperate and more often than not futile attempt to make them healthy again. You can only appreciate the irony, while outside the sanatorium darkness reigns.

Brilliant! 

Jenny Erpenbeck - Kairos (Granta, 2024) **

A 19-year old woman starts a relationship with a 53-year old married man. They are like soulmates from a cultural perspective, loving the same music, accepting the open relationship, the age difference with style. Yet it somehow does not work out. He is like a father or a teacher, suffocating the relationship instead of liberating both partners. 

The narrative takes place against the backdrop of the reunification of Germany after the Berlin Wall collapses. There are parallels between their personal relationship and the broader political picture: the contradictions, the constrained walled in meeting places, the lack of liberating freedom to handle, the feeling of being unfulfilled, control versus chaos. 

Despite the good reviews the novel received, it did not suck me in. The situation of both lovers was too unnatural to me, too manipulated by the author as two puppets in a grander theatre of geopolitics. 

The writing is good. 

Miranda July - All Fours (Canongate, 2024) *

 I'm sorry. I truly did not like this novel. The writing is bland, the plot puerile, the emotions shallow. It's about the mid-life crisis of a woman who wants to drive from the West Coast to New York on her own, in order to get some 'me-time', leaving her husband and child for a few weeks. She never gets past the next town, where she books a motel room and starts a relationship with a much younger married man. It's uninteresting, none of the characters resonate with me - yes, I am not a woman in her fourties, but still ... It all seems so fake, so programmatic, so self-absorbed. It puzzles me why anyone would write such a novel. So, good luck with it. You might have a different opinion. 

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) *****

This fascinating and genial book was published in 1979, when I was at university. It was a kind of a hype among my fellow-students, and even if I did not understand (or read) half of it, it opened a world, or rather a universe of thinking, while at the same time presenting it in an incredibly creative way. Earlier this year, I decided to read it in full and buy a copy. Fourty-five years later, it is still as enthralling as it was then. Hofstadter explores the boundaries of our thinking, where reason and logic meet their limits in paradoxes, contradictions, self-references and loops. The subject is about cognitive science, logic and computer sciences (and Artificial Intelligence), and he learns us how meaning and meaninglessness exist and how they come to life (or not) in abstract systems, including the human mind and the perception or delusion of the self or the "I". 

I do not think the book would have so much resonated with larger audiences or with us at that time, if it were not for the extensive illustrations of Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his impossible drawings, or the long dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, occasionally joined by the Crab, and further illustrated by analysing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and their inherent structural elements of self-reference and loops, as in the sentence sequence: 

"The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true"

The starting point of course are the theorems of German mathematician Kurt Gödel: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure(i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system" (Wikipedia)

On top of this, Hofstadter develops dozens of new ways of looking at familiar or less familiar problems of logic and computation. He creates his own different logical systems in the book to illustrate his points, to take the reader without knowledge of mathematics or the formal language of computer scientists by the hand, and explain whatever elements he wants to demonstrate. 

He describes it as follows: 

"Here one runs up against a seeming paradox. Computers by their very nature are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts. Fast though they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness. How, then, can intelligent behavior be programmed? Isn't this the most blatant of contradictions in terms? One of the major theses of this book is that it is not a contradiction at all. One of the major purposes of this book is to urge each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.  This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about." (p.26)

or:  

"No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations very flexibly; 
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; 
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; 
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; 
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them; 
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; 
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; 
• to come up with ideas which are novel. "

"This little debate shows the difficulty of trying to use logic and reasoning to defend themselves. At some point, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except loudly shouting, "I know I'm right!" Once again, we are up against the issue which Lewis Carroll so sharply set forth in his Dialogue: you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over." (p. 192)

On the origin of life:  

"A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: "How did ever get started in the first place?" It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages - but bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond our power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. The run aground on this most central of all central questions: "How did Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosome_ tRNA molecules), originate?" For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer and perhaps experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer-at least for a while". (p. 548)

 Or using nice examples to make the reading easier to digest: 

"Here is a well-known children's joke which illustrates the open-endedness of real-life situations: 

• A man took a ride in an airplane. 
• Unfortunately, he fell out. 
• Fortunately, he had a parachute on. 
• Unfortunately, it didn't work. 
• Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. 
• Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. 
• Unfortunately, he missed the haystack. 

It can be extended indefinitely. To represent this silly story in a frame­based system would be extremely complex, involving jointly activating frames for the concepts of man, airplane, exit, parachute, falling, etc., etc." (p. 675)

His ultimate endeavour is to link the world of abstract logic with the physical reality we live in, and of course especially our brain and its capacity to for abstract thought, to cross the levels set by scientific disciplines and to come to an more holistic understanding of the interactions. 

"My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between dif­ferent levels-quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. 

 This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must ring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In princi­ple, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into metamathematical state­ments. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact transla­jon point is what creates Gödel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes 'cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any expla­nation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards" (p. 709)

And of course also the existence of free will. Are we the consequence of algorithms (historical/cultural/social/genetic/contextual/...) or not. 

"One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask "Does system X make choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making "choices", I think we can shed much light on free will." (p. 711)

We will come back to this topic when reading Robert Sapolsky's "Determined". 

Even if in some respects the book is a little dated, especially when describing Artificial Intelligence or genetics, it remains one of the milestone books on cognitive science and logic, absolutely unique in terms of content and form, incredibly complex yet fun to read, even if it is impossible to understand everything, as most readers such as myself will have to confess. 

Ignaas Devisch - Een Kleine Filosofie Van Grote Emoties (Pelckmans, 2023) ***

In dit korte en frisje boekje schrijft filosoof Ignaas Devisch over het belang van onze 'grote emoties'. En dit kunnen vele soorten emoties zijn: als iets wat je raakt als individu, als iets dat je kan delen met anderen, als een sterkte om je te kunnen uitdrukken. Hij wijs echter ook op de gevaren van het gebruik van emoties op de juiste plaats en het juiste moment. Het moet relevant en authentiek zijn, en geen vorm van zelfzuchtige zelfpromotie.

"Een gesprek met een journalist of een bekende per­soon gaat al gauw over de mens achter de functie en hoe die in het leven staat, welke donkere pe­riodes die heeft meegemaakt en wat hem of haar drijft. Niet hoe de wereld is staat centraal, maar hoe we die ervaren en met die ervaring naar bui­ten komen. En het is maar de vraag of we hier niet doorslaan en stilaan terecht zijn gekomen in een opbod aan getuigenissen." (blz 31)

Of nog:  

"De Nederlandse filosoof Theo de Wit het stelt kan slachtofferschap een aantrekkelijke manier wor­den om jezelf op de kaart te zetten en aandacht te eisen, maar gaat die aandacht gepaard met een ranzig kantje. Zeker 'in een postideologische wereld waar 'waar­heid' vooral gevoelsmatig beleefde waarheid aan het worden is. Respect voor anderen is dan vooral respect voor andermans beleving van de waarheid. De kritische vraag naar de feiten achter die beleving kan dan als uiterst ongewenst worden ervaren; over gevoelens is het namelijk moeilijk discussieren.' Wanneer emoties een wapen worden om ons ge­drag niet langer ter discussie voor te willen leg­gen, wordt het lastig om met elkaar samen te leven. Zoals Plato dacht dat je emoties kan uit­schakelen om goed te kunnen nadenken, zo pro­beert men hier het omgekeerde: de gevoelens worden aan het gesprek of het debat onttrokken zodat ze de status van vastliggende waarheid ver­krijgen en anderen er geen toegang of zelfs geen verhouding tot hebben." (blz 73)

Als iemand die de belangen van patiënten behartigt, kan ik het alleen maar eens zijn met volgende paragraaf: de mens is meer dan een klinisch gegeven, en behandelingen zijn meestal pas succesvol als ze echt rekening houden met de volledige mens. 

"Wie daarentegen met mensen omgaat - denk aan artsen die patiënten ontmoeten - heeft wel de­gelijk andere kennis nodig dan alleen klinische gegevens. Weten hoe iemand eraan toe is en wat een ingreep met hem of haar doet, is allemaal bij­zonder relevant en noodzakelijk voor een goeie omgang met elkaar. Dan gaat het vaak om erva­ringskennis waar emoties een grote rol in spelen, en minder het louter cijfermatige of in formules om te zetten data. " (blz 56)

 Niet alle emoties komen evenveel aan bod, en misschien is emotie als drijfveer tot handelen misschien de grootste misbedeelde in dit overzicht. We doen wat we doen omdat we ergens door gepassioneerd zijn, nieuwsgierig zijn, moreel geschokt zijn. Deze diepe emotie dat de wereld beter kan zijn, lukt enkel dankzij de energie die deze emoties tot stand brengen. Als Plato zijn figuurlijke paarden met de ratio in bedwang denkt te houden en de emoties naar de achtergrond wil brengen, dan stopt hij ook het draaien van onze wereld. Zelfs de grootste wetenschapper - die uiteraard geen persoonlijke gevoelens in haar methode toelaat -  doet haar onderzoek gedreven door een diepe persoonlijke overtuiging en emotie. 

Maar ik kan het iedereen aanraden. Denken over emoties met Devisch als gids, biedt veel inzichten en stof tot nadenken. Het is geen wetenschappelijk werk uiteraard, maar een persoonlijke mijmering die zeer laagdrempelig en zelfs een tikje persoonlijk. 

John Glassie - A Man Of Misconceptions (Riverhead Books, 2012) ****

Several years ago I read Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès novel "Là Où Les Tigres Sont Chez Eux" in which he extensively mentions the 17th Century polymath and jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was as much a scientist as he was a fantast and con man. For one or the other reason I stumbled upon a biography of the man, which is easy to recommend for anyone interested in the history of science or religion. 

To the man's credit, he was interested in everything, and his arrogant self-confidence made him also belief he was the best at everything, from math over astronomy and physics to medicine and linguistics, and of course also astrology and alchemy. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman college. He wrote extensive books on many subjects. Some of his contributions were valuable, but for many of them he got away with them because nobody else had any knowledge on the subject. 

His books were read by scientists and philosophers such as Leibniz, Descartes and Christiaan Huygens. Descartes sent the books back with the following comment: "The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar". Leibniz was then much younger and absolutely fascinated by Kircher's writings, even if he already asked for some evidence for the claims made by the Jesuit. 

The Jesuits were at that time among the world leaders in science education and development, and Kircher's role is best placed in this context. 

"Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests "distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems," serving as "a source of great fear to all enemies" and as "an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world." Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflex­ibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them." (p.34)

Although already at that time, the role of the jesuits was often mocked, and Kircher clearly did not match the description of the ideal jesuit: 

"Recall that for the Jesuits, the path toward Christ was predicated on an effort to achieve humility. It's unclear how well or how often Kircher took a good look at his apparent lack in that regard. But given that hypocrisy is almost requisitely present in human beings, and common among religious, political, and philosophical practices, he surely wasn't the only vain or selfinterested member of the Society of Jesus. As the satirizing sermon by a monk from another order in Rome went, the Jesuits "are the best Men that Live on the Earth. They are as Modest as Angels. They never open their eyes to cast a Look upon the Ladies at Church. They are such great Lovers of Restraint, that you never see them in the Streets. They are so in Love with Poverty, that they Despise and trample upon all the Riches in the World. They never come near Dying Persons or Widows, to importune them to be Remember' d in their last Wills .... They never go among Courts, or mind State Affairs."  (p.209)

Kircher claimed that he could decipher hieroglyphs, and because nobody else had any clue, he was believed in this matter. When a heavy fallen obelisk was found, Kircher even gave the translation of the side that had not been revealed yet because it was still lying on the ground. 

""They in turn marveled at my boldness," Kircher claimed, "and perhaps my lack of temerity, but several decreed that the truth of the matter must be determined by the original on the obelisk itself' After the obelisk had finally been rolled, they compared Kircher's scheme with the newly revealed side. "And when they had discovered that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original," he recalled, "they were utterly stupefied, those same men who were formerly mocking my interpretations as merely pure conjecture." This left "certain individuals saying that this knowledge had been inspired by the power of God, while several, not without calumny, even asserted that the knowledge had been acquired by some illicit pact with a demon. Some, finally, judged that this type of knowledge, attained by many years of study, was able to be acquired by the strength of a singular intellect." (p.204)

Kircher collected automata and made some himself, such as this wonderful tool that could do almost anything: 

"What is known about Kircher's device comes from an instruc­tional guide he wrote titled Specula Melitensis (Maltese Observatory), which, as one historian says, mostly conveyed Kircher's "enthusiastic capacity for fatiguing detail." The apparatus had "the form and figure of an observatory," or watchtower, hence its name, and it evidently employed the Llullian discs. Beyond that, it's hard to say precisely what this instrument looked like or how it worked. A "universal chronoscope" was on "the first cubical side." A "cosmographic mir­ror" was on the second. A "physico-mathematical mirror" was on the third, and the fourth cubical side was used for "medical-mathematical" purposes. The top of the structure was a pyramid. In all, the device had one hundred twenty-five functions. Among other things, it could be used to determine: 

• the "amount of dusk"
• the "flux and reflux of the seas"
• the astrological houses of the planets
• the signs of disease and "simple medicines for healing"
• the best times to go fishing and to give birth" (p.90)

He was fascinated by everything, often boastful, less competent and scientific than he presented himself, but like with Leibniz, his unbridled interest in everything, and his incredibly productive output on so many topics raised the interest among other, possibly better scientists, to also start investigating the same topics with more success. 

"Peiresc put it very mildly when he said that Kircher's ambitions were "a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues." This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and-multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination. (p. 269)

This biography is well-documented, well-written and offers a fascinating view on the century when science was still in its early infancy. That some did not make great inventions such as Kircher, is inevitable. His broad interests, his assured self-confidence and his deliberate fabrications make this a wonderful read. 

Giorgio Parisi - In A Flight Of Starlings (Allan Lane, 2023) ****

Giorgio Parisi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for his “discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

In this short book he describes, explains and muses on complex systems, such as the flight of starlings, which is only the subject of the first chapter. His writing is simple, elegant and accessible, and easy to understand for the lay reader. 

He explains how as a young researcher he was encouraged to focus on just a few subjects instead of "concentrating on a few important ones. On the one hand this was obviously good advice, but on the other it was precisely by studying many things at once that I was able to make connections between different fields, the basis of many later discoveries"(p. 46). Next to starlings, we learn about the boiling of water and phase transitions, spin glasses, quantum physics, metaphors in physics and how ideas are born. Each chapter is worth reading, even if the first chapter on the flight of starlings was why I bought the book. The essence is about Parisi's work in complex system and the interaction of the various elements that they consist of. 

"In the context of physics, 'exchanging information' is equivalent to 'being subject to forces'. But generally speaking - given that the model can be applied to many fields of study, from physics and biology to economics and so on - there are many objects whose behavior depends on the behavior of other objects that are more or less in proximity to them, given that objects that are too far apart from each other cannot exchange information" (p. 47)

Not surprisingly, scientists from other disciplines are not always too happy when experts from other fields intrude in their area of interest. Just like anthropologists and sociologists hated the biologists who started with sociobiology, here the biologists are sometimes not all too happy when physicists come on their turf, when of course this cross-breeding is where the fun is. 

"We defined new standards of investigation in biology by using techniques originated and developed in statistical physics to solve complex and disordered problems. Not all biologists ap­preciated this incursion into their territory: some have shown themselves to be very interested in the results, while others have found our investigations to be too short on biology and top-heavy with math. The work was rejected by various journals that are probably kicking themselves now. After the great success of our first· article, which was cited in almost two thousand scientific publications, many others have followed." (p.17)

 And of course that's also where the value of analysing complex systems comes from. Understanding their workings at a very basic and abstract level, amplifies their use across contexts and areas of interest. 

"The actual world is disordered, and as we said at the start, many situations in the real world can be described as a large number of elementary agents that interact with each other. These interactions can be schematized with simple rules, but the results of their collective action are sometimes really unpredictable. The elementary agents can be spins, atoms or molecules, neurons, cells in general-but also websites, financial traders, stocks and shares, people, animals, components of ecosystems, and so on. 

Not all interactions between elementary agents generate dis­ordered systems. Disorder is born from the fact that certain ele­mentary entities behave differently from others: some spins try to go in opposite directions; certain atoms are different from most others; certain financial actors sell shares that others are buy,ing; some dinner guests actively dislike others who have been invited and want to sit as far away from them as possible. In all these disordered cases, the mathematical and conceptual tool I found is indispensable for tackling the problems associated with them." (p.80)

The book is an easy read, but with a very important topic. 

Sarah Bernstein - Study For Obedience (Granta, 2023) ***

In "Study for Obedience", the anonymous narrator tells how she dropped everything after his brother's marriage broke up, in order to serve him. The brother lives lavishly in an old mansion in a remote mountain village. Once her brother leaves on business, she remains alone in the house, trying to connect with the villagers who seem to avoid or even reject her. She is at the full service of her brother, as the youngest child in the family and "trained" for this role of obedience and servitude. Bernstein's narrator is quite elliptical in her description of her situation. You can expect abuse or even incest by her brother, although it's never explicitly mentioned. You can expect the villagers to act as they do because she and her brother are jewish, or rich, or intruders, or all of those, but without clear explanation. The narrator tries her best to fold in, even volunteering to help with farming, but all in vain. 

Bernstein manages to create a very coherent narrative, both in content and style, an unusual book, written with precision and elegance, shimmering with unsaid emotions, by a main character who appears a little naive, simple and of course docile, and allows life to unroll without too much intervening, and when she does, tiny problems and frictions seem to arise. So her safety spot is just to do what others want. 

As a reader, you cannot but sympathise with her predicament, and even if - I think - my personality is the complete opposite of the narrator, Bernstein brings her to life in such a way that anyone will relate to her. 

 

Hanya Yanagihara - The People In The Trees (Picador, 2013) ***

 

I have rarely been so disappointed by the denouement of a book as with this one. Hanya Yanagihara writes a truly excellent book, with a brilliant style, a slow and careful build-up, only to make it end with a rather immature element that she kept hidden from the readers all along. It's a cheap trick that the book and the quality of her writing does not deserve. Sorry for this harsh judgment, given with mixed feelings. 

It's the story about a young doctor, Norton Perina, working in a laboratory who gets the opportunity to accompany Paul Tallent, an anthropologist, to look for an unknown tribe on an island in the Pacific. Apparently, among this tribe some people live for hundreds of years, but increasingly senile. Perina uncovers the reason for their longevity and eventually gets the Nobel Prize for his work, but that's not how the book ends of course. 

As said, Yanagihara's writing is excellent. Here are some examples. 

"Labs at that time were not like the ones today. Not that I cared a terrible amount about my colleagues' lives, the things they were interested in outside of the office, but there was at work a kind of conservatism, a fixation on neatness, that I found difficult and dispiriting. In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen. This was the era, after all, of Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, both of them exceptional, of course, but not exempt from having to dress a certain way, or from being able to perform at cocktail parties, or from pursuing romance. Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one's intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind." (p58)

The experience of the explorers on the remote island completely desintegrates the author from all things known and familiar to him. 

"And yet-and this was even more frightening still - I could also feel something within me come undone. Even today, all these decades later, I cannot explain it with any greater accuracy. I found myself suddenly imagining a long, fat, chalked line stretching across a flat burned earth. To one side was what I had known, a neat-bricked city of windowless structures, the stuff and facts I knew to be true (I thought, unbidden, of my staircase, its names of those wiser than I, and was at once embarrassed for myself, for finding myself in this situation, in speechless thrall to an anthropologist). And on the other side was Tallent's world, the shape of which I could not see, for it was obscured by a fog, one that thinned and thickened in unpredictable movements, so that I could discern, occasionally, glimpses of what lay behind it: nothing more than colors and movements, no real shapes; but there was something irresistible there, I knew it, and the fear of succumbing to it was finally less awful than never knowing what lay beyond that fog, never exploring what I might never again have the opportunity to explore.  And so I closed my eyes; I forgot my senses; and I stepped over the line." (p. 94)

or :  

"We slept then, all of us, even the guides, and when I woke and saw the others' still bodies, I thought for a minute that they were dead and I was alone in this strange, sunlit place, surrounded by trees I did not know the names of and birds I could hear but could not see, and that no one would ever know I was here or remember I had ever existed or would ever find me. The sensation was fleeting, but what I would remember is how quickly, like a breath, I moved from despair to resignation, how well equipped the human mind is to readjust to its realities, to soothe oneself of one's deepest fears. And then I felt proud, I suppose, of my very humanness, and briefly invincible, and sure that I would be greeted with nothing in the next day that I could not bear." (p. 102)

Both excerpts demonstrate the unsettling, uncanny, unheimlich situation a person can be in when all known elements - rationality, familiarity, logic - have to be given up to get a full grasp of what is happening or to be part of something that you have no ideas what it is. The novels and especially the writing style of H.P. Lovecraft often come to mind, as you can deduct from the above. 

My negative comment at the beginning may scare you off. I still think it's a novel worth reading. I did not read her other novels yet: "A Little Life" and "To Paradise". Based on her writing skills, I assume they are still on my reading list. 

Daniel C. Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Penguin, 1995) ****

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett passed away earlier this year. He is one the four riders of the apocalypse, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, called like that for their outspoken and often militant atheism. This was a good reason to read one of Dennett's initial books on Darwin's theory of evolution. 

Thirty years after publication, the book is somewhat outdated, luckily, but unfortunately also very actual. Many of his references about genetics, quantum physics and artificial intelligence are of course no longer entirely correct, and would have been presented in a very different way today, considering the incredible progress that was made in the last decade and years. But the essence of what he writes is still valid. The idea that life is the result of random chance events, with some basic rules that continue to be subjected to chance, and the organsism's fitness to survive in an often hostile environment, is something that - my guess - roughly 90% of the world's population would still reject today. 

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. 

Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong; of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task environment (or fitness landscape) with a new criterion of right and wrong, better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters, differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them, but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be discerned, and every mistake anybody or any­thing has ever made since is dependent on that original error-making pro­cess. In fact, there is strong selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (p. 203)

This core idea cannot be repeated enough. It's a message of humility. It's a message that requires collaboration and pragmatic solutions among people for the complex problemas that we are confronted with, instead of relying on age-old and unworkable rigid ethical concepts. 

A large part of the book consists in refuting concepts of other academics whose writings and viewpoints are no longer a point of discussion today. If you can live with this, the book is still easy to recommend, and Dennett's knowledge of various scientific disciplines and the rigour of his approach are an absolute pleasure to read. 

Our world has lost a great mind. 

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt - L'Evangile Selon Pilate (Albin Michel, 2000) **

Because I had read all the books I brought with me on a rainy holiday, I took this book from a 'book swap box' on a street somewhere in France. It describes the doubts of Jesus the day before his crucifixion in the first part, and in the second part Pontius Pilate starts his search for the missing body of Jesus. Schmitt is certainly not the first to re-imagine and re-write with a more modern perspective the stories of the New Testament. It's always an interesting exercise, especially when it's presented as here as a police investigation. Schmitt leaves many aspects hanging in a veil of uncertainty. Pilate remains doubtful, yet his wife Claudia is convinced and becomes a Christian. 

Schmitt presents the story with style, but in my opinion with little conviction. Pilate does not ask the right questions in my opinion. Many aspects remain untouched, as if Schmitt wants to use doubt as a possibility that the resurrection actually occured as described in the later gospels (of Matthew, Luke and John), but not in the earliest gospel of Mark, in which the tomb is just empty. And for reference, none of the four evangelists actually ever met Jesus. It is all based on hearsay. 

Many of the modernised versions of the bible have only one goal: to convert the doubtful to christianity, in the hope that the language and style of today might be more effective than the real scriptures. I think Schmitt's book does not fall into this category. It has literary merits. 

Paul Harding - This Other Eden (Penguin, 2023) ****½

In "This Other Eden", Paul Harding fictionalises a historical event, the removal of a few families from Malaga Island, located in the New Meadows River in Maine, United States. 

Harding is known for his exquisite penmanship, which is also the case here. With a deep tenderness and lyricism he describes the lives of the people living on the island, originally outcasts who developed their own secluded little world, as a kind of metaphor of this world, with its horror and beauty, its humanity and its cruelty. 

The few dozen characters all have their own personal story, their strong personalities and special traits, some of them with special and unique talents, but also with their problems and issues, which makes their interaction even more powerful. They are partly descendants of a freed slave and are of different complexions, in the words of a visitor to the island:  "There was white Negroes and coloured white people. Some of them were grey. Some of them pink, like they were raw or something. And some of them were yellow, like waxy cracked old piano keys."

Despite the poverty, the malnutrition, the bugs on the island and the lack of prospects of its inhabitants, you fill sympathy for them, and especially when the bureaucratic outside world of politics and religion starts to intervene. Harding's book has been criticised for not being truthful to what actually happened, or for using elements that come more from myths around the island than from fact. I do not think that this matters to appreciate the novel. Harding has written a beautiful, heart-rending and lyrical novel that juxtaposes different communities, both with their strengths and weaknesses, without actually judging about right and wrong. Even if the bureaucrats and the teacher are clumsy and disrespectful, their intentions - and especially at that time in history - are somewhat understandable. 

It's a nice piece of literature.