"Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland": Book Review

For all the attention given Icelandic music, scenery, and travel lately, its translated literature lingers in fourth place, at least. A couple of crime novelists follow the Scandinavian boom in gloom and morbidity. Yet, the depth of this island's contributions to the short story remain little plumbed over the sea. Its 1955 Nobel Laureate, Halldór Laxness, has had some of his many epic works find success in English over the past two decades. But even his shorter tales languish untranslated and neglected in our language.

Helen Mitsios edits "Out of the Blue," the first anthology of Icelandic short fiction translated into our language. Its twenty new selections range from a page to many, and many indeed feature what she labels as a native "regard for entertaining conversation." She repeats the familiar lore of the oral tradition and the sagas being passed down for a millennium, and the fond factoid that Icelanders read (and write per capita) more books than any other nation.


"The collection transports readers to Iceland’s timeless and magical island of Vikings and geographical wonders," promises the cover blurb. But little emerges for the careful reader of this collection from that medieval era, or about the haunting or dazzling raw and fiery landscapes. For, these voices speak from their homeland, where both these legacies may seem truly mundane. These stories refuse to romanticize the fabled past or the frenzied present. Many protagonists and storytellers within  sound jaded. They've been unmoored by the whirlwind which propelled Iceland to the heady air of economic peaks, only in the banking crash a decade ago to crash down suddenly.

In his fragmented forward, the poet-novelist-lyricist who goes by the name of Sjón concludes: "Perhaps it is because philosophy reached these shores comparatively late that Icelandic writers have never felt bound by the truth. While recognizing no literature except that which springs from reality, they reserve the right to distort the truth according to the demands of their tales." The experimental and restless tone of these selections stresses the uncanny and the upended. They follow Sjón's sly reflection more faithfully or waywardly than Mitsios' recital of well-worn tourist tropes and touts.

However, the central preoccupation with articulating unease infuses this slim volume. Mitsios compares their contents to "the lyrics of a good country-western song." Regret, revenge, and recrimination reoccur. Fidelity, fun, and feasting more rarely do. The first story, "Self-Portrait," by Halldór's granddaughter Auður Jónsdóttir, captures vividly the mid-life crisis of a harried mother on vacation in the South of Italy. "She's not the same person who left anymore; she can't see home the same way again." With ex-pats adrift in Southern California and the South of France, the next two entries in this collection continue such themes, if less successfully. Given the self-generating acclaim and grants afforded many recipients among the estimated one-tenth of the population who will find their work in print during their lifetime, quality control lags behind such a rapid rate of production. Some stories fall flat, the product of workshops rather than life. The anthology's title sounds stale.

Luckily, enigmatic endings linger in more than one entry. Einar Örn Gunnarsson's "The Most Precious Secret" conjures up the spirit of Anaïs Nin, if less for the erotic than the artistic content. Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s "One Hundred Fifty Square Meters" combines the concerns of a generation raised on Craigslist and now on the dole or working dreary jobs with an encounter with a Cold War past of an island caught between superpowers. A couple move into a flat, a coveted find in crowded and costly Reykjavík. They must share it with the spirit of a vanished tenant. His preoccupations ensnare one of this pair. Kristín evokes the predicament of Iceland's geopolitics and its geography.

Such attenuated connections to departed specters or disturbing partners enliven some of the best stories here. Gyrðir Elíasson's "The Black Dog" puzzles; Andri Snær Magnason's "Grass" recalls a sly folktale. Two longer selections sustain skillful moods of tenderness amidst dissonance. Þórunn Erlu-Valdimarsdóttir's "The Secret Raven Service and Three Hens" takes the Norse norns of fate and places them in our own times. Ólafur Gunnarsson's "Killer Whale" mingles joy and despair into a memorable Saturday afternoon. As the "Raven" narrator realizes, fate grips every creature, down into the dark. "My raven's beak is specially designed to pluck one of my eyes out! My hand is specially designed to pick fruit at the supermarket." This story works. It captures now, as filtered through then.

Fanciful excursions naturally encompass the narratives chosen by tellers eager to adapt venerable modes to contemporary Icelandic settings. Þórarinn Eldjárn's "Scorn Pole" finds its characters rummaging around their memories of Egil's saga, "some pretty savage stuff we had learned from television," and bits scavenged from televised pop depictions of the occult. These restive fellows summon up a structure to invoke the old powers, in a land where Christianity barely registers anymore, and where incantations may come quickly bidden and almost habitually or unconsciously to the lips of men and women in their moments of fear or stress. This generates an uncertain set of possibilities, as the affluence enjoyed by many in these pages pales before the ultimate mysteries suffusing the island. As its title promises, Jón Kalman Stefánsson's "The Universe and the Deep Velvet Dress" indulges in an astronomical parable. This last story in this anthology ends with the protagonist listening "to the creaking of distant windows as winter darkness tightens around them."

While the fictional craft remains uneven for some of the unnamed entries in this collection, "Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland" merits notice among foreign audiences curious about this now-trendy destination. Alongside the celebrated creative achievements of this place and its people, the art of the story continues to grapple with conditions far changed from the sagas, yet nevertheless constrained by the elements which surround the fragile compounds in the pampered capital. From this tension between comfort and threat, thriving and despair, these Icelandic writers take odd inspiration. (PopMatters 3/31/17)

Liza Knapp's "The Giants of Russian Literature": Audiobook Review

 

I checked this out [in The Modern Scholar series at over seven hours total] via my library to hear, as an introduction to the big four, Turgenev and Chekhov as well as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I've read some of the latter two, along with a few stories by Chekhov. Liza Knapp, from Columbia U., addresses us as she might her beginning students. She takes the theme, crediting both Woody Allen and E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," to emphasize the existential themes of love and death in the four. Her delivery is acceptable, but she hesitates a lot in her speech patterns, halting sometimes at odd moments in her sentences.

She aroused my curiosity about the comparatively lesser appreciated (at least in renown abroad today) "Fathers and Sons" as an exemplar of a well-crafted fictional creation of the same century that found the novel so perfected in Britain. Frankly, while Turgenev does not sound that exciting, I was interested to learn that he influenced the Irish writer William Trevor, who made his "Reading Turgenev" novella in "Two Lives" on this inspiration. I'd have liked more from Knapp on the wider impact of Turgenev, as he is now eclipsed by the three admirers who followed him.

Dostoevsky's dramatic life follows, and Knapp refers us to his biographer Joseph Frank for more detail. She takes "Notes from the Underground" with its carping narrator as a harbinger of what so many after him next century would harp upon. (A star deducted as the "Notes" lecture is not a half-hour as the rest of the main ones, but it cuts off mid-sentence at under thirteen minutes.) She reminds us how these later 19th c. works only found translation via Constance Garnett (and the Maudes) at the start of the 20th c. among English-language audiences then creating quite an effect. "Crime and Punishment" gains center stage here as the set-text. Similarly, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" dominates that next section.

Finally, Chekhov in a few stories shows his own background; as with the previous three, Knapp guides us as to how each came from a class system that left a firm mark on their outlooks and attitudes. I found it surprising that Chekhov professed (like a man between wife and mistress) going back and forth between his medical profession and his writing avocation when he got bored with the charms of one and then the other.

In conclusion, Knapp suggests that the answer tor the meaning of life may lie in the love that carries us on in the face of inevitable death. She credits the four Russian giants as pioneering the Big Questions in fictional form which have preoccupied so many of us, writers or readers, since. (Amazon US 3-27-17)

Boccaccio's "Decameron" (Norton Critical Edition): Book Review

The first baby steps in Italian prose, away from the mystical, the ascetic, the heavenly, the Papacy towards the sensuous, the sexual, the clever, and the bourgeoisie, were taken by Boccaccio in his hundred tales, Decameron. These lively (if sometimes awkward or hesitantly told) stories reveal everyday men--and many women, at last--keeping up appearances, fooling priests and potentates, and striving to express their fleshly, calculating, and grasping desires. Narrated by seven young ladies and three gentlemen fleeing Florence during the Black Plague of 1348, these clever schemers may succeed or fail, but their ambitions energize these tales. They promote the Renaissance humanist, eager to hear from his peers.

Twenty-one representative novelle were chosen for a 1977 Norton Critical Edition; the somewhat ironically surnamed Francisco De Sanctis sums up their appeal as human comedy: "The flesh entertains itself at the expense of the spirit." Considered in the triad if below Dante, we get the next two conversing, via the letters of Petrarch, who chides his old friend Boccaccio for recanting (I wonder if Chaucer knew this when he abandoned his frame-tale scheme for his Canterbury project?) and threatening in a state of guilt to burn his manuscripts. Colleagues tended in their biographical accounts to admire not these "new" tales so much as his more edifying ones, inspired by the classics.

Later, scholars weigh in. Seeing this was issued in 1977, I'd reckon as with other Norton Critical Editions (yes, this has a few footnotes if not many), that a revision with some newer scholarship might enhance its value. As to what's in this version, I sympathize intuitively with literary historian Ugo Foscolo, who advances the idea of Boccaccio separating his concerns from Church and urging the expression of the female, the mercantile, even the roguish voices, along with those of the elite and the clerics who had long dominated the conversation of who should act how, in fact as well as fable. Erich Auerbach follows with an excerpt from Mimesis analyzing stylistic variety, and Aldo Scaglione takes on nature and love as the concerns supplanting those of piety and renunciation. Wayne Booth explains how Boccaccio tries out both telling and showing as a narrator early in the evolution of a longer set of fictional tales. Even if he did not meet our expectations, yet he tried to show, not tell.

Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov as to structure and Robert Clements as to collections illustrate the sorting process within stories and among them. Marga Cottino-Jones argues how patient Griselda's account uses the Christian figurative mode to elevate her status, and how despite however moderns react, for the audience of Boccaccio, such a presence resonated with Christ-like ideals of endurance and sacrifice. Ben Lawton defends Pasolini's 1971 film as true to some of the spirit of the source, even as it skips from a medieval time and place to a jarringly modern one, if but two-thirds of a bold triptych.

Translators Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, who later published a Signet edition of all hundred stories, conclude by pointing to the meaning of them all. Beyond the purported audience of "idle ladies," the impact of the Decameron reverberates in themes of love, intelligence, and fortune. Instead of God's will governing this universe, men and women seek to procure not heavenly but earthly fame.
(Part of this is on a List Inconsequential: Late Summer Reading List, 7-31-14, Spectrum Culture.)

A.N. Wilson's "Dante in Love": Book Review

This English academic turned journalist-novelist combines an explication of Dante's political milieu with an overview of his life and times. While it ranges sometimes so deeply into the endless Guelf-Ghibelline contentions that non-historians may find their attention flagging, Wilson's "Dante in Love" fulfills Wilson's wish: a primer for those needing help before taking on Dante.

Wilson does take some liberty, given that much in Dante's crafting of his Commedia eludes precise documentation. For instance, on pg. 35 Wilson points to Pope Boniface's conniving to literally rake in cash at the altar of St. Peter's at the 1300 Jubilee as a way to profit from the newly formulated doctrine of Purgatory as a place as well as a state, where the souls of the dead might be assisted by donations as well as sacrifices by the living. Wilson then claims this set in Dante's "brain a sequence of inspirations which would create a literary masterpiece, the beginnings of modern literature with human singularity and self-consciousness at the center of it." But where is the proof?

His title repeats that of Harriet Rubin's 2004 attempt in similar fashion to provide an introduction full of guidance and ideas for the doughty reader of Dante, and Wilson wanders from the straight path similarly. It's difficult to follow a chronological presentation integrating Dante's formation as a Papal backer turned imperial supporter, and how this gets embedded into the poem and his earlier texts. So, Wilson in 2011 like Rubin goes on tangents and down byways, like Dante the pilgrim, to indulge his curiosity. Along with the political allegiances and the "allegorical autobiography" Wilson notes in the poem a third concentration, unlike that of Chaucer or Shakespeare: Dante's ambition to further his professional credentials as a poet, given the competition such as Guido Cavalcanti, around Florence.

While Wilson's title promises love, Dante also is "the poet of hate, the poet of vengeance, of implacable resentment and everlasting feuds." (40) Hell fills from "hard cases"; those who binge, addicts who choose desires or ambitions rather than God's plan. While the infernal realm itself gains less evocation in Wilson than one may expect (lots of politics, lots of papal intrigue dominate this narrative), he does show the careful reader how Dante used the text to integrate bits of his own life, a confession of sorts aimed at, as the epic unfolds, "universal application" rather than the Rousseau model of self-promotion. Even as Dante filled Hell with Italians and post-dated it to settle his scores.

Wilson finds Dante veering between tenderness and "Tourette's Syndrome" (280) on his quest, and suddenly lurching from one register to the other; at least it stays animated. As in Rubin, Wilson wisely varies the translations to show the variety of ways English voices try to echo the propulsive line of Dante. Certainly terza rima cannot be duplicated, meaning any word-for-word cadences of the language must give way to English sentence structure and can turn stilted or clunky. Wilson cites how the Commedia increased the stock of written Italian from 60% to 90% with its inventive vocabulary.

As one who had left Christianity as an adult and later returned to an Anglican observance, Wilson discerns hints of proto-Reformation unease in Dante's critiques of the Catholic Church, however hidden for understandable caution. Wilson finds a Catholic innovation of purgatory guided by the Aeneid's example in its sixth section of how souls were hung up on the winds or purged by fire, but he does not elaborate this intriguing claim. While endnotes often do point to sources, not all his readings or assertions are grounded, but the list of works consulted does attest as he says to a life spent studying Dante since his teens and a visit to Florence, as well as learning Italian early on there.

One advantage of this study is while Wilson eschews the step-by-step commentary through the poem, he does spend more time in Paradise than, say, Rubin or many readers. They tend to lose steam after the Inferno, bogging down as they hike up Mount Purgatory. The lack of a single translation of the last cantica by a poet to set along Robert Pinsky, Ciaran Carson, or many other versifiers of Inferno, or the elegant W.S. Merwin rendering of Purgatorio, speaks perhaps to this lack of interest for us. Wilson does not say this straight out. But he recommends that "months" spent in the last section may reward, as the verses can be pondered a very few at a time per day, slowing the pace to allow insight.

"Heaven is crowded, but it draws its citizens one by one." (303) Wilson finds beauty in Dante's difficulty, as he moves from observer in Hell to participant in Purgatory to guest in Heaven. By then, we readers find we have entered the allegory, to join Dante "to be unclothed before the searchlight of heaven." In his chapter on Paradise, Wilson reaches his own heights, and this portion merits acclaim.

He follows with "Dante's Afterlife," a fine tour through the ways mainly how Europeans since have kept Dante's memory buried or alive. We glimpse how Henry Francis Cary's 1814 version excited the Romantics; Gladstone himself immersed himself in Dante, as did many Victorians and Edwardians, later in a Temple Classics bilingual edition. From the troubadours to Ezra Pound, Wilson avers the "great European mainstream" endured in its canon, but that this died with T.S. Eliot and Pound's generation. We are walled off from Pound's "common Kulchur" and in that poet's fumbled attempts, Wilson finds "danger" in how moderns might interpret Dante's obsessions. Wilson rightly regards the attempts of today's readers to tackle the Comedy as a classic akin to starting the Bhagavad-Gita. A classic, but a remote one from Western secular mentality, and full of references we lack nowadays.

Still, Wilson leaves us with two suggestions as to its appeal for our century. Outrage at corrupt institutions, and a quest for a "Good Place" animate the poem. Dante continues to anticipate and to articulate our own unease at the past and the present, and tells us our dreams for a better future. This narrative straddles the Christian tradition and the post-Christian attitude many of us inherit whatever our allegiance, and Wilson fairly strives to show Dante's relevance as each century reinterprets this. (Amazon US 10-12-14; see also Prue Shaw's invaluable thematic 2014 study, Reading Dante)

Arno Camenisch's "The Alp": Book Review

Four characters, identified only by their occupations, spend the Swiss summer working, drinking, brooding, and sleeping. Around them, as things fall apart, tourist gawk, soldiers train, and what passes for progress looms. That sums up this very short novel, a series of vignettes translated from Swiss-German and the lesser known language of Rhaeto-Romanic, itself an amalgamation of ancient bits of pre-Roman contact tongues, as well as what thousands of years have created where Teutonic and Italian varieties meet, where the Alps isolate a few to carry on today.

These few, in Arno Camenisch's spare telling, create their own hierarchy. Beckett might have conjured up such a quartet, and the Irish-born, Scots-raised translator Donal McLaughlin conveys the low-key happenings in suitably stringent, spare, sour prose. Neither Camenisch nor McLaughlin appear to pander to crowd pleasing, and they favor a detached if exacting take on this setting.

This combination of detail and distance creates a hermetic feel within stoic scenes. People, others with proper names, come and go, but these tend to remain rather sketchy, glimpsed rather than known more deeply. This stance reflects the attitude of the four main characters, who must remain at the foot of Sez Ner, the original title of this novella. Translating this into a more generic Alp, McLaughlin may have lost the specificity a Swiss reader would bring to this place, but he keeps its resonance for a wider audience, likely far less familiar with humdrum reality than the romance this setting suggests.

Among the anonymous or symbolic protagonists, the dairyman, who guards his cheese wheels like "ingots" in his home, in a bottom drawer, dominates. The farmhand takes refuge in a book which appeals to Catholic sentiment, welcoming manners towards visitors, and local pride. The swineherd makes an excursion to a Stone Man cairn but his motive and his action there remain mysterious. The cowherd puts him, like a Beckett figure, with a lot of bother, and calls his hapless dog "the dope".

What saves this from tedium or insignificance, over about seventy-five pages, is the manner Camenisch chooses to relate the everyday lives these men lead. Rather than chapters, the book divides into paragraphs. No breaks or editorial framework are given, so the reader plunges into the situation as it is. As McLaughlin renders the Swiss-German and I assume from the italicized fragments untranslated the Surselva dialect of Romansh itself, in all its half-understood orthographic and linguistic novelty for English-speaking readers, the impact is muted, yet sustained, by the tone.

Many paragraphs could bloom into their own tales, but they are cut off or reduced to essentials. A cinematic precision stages what we are allowed to see. For instance, here is a paragraph in full:

"With their high-gloss leaflets in their hands, the day-trippers are standing around the cheese kettle, beside the tourist guide from tourist information, who is holding a red flag with a white cross. The dairyman, with a dripping skimmer in his right hand, welcomes them and explains things. The cameras flash and the guide nods as if he knows all this already and a lot more besides. The flock of guests, bunched close together, marvel at the demonstration, not realizing that outside, beneath the steamed-up windows, their rucksacks are being ransacked by the herders."

It's a hard luck life, and the road which cuts down the firs by its construction, the golf course mooted for a slope, the giant phone which although it does not work well, signals change: these markers point ahead from this novel's vague setting. It could be anytime in the past fifty years, in such remoteness.

What endures, Camenisch suggests rather than emphasizes, are the harsh lessons people in these realms have learned to their gain or loss. "Morality is a frost, says Luis. And frost arrives early here, and stops late. The first frost burns any green shoots/ It clears the hillside. What remains has always been there. You can depend on frost." The ambiguity of that final line sums up this 2009 novella well, the first in a alpine trilogy to be released in McLaughlin's translations by Dalkey Archive Press.
(Amazon US 5-30-14; 6-5-14 to PopMatters)

Peter Marshall's "Demanding the Impossible": Book Review

Seven hundred pages of fine print, and another hundred of footnotes (in 2010's revised edition) narrate thousands of years over which people have longed for the right to make their own decisions, live as best they choose among each others' mutual assistance and communal support, and to conduct their livelihoods and relationships as they please, free of coercion, top-down dominance, or imposed government or creed. If leaders are chosen, if organizations are established, then these are entered freely and exited at will.

This sums up anarchism's principled versions. It seems from early on, philosophers, priests, bosses, legislators, politicians, and generals all have feared such a movement. Peter Marshall's immense survey shows the results, parading steadily the greatest names in the centuries who've tried to make theory into practice. The Introduction begins with great quotes from some of its exponents, and prefaces in Part I anarchism as it is in theory. While "the river of anarchy" changes with each version, the essence of freedom attracts a few each generation to plunge into what, by the heady rhetoric recurring, appear inviting waters of liberation, personally and socially. For, society for most advocates remains, even if the State withers away. The former is sought freely; the latter isn't chosen. "Society and the State" and "Freedom and Equality" articulate this in Marshall's introduction.

In Part II, the forerunners of anarchism, Taoism and Buddhism, surprisingly show how ancient this impulse is. Feared by Plato if somewhat anticipated by the pre-Socratic Greeks, its impulses survived into early and medieval Christianity, among such as dissenters, heretics, guilds, and rebels against Rome--and against Luther, tellingly. By the English Revolution, we see the short rise of Levellers and Diggers, and the brief establishment of Gerard Winstanley's commune--and then his about-face later in life, as he turned away from his earlier rebellious stance. Inconsistency, as Marshall patiently notes, characterizes many who in the French Renaissance and Enlightenment and also, as with Burke in the British Enlightenment, toyed with models for radical change without truly supporting them.

By Part III, French, German, British, and American libertarians emerge. Not quite anarchist for the term was not yet in common usage, but such as Tom Paine presage if imperfectly, for many sought the protection of a Jeffersonian State, however limited, along a federalist or decentralized system, the dreams of the later 18th century, as revolution sparked the possibility for change and no more kings. Partial anarchists, as it were, abound among Rousseau, Emerson, Swift, Mill, Morris, or Fourier, et al.

In Part IV, we finally reach the heart of the book. Classic anarchist thinkers begin with the passionate example of William Godwin, the lover of order. Next comes the near-Nietzschian Max Stirner, the conscious egoist, who as many would angered Marx. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's intricate theories reveal the philosopher of poverty. Two Russians pair off: Michael Bakunin as the fanatic of freedom, full of inconsistencies as many theorists seem to be in this century. Peter Kropotkin, the revolutionary evolutionist, tries to tame the theories with a study of geography and science to fit anarchism within a natural determinism, akin to many world-changing paradigms of the nineteenth century. So does, on a smaller scale, the fierce Elisée Reclus: the geographer of liberty. For all but Reclus in this long part, Marshall offers a grand sweep of their life and thought before entering topics such as their ethical views, political attitudes, thoughts on the State or human nature, to clarify particular ideas in depth.

The twentieth century's Errico Malatesta, the electrician of revolution, sparks a new current: the energy of the will, not of nature, as a way to transform human drives towards peaceful (again a contentious point among many, as the fall of the Paris Commune and the rise of WWI split many) goals. Marshall seems to sympathize with those who reject war or violence, as these are coercive means to achieve the end of the end of class antagonism, national boundaries, and capitalist rule.

Leo Tolstoy, the count of peace, gets sympathetic treatment, and various American individualists and anti-State Communists such as Lysander Spooner (who finally takes up a question I'd been asking ever since I read Locke to ask: who signed us up to the social contract established by the "consent of the governed" centuries ago?), Voltairine de Cleyre, Benjamin Tucker, and Alexander Berkman but they're all skimmed over too hastily, in admittedly a very lengthy book as it is. Sasha B's companion, Emma Goldman as "the most dangerous woman" earns a brisk, lively study, as Marshall scans her ambiguous position between understanding and condoning the use of violence to achieve liberation. 

German Communists, notably the brave martyr to the cause in the aftermath of 1919's failed Munich soviet, Gustav Landauer, follow suit, and then Mohandas Gandhi, who counters brutality as "the gentle revolutionary"; a strength of Marshall's treatment is that he firmly if gently calls out Gandhi for devolving from leader to guru with a cult of personality, or chides in part V, "Anarchism in action," those in France, Italy, and Spain who capitulated to compromise, as with the CNT-FAI, and so lost the momentum of the social revolution, during Spain's war against fascism--and Stalinism. Still, then as now, some accommodation with party politics appears inevitable for many radicals, to advance situations amenable to elusive goals of autonomy and mutual aid beyond unions or regions.

Russia and the Ukraine, with Makhno's early attempt, similar to Spain's at a sustained anarchist society during war, offer cautionary tales, as do repeated situations in Northern Europe, the United States, and especially Latin America, when attempts at progress were stymied by unions, violence, agitation, and crackdowns. Mexico and Cuba repeat the same story as the USSR and Spain, where anti-statist traditions were lured or pressed into capitulation by crafty cadres led by brutal despots.

While these chapters inevitably and rather dully in parts tell some of the same narrative the earlier chapters on leading anarchists had, depending on the nation, glimpses at such movements as French Situationists, British punks, American Wobblies, and German agitators show how the 20c managed in a few nations to survive its heyday 1880-1930 and a few progressives lived long enough to see the 1960s and inspire younger activists. The downside of this in India, where the Sarvodaya movement was co-opted by a very clever politician who used it for his own party advancement, is also telling.

After a hasty look at Asia (many regions get a rapid glance, and this tends to be names-and-dates and unions-full-of-initials types of coverage, of uneven interest compared to earlier biographical narrative), Marshall shifts in part VI to modern anarchism, with the New Left and the counterculture. This lively section looks at Situationists, Kabouters, Provos, and Greens along with anarchists themselves, as by the 1960s, a loose collective rather than unions or platforms drives many experiments. One of these, concocted on the New Right as anarcho-capitalism, merits blunt critique.

Modern libertarians and anarchists gain briefer mention; Murray Bookchin and his ecology of freedom meets an in-depth challenge as Marshall takes on this former and then future Marxist who bridled at the "lifestyle" rather than "social" anarchists as insufficiently committed. Marshall's passion emerges here and makes this part of the book lively and spirited. Similarly, his reprise as Part VII of the book's contents, as he reviews the big thinkers who established the legacy of anarchism, its ends and means, and the relevance of anarchism, along with an epilogue, shows how difficult it is for the author to let go of this vast topic. He examines the strengths and weaknesses, he tackles the applicability of this ideal to our "post-scarcity" economy after the heady utopian dreams of the 60s have given way to environmental damage, job loss, unfettered capitalism, and a commodity culture.

Again, in the last sections there is some repetition, and certain material gets included a third time, for overlap of thinkers, regions, and recent events may be inevitable. A history of a big idea causes the weight of a big book. But anyone who's read shorter works such as Colin Ward's Anarchy: A Very Short Introduction or the newer A Living Spirit of Revolt by Ziga Vodovnik will welcome Marshall. 

P.S. This massive work might be read on a Kindle so note-taking can be eased. As the print copy and bulk necessitate a very small font, readers may prefer a dual version. I found the index and notes easier to consult in book fashion, but the highlighting made an e-book appealing. A few typos remained, and the margins of a Kindle version meant that 40% of the text was end-material, but the portability of this meant I could finally finish what I'd been making my way through in print, slowly...
(Amazon US 6-10-14)

[His conclusions anticipate anthropologist David Graeber's post-millennial OWS activism, reviewed well by Christopher Shea at the Chronicle of Higher Education; Kalefa Sanneh at The New Yorker; Greg Downey at Resilience, and Eli Cook at Raritan, which burst forth a year after this edition.]

Euripides' "Bacchae": Book Review

This tragedy's all about showdowns. Dichotomies and conflicts, as Daniel Mendelsohn, emphasizes in his preface, create a character unique to the genre. Dionysus "hovering between divine majesty and human weakness, magnificence and pettiness--and between male and female--the teasing, seductive, playful, epicene god is a great study in ambiguity." This god, an effeminate foil for the law-and-order bent, but fatally lured Pentheus, draws him and the audience into a diabolically clever trap. The horror than felt, as Pentheus is punished and then his corpse torn apart, while his own mother than slowly comes out of the bacchanalian frenzy to realize her own complicity, deepens what could have been but a strange depiction of subliminal drives into a portrayal of compassion after cruelty.

Mendelson explains how this drama "explores both the benevolent and the punishing faces of divinity." Ecstasy and terror follow  instead, as the natural wonder and delight transfers through a breakout of the repressed tendencies within us, once under some spell cast, into dread and sorrow. Euripides tells this story swiftly; this can be read in a short sitting, and it moves as rapidly as a well-written thriller might in an short television production today on some "prestige" cable network. Like shows now, the critics stay divided. As Mendelsohn notes, consensus is lacking "because its subject--among other things--is the irrational, and how conventional intellectual resources wither in the face of a wildness, a potency beyond reason."

From Robin Robinson's translation, an excerpt illustrates the swift concision of his rendering. Cadmus mourns Pentheus' end: "If anyone still disputes the power of heaven./ let them look at this boy's death/ and they will see that the gods live." Certainly the reaction of this grandfather captures the human response to the whims and imperatives of a divine plan unfathomed by mortals, yet again.

This edition includes a supplement, complete with a glossary on how to pronounce names, as this assumes we now lack this preparation. A chart of who's related to who, and an introduction to Euripides, about whom we know nearly nothing, helps the reader. It's sobering to be reminded that out of a thousand works performed in the 5th c. BC from Greece, we have only 33 of them today.
(Amazon US 9-12-14)

Leo Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych + Confession": Book Review

The pairing of these two accounts of mortality, Mary Beard explains in her introduction, reveals Tolstoy's interest in death during his fifties. Although he lived another quarter-century or so, Leo Tolstoy's fascination with what transpired as the body aged and fell apart animates the story of forty-five-year-old Ivan. His fate, well-known and well-translated by Peter Carson, possesses its own poignancy. As Beard relates, the finished manuscript of these paired translations was delivered by his wife one day before his own death in January of 2013. An editor at Penguin, he came to the choice of texts ideally suited, being raised by his Russian mother and Anglo-Irish/French father trilingually. Rosamund Bartlett's afterword elaborates on Carson's rendering compared to his predecessors in English.

He favors for Ivan a plain style. You can see his use of repetition, suiting the matter-of-fact manner of Ivan and his colleagues and family, indirectly telling his story by the coolly omniscient voice in plain fashion that Tolstoy adapts for this streamlined, efficiently conveyed novella. His wife "began to wish that he would die, but she couldn't wish for that because then there would be no salary. And that irritated her even more. She considered herself terribly unhappy precisely because even his death could not rescue her and she became irritated; and her concealed irritation increased his own irritation."

Similarly, you see Ivan's own haunted realization that he must share our common fate. "He tried to defend all that to himself. And suddenly he felt the fragility of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend." I've heard and admired this as read by Oliver Ford Davos for Naxos on audio (review 7-5-12), and Carson's version provides Ivan Ilyich and his harried household a fitting tribute.

"Confession" is less familiar to readers, but as Beard shows, in the manner of Augustine or Rousseau, it preoccupies itself with similar concerns, and indeed the fact and fiction of Tolstoy's pursuit of mortality enters into this purportedly non-fictional treatise as it does his story. He assumes the kind of air that sounds like Ivan and his circle at the bar or while he plays cards, too. "People with our kind of education are in a position where the light of knowledge and life have dissolved artificial knowledge, and either they have noticed this and emptied that space, or they haven't yet noticed it."

He tells of his youthful turn from Orthodoxy to rationalism, although this text anticipates his controversial return to a fervent evangelical, idealistic, but committed phase late in his life. It's valuable for recording the type of mindset Tolstoy and many advocated in the mid-19th century, when Russian intellectuals chafed against tradition and piety. He agonizes over the loss of comfort the aesthetic pursuit affords and how helpless he feels he can ease his family's support, when "the truth is death." He and Ivan combine to show the ridiculousness of vanity and the feebleness of ambition.

He anticipates the existentialists and complements Dostoevsky perhaps as he looks into himself and finds emptiness, and contemplates suicide at the age of fifty. "Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?" Science does not satisfy his quest, either. Socrates, Shakyamuni, Solomon, and Schopenhauer gain citation, as Tolstoy looks to philosophy and speculation for wisdom. While this segment for me rambled, like Ivan as he interrogates doctors, undergoes treatments, and tries on remedies to no avail, Tolstoy here wonders: "Why do I live?"

Most of us, he avers, do not investigate so diligently. Rather, the majority prefer ignorance (especially when young) or escape into Epicureanism (often when not so young, too). A third way, he suggests, lies in "the way of strength and energy." If life's a joke, take action and strangle evil. Fourth, weakness presents a way to be dragged along; this resembles Ivan's choice after his illness invades. Life is "contrary to reason," so why is it that so few seem to recognize this, while so many shrug it off and plunge into pleasure or denial?

One answer may lie in the "consciousness of life" that impels generations to create and improve our lot. But, standard definitions of faith cannot easily satisfy Tolstoy as he wrestles with a trust in the unseen or the irrational solution. He must redefine it as "the knowledge of the meaning of man's life, as a result of which man does not destroy himself but lives."  Some of this smacks of romanticism, and much of it rambles, but Tolstoy's intelligence prevents him for long from indulging in idle reflection. He keeps returning to the need to make sense of his life, and to balance reason with a less measurable but still present sense of a force that eludes mathematics or the laboratory.

In the common people, he witnesses a faith that helps them endure and find comfort. They also die a "calm death," one that by the way Ivan Ilych fights and only meets at the last moments. Tolstoy abandons himself to a belief that he can assent to out of conviction, his own melange. He is saved from despair by this message: "Live seeking God, and then there will be no life without God." He finds the shore after being pushed into a boat and cast adrift, and he uses his oars to steer accordingly.

Three years re-learning the truths of Orthodox Christianity on, Tolstoy bristles at that denomination's hostility to other Christians. He resigns himself to the human manner all seek the life force. He accepts truth can reside outside an institution's definitions. Falsehoods are mixed in, it being human.

He ends this with an eerie vision of suspension, a dreamlike state evoking the vertigo of Ivan in his torment, three years after writing the early chapters. It's an odd conclusion but a complementary one to Ivan's own tale, and a fitting inclusion for these two thoughtful works, together at last. (Amazon US 11-13-13)

Slavoj Žižek's "Event": Book Review

Slavoj Žižek proves as quirky and unpredictable in his references and leaps between them as ever. I started this with caution, warmed up as the pace quickened, and became excited. Was this the best out of the admittedly few of his dozens of books I'd read? For a few chapters, it seemed so. Despite the pace slackening halfway as Lacan and then Hegel returned as usual, when the tone grew occluded, diffusing the burst of intellectual fireworks, "Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept" does entertain and educate. It makes sudden connections between exponents as diverse as Rosa Luxemburg and Psy of "Gangnam Style" fame. He cites from the recent films "Melancholia" and "An Act of Killing" adroitly, while Tahrir Square and Greek anti-austerity protests (if not the letdown of Occupy directly, an odd omission given past concern) show topicality.

Žižek repeats his ability to blend, if fleetingly or faintly (which also to me seems his weakness--you want him to pause and ponder more as he rushes from one film snippet or one detective novel and then on to a joke about Jesus or an expounded consideration of Descartes, the Big Bang, Hitchcock, or Lenin (in his love letters), the trendy signifiers of our own era as well as the intricacies of Buddhist debate, quantum physics, and Plato. This Slovenian critic aims also to somehow chide us for not rising up the past few years against capitalist oppression, but he eludes the question of how many eggs were broken by the failed communist suppression even if he repeats a Romanian's right question, wondering about an omelette. Žižek is toying with us here.

It remains a muddle in the telling, but certain parts will pop up to draw you in. This short book is marketed as ideal for a commute, so it's aimed at the curious reader with a few hours to spend on big ideas, told with far more verve than usual by a philosopher, and with certainly less obfuscation. What this adds up to, as with other books I've read by Žižek, appears less tangible. Therefore, appending the overview may be an efficient way to ask if this one's for you. Imagine it as a subway commute: 

"The first stop will be a change or disintegration of the frame through which reality appears to us; the second, a religious Fall. This is followed by the breaking of symmetry; Buddhist Enlightenment; an encounter with Truth that shatters our ordinary life; the experience of the self as a purely evental occurrence; the immanence of illusion to truth which makes truth itself evental; a trauma which destabilizes the symbolic order we dwell in; the rise of a new ‘Master-Signifier’, a signifier which structures an entire field of meaning; the experience of the pure flow of a (non)sense; a radical political rupture; and the undoing of an evental achievement. The journey will be bumpy but exciting, and much will be explained along the way." The results, as on a train, jostle you and may jolt.

What I found in "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously" by Slavoj Žižek applies again: "All this winds up chaotic, willfully so or due to the author's expectation that his diligent and combative readers do the heavy lifting to enact change, beyond that of intellectual suggestions or ideological explorations."

I continue to return to Žižek, but his evasive response as a Marxian (probably with a parenthetical qualifying prefix to distance himself knowingly from his formative exposure) critic of the depredations wrought by the other world-dominating economic system alongside those of our capitalist hegemony now endured and insufficiently resisted left me once more perplexed. We all witness declines of our political, educational, ecological, and economic realms, but what next? He reminds me of an authority figure (therapist, guru, mentor, coach) who refuses to suggest a solution.

This learned strategy of sages is an old one, of course, among philosophers, but one seeks guidance. It's another of his magical if demystifying history tours, a mad dash and a headlong rush through lofty concepts. Žižek's knack remains his clever eye for the cinematic moment or the literary aperçu to toss into Cartesian this or Chestertonian that. His characteristic tick keeps us off-guard about his sly, arch, avant-garde insistence that we can never get this task of running our lives or our world right, or left.
(To be published 8-26-14 in the US) P.S. See Amazon US 10-14 12 and my blog for my reviews of "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously."

Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being": Book Review

I could not recall if I had read this years ago when or before the film. Given my son's interest in both novel and adaptation, I found my wife's own copy and dove in. I realized I had not read it, but recognized early on the significance of Sabina's bowler hat, the 1988 film's icon; the pleasure of the 1984 book as in the successful cinematic version lies in how such symbols and tropes revolve and swirl over time. An intrusive narrator adds far more insights than could a film, however, gleaned from a cultural heritage, as well as such predecessors in the art of storytelling as Stendhal, Sophocles, and Tolstoy.

It's therefore a novel of ideas as well as a love triangle (at least, around Tomas; adding Franz to Tereza and F's wife Marie-Claude we extend the dimensions, let alone Tomas' unnamed hundreds of lovers). One could quote hundreds of passages. Aphoristic, the prose lingers. If you want to see infinity, the teller tells us, close your eyes. Distance between one's life and one's feelings dominates its characters as they struggle to make sense out of the Czech occupation by the Soviets after the failed 1968 demonstrations. The uprising occupies less space than one may anticipate: the aftermath, as Tomas finds in a gripping sequence, brings down many intellectuals, as doctors turn window washers. Still, that affords him more time for seduction.

Unsettled by her inability to conform, Tereza also bristles. In Paris a year or two (note the ambiguity as she reflects on it) after the occupation, she resents the supposition of her French friends that she'd join the local protests against the Soviets. "She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never make them understand." (100)

Sabina aspires to live in truth, but wonders how: "lying neither to ourselves nor to others" she considers "was possible only away from the public; the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntary make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies." (112-3) Sabina hates novels that give away the secrets of intimacy; Kundera deepens suspense and builds momentum by state pressure to expose loyalties.

Tereza--in what may seem hyperbole to us as with the French, but to those within a police state riddled with informers, compounded by casual conversations leading to coercion and compromise in the name of Communist conformity, may not seem a literary conceit--cringes. A tableau on Prague's Petrin Hill haunts her. Her mother resembles a wailing jailer. "Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only through the greatest of efforts." (137)

All three major characters attempt this liberation. Tereza interrogates herself with the types of questions about her self within her body or without it that a child might raise. "Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." (137) Michael Henry Heim's translation shows the clarity of this expression, even as Kundera's non-chronology evades neat order.

Yet the Middle European setting reveals some control over one's mindset no matter who's in charge. The "premeditated quality" of European beauty grounds its inhabitants within "an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan." (101) By contrast, New York City represents a later stage of "beauty by mistake," not intended but a lesser expression before beauty itself perishes from this earth. 

In this grayer time, cemeteries provide peace for Sabina. A reclamation by the urban of a vanished rural presence hovers. In the secular, a deeper longing persists. Kundera evokes an older sense of interior awe within primitive people early on: one must have once marveled at the unseen, before Tomas and his colleagues invaded the body's interior. Heartbeats invisible, a soul lurked within the cage of one's own ribs, and duality turned into identity. Now, "the face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the bodily mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought." (40)

Speaking of the differences between outer and inner, the tensions during part six, "The Great March," address the trouble when the "brotherhood of man" beloved by liberals worldwide forces conformity. Stalin's son, Parmenides' division between heaviness and lightness, Nietzsche's Turin Horse. baby Moses in the bulrushes, Descartes, Plato's Symposium, Adam's naming of the animals: allusions multiply. Kundera seeks to align his novel, with its sprawling approach (we learn in an aside, fifty pages from its end, the fate of two of the protagonists, and the time continues to leap ahead of the events we thought it would remain discussing), to the Western intellectual tradition. This can get messy, as the narrator himself would agree.

Still, the sixth section as it follows Franz into a mercy mission (with media coverage and celebrities) to let medical aid enter Communist Cambodia rouses Kundera to integrate a discussion of kitsch. This pings off of one on excrement, but his point is that glossing over the human with all its flaws leads to emotional falsity. "In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme." (252)

It's a "folding screen set up to curtain off death," and the "true function" of kitsch forces upon the viewer a tyranny of giving in to unearned feelings, tired re-creations of easy sentiment. Kundera compares Sabina's explanation of her paintings earlier to Tereza: "on the surface, an intelligible lie, underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through."

In some situations, people may be "condemned to playact. Their struggle with mute power (the mute power across the river, a police transmogrified into mute microphones in the wall) is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army." Franz like Tereza distances himself from the posturing, yet like Tomas, he is haunted if he does not do something against the forces of oppression. (268)

Political kitsch, for Kundera's characters, threatens, whether labelled from the left or on the right. "Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion." (278) Yet, somehow Kundera's seventh section, "Karenin's Smile" in a powerful sequence conveying the decline of Tomas and Tereza's beloved dog, evokes not kitsch but earned emotion. I doubt if anyone who has loved a pet can read this easily.

While the conclusion (which without spoilers shows how the film adaptation differed) did not fully sustain the impact I had expected, the conjuration of the ideal attempted of the pastoral idyll within the Czech lands' occupation sharpens the contrasts Kundera favors between cities the country dwellers cannot wait to move to and the predicament of the intellectuals in internal exile who depart Prague for such places as their last defense against the kitsch and the compromises of its regimes.

Image:  Daisies (Sedmikrasky). Directed by Věra Chytilová. This fits the time and mood perfectly. (7-9-13 to Amazon US)

Umberto Eco's "Inventing the Enemy": Book Review

Eco explains "occasional writings" as its proper subtitle: he had no interest on the topics herein at first, but being commissioned or encouraged to contribute these pieces as essays, he reflected more on them out of necessity. Over the past decade, so they emerged to entertain himself and his audience as "an exercise in baroque rhetoric." Like that style, its ornamentation may intrigue some and lull others.

Any reader coming to Eco not for the first time expects erudition and range. His medievalism engages us in many entries. The titular one considers how his native Italy lacks enemies for the past sixty years, and how this undermines a national identity. So, enemies if not real must be invented, against which a people test their self-worth. Eco uses an array of classical, medieval, and fascist examples to prove this point, as well as Shakespeare, Sartre, and Orwell. He conveys with well-chosen excerpts, as throughout this collection, the lively spirit of rhetorical and intellectual excess.

"Absolute and Relative" takes on the present pope as well as Nicholas of Cusa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Lenin and Aquinas. These enliven the more bookish analyses of logic he applies. Fire in "The Beauty of the Flame" uses its metaphorical themes, with a dutiful citation from Bachelard before going back to hellfire, heavenly light, alchemy, luminosity, destruction, ekpyrosis, and even Joycean epiphany. This exemplifies Eco's range efficiently.

So does "Treasure Hunting," allowing him another romp into medieval relics displayed all over the Christian world. As with fellow scholar Piero Camporesi, a wonderfully eclectic investigator of odd lore, Umberto Eco in his tribute to this "gourmet of lists" as well as tastes and smells finds a fitting subject. Same for the stolid but offbeat "No Embyros in Paradise," to find what Thomas Aquinas thinks (as opposed to Catholic orthodoxy today!) about stem cells, embryos, abortion, and "the so-called right to life." Eco finds, no surprise, that the Angelic Doctor differed from the modern Church in when ensoulment entered the fetus.

Victor Hugo's "sublime excess" and that of the gothic (the original version!) novel slots Eco into the grotesque adroitly. Even if I lacked knowledge (as often in this wide-ranging book) the source texts quoted often at wonderful length and astute choice, Eco's pleasure is infectious. "Censorship and Silence" takes a more serious turn, if Italy's "television showgirls" can pass as that via the term "valina" or "veline." He moves this discussion into current fears of censorship, and the ethical problem of how in a media-drenched world "to return to silence."

"Imaginary Astronomies" benefits by its charts and maps; how the earth and sky were charted by our ancestors segues into Jules Verne and science fiction and finally "true history." A "spurious review" titled "Living by Proverbs" follows as the first of three pieces of "real entertainment." The next on "sentimental digressions on early times" expounds (tediously at times for my tastes) on "anagnorisis" or "the change from ignorance to knowledge." These two felt fustier if perhaps intentionally so, more a drawing-room exercise by a wit. But, they preface my favorite, hauntingly and disorientingly composed of seventeen real excerpts from 1920-30s Italian reviews of James Joyce's "Ulysses" by fascist critics.

The penultimate essay looks at why utopia is lost and its islands never found, in visual and textual illustrations. The last, from December 2010, combines two articles on WikiLeaks as a "false scandal"--one that becomes public but which was known widely and whispered about in private long before. While subsequent events perhaps show the power of the authorities bent on taking its mastermind down, Eco leaves us with another smart remark: "technology moves like a crayfish, in other words, backwards." That is, compromised spies and duplicitous diplomats may have to retreat from electronic databases and networked communiques to the days of "meetings in the steam room of a Turkish bath, or messages left in the alcove by some Mata Hari."

Richard Dixon translates these assorted essays with vigor. It's fun to learn so much from 222 fast-paced, smart, and thoughtful pages. Intellectuals can have a blast too, and Umberto Eco in his lectures and discussions teaches us how to look fresh at the world of the past as well as the foibles that literature and history and philosophy (and theology and alchemy and astronomy) dutifully investigate, satirize, and pontificate upon. (Amazon US 7/23/12)

Jose Saramago's "Raised from the Ground": Book Review

This chronicle of most of the last century opens long before, when the vast "inland sea" of southern Portugal with its "fish-sheep and predators" was first divided up. Warlords divided the natural from the man-made, as "the future shape of this present land was decided, and by very crooked means indeed, a shape carved out by those who owned the largest and sharpest knives and according to size of knife and quality of blade." 

The Great War begins, beyond these borders of provincial Alentejo, early in the narrative. While it effects the fate of its weary peasants and resigned workers only indirectly, the power of its force, in Jose Saramago's telling, reiterates his judgments, delivered implacably: "War ate a great deal and war grew fat and rich. War is a monster who empties men's pockets, coin by coin, before devouring the men themselves, so that nothing is lost and all is changed, which is the primary law of nature, as one learns later on, and when war has eaten its fill, when it is sated to the point of vomiting, it continues its skillful pickpocketing, always taking from the same people, the same pockets. It's a habit acquired in peacetime."

This passage demonstrates José Saramago's accumulative tendencies. Time subsumes plot. Characters emerge among the Mau-Tempo (their surname denotes "bad-weather") clan, wear themselves out, and die off after generating their hardy offspring. Nature dominates, and man-made imposition of wages and laws and force contends against a perpetual order attuned to the seasons and the crops. To capture this rush of sensation, its lassitude and its propulsion, this author's characteristic prose eschews capitalization and quotation marks and indentation. He inserts whenever a new speaker comes in a capital letter, but otherwise, he prefers a headlong dash of words carrying dense paragraphs along. 

For instance, workers who dare under the Salazar dictatorship to strike (even if they don't know what that concept means, only that they weary of threshing and quit) find this implicit warning: "Mend your ways while there's still time, and swear that you've taken twenty beatings, crucify yourself, hold out your arm to be bled, open your veins and say, This is my blood, drink it, this is my body, eat it, this is my life, take it, Along with the church's blessing, the salute of the flag, the march past, the handing over of the credentials, the awarding of the university diploma, thy will be done as it is in heaven." 

As in this Nobel laureate's daring retellings The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, Raised From the Ground even by its own title evokes enduring myths. The Three Wise Men make a cameo appearance at a baby's birth, suitably adapted for Mr. Saramago's anticlerical sympathies. Here, the protagonists do not battle an angry and jealous God, but their own predicament within the class system. As a libertarian Communist, Mr. Saramago leaves the reader with no illusions as to his stolid humanism. While he nods to the duty of the policeman or priest, he cannot take their side when justice cries out and mercy goes unheard.

"Who gives the orders, who gives us life, well, that's a good question, the boss gives the orders, and as for life, what's that." This counter-narrative voice battles against the commands a peasant is given as he and his comrades are herded to an anti-communist, pro-Salazar rally. Throughout this febrile but readable novel, the Mau-Tempo family seeks to survive in the ancestral terrain of Mr. Saramago's grandparents. Here, the feudal system continues amid cork trees and wheat fields, and the twentieth century unfolds with barely a notice by those bound to the land and the nation taken over by the supposed republic under the Salazar regime. World War Two comes and goes with barely an aside; isolation and ignorance attain the status of virtues by those ruling this far corner of Europe, next to another dictatorship over the rest of the Iberian peninsula. 

When peasants and workers fight back, by striking, by organizing, they are hunted down. From the perspective of an ant, we witness one man beaten to death in a bullring. "Even freedom is a slap in the face, a crust of bread thrown to the ground to see if we'll pick it up." Out of this relentless setting, the Mau-Tempos try to rise up.

The narrator speaks in "we" usually, but sometimes leaps to "I" for a moment, before assuming the voice of omniscience, yet a puzzled one bemused, angry, or resigned to the ages. The teller of this family saga appears not to know all the answers, either. "Our problem is that we think only the big things are important, and so we talk about them, but when we want to know how things really were, who was there and what they said, we're in trouble." 

Mr. Saramago seeks to give a voice back to those from whom his family came. But, he searches within the uncertain vantage point of a narrator also stymied by how to give back to the illiterate and barely literate a fluent tone, a steady consciousness, worthy of them: "if only we could tie up all the loose ends, the world would be a stronger and better place." 

The bulk of the novel settles into resistance against the landowners, followed by repression. An eight-hour day and a minimum wage assume revolutionary potential, as such basic demands meet suppression by a determined oligarchy. Meanwhile, Portugal holds back the outside world, fearing liberalism, imposing censorship.  Margaret Jull Costa's translation of this 1980 novel conveys the contexts of this era with helpful and necessary footnotes filling in what English-speaking audiences will miss about veiled allusions to despots, rebels, puns, and poems from Portugal's recent and distant past.  

The pace slows, as endurance among the Mau-Tempos and their allies dwindles with old age, filtered through the central figures of João and his wife Gracinda in and past the middle of the twentieth century. This novel expects a patient reader, willing to plunge into a detailed, nearly stream-of-consciousness approach played off of Mr. Saramago's unpredictable third-person, yet intimate and off-beat, voice filtered in and out of a variety of heroes and rogues. They yearn for release: "someone caught a glimpse of that much-vaunted freedom, but she is not one to be seen out walking the highways, she won't sit on a stone and wait to be invited in to supper or to share a bed for the rest of our life." However, discontent grows, and rumors of revolt from far off come to hamlets without a radio or a newspaper, with startling results.

Eventually, the "Carnation Revolution" of 1974 succeeds with barely any blood shed. The military regime of Salazar and his cronies ends after more than forty years of control. The novel concludes with a burst of energy: "one thousand living and one hundred thousand dead, or two million sighs rising up from the ground" combine "on this unique and new-risen day" as freedom appears to arrive for the Mau-Tempos and their neighbors at last.  (New York Journal of Books 8-16-12)

Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich": Audiobook Review

Certain stories matter more as we mature, and age. I read this years ago as a student, and found myself remembering its bleak evocations of pain and loneliness. This is a strong story, not for the weak-willed or casual reader. I find it works better, perhaps, for those who've undergone some encounters with those facing death, although it may arouse sad memories.

Now middle-aged, I listened to the Naxos audiobook version with Oliver Ford Davies in returning to the novella. In audio versions, Naxos intersperses classical music from the period deftly. Here, interludes enhance what will prove a harrowing, but necessary, delineation of how one man faces the Biq Question of how death comes, at last, to us no matter what.

Davies captured the officious nature of those around Ivan, colleagues and family, who were faced with the necessary burdens of paying respects and going through the familiar motions we all have, once we've lived awhile, of attending to the impact of death on one we work with or know, but whom we don't feel all that close to. The tedium of funereal arrangements, and the impact of what a colleague or family member's loss will mean for us, will sound all too convincing, for many of us. Tolstoy makes us see, first, Ivan's demise through their perspectives, as ones we recognize with a twinge of guilt.

Then, he shifts to his wife turned widow; we hear her own mixed reactions: she's happy in a way to be free of the torment of a husband she'd grown distanced from, and one whose last hours were but a howl of agony, from the hearing of her, their son, and their household, this being a respectable judge's residence. We understand her weariness with the duties inflicted upon family, and the wish, often unspoken but nearly always felt, by the survivors that the dying one be finally gone.

The doctor is also harried, and we hear from him the routine platitudes and vague assurances that any patient does, no matter how grave the case. It's another day at the office for the medical profession, and what's a case study to solve for them reminds Ivan of his own aloofness as an educated, but detached, judicial functionary, above the reality felt by the troubled man brought before him to be analyzed and sentenced. Again, Tolstoy presents the administrative or familial point of view fairly, and steadily. It's human nature to step away from the messiness of fate and mortality, after all.

Finally, we enter into Ivan's consciousness, indirectly but powerfully. Oliver Ford Davies navigates the gradual move from complacency and self-regard into raw, cold, mental and physical and spiritual brutality. Only forty-five, mostly convinced as most of us that success lies in accomplishments, comforts, a career, and status despite his misgivings, Ivan must confront what we all fear. Davies shows how he moans and contorts, in thoughts and words, as his final moments near. Gerasim, a servant, by his humble commitment to bedside duties helps Ivan find a saving grace of comfort when most needed.

The final moments of this tale moved me to tears as I heard them. I recommend an audiobook version as this takes you away from too quickly skimming over the nuances of emotion and subtlety which Tolstoy brings to this novella. Hearing the prose reminds us of our common fate, and how Tolstoy captures unforgettably the revelation that we can only hope is not an illusion. The delicacy and craft with which he creates the same reactions in us as Ivan undergoes will astonish you. (Amazon US 7-15-12)

Leo Tolstoy's "War + Peace" Kindle Book Review

I chose the public domain version on Project Gutenberg. Earlier reviewers had mentioned a free Kindle version. While as of this writing, it is not available on Amazon, you can find the Maude 1922 translation to download directly as a Kindle file (pg2600.mobi @ 5.2 mb) from the Project Gutenberg site. (This lack of direct access via Amazon happened to me for Joyce's "Portrait" and suddenly for "Ulysses,", as well as Melville's "Redburn," for example.)

One problem is that Amazon lumps all the reviews for different media and versions and translations if it's a public domain title (this happens for "War and Peace," "Huck Finn," "Don Quixote" and "Ulysses," too), to my discouragement. This lack of finesse can confound those of us trying to evaluate one against another. Audiobooks, e-books, Kindle texts and print all jostle for attention. For instance, the version above is what I enter this under, and apparently despite the credit, it's not Constance Garnett's translation as the Kindle version!

I sampled the first chapters of a few e-book versions. Xanzoc's 1-16-11 review set out the first lines of some translations to contrast; I found that entry and Patrick Crabtree's Listmania one after I had done my own sampling to find what Kindle offered. I wondered how the free version stood up against later contenders.

Constance Garnett (1904) is common, alongside the Maude. These two in word choice did differ more than other versions, resembling more each other, and for me, the Maudes get the nod. Garnett apparently left out some nuance in a quick version that nonetheless tried to keep Tolstoy's voice. I thought I'd favor the Pevear-Volokhonsky (2007), promoted vigorously as faithful to Tolstoy's syntax and repetition, but as with their "Brothers Karamazov," somehow its stiffer if more scholarly pace paled. I compared sections in tandem (troika?) with the Maudes' version and frankly, there's often less difference. Sometimes a more contemporary verve enters, but I'd contend the Maudes' century-old take holds its own. (I review P-V on Kindle version under that translation as catalogued separately on Amazon, 8/24/12. Despite the unwieldiness inherent in footnotes, French + German as is to navigate, and the trickiness of using an e-book to go back and forth from notes to text, they do offer in their edition many annotations and maps.) I had read "Brothers" in college in Garnett's version and recalled it being faster paced and more engaging then. Similarly, the pair's take on "War and Peace" appeared to slow a bit, perhaps for those wanting to sense the Russian itself?

Rosemary Edmonds' 1957 translation in an affordable Penguin e-book felt respectable, and this may be a choice for those not enamored with P-V. I confess the different translations seemed more subtly distinguishable than I anticipated. For a bound version, I favor the Penguin 2005 edition by Anthony Briggs (it has maps and notes too, and I like the translation's brisk but slightly theatrical feel a lot). Neither Briggs nor the Maudes keep the French but for a phrase here and there; P-V keep it but translate in the footnotes Tolstoy composed about 2% of his text in French. Without the French blocks of text, both move steadily, if with a British ambiance. Aylmer and Louise Maude worked with Tolstoy on their version, at least for awhile. Americans may not like either version as it puts the lower classes into a register closer to an English/ stage dialect than whatever we'd "hear" from those with broken or lower-class speech.

I wish Briggs' rendering was electronically available. As it is not, I decided for my Kindle given the P-V challenges to stick with the Maude style, which is not as stolid as we nearly a hundred years later may suppose. Of course, a free version lacks the guidance you'll need. I cannot give the public domain version fewer stars for its more venerable idiom, or its lack of editorial additions, as those volunteers labor to give us the best they can out of their own good will.

I read a chapter in Maude. I check in Briggs for endnotes and assistance, as any reader of Tolstoy needs this. But, for a portable e-book, I find myself moving along to my surprise, into a narrative not as difficult as I expected from its monumental reputation. If you read a few chapters past the initial conversations, as with Shakespeare, you will get the hang of the diction and mood. I admired "Anna Karenina" (Garnett) when that too was assigned in college. For both classics, Tolstoy's evocations of dialogue and character merit their acclaim.

(7-24-12 to Amazon US; see my Pevear-Volokhonsky review for more on its comparisons and contrasts via Kindle. Cover image, not "W+P," but Tolstoy's "The Three Bears," Russian still, Yiddish too, CCCP in fact, by "M. Glukhov," which I liked better. #53 of 65 bear images via VintagePrintable)

Peter Glassgold's "Anarchy!" Book Review

Emma Goldman published 5000 pages of Mother Earth, a monthly journal between 1906 and 1918. If it had not been raided and its contents confiscated by Red-fearing Fed agents, how long might it have lasted? Would Occupy Wall Street burst into life from it and not Adbusters just over a year ago?

Peter Glassgold updates his 2001 anthology, which distilled to four hundred pages the bulk of Red Emma's anarchist appeals. Despite the intentions of Goldman and her one-time lover and lifelong comrade-in-arms, chief editor Alexander Berkman, the magazine devoted far more attention to the benefits of voluntary agreement rather than imposed government, freedom rather than coercion, which defined their anarchism, a marriage of Peter Kropotkin's communal/ communist aspirations with Jefferson, Emerson, and Whitman's libertarian American roots. In fact, its founders wanted to name their effort after Whitman's poem "The Open Road" until a threat of litigation by a rival publication forced the name change. After a buggy ride, Goldman noticed in April spring germinating, and this inspired the title.

This collection, as the magazine itself, focuses on anarchism and political messages--these dominated despite the subtitle of Mother Earth as "Devoted to Social Science and Literature". For Glassgold, the relevance of its contents in the aftermath of Tea Party populism and Occupy reformist agitation remains, although a century ago, radicals sought a stateless society rather than student loan debt forgiveness, single-payer healthcare, open borders, passage of the ERA, or a green economy. For this second edition, he adds an appendix a "summary and partial transcript" of the July 1917 trial of Goldman and Berkman under the newly signed Espionage Act "for conspiring against the institution of a wartime draft". (I plan to review for PopMatters Paul and Carol Avrich's Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman when it is released later this year.)

The contents of Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth follow Glassgold's five criteria. Variety and verve; brevity; exclusive publication therein; originating in America with this publication; relevance then and now. Certainly the name of Voltairine de Cleyre with "her elegant but grand style" conjures up another era's airs. But, turn to her "They Who Marry Do Ill": "Nothing is so disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging all delicacy with the trumpering of private matters in the general ear. Anarchists argued against this status as a property arrangement, a state intrusion into what should have been and could be a choice of free adults.

As we debate birth control availability, foreign policy as eternal war, Wall Street wealth and Beltway corruption, these contents show that the subjects explained do not remain dusty or neglected. They merit revisiting, and application to our own global upheavals. Margaret Sanger, The Mexican Revolution, the shooting of the Ludlow miners, Ibsen and Jack London, the case of Mooney and Billings, the Paris Commune, the death of James Connolly and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington in the Irish rebellion reveal the topical concerns of a restless age not unlike our own, as international revolt and violent unrest challenged bankers and business.

Closer to our own concerns, the six chapters Glassgold arranges emphasize an entry into the anarchist origins and its spirited resistance to the loss of liberty. Rather than the currently common distortion of disorder as an anarchist definition, a cooperative arrangement to advance grassroots interests predominates. "Direct action," attempted by the Occupy movements and last year's Arab Spring, back then depended more on unions and syndicalist workers' associations to swerve around politics into boycotts, slowdowns on the job, and general strikes. Spanish and Russian organizing, the Haymarket affair, McKinley's assassination, and predictable infighting within the labor movement exemplify the issues in this opening section.

Feminism focused beyond the campaigns of suffragettes follows, for the right to vote was but a hollow gesture for anarchists opposed to politics as usual. Morality itself met attack. Marriage, modesty, contraception, abortion, free love, prostitution, eugenics broadened the debate beyond convention.

Literature sought with modernism to overthrow the system, too. A piece subsequently attributed to Eugene O'Neill as his disguised debut in print features (not his best). One cannot argue with his conclusion, that the workers' "efforts help their leaders get the Dough" but a weakness of left-leaning lovers of literature persists here. Some soggy verse or militant prose risks being dragooned into the service of right-thinking if dreary, dutiful devotion to the Cause. O'Neill's unsigned ditty appears alongside reviews of London's Martin Eden,  The Jungle, The Brothers Karamazov, and Berkman's Prison Memoirs. Original works enter by talents such as Maxim Gorky, Ben Hecht, and journalist John Reed's companion Louise Bryant.

Bryant returns for part three, along with Berkman and de Cleyre, discussing "Civil Liberties". A fresh contributor, Ben Reitman, Goldman's newer lover, deserves his own biopic. "King of the Hobos," a brash loud doctor, a Chicago slum kid without a high school degree, who gave up his wandering if not his womanizing "which tested Goldman's well-known advocacy of free love to its limits".

"The Social War" tackles upheaval in Paris, Dublin, Mexico, Colorado, Philadelphia among other hotspots; "War and Peace" shifts into how capitalism and its state protections might "wither away," not by a gradual socialist evolution but revolution. Zionism, Italian protests, and the threats to democracy as war fever spread show the range of issues in part six. Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Errico Malatesta personify the revolutionary caliber of contributors. This moment, however, led to the dissolution not of the capitalist state, but the magazine itself.

The Soviet triumph divided anarchists, who as libertarians tended to side against state-socialism of the prevailing Bolsheviks. Glassgold notes, contrary to the "Red Emma" moniker most associated with Goldman and company, how Mother Earth succumbed. The cause of its termination? Not its support of the Russian Revolution, but its opposition to the Great War and the conscription demanded by the nations who forced its men to fight.

This expanded collection, which originally appeared the year of 9/11, remains crucial for us a decade later. Civil Liberties struggle against surveillance and an endless war on terror. Women's issues return to presidential campaigns and Supreme Court decisions on healthcare reform and insurance coverage. Social wars as street protests in the EU and Middle East flare up regularly. Anarchism itself remains often misunderstood by the mainstream, caricatured by the media, commodified by "punk" marketers, and appropriated by Anonymous and Black Box movements that thrive on secrecy.

With a timely reprint and revision, Peter Glassgold's project to revive the primary sources may find an eager audience. Commentary prefaces some entries, the index and illustrations enrich, and the introduction sets the major players within their unsettled time, not unlike our own decades of uncertainty. For all the bluster and cant along with the genuine encouragement for betterment, part of any socio-political ideology or strategy, those who cultivated the energy within this journal reacted with passion and conviction, facing jail and deportation for their idealism and activity.

Hysteria over subversion and hype over radical threats have not gone away in the century since Mother Earth. Neither have the real opportunities to channel idealism into action to better each others' human condition. As I write this review, my state hosts on its November ballot a proposition against sex trafficking, showing that the horrors of the "White Slave Trade" inveighed against by Goldman survived the fall of communism and the rise of capitalism worldwide. (Amazon US 10-15-12 and PopMatters 10-30-12)

Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve": Book Review

 Matching the approach in Greenblatt's first work addressed beyond the seminar table, Will in the World (2004), The Swerve elaborates this professor's New Historicist direction. This literary theory favors context over text; it explores the historical backgrounds and "cultural poetics" infusing a literary work.

Greenblatt, a leading New Historicist and Renaissance expert now teaching at Harvard, roams over the centuries that comprise a back story and a sequel for one Roman writer's surviving philosophy in 7,400 verses. With Lucretius, we have much less to go on than even the famously debated documentary evidence (or its lack) for the life and career of this professor's usual center of attention, Shakespeare.

We know almost nothing about Lucretius, but we can know his era.

Greenblatt's lively study takes the reader into pagan philosophical and literary culture in the centuries before Christ. This was a time, as Flaubert noted, when human speculation rested between the gods and God, between the expectation that Jove explained everything and that Jesus controlled everyone. While often distorted by its Christian critics as a stunned satiation of the senses, Epicureanism elevated instead the happiness found by retreat from worldly distraction. By reasoned detachment, a wise man or woman could better appreciate life's brevity, and the need to embrace the pleasure afforded those who avoided pain. These ancient adepts sought by contemplation the attainment of joy through the conquest of delusion.

Two-and-a-half centuries after Epicurus, around 50 BCE, Lucretius wrote De rerum natura, "On the Nature of Things". This elegant Latin poem promoted the concept of "atoms and void and nothing else". It replaced religion and superstition with the one proven way to overcome the fear of death: to accept life as transitory and to see the universe as governed by unalterable laws. These laws formulated that all matter is composed of atoms, and that a clinamen, a "swerve" in the course of these endlessly colliding, eternally moving "seeds" accounts for what we translate as choice, as free will. The gods retreated as figureheads; nothing endured except matter, within an infinite void, invisible particles never created and never annihilated.

Pagans suspected this as upsetting the state religions, but fewer Romans by the rise of Lucretius believed in their gods as able to work wonders in the terrestrial realm. For subsequent Christians, Lucretius' manuscript represented danger. It undermined the model of eternal reward and damnation, and its insistence upon the soul's mortality along with that of the body countered the elaborate system of reward and punishment that began to control the thoughts and deeds of the empowered Catholic successors to the pagan philosophers.

Greenblatt imaginatively revives the situation where devout, if grumbling, generations of monks were charged with copying pagan manuscripts; nobody else was left literate enough to do so after the Roman empire disintegrated. Most ancient archives were destroyed; the fraction of the libraries left met their fate from weather, fanatics, worms, and recycling; Christian texts were written over pagan ones on valuable parchment. As a result, the survival of a radical text by Lucretius comes down to luck against such overwhelming odds.

Poggio Bracciolini was an amateur book collector, as well as a professional secretary for the original Pope John XXIII. The reason that this pope's name repeated, and many safe centuries later, was that the first John to take this title was removed, in a power struggle: three claimants argued over who was the legitimate heir to the throne of St. Peter. Poggio worked his way up the papal bureaucracy. By in his thirties he had secured a very powerful position, working at the right hand of the most powerful man in the Western world.

He went on duty with his Roman master in 1415 to the Council of Constance, convened to settle who would be pope. Poggio saw John deposed. He also, as Greenblatt shows, may have witnessed the brave Jerome of Prague burned alive after an eloquent Latin defense of his support of the similarly doomed heretic Jan Hus. In New Historicist fashion, Greenblatt figures these series of confrontations might have spurred the temporarily unemployed Poggio to make a side trip, most likely to the monastic library at the nearby German town of Fulda. He discovered in 1417 the Lucretian manuscript as solace--and to fuel his book mania. I find Greenblatt's conjecture convincing, even if as elsewhere in this work such a scenario must remain speculative.

The book tends to roam about, with necessarily "might have" and "could" similar to scenes in Will in the World. Greenblatt skillfully makes his case, even if this rambles at times too far afield, but it unfolds gracefully and at times movingly. Greenblatt favors rebels over authority, and dissenters against dogma, but he makes a convincing, if open-ended at times, case for why Poggio's retrieval of possibly the only surviving copy of Lucretius mattered in its eloquent explication of matter. Any exposure of this Renaissance milieu and its classical foundation surely is welcome when few books aimed at a wider audience by professors address serious issues from the history of ideas with verve and insight.

Poggio returned to Rome with his prized manuscript. He served eight popes as "apostolic secretary." This job required him to keep secrets. Such opportunities afforded a tempting post for his peers who wished by bribes to augment their salary. While combative and bitter, Poggio appears to have kept on a straighter course than many others who served the Papacy. Still, he had fourteen children by his mistress before he married at fifty-six to a girl of eighteen, with whom he had five more children. After more than a half-century of labor, mostly in Rome, he died as chancellor in Florence at the age of seventy-eight.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, as such confident subtitles do for many books seeking a wider audience, places too much weight on its claim. Yet, the rescue of a copy of this one ancient manuscript assisted, in Greenblatt's argument, in freeing modern thought from a fear of the gods and of death itself. The narrative follows the career of Poggio into the Renaissance recovery of De rerum natura through its subversive influences on leading thinkers of the early modern era.

Thomas More's utopia, Giordano Bruno's heresy, Machiavelli's diplomacy, Galileo's cosmology, Montaigne's essays, Newton's physics, and Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" all bear the imprint, in Greenblatt's analysis, of the bold challenges of Lucretius. His book earned the condemnation of the Church; Protestants reacted to it variously, while scientists encouraged its rational affirmations. Lucretius' ideas were transmitted often underground and kept as safely marginal for fear of Christian persecution. However, the printing press ensured they could not be silenced. "The universe as a constant, intensely erotic hymn to Venus" endures in the joy and wonder of the vast perspective celebrated by the classical atomists.

Naturally, Greenblatt interprets, if in passing, how Shakespeare, who loved Montaigne, would have alluded to the atomists in Romeo and Juliet. The professor with Poggio's quest (as in Shakespeare's career) connects what we do know (amidst asides about flagellating monks, volcanically charred papyri, and bookworms) with what we cannot prove but can reasonably suppose. So, adjusting its diverging angles to account for Greenblatt's New Historicist perspective may help those readers who wonder why this professor constructs his tale as he does. May it also spark a renewed appreciation for Lucretius himself. (In short and very altered form to Amazon US 11-24-11; as above, to PopMatters 12-5-11.)