"Vasily Grossman from the Frontline": Audiobook Review

While many eyewitnesses endured the siege of Stalingrad and the battle by the Soviets to free it from the Nazi invasion, probably none has the stature of Vasily Grossman. His novels recount his and his comrades' experiences, during and then after this Great Patriotic War. when Grossman like so many fell afoul of the Stalinist regime. The Man of Steel's antisemitism increased, and Grossman was censored by the state and investigated by the KGB. Luckily, he was not sentenced to prison or gulag.

As a war correspondent for Red Star, he volunteered for service and spent over a thousand days at the front. The BBC dramatization of three of his wartime reports is well-delivered. First comes a sniper's first two days. His name's Chekhov, but his prowess comes in targeting Germans, and ensuring that their own beleaguered situation grows as the Russians figure out the layout of their ruined city's heart.

Then comes an evocation of Stalingrad. Imagine it on a moonlit night among the bombed buildings and it may nearly for a second seem romantic. Grossman applies his prose style here for more effect than one would I imagine find in journalism from the battleground. It can be flowery, but it can also be deployed skillfully. In Elliot Levey's radio recital of his account, one feels its emotional tug again.

This increases for the bleak report on the Jewish question, as answered in the Ukraine. He reports only one Jew survives in one place, and he hears rumors of two others. Out of what he claims here three million dead, a testament to victims named by trades and traits accumulates into a dour litany. (Amazon US 4/22/17) 

Emmanuel Carrere's "My Life as a Russian Novel": Audiobook Review

 
I am reviewing the Audible version read by the always elegant Simon Vance. The audiobook's performance, as usual by Vance, is excellent. He relates the erotic content with verve, and the emotional trajectories with sensitivity. He captures Sophie's tone as well as an array of Russian men.

As for this first entry of what has become a growing shelf of "nonfictional novels" by Emmanuel Carrere, the benefits and drawbacks of this format emerge. You feel the difficulties Carrere puts "himself" in, but you also note his privilege, his holidays to Corsica and the coast at will, and despite his claims of working as a writer, the elevated position he has as the son of the esteemed "perpetual secretary" of the Academie Francaise. While his difficulties in love will find a reception among any who have dealt with passion, desire, frustration, and betrayal, whether this immersion into what seems like a description transcribed in "real time" weighs down the book past its halfway mark. It's all quite "French" as well as Russian.

Carrere over nearly nine hours hearing his plaints grows, after a promising start investigating "the last soldier of WWII" in a desolate Russian town, tedious for a listener. Simon Vance's talent keeps the listener steadily aware, but despite his skill, the material becomes interminable. Carrere integrates true to the title his detailed ups and downs in love with Sophie, but as the narrative progresses past his own search for his Georgian-born grandfather in the former Soviet Union, it becomes experimental. Sophie becomes the recipient of an overly clever paean from her lover, and while this is "novel" in a different way I have not found in any other fiction or fact, it serves to extend the complaints of Carrere himself.

It's difficult to feel sorry for him. The climactic scene back in the Russian town is expressed powerfully. But then the denouement unravels as Carrere packs more revelations in, and the book seems to fight its own ending. Maybe it does not want to die either. The Russians often seem as props for his own egotistical compulsions to make a film, to write about this to further his career, and the writer-as-writer and filmmaker-making-a-film setups have long outworn their welcome. Carrere does not appear to be aware of this, except when he admits in an aside near the conclusion: "If this was a novel..." One finishes this due to the dexterity of Simon Vance more than the text from Emmanuel Carrere.

All the same, his brief statements about the Gospels and the setting he shows of Russia, however limited in this ca. 2002-2006 span, makes me wonder about the subsequent installments in what seems to be a successful genre for Carrere of integrating his life into the lives of others. So, that is some measure of success. Carrere himself comes off as preening, but there's no denying his "way with words" and his narrative ambition. (Amazon US 4/7/17)

Eric Kurlander's "Hitler's Monsters": Book Review

This Florida-based historian bases his investigation of the supposed supernatural in Nazi Germany on archival research, vast documentation, and a determination to produce a calm, focused, and sober study of an inevitably sensational topic. He seeks a "post-revisionist" balance to recent claims diminishing or explaining by other means the reasons so many under the Nazi regime sought guidance through "border sciences" of paranormal, Thule-obsessed, and other dodgy speculation.

In this galley, no index was provided. Looking at his admittedly impressive list of sources, one is aware of Eric Kurlander's steady ability to explain such arcane and often disturbing lore and its applications. Spot-checking, for instance, I was surprised not to find any mention of Julius Evola, as his role playing off or even against the German interpretations of esoteric theory is well-known. But within the borders of his narrower topic, this professor provides a surprisingly readable guide. Coming to this as a newcomer, wary of special pleading, instead Hitler's Monsters offers balance.

That is, Prof. Kurlander achieves a combination of the distance from the events that enables reflection, and a firsthand ability to handle primary sources which many who attempt to make claims about this subject cannot support, given their lack not only of the language, but the historical acumen. The "supernatural" takes in much, and astrology, paganism. Ario-centered myth-making, witchcraft are expanded to include "miracle weapons," "supernatural partisans," and unfortunately "racial science" as supporting experimentation, resettlement, and of course mass genocide.

Nearly every paragraph contains superscriptions to the documentation. There a few endnotes elaborate on the text proper. The care taken by Kurlander is evident. With so many continuing to challenge historical veracity on this emotive episode, this caution and meticulous defense from the work of previous colleagues is welcome. It's a valuable contribution to the study of pseudo-science, far-fledged theories, insistent fabrication, and ultimate devastation. Not the kind of power results the Reich wanted to achieve, but the kind it kept churning out in apocalyptic rhetoric and frenzied schemes, even as the enemy closed in around its own borders. Werewolves, vampires, and pre-modern cosmology all played dark roles.

Out of this "supernatural imaginary," as Kurlander calls this plethora of sinister powers, an appeal beyond anti-semites, fascists, and "racist imperialists" enveloped a broader support base. This is crucial to understand, for without clear economic solutions or political policies, Kurlander concludes, the Nazi party came to and maintained its rule by blurring the problems of social and economic reality with this concocted dust of mass media manipulation. Rather than forces unseen, the dictatorship drew upon illiberal conceptions which survived the end of the Reich. As we see...
(Amazon US 4/2/17)

"Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature": Book Review

While cross-cultural studies of the transmission and reception of Buddhism within historical and sociological contexts multiply, those examining literary aspects remain less common. These eleven essays examine American and British authors during the past century who have taken up Buddhist themes; some of them have taken refuge in Buddhism. Aimed at an academic audience, these entries generally remain accessible to a broad readership. This collection, despite its high price as sold by an academic press, may appeal to many inquirers intrigued by its wide coverage.

Introducing this book’s range, co-editor Lawrence Normand surveys the reception and adaptation of Buddhism in the West. He cites Donald S. Lopez and David McMahan. He supports their responses to the ways in which Buddhism has been reshaped for twentieth-century concerns. Lopez and McMahon have analyzed how meditation and modernism influence recent cultural trends. Normand notes more of an emphasis on the needs of the body. The contemporary insistence of concentrating on the breath focuses on the mental flow of images. This shift engages more than one of the authors investigated by Normand’s international colleagues.

Erin Louttit in “Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner’s The Buddhist Priest’s Wife and Undine” reminds readers that this South African writer, despite her late-Victorian period of production, looks forward in time. Both the story of the priest’s wife and Schreiner’s novella Undine humanize and normalize Buddhism. Death is blurred. The self survives the body in her post-Christian perspective. Schreiner considers and acknowledges possibilities of reincarnation.

 
Normand’s “Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6” contrasts two treatments of this earthly paradise. Thanks to its film adaptation, Hilton’s 1933 novel endures as certainly more popular than Auden and Isherwood’s ambitious if flawed drama. Incorporating historical crises and struggles of personal alienation, both channel the appeal of the late-Victorian romances which J. Jeffrey Franklin in The Lotus and the Lion (2008) investigated in imperial and colonial British literature. Hilton’s quest entices the reader as if possible; Auden and Isherwood’s satire demolishes the dream as futile. However, the limits of the duo’s Buddhist sources (including Alexandra David-Neél’s With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) blunt the dramatic impact of their barbed points.

Via readings of D.T. Suzuki, Erin Lafford and Emma Mason take up another poet’s mid-century approach to Buddhist content. In “‘ears of my ears’: e. e. cummings’ Buddhist prosody,” the pair (sticking to that author’s conventionally unconventional spelling), looks at Cummings by way of Martin Heidegger. This philosopher’s challenge to the ego atomizes the sense of self. Similarly, Cummings’ poems, grounded in the breath’s rhythms, aspire not to human voice but to birdsong, in Lafford and Mason’s report on this poet’s craft. It rewards listening, meditation, and silence.

The center of this anthology finds many names repeating, as Cummings and Suzuki begin to sway other writers and thinkers. “Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton” features three leading advocates during the period during and especially after WWII who begin to react against conformity. Manuel Yang applies Ivan Illich’s “radical conviviality” as akin to the “creative spontaneity and non-attachment” connecting these three countercultural creators. (p. 72) Promoting “spontaneous convergence,” the trio shares a commitment to a “non-action, non-institutional” form of “spiritual assonance,” their non-conformity appealing to dissidents. Yet, many then conformed.

They conformed as the Beats. The appeal of Buddhism for 1950s seekers rebounded off of two other poets based in the Bay Area during this restive postwar period. “Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen” offers James Patrick Brown’s analysis. He shows how the Beats adapted Suzuki’s teachings into a nascent counter-cultural milieu. Brown avers: “Suzuki translated Zen into an American idiom that hit some of the keynotes of American anarchism: a rejection of cultural conditioning, institutionalism, and traditionalism; an affirmation of individualism and radical self-reliance in the Thoreauvian vein; and a language of revolutionary aspiration.” (pp. 94-95) For more about these anarchist roots within American Transcendentalism, a translation of the Slovenian professor Ziga Vodovnik’s The Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism (Berkeley CA: PM Press, 2013) is recommended.

Unsurprisingly, “Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System” follows. Any analysis of American Buddhist literature should include Kerouac. What has been less examined, as it lacks pop culture appeal, is his retreat back to boyhood Catholicism after his 1950s immersion into Buddhism. Bent Sørensen explains the breakdown of his “hybrid system of faith,” triggered by a 1960 visit to those whom Kerouac called the “Mexican Fellaheen” or poor peasants. (p. 106) He pivoted from a romanticized fatalism to “a complete lack of compassion” for those who refused to better their condition. Kerouac, fueled by drink, flirted with madness as his guilt persisted and his sense of sin returned. His characters by the 1960s often entered silence, before death. Kerouac accounted for their dire straits by resorting to Christian rationales “as a punishment for sin.” (p. 118) Like their author, his protagonists try to move on, but samsara catches up with them and thwarts their doomed quests to escape justice.

Another gloomy fiction from the early 1960s depicts this “cyclical nature of suffering.” (p. 136) “Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” displays Andy Wimbush’s recovery of Haeckel’s A Visit to Ceylon (1882). Beckett mentions this author in his grim 1964 novel (translated from Comment C’est (1961). Both versions plunge into an unsparing reduction of existence through an agonizing series of reincarnations. These enable torture of lower life-forms by the Sinhalese, witnessed by Haeckel. While the natives do not kill beasts and creatures, the Sinhalese justify treating them badly. For, they reason, if they had not merited life in such debased versions, they would not be such. This application of Buddhist concepts to real-world dukkha sobers the reader.

A return to Isherwood, now living in a more congenial incarnation in Southern California, finds him thriving. In “‘That Other Ocean’: Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man,” Bidhan Roy shows how not only the author’s well-known immersion into Vedanta but his exposure to Buddhism and fellow British expatriate Aldous Huxley enters the 1964 novel, based on Isherwood’s own sojourn. Filtered through popular reinterpretations of Buddhism in vogue by then, Isherwood’s novel reveals his sympathy with Buddhism, contrasted with the arch satire he and Auden had deployed for The Ascent of F6.

For writers closer to our time, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation” finds Sarah Gardam examining Pure Land sutras and Mahāyāna emptiness doctrines. Gardam uses these to explicate Kingston’s Chinese “talk-story” in her 1986 memoir.

Elena Spandri’s “The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea” affirms another doctrine, that of the Middle Way, as a compliment to Murdoch’s philosophical career. This champions humanism rather than a Kantian or utilitarian ethics in her 1986 novel. A compassionate ethics wins out, in Spandri’s articulation of Murdoch’s plot and character choices.

The final entry tackles one more formidable topic, arguably more arcane than any philosophy. “Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction” unravels the tangle of two popular if recondite genres. Anglo-American popularizations of physics and debates or attempts to reconcile debate between science and religion both, in Sean Miller’s energetic chapter, seek to posit parallels between physics formulae and Buddhist or Taoist descriptions of phenomena. Fritjof Capra, B. Alan Wallace, Matthieu Ricard, and Trinh Xuan Thuan typify decontextualized efforts. Miller doubts their truth-claims for dharma as science.

He finds futile their attempts to reconcile Sanskrit texts full of “imaginative parataxes.” (p. 205) Contemporary exegetes wind up at dead-ends. They wriggle in fudge factors and they refuse to admit their results, which tally only as logical incoherence. Miller pinpoints irony in the Vietnamese-born, American-educated astrophysicist Thuan’s deferral to the “ecclesiastical authority of a French-born Buddhist monk who resides in Nepal.” (p. 214) On the other hand, according to the French-language version of his eponymous website, Ricard earned a Ph.D. in cellular genetics in 1972, after which he entered monasticism.  Miller could have delved deeper into Ricard’s scientific training, as how much Ricard has kept up with his past field and that of astrophysics alongside his Tibetan adaptation and practice, granted, remains a relevant topic to debate. All the same, Miller relishes the chance to tackle a topic which diverges drastically in tone and approach from his predecessors, and this intriguing chapter deserves attention for that.

Miller concludes by summing up the current position of Buddhism in the West. “Stripped of its literary and cultural contingencies, in its mildest form, Buddhism becomes a form of self-help therapy contained by a consumerist market-logic, a happy face put on a liberal humanism purified of reductive materialism. And at its most stringent, Buddhism becomes a form of submission to a hierophantic theocracy, however benign.” (p. 213) This collection needed this voice calling out what some of these writers treated tended to sidestep or gloss over: the manner in which messages of Buddhism warp through our capitalist mindset into globalized commodity.
 

Normand in his introduction noted how pre-1945, the textual approach of T.S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist “engagements” dominated Western reactions. (p. 15) But, neither Normand nor subsequent contributors elaborate sufficiently as to how these “engagements” entered texts during the last century. The earlier impact of Edwin Arnold’s bestselling life of the Buddha as The Light of Asia (1879), J. Jeffrey Franklin has begun to show, reverberated into the next century. This issue, likewise, does not earn any mention beyond Normand’s few references.

All the same, this book’s emphasis on the Beats, more than its scattered coverage of writers after the 1960s, should encourage more research by scholars. Additionally, Sean Miller’s divergent if necessary exploration of a dimension of Buddhism in non-fictional literature may encourage scholars to pursue the portrayals of Buddhism in other scientific and philosophical contexts, a subject needing as much if not more attention than, say, Kerouac’s appropriations of the dharma. For now, this anthology serves readers as a portal, opening up into a display of texts which have integrated Buddhist characters, settings, debates, and insights, gathered during the past century.

Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain Project

Last entry, I reviewed Paul Kingsnorth's deservedly acclaimed, if harrowing and relentless, novel The Wake. Evoking by a "shadow language" adapting Old English, he conveys a first-person narration of a selfish, snobbish small-holder with big plans to fight the Normans who have invaded and ruined his land, and the nation of England itself. Kingsnorth's name seemed vaguely familiar, and I realized that I had read about him last year in this article in the NY Times Magazine, "Ït's the End of the World as He Knows It, and He Feels Fine." Ever since his teens, he has protested as an activist the destruction in his homeland, a millennium later, that never ceases. Forests fall, shopping centers rise.

What can we do? Increasingly, he viewed his fervent struggles against the Machine and Man as futile. “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.“ He cites poet Robertson Jeffers, who also retreated from the fight, and was outcast by his peers once he spoke too loudly against Uncle Sam during WWII, its profiteering, and patriotism demanding fealty from war objectors and dissidents. He lived in Tor House on the Carmel coast, once a modest bohemian burg.

Jeffers as it happens lived as a teen near me. I found this out when researching a local history booklet to which I contributed. I find it impossible, a century later, to imagine him wandering down to a mountain-fed river, full of boulders. Plein-air artists came to the Arroyo Seco to capture its vistas. Now it's the site of the world's first freeway, built in 1941 as a scenic parkway, but all around most of it, houses (like mine, yes) soar, cars whir, and the "urban hum" of Los Angeles runs day and night.

Like Jeffers, those at this Dark Mountain Project seek renewal in a bold response to the havoc wrought by our "progress." But it isn't a political campaign, as he once hoped. (Greens, after all, flounder compromised by coalitions.) He links to this piece on his homepage, where he asks himself FAQs, too. As with any artist, he must promote his views, and like few I read, his views please mine.

The answer that resounded with me, despite the fact I suspect he's one of "those" Oxford grads pretty cocksure of himself, is below. As I saw via my friend Andrea Harcher on FB this photo the same day, and I'd been wondering about the fate of the forests in both The Wake and our own devastating era, I share his reflections. There is sentiment in this photo, and sadness on the Dark Mountain site. Both are fair responses. If you are keen, visit his page as well as his Dark Mountain Manifesto, the subject of the NYT profile. He and colleagues seek to come to literary and aesthetic terms with the end of civilization as we know it, as ecocide replaces ecology. For we stand looking down at/on earth.

What are your politics?

I used to be a political obsessive. But the older I get, the further I want to run from anything with the p-word attached. It’s partly a desire to avoid defining myself, and to allow my mind some freedom. But it’s also because ‘politics’ seems mostly to be thinly-disguised primate tribalism. I think that what we call ‘politics’ is a means of clumsily rationalising deep psychic impulses and then fighting about them. There is very little that is more fruitless than this kind of behaviour. You’re more likely to find truth in science, poetry or the caves of a desert hermit, and I’d suggest you look in all those places first.

Still, you’re going to want more than that, aren’t you? So here’s my best stab right now. It might change tomorrow.

I am left wing. That is to say that I am opposed to obscene concentrations of land, power and wealth, I instinctively favour the underdog and, like anyone else who is paying attention, I am anti-capitalist. Capitalism is the name applied to an economic and cultural machine which makes paper profits for agglomerations of private individuals by externalising its costs onto nature and the weaker bits of humanity. It functions by turning living things into dead things and calling this process ‘growth’. Capitalism is like a tank: it’s a death machine which feels safe and warm as long as you’re sitting inside it rather than in its way.

I am also right wing. That is to say that I am suspicious of ‘progress’ when that word is used to denote the onward march of the industrial machine (see above), and I think that a feeling for place and locality, history and human community, are things worth paying close attention to. I think that the State as an institution is the root cause of many of the world’s problems, and I think that the tradition of Western liberalism is decaying into a kind of self-righteous illiberalism, surrounding itself with a wall of isms and phobias in order to avoid the encroachment of inconvenient realities.

Will that do?

Flag Day

My mom would mark her birthday on June 14th. This is Flag Day in the U.S. But few ever flew the Stars and Stripes, I noticed. But she was tickled that her natal day coincided with what in her youth, I reckoned, must have been a far more celebrated commemoration of patriotism. It also must have been so back then, as she was born a few years after the end of WWI and was married the year America entered WWII, in which her only sibling, her beloved brother Jack and my namesake two decades later, died at Saipan.

I found recently a scarifying quote by the Indian anti-globalism activist-writer Arundhati Roy. “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

I thought of this watching last week this video by Neil Halloran, "The Fallen of World War II." George Dvorsky comments on how the impact of Stalin on his own civilians, whom he let die so as to make his soldiers fight harder, and the immense amount of casualties the Soviet Union endured, remains eerily evident in these data. Halloran masterfully combines narration and charts, with simple sound effects, minimal pictures, and a clear argument, to show how since 1945, the richer nations have not warred with each other. Civil war declines as nationalism grows, and now, far fewer die. Roy blames death on nationalism; India and Pakistan's birth pangs attest to this slaughter, admittedly.

Halloran would admit that such barbarism in the past few years when it happens may loom as more disproportionate. While news fills our feeds with conflict, very low numbers of deaths register. This is not to minimize loss, but Halloran reminds us that there is a growing tendency from the hard  numbers to demonstrate a definite move away from armed conflict and terror as inflicted worldwide.

At the bottom of every mortal, bloody bar chart he shows, a small flag can be seen. For these, and for of course the ideologies each nation represented (or in some cases, was forced to uphold after invasion or capitulation), I was reminded of my ambivalence towards ritual rallies. In my cubicle, a souvenir (je me souviens) magnet of Québec aside, all I have hanging are mini- Tibetan prayer flags.

This may or may not uphold my principles. In kindergarten, I cherished a booklet of the world's flags; in stamps from colonies and countries, I loved learning geography. Kashmir's partition, Bhutan's frailty, the takeover of Sikkim by India, Maoist victory in Nepal, and the predicament of Tibet all speak to another rebel flag: "Don't Tread on Me." But as the Buddhist appeal in its lofty heartland tries to remind us if unsuccessfully given its own decimation under a red banner, that the ultimate reminder of our shared humanity points to pieces of cloth we hoist with not hate but humility.

Industry of death

When I was in college, I showed my dad an op-ed column in the L.A. Times. Our cardinal, Timothy Manning, whom I had shaken hands with and exchanged cordialities at my high school graduation, was a soft-spoken emigrant from County Cork. But his editorial castigated, in Reagan's first term, the "industry of death" (or terms like that) which profited off of a Cold or hot war, and which employed hundreds of thousands in the "defense industry" that in that time still dominated much of the regional economy in aerospace and in manufacturing.

My blue-collar, Reagan Democrat dad responded evenly but with a touch of bitterness: those priests never had to support a family with a job. He reminded me, the know-it-all at the Jesuit university that, although full of working-class undergrads (and many middle-class, true), we were removed from the realities of the economy. My dad had worked at many tool-and-die machine shops, many factories, for decades in this industry.

So, when I share such citations from a clergy with whom I otherwise often disagree, what's the point? I have been convinced that war is not the answer since my teens. Somehow, exposure to St. Francis, to Thomas Merton, to a hint of the Catholic Worker movement, drew me away from my childhood fascination with conflict, one so strong it unsettled a second-grade teacher. At the height of the Vietnam War, I kept changing every creative writing opportunity into a little guy's fiery combat tale.

I was the first year to have to register for the Selective Service imposed by Jimmy Carter late in his term. Those males turning 18 had to sign up at the Post Office on a small card, I recall. The Persian Gulf Doctrine mandated a ready force of young men on call. Protecting oil, as we have seen for decades since, became in the wake of OPEC and the embargoes of the Seventies today's key priority.

So, I also sent a letter to Pax Christi in Boston. I went on record as a conscientious objector to such war. Back then, at least then I could admit some use in serving to help people even in the military in a non-combat capacity, but my preference, not that the government cared, was to not support the service, but to do whatever duty I had to do if required in a domestic role, not furthering conflict.

Now I am not sure about that. Finding out in '07 about my murdered Fenian great-grandfather threw me for a loop, given my seemingly inherited bent against the Butcher's Apron and the Crown. It made me wonder if I, the boy with the crayons drawing tanks and fire and soldiers, revealed a violent gene. Or maybe I carry an idealistic one, romantic and impractical, that ordinary people deserve control.

The War of Independence left Ireland a partitioned nation and sparked civil war, and long decades of hatred and political rancor. The guerrillas in the Six Counties did not wrench that province away from Britain. Thousands died, many more wounded in the soul or in the body. Still, as with some revolutions, I can't tell if a peaceful Irish movement against the Empire might have succeeded.

If asked now by my nation, with the anarchist leanings I have discovered I had formulated without knowing earlier in my life those definitions, I'd opt out from aiding war. I have written about J.F. Powers, who was sent to prison for refusing to buy war bonds in WWII, and I have learned recently about those who turned away from even the "good war"; my father mused one day to me--perhaps after reflecting on the Gold Star flag hung in my mother's house for the death of her only sibling, my namesake Uncle Jack, on the shores of Saipan--that nobody really ever won a war. I turn away more than ever from slogans, jingoism, and ribbons. So, I post this with another Jesuit's chastisement, on another Memorial Day. My students from Iraq and Afghanistan still return, still wounded, if hidden.

Is it immoral to serve?

We commonly heard it said "thank you for your service" in post-9/11 America. So, I ask my veteran or current on-duty students if they'd recommend their choice to others contemplating enlisting. They've returned to get degrees on the G.I. Bill; there is a V.A. hospital nearby campus that attracts many. At least a few after their combat come back disabled mentally, others physically. Many others are happy if a bit weary after their tours of duty, including a spirited woman tallying 37 years in the Army at present. Most say they'd encourage others. A "party girl" from Miami turned her life around by choosing to join the Coast Guard. A stalwart Texas student came back with a prosthetic leg and a year of therapy learning to walk on it, but also a determination to stay motivated; he landed a great job and convinced his cousin, also a veteran, to take classes from me a few years later; as different as the quiet, affable one, a young father and quite modest, and his boisterous, tattooed and orange-work suited and greasy pipe fitter booted relative were, they both succeeded, articulately and admirably.

As an aside, after I wrote this original post, in a threaded discussion this week with many high-achieving students in a class made up mostly of veterans, one wrote when we chatted online about the impact of globalization, competition among lower-waged workers with immigrants, the role our effort plays vs. the privilege or discrimination many claim for themselves, and the hardship of getting more than entry-level jobs (despite our government's and economy's much-touted "recovery"):

It annoys me to no end when people look for hand outs because they are X or they did Y. It reminds me of when my battalion was coming back from deployment and our Sergeant Major spoke with us before getting on the planes to bring us back. He told us with no question, but rather 100% certainty "No one cares." The speech is much longer and many other choice words are used but the main message is that no one cares. Not that people don't support the military, or that they won't be appreciative of what we did, but they can not begin to know what we went through. No one cares because they can only sympathize. No one cares because they didn't choose to do what we did. So to expect anything special is ignorant.

That full on hit me in the most when I applied at King's Fish House here in Huntington Beach. They had walk-in interviews and I started out as a server, and then a bus boy because I wasn't qualified to be a server, which I have no background as a server so I didn't blame them. But then got a call back asking me if I wouldn't mind washing dishes because I wasn't qualified to bus tables. Each time the next person would thank me for my service and tell me how much they appreciated what I did. I was very annoyed with them, and have never stepped in that restaurant since. And even though I could tell they sympathized and supported the military, they did not care and they were not going to make a business decision that would not benefit them.

A few disagree with enlisting in hindsight, but very few to date. I stumbled across this today when searching for a different topic entirely, and so I share it. Glen T. Martin argues with Three Reasons Why it is Immoral to Serve in the Military of Any Country. I'm reminded of Max Aue's words near the start of the immense epic by Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones. In my review of this novel a few years ago, I singled out key passages, as these have often been overlooked by critics of this story  told by a gay man, blackmailed, who then joins the SS. He narrates his unsettling version of events.

"If the State one must serve is made up of ordinary folks, some will find themselves on the wrong side of history, then as now, not by a chosen career path or personal preference, but by the pressures of bureaucracy and the exigencies of the moment that pressure people into acting. Not all victims are good and not all executioners are evil, Aue reasons.

The State, both sides agree as do we, must exist, must call its male citizens to take lives in its name and its female ones to serve its demands. Free will vanishes if a soldier is assigned to a concentration camp or mobile killing battalion: "chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man." (592) We give up the right not to kill and our own right to life, if male, he warns, to do our wartime duty to our masters.
"The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or for me." (21)

The counter-arguments are legion. Google "pacifism" into an image search for angry memes. Despite them, a Quaker image I liked via my review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, more controversy.
P.S. Thanks to Carrie McIntyre for noting "The Lives of Others" and "Barbara" as congenial with Aue, and to Matt Cavanaugh for urging me to "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," and Four Minutes.

Revolutionary Suicide, Freeways, Kabbalah, Countdowns

 

I've finished the 40-hour audiobook of Gravity's Rainbow. I had reviewed the book a few years back, when at last I figured I was patient enough for Thomas Pynchon's epic. Actually, while I liked Against the Day's anarchic apocalypsoes far more, I do admire the sometimes overlooked beauty in his prose, amid the coprophilia, antic songs, banana obsessions, bewildering hijinks, and pain. His books put off the uninitiated, as they had me for decades. I'd read Crying of Lot 49 in grad school and Vineland during that same time voluntarily, but that was it. But I kept getting asked if I had read it, so after V. and AtD, Inherent Vice if logically before Bleeding Edge (still in the works), I figured I had to tackle GR as a purported postmodern masterpiece. The PynchonWiki is invaluable. Even if it never responded to my repeated queries as how to become a contributing member. I suspect a gag is afoot.

What stands out on hearing it again is not the Nazi resistance narrated by a young woman, which had moved me the first time. I missed that. Either the fault of the accidental replaying of two hours when I pressed my phone back button by accident on the Audible app, or the noise, for I heard this as background for about two months of my commute, and sometimes I failed to make out narration or hang on every word. I liked George Guidall's wry, demotic, American drawl, educated yet homespun, a fitting match for Pynchon's blend of astonishing erudition (see that wiki) and down-home satire.

I thought about the novel, while recently reviewing Joanna Freed's monograph on Pynchon and the American Counterculture. So, I use this cover of a relevant book she mentions about "revolutionary suicide" by one who advocated it, to dire results. Freed compares this to the Black Panthers' fate.

The last section, as I drove to work down the Long Beach Freeway, made me wonder. "The Horse" opened as I left the house and ranged from a Germanic totemic sacrifice evoked poetically, to a take on the backward countdown of the rocket coming from a Fritz Lang 1929 film, to the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life tied into the ten worlds emanating from the initial pulse of light, to L.A. freeways (were its basic grids already in place by the end of WWII? I doubt it, but Pynchon never seems to err). The one I was on was not mentioned, but the coincidence was notable. The novel does take on so much, all the same. The freeways carry garbage trucks, and these are filled with the fragments of light from the God-explosion, or is it implosion, another connection that outside Pynchon sounds odd.

I leave you with a few passages that leapt out, as the novel reached at last its final pages, recited.

“Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the people.

Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth’s core. "Marxist dialectics? That’s not an opiate, eh?"

"It’s the antidote."

"No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that’s ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it’s no use—or, out of the moment’s velleity, lay it right out for the young fool.

"The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?"

"But you haven’t ever had the choice to make, have you."

"If I ever did, you can be sure—"

"You don’t know. Not till you’re there, Wimpe. You can’t say."

"That doesn’t sound very dialectical."

"I don’t know what it is."

"Then, right up to the point of decision," Wimpe curious but careful, "a man could still be perfectly pure . . ."

"He could be anything. I don’t care. But he’s only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter."

"Real to a Marxist."

"No. Real to himself."

Wimpe looks doubtful.

"I've been there. You haven't.”

I've been reading Ignazio Silone, the anti-fascist novelist between the wars (and during WWII), and contemplating his socialist-Stalinist-Communist-socialist to eventually a democratic socialist free agent. I reckon how I keep seeing, as I study Irish republicanism for so long and witness ideological and again religious fanaticism, and I teach veterans from our recent wars, proof of what we die for. 

We are told we must gear up and fund another endless war on terror, a war that we can never win.

“What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets."

It's part of the plan. My students who fight tell me that between them and us, it's only the military who keep us safe from terrorism, and if not for those armed, we'd be at the mercy of the mean.

 “Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”

This book rewards. My first time through, I don't think my review linked above cited any of these....

“It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”

Finally, as I think Joe Biden of all nitwits cited, or a better educated aide handed him the soundbite: 
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” He knows.

David Mitchell's "Number9Dream": Book Review

This is my fourth David Mitchell novel, and by now, the pattern's familiar. I enjoy once again Mitchell's fidelity to a young narrator's voice. He evokes in Eiji Miyake, twenty and fresh to Tokyo from an idyllic rural setting where nothing ever happens, the raw shyness and perpetual uneasiness of a fine coming-of-age story. The title, of course, alludes to John Lennon's pastoral, warbling song, and no surprise, Miyake's a big fan. Late in one of the many, many dreams, Lennon tells him: "The ninth dream begins after every ending." Mitchell aspires to re-create the dream patterns in his typically overlapping and interlinked (more or less) narratives, as in "Ghostwritten" and "Cloud Atlas"; it anticipates the troubled teen in "Black Swan Green" and the continuing look into Japan's past, torn between modernity and tradition, which will be "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet."

The challenge is, like dreams themselves, when they comprise so much of the storyline, their appeal dissipates when set down. Reading those inspired by the Goatwriter series is dull. Those sparked by the protagonist's fearful bowling alley and card game run-ins with the Yakuza are more apropos. But, as the novel goes on, inevitably reality and fantasy blur and it's hard to care much.

However, the strength for Mitchell in his second novel remains from "Ghostwritten" as he loves interlinking stories, and the mingling of quiet ones about growing up insecure, and falling in love, and liking music or video games or films, make Miyake one of us. Still, betraying some formulaic moments in the thriller sections, there is a deus ex machina, labeled as such, and a hi-tech revenge that is far too neat. Perhaps these elements borrow from films themselves? Flights of fancy, shown off well in the Panopticon opening sections, shift into films themselves, and it's unclear at a first reading where that storyline stops or resumes later on, a typical fudge factor for the writer here. Such tricks--and no wonder Haruki Murakami is mentioned as a book half-finished that Miyake found in the unclaimed items of his railway job--can weary over the course of a novel. But, the terror of some portions, when Miyake faces cruel fate and moral retribution, and the haunting, powerful subplot of his forebear, on a doomed mission as a human torpedo late in WWII, balance the feel of the hellish pizzeria where Miyake toils at night, in scenes that again feel real. Mitchell uses a very British slang to portray his narrator, and this may seem odd for us, but he tries to evoke the differences in dialect and register, avoiding overtly Japanese imitations of conversation or idiom, probably a wise move.

The tale feels true in much of the everyday sections: "I like the glimpses of commuters in parallel windows--two stories being remembered at the same time" speaks not only for subway travelers but for the shape of the novel itself. The main plot, a boy's search for his father, is classic, and although his mother's laments wore me down as they did her son here, the quest does again seem realistic, and sometimes mundane: "A dirty rag of bleached sky-- the morning forgets it is raining, as suddenly as a child forgetting a sulk she planned to last years." This seems more Mitchell than Miyake, but it shows his ability for fresh phrases.

Ending suddenly, and here recalling Mitchell's first novel in similar evocations of possible doom emanating from an ecologically wrecked, materialistic, paved-over Japanese society with few redeeming aspects, the novel may not please anyone wanting a clearly delineated read. What kept me on was Miyake's winning presence, the power of the WWII subplot and the thrill of the Yakuza scenes, and the natural curiosity sparked by a quest for origins. Out of such elements, Number9Dream mostly succeeds. (See earlier Mitchell reviews linked above; Amazon US 5-18-14)

Cesar Pavese's "The Moon and the Bonfires": Book Review

Published shortly before the author's suicide in 1950, after an affair with an American actress, the hardboiled nature of Cesare Pavese's final novel demonstrates his skill, honed by translations of American literature, in integrating the hardboiled prose style or Chandler, Cain, and Hemingway back into Italian. Or vice versa, as R.W. Flint's rendering in turn of Pavese emphasizes its affinities. I am reminded of how Hemingway tried to convey Spanish idioms or Italian landscapes in his own fiction, so Pavese's familiar tone, for American readers in this 2002 edition for New York Review Classics, should find a ready reception among those curious to see how an Italian enamored of American sensibilities tries to work them into his own language, and his own post-war sensibilities.

The results, to me, are modest but successful on these terms. Mark Rudman's introduction might be read as an afterward, for he gives away the whole plot and its climactic scene. However, Pavese's decision to treat that as the final two pages of his novel, and to cut away from any lasting denouement, attests to his skill, and daring.

Other writers would have softened this or pressed it into a framework more pliable. It's true that for long stretches of this 150-page novel, not much happens, on the other hand, so the action that does occur, told in retrospect, does matter more. I was not as pulled into the narrative as I expected. Perhaps as a Californian, viewing the remove at which Oakland, Fresno, the great valleys, and the desert of this state are evoked in a stylized manner (reminding me of the rather endearing way Kafka imagined his Amerika) kept me distanced. I was not convinced by the narrator's loves or adventures, for these--nodding back to the tough-guy inspirations--are not given enough depth to draw you close.

However, in the smells of Italy's lime trees, the legend of how the moon fructifies the fields if bonfires are set at its margins, and how as in 1914, so since: war is "a lot of dogs unchained by their masters to murder each other and keep their masters in control" (88), there is enough to satisfy a reader. "Maybe it is better that way, better for everything to go up in a bonfire of dry grass and for people to begin again. That was how it was in America--when you were sick of something, a job or a place, you changed it. Over there even whole towns, with taverns, city halls and stores, are as empty now as graveyards." (120-1) This sparely told pastoral narrative leaves its impression, in a muted, melancholic manner. Not the lively evocation of the war against the Fascists I had suspected, Pavese prefers to tamp down the emotion, and to use memory and equivocation to explore his national pain.

Curzio Malaparte's "The Skin": Book Review

Born Kurt Eric Suchert, this half-German writer castigates his losing side, as the Allies "liberate" Naples in 1943. Their new Italian allies take up the uniforms of the dead British they have recently killed in the defense of their Fascist nation. Italians now resolve to fight against the deposed Mussolini and the Germans. How the Napolitan natives feel about this has been rarely acknowledged by many who dramatize WWII. Malaparte, as his nom-de-plume indicates, takes the "bad side"; he shows the physical and moral costs of capitulation when one's own loyalties insist one was never defeated, and cannot surrender one's liberty unless once a slave. 


Such complex questions drive this 1949 novel. A work of fiction, but in its headlong prose rush and its tendency to indulge in set-pieces and tirades, I suspect this is better understood as thinly disguised or ambitiously elaborated vignettes from Malaparte's own experiences. The results fit better not as a sustained narrative but as episodic depictions of encounters between the Italians and those who now occupy their territory as erstwhile comrades, but also as avengers, judges, juries, and executioners.

Like Céline, Malaparte brings a complicated and shifty set of his own alliances into play, as he survives the shifts in regimes and ideologies. Similarly, this also needed an editor, for parts lapse into opprobrium, and the long conversations untranslated in David Moore's English version from French, between Malaparte's mouthpiece and his charge, Colonel Jack Hamilton, may slow the pace or dissuade a less cosmopolitan reader. But in the central section, "The Black Wind," one glimpses, finally, the power Malaparte can summon.  He had traveled to the steppes and witnessed the barbarities of the elite Germans (in this novel he appears slightly anachronistically already as "the author of 'Kaputt'"); he transforms this into a nightmare of crucified victims of the Nazis appealing for his assistance, before this segues into a tribute to his beloved greyhound Febo, and then a moving scene set in the last hour of a wounded American soldier. These three scenes, at first disparate, cohere as a meditation on death, and how we come to it ready or not. Malaparte takes dramatic license here, but the chapter works, as the central pivot in an otherwise metropolitan setting, to free the narrative from its concentration on the the demi-monde of Naples, of satire against the Allies, and lurid excess.

Rachel Kushner introduces the New York Review Classics 2013 reprint (with added passages expurgated from previous English printings) by calling Malaparte a plague or a pest, taking down all with him, and this fittingly finds an echo in the first chapter. On pg. 34, Boccaccio is cited appropriately, as compassion is felt for the afflicted of a great disaster, but this time, also by the Americans for themselves, as Christian benefactors. The trouble Malaparte finds is that such largesse cannot be reconciled with Naples' more pagan heritage, and the fact that Italian suffering predates Christian concepts. The last virgin in the city is shown intact, admission required for gawkers, and this emphasis on the grotesque (dwarf prostitutes, "Negro" soldiers hoodwinked by local "brides" and their scheming, black-market connected families despite smiles, merkins, "inverts" galore) may delight some, even if it soon gets tiresome. I get the point; Malaparte for 330 pages keeps making it.

He avers, in more provocative mood, that "capitalist society is founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions and his happiness; and that without the alibi of Christianity capitalism could not prevail." (63) Malaparte distrusts the civilizing mission of the Allies, he dislikes the craven bargaining of his false nation, and he seeks to distance himself from a Fascist past which despite partisans and reprisals does not recede so rapidly.

As with many European mid-century intellectuals, Communism hovers as a possible alternative. But Malaparte, true to his contrary nature, wonders if "pederasts" and "inverts" flocked to the red flag as if some pawns in a "Five Year Plan" hatched for easy marks among those who sought to deny their bourgeois nature and pretend to be proles, or to seek rough trade and fresh conquests among such who were driven by desperation and hunger to sell themselves to the "international community" of opportunistic coquettes and dilettante poseurs. A horrible interlude of the aftermath of phosphorus bombs in Hamburg conjures up a Dantean diorama, and innocents suffer horribly, cant and ideology aside. Children are sold to Moroccan soldiers, the Church connives, and the author speculates that this is not the inevitable outcome of moral breakdown so much as a sly campaign via Marxists to undermine the standards of a West they despise. Malaparte's suppositions may anger us, but he forces us to consider how popular or romanticized ideas generate unexpected, ugly impacts. People do not try to save their souls. all labor for good or bad only "to save their skins, and their skins alone." (129)

The rest of the book continues in the same mood. A bizarre birthing scene, a banquet of "fried Spam and boiled corn" for the Allies, a girl's death and her posthumous transformation, the eruption of Vesuvius, the entrance of the Allies into Rome--where a man welcoming the troops is run down by a Sherman tank, and a "flag of human skin" seems the appropriate icon for the Europe thus freed, reprisals against teenaged boys who fought for the losing side, and a recognition that it is a "shameful thing to win a war" (343) wrap up this journey into the rotten core of a continent as it is conquered.
(Amazon US 9-27-14)

William T. Vollmann's "Europe Central": Book Review

Having finished this a few minutes ago, I must record my reactions. I spent the last few weeks in its passages--on and off, necessarily--it's an overwhelming monolith as forbidding as its 1935 Deutschland, das Land der Musik stylized eagle cover image. Yet, like the somber image, it attracts a certain reader curious to part the curtain and enter. This mythic structure towers over the individual, whether in the storylines or ourselves, wandering into a great labyrinth.

The blurbs summarize the plots, but a few overall reactions may let you know if this book may be worth the considerable effort and investment of time. I was pleased to see that in the sources appended to the text, Guy Sajer's outstanding memoir (which I reviewed for Amazon) The Forgotten Soldier is cited first of all. This account of an Alsatian fighting for the Germans (although it's been charged with taking liberties) on the Ostfront came often to mind as I read Vollmann. The author's scope and research simply is not the type we expect to find so evidently scaffolding even "historical fiction," and this involved me more in the result even as it distanced me from the conceit that I was listening to fully-realized narrators rather than, as Vollmann gives away in one footnote, a "fabulist."

The musical themes I found appropriate, but lacking knowledge of Shostakovich's ouevre, the exacting attention given to them left me floundering for long stretches of an already nearly endless work. (My wife was reading Anna Karenina simultaneously, and we kept pace with each other!) Unlike the earlier Russian writers, Vollmann's epic does not unfold so easily. Even with background knowledge of the conflicts (in no small part thanks to Sajer), the panoramas, like the Ostfront serving as the focus for so many scenes, astonish but diminish you as a reader, struggling to keep up with the events. Perhaps this reaction is intended by Vollmann as the appropriate response?

My favorite parts were those of Kurt Gerstein, Van Cliburn, Vlasov and Paulus, and Hilde Benjamin, the GDR's "Red Guillotine." Vollmann takes on a very intriguing narrative style imitating the leaden justifications of Soviet propagandists well for many vignettes, and his energy often seems more expended on the side of the USSR rather than the "German Fascist" entries, leaving the book a bit more lopsided than the design of paired stories would suggest. This probably, given the determinism of the Soviets as well as actual events, nonetheless may convey the force--in so many ways--of the Russian over the German ideology in the struggle for Europe Central--which tends to get overlooked, actually, in the novel in favor of the Russian steppes.

If you're somewhat familiar with the contexts already, this is in my opinion a fitting and challenging work that will force you to enter into the minds of people that you may have only glimpsed at a distance in grainy documentaries--this itself serves as one of many motifs--the humanity is less directly perceived than in more accessible, sentimentalized, or tidy novels.

Yes, the work needed an editor. A lesser author would have ironically earned another star! But a writer as intelligent as Vollmann should know that he needs to keep his reader in mind, and not expect us to labor for so long on what his labor needs to compress into a more comprehensible form. The Shostakovich-Elena-Karman triangle makes its point and encapsulates the question of "can art fight evil" well. But it goes on three times longer than needed in an already stuffed narrative that needed more concentration upon, say, Zoya. Ties with the Nibelungenlied, Tristan, and the Germanic myth are excellent, but I think these could have been tightened and honed. You also sense that Stalingrad, Dresden, the gulags and lagers all are filtered through book-learning. Vollmann for all his impressive research tends to let it sit on the page as "facts that need to be made into fiction to make it a WWII story" rather than to incorporate what's been published as memoirs and first-hand interviews, say, into vividly rendered experiences transferred into the plight of his imagined protagonists.

For many authors, this would have been the work of a lifetime. For this prolific if admittedly prolix writer, it's an immersion that seems to have been, more or less effectively in parts rather than the whole--within who knows what shorter time. And what's Vollmann getting at in blaming "wartime paper shortages" for the lack of the supplement's chronology? Perhaps a sly relevance for us today? (7-17-05 to Amazon US in slightly altered form as the first of his books I'd reviewed, years before...)

William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down" (abridged): Book Review

These 730 pages compile but one-fourth of seven volumes in 2003 published by McSweeney's as "some thoughts on violence, freedom and urgent means" about the justifications for violence and inflicting death on others, usually human, but also upon other sentient beings. William T. Vollmann admits in a brief introduction to this 2004 Ecco abridgement that it "falls short of being short enough" considering the "simple if laborious inductive method employed" to ask "when is violent defense of X justified?" (xii-xiii) Speaking of justification, he claims right away: "I did it for the money." He figures "the possibility now exists that someone might read it." Such off-handed if frank statements typify Vollmann's conversational style. For me, this shows his strength, and his appeal.

Many criticize this erudite, garrulous, probing, restless style, and Vollmann's refusal to submit to editing. Once in a while, as with his promising explication of the "cash nexus" (cf. 203), I found myself frustrated as Vollmann tried to cram in too much in too little space (despite these dimensions) as when he conflated this (on page 274) with a denunciation of "dekulakization" and collectivization.

Sometimes, he favors aphorisms. "An authority is by nature noxious, a windbag, a parasite, a professional vulture." (34) This recalls Swift, Bierce, Orwell, or Twain. Or, "only a saint can practice nonviolence in isolation; the rest of us have to do it in gangs." (61) He asks profound questions of the social contract, which may elude glib solutions: "law and government of any kind--even if the dispossessed are self-professedly conspiring to overthrow it--implies consent!" (98) He muses whether selfishness persists as our "quotidian quality" rather than a utopian "tidal pool" isolated from both land and sea as its viable locale, protected as it were, where self-sacrifice may flourish. (274)

Emerging as "that transitional life-form, a highwayman with an ideology," Pancho Villa rises up. "Having crawled out of the primeval sea of manifest self-interest, he could now evolve successively into each of the following creatures: guerrilla, leader, general, statesman, underdog, martyr." (357-8) Vollmann avers: "No matter that self-interest nourished these incarnations, too; authority needs to act a rarified part in order to legitimize itself." If this intrigues you, this book rewards your and his labor.

The author often defends his writing as precisely the length he wishes it to be, and given few can now access copies of the original series (3,500 sets were printed, but no reprints seem probable), the extended attention "to categorize excuses for violence" in this condensed form merits and rewards concentration. Befitting his attempt to verify his belief how "every violent act refers back to some more or less rational explanation," this serious topic merits the depth Vollmann provides. Still, it may exhaust the patience his less fervent readers may bring to even a shorter, if as demanding, study. (xi)

Vollmann's audience, familiar with his massive fiction and non-fiction, and his blurring of these two genres in so many books before and after this, might not be so surprised; this took twenty-three years "counting editorial errands," he avers coyly, while the "abridgement took me half an hour." (xii) Part i elaborates categories and justifications, as exemplified by Trotsky and Lincoln, and John Brown in their actions, as challenged by Cortes, and as enriched by Napoleon's appeal to honor, authority, and self-defense. Some of this suffers from allusions to material that a reader may not have found earlier; this may be inevitable if most of the germane content has been excised, leaving us with nearly no editorial guidance about what has been lost. As partial compensation, Vollmann inserts the moral calculus from the original series. Part II surveys global case studies, some adapting his journalism, some introducing in-depth interviews with victims, participants, and perpetrators. It ends with the annotated table of contents for reference from the full edition. Despite tempting glimpses this précis embeds from its predecessor, it adds value in (relative) concision for a wider audience of inquirers.

This reminds me, in its verve and its embrace of a big idea, of a book that inspired Occupy nearly a decade later, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's "Debt: the First 5000 Years." Vollmann shares, with a few principled dissidents before and after, a willingness to delve into academic sources and political categories without resorting to tenure-track cant or think-tank jargon. What such contributions may lack in fealty to scholarly convention, they make up in a mass appeal to the restless and frustrated, wanting bolder interpreters able to leap over categories. "Rising Up and Rising Down" provides a convenient compendium for Vollmann's time-tested themes of state-sponsored and insurgent brutality, his roaming into remote terrain to uncover those who perpetrate such activity, his compassion for those victimized by policies and bullets, and his determination to listen to witnesses. (3-8-14 to Amazon US)

Ian Mac Niven's "Lawrence Durrell: A Biography": Book Review

I read this immediately after another biography, also published in 1998, Gordon Bowker's "Through the Dark Labyrinth." Bowker, although constrained by Mac Niven's authorized version from quoting from Durrell's correspondence let alone his novels, nonetheless managed to provide insight into the troubled, determined talent who juggled a manic pace when creating intricate texts, a heavy work load earlier in his checkered career working for the British foreign service, and many, many women.

Starting with India as the key to Durrell's mentality, part of but apart from his British origins, searching for belonging beyond the usual borders, seeking hidden patterns in arcana, Mac Niven takes us through his years growing up in an Anglo-Indian, as Durrell preferred to label his downscale (by comparison at least with some British lording over the Jewel of the Crown) background, his schooling in London, his failure to summon up the effort to get into Cambridge, and his bohemianism. Already, via Hamlet's predicament, Durrell contemplated his "heraldic" theory, that two Hamlets existed, one bound in the here and now and another in a sort of Platonic (to me if not him) realm of forms and symbols. Henry Miller and Anais Nin encouraged him in this pursuit.

His arrival as a poet preceded his departure in 1938 with his first wife for Corfu, and his Greek ties grew strong. But his marital ones could slacken. His second wife, Eve or Yvette Cohen, daughter of a Tunisian Jewish father and a Ladino-Sephardic Turkish mother, with her ideal beauty, stimulated what would become Justine. Although he never thought he'd wind up in Egypt, a flight from the invading Nazis found him in first Cairo and then Alexandria. Mac Niven sums up its crossroads appeal well, while noting that Durrell's depiction of the port as a lascivious landscape takes much more from its WWII brothels than its pre-war, more Greek and Italian, sedate character for what was then a compact city of 750,000. Certainly, in the Alexandria Quartet the city turned its own symbolic terrain, brought to life, if a dusky and detached, aesthetic and literary, form of its own. Mac Niven emphasizes how this novel was written in the mid-1950s, on insurgent Cyprus (after diplomatic assignments to postwar Rhodes, Argentina, and Yugoslavia), while his marriage to Justine crumbled.

But, Mac Niven offers very little coverage of the novels themselves that made his fame, or their critical reception. His details about the writer provide the data, and this data, as said before, can answer probably many questions readers have, but still this book, aiming not at a critique of his texts but a presentation of their author, serves its purpose, leaving explication and reader reception to others. We do get nods to the four-dimensional quality and its purported application of relativity, its time-based and space-based novel arrangement, and its ties to letting go of the ego and welcoming death. This facet, a turn from Christian-based or earlier European fiction, may portend the drift, in his later Avignon Quintet, to a more Buddhist-based approach, where characters appear and revive, freer of chronological convention or indeed, verisimilitude. This enchanted some and maddened other readers. Durrell tried to leap past material limitations in his work, but it seems to stay blurred and off-kilter. While Mac Niven does not take on the issue of if his novels will last, he looks at Durrell's travel writing and poems, and provides at least an overview of the works, if again, no real analyses.

Mac Niven provides about five times, it often seems, the information on any incident discussed by Bowker. For instance, Durrell's teaching stint at Caltech gains by a description of where he stayed, what he lectured upon, and what car he even drove on Los Angeles' freeways. Some may, however, wonder if such depth is necessary for a reader curious but not determined to find out every detail. Such biographies, full of documentation, as Mac Niven offers serve a scholarly purpose, as the go-to work to be consulted by students of his subject. But for general readers, Bowker, at a few hundred fewer pages, with his own array of sources, may suffice. The value of both works, to me, is evident.

The issue of his conflicted daughter, Sappho, her claims of incest by her father, and her eventual suicide, receives a judgment of relying on the discredited "recovered memories" treatment once in vogue, in Mac Niven's estimation. He shows in a poignant scene his own day spent looking at photos of her in the company of the grieving father, and he laments his failure to help his daughter more.

Durrell, in conclusion, does wonder as an aside if his work will endure. Late in his life, he seems to wonder, in his South of France retreat, if any one will listen to his admonitions that appeal in his final works to "selflessness and non-possession" and with this, one closes this in-depth study of this author.
(Amazon US 5-14-14)

Gordon Bowker's "Through the Dark Labyrinth": Book Review

Having finished this biographer's 2012 study of James Joyce, I was curious if Lawrence Durrell, less heralded now than half a century ago, certainly, merited the same steady if detailed life survey Bowker applied to the Irish innovator. Durrell's contribution, as attempting to integrate an Einstein-derived, relativistic series of levels from which to examine what, in the start of his most famous novel, Justine, Freud avers are the four people present when a couple couples, seems to me at a distance rather musty, and The Alexandria Quartet appears more of series of hothouse flowers, in characters and sultry ambiance. Arguably, the author's wanderings, writings, and self-importance make him a worthwhile subject for Bowker's scrutiny.

Hobbled as Ian Mac Niven's even longer authorized biography then in the making prevented Bowker from citing from Durrell's correspondence let alone his works, Through the Dark Labyrinth--similar to his Joyce take--breaks little new ground. But Bowker despite his handicap tackles the remarkably self-involved Durrell with sympathy if not forgiveness, although the biographer to me remains largely polite and well-behaved when describing the affairs, abandonments, and amours of this dedicated lothario. His preference, given if not romanticized "Tibetan" origins given some general proximity to the Himalayas from his Indian birthplace to an English father and Irish-descended mother, for the warmer climes and the less restrictive mores they supposedly engender, is clear. "Pudding Island" as his ancestral homeland and the place where he is sent for school as a boy remains detested, although he repaired there often over his career. A bohemian, he failed to master the math to get him into Cambridge. He chose to hang out in London, befriend Henry Miller, and cultivate connections, as a poet and then novelist, in the 1930s. As war loomed, Greece appealed, and it was off to Corfu.

The Nazi invasion barely avoided, he fled to Alexandria, to cobble together a career as a sort-of spy, information officer, propagandist, and British diplomatic such-and-such, there and in postwar Greece and Cyprus. In the latter, he found himself entangled as the colonial power Britain exerted weakened under the pressure for ties to Greece, and Durrell had to flee, again, as violence over land broke out.

Bowker shows how Alexandria provided, as well as Durrell's beloved and adopted Greek nation, the setting that inspired him. Then more Greek-British-Jewish and much smaller than today's Egyptian sprawl, the city served as a natural crossroads and an erotic cauldron. Modernism meets Freud, as spirals rather than linear narrative arrive to plunge a reader into breakdown--the one aspect Durrell complained to T.S. Eliot that he wished he'd have experienced (as he had with his first if lesser success, The Black Book) to add verisimilitude. But his failed second marriage to Eve Cohen, the Sephardic beauty who provoked the novel, provided his own anxieties, although never for long. He seems selfish, letting go as he outgrows his wives and a little daughter, she twice set aside. Bowker does not editorialize much, but he mentions how Henry Miller saw women as an "aperture" and later alludes to Durrell's take on women as less than persons and more general laws or biological urges.

The Atlantic complained how his "characters embraced with the cool click of algebraic equations." The haste in which he wrote the three installments to come shows he worked out his Quartet as he went, rather than starting in the first novel with a solid structure. Balthazar in six weeks, finds Durrell "feeling his way forward." Mountolive took two months, Clea eight weeks, he attested. This looseness may however have worked to his favor, for what Bowker sums up in the insighful, valedictory, final chapter of this biography as an achievement where we care less about the fates of the characters (his friend Diana Gould Mehunin complained of their coldness even and especially when sex was asserted as the main energy in these novels, and his others, after all) but we learn about the role destiny plays, and how we may reinvent ourselves, remaking our reality and our perceptions.

For all his indulgences as an intellectual, Durrell appears rather lightweight, preferring the effusions of what the nascent counterculture might cotton onto as gurus, seers, New Age exponents, or what some call today life coaches, for his nebulous or scattered musings. Granted, his main diversions in these years were sex and sunbathing, but he did manage fourteen-hour days often, parallel to careers on and off, working away on the next book. Certainly his knack for Greek, his fluency in French, his ability for sussing out the natives around the Mediterranean, speak to his skill at depicting his setting.

This setting shifted to Languedoc, after the success of the Quartet brought him fame and many more women to woo. The nature of his relationship with his troubled daughter Sappho, and her claims (Bowker weighing them decides innocent until proven guilty on Durrell's behalf) of incest clouded his later years; she eventually hanged herself. His third marriage appeared his happiest; his fourth demonstrated his brutality. Bowker alludes to Durrell's admiration for Sade (whom he refers to as de Sade; he also misspells MacNiven's name and makes a few minor errors throughout in proper nouns), and the appeal Durrell exerted over women up to his death in 1990 must prove the triumph of a certain charm, given his short stature, increasing portliness, and large nose. He turned his friends into fiction, and many complained. The women he seduced rarely returned for more. He tends to be a cad.

However, he softened as yoga and Buddhism--when a Tibetan monastery was established near his rural retreat--taught him the value of patience. He avers how reincarnation made more sense, living a life over and over until it was perfect, and the monks claim he has been reborn as a vineyard keeper in Burgundy. Bowker, in spite of the limits under which this was written, provides a thoughtful overview of Durrell. It can bog down in minutiae even as some parts skim; for instance, he goes to Israel and visits a kibbutz, but that's all we learn, while other times we find out what he had for dinner with such-and-such, time and time again. This may be due to the archival access he was granted, and in the end, Bowker does the best he can, digging into many sources, interviewing many, about Durrell
(Amazon US 5-13-14)

Duncan Robinson's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

The 1990 printing updates the 1979 version, subtitled "Visions of a Berkshire village"; Duncan Robinson draws upon fellow scholars to offer a valuable introduction in a brisk text to this influential and controversial English painter. Over 100 illustrations provide a look at his work (and sometimes his contemporaries) but some of the monochrome photos are nearly thumbnail. Better are the fifty depictions in color of his neo-Primitive paintings.

Spencer may seem to some one-of-a-kind and to others very much of his early 20c training. Everyone from Giotto to D.H. Lawrence, Burne-Jones to Wyndham Lewis, Gauguin to the Cubists, can be drawn upon for relevant connection, as well as closer contemporaries such as Eric Gill and poets and painters who fought alongside Spencer in the formative experience of the Great War. Robinson notes, however too briefly, Spencer's decision for his art not to emphasize brutality but the redemptive powers of the trenches and hospitals provides a logical extension of his service in the ambulance brigade. His paintings as a form of immersion allow the same odd mixtures of perspective and detail that enliven his village paintings. Both take everyday elements and blend them with the mystical and surreal, creating a dreamlike sensation of the palpable crossing over with the ethereal, obliquely.

The text moves quickly, and the digressions to others in his generation and his predecessors help to place Spencer more in his time than out of it as romantics might have it. The text seems to dip into his life and then draw back from it, but this may be an editorial imposition due to the short length of the text compared to the pictorial content in 128 pages. Robinson's expertise in British art allows him to go back and forth from the contexts intellectually and personally that Spencer navigated in his eccentric life with the greater forces that war and making a living necessitated. While more here on his religious attitude might explain more, the ambiguity of his very distinctive angle on the intersection of local with universal endures.

From his beloved Berkshire village of Cookham, he drew the innovative combination of the everyday faces he knew well in natural and man-made settings. He included his friends, wives, and neighbors into portraits, landscapes, and the religiously bold or even sexually charged imagery. While he had to depict war again, twenty-odd years later, he again chose to use his memorable poses, settings, and elongated or foreshortened figures to commemorate not destruction but energy. You can see in the results here Spencer's love for humanity.

As Robinson reminds us, the pressures of the time made Spencer no less determined to make his individual mark on artistic society. In what he dismissed unjustly as "potboilers" for hire we see him apply no less a fine brush and a careful eye to landscapes and portraits executed, even as he labored on vast canvases full of resurrections and frolic. He gained fame and a knighthood before his death, which barely finds mention herein, which may be somewhat appropriate for a man who tried to bring the joy of salvation down to English earth. (Amazon US 12-11-13 or in Britain, 11-12-13!)

Laurent Binet's "HHhH": Book Review

This novel's curious title derives from the German initials of the phrase "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." That is, Reinhard(t), Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, #2 man in the Nazi ranks, and "the Butcher of Prague." While Laurent Binet's topic may be very well-known among students of Middle European history, the Czech lands, and of WWII, the heroism shown by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, one Slovak, one Czech, to fight for their nation against tyranny deserves retelling.

As with two recent, massive novels  influences this French author credits, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (which he disparages as "Houellebecq does Nazis") and William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, HHhH takes on a modern perspective, plunging a reader into the German mindset and the frenzy of the era, seasoned with a retrospective judgement upon the morality abused or rescued in WWII.

The difference? Binet chooses never to immerse himself into fiction. Most of these three-hundred quickly told pages (a fraction of Littell or Vollmann) treat the subject and how it defies the reversion to fantasy or imagination. That becomes Binet's obsession. Inspired by his two Czechoslovak figures, sent to England to train for their suicide mission behind enemy lines, Binet prefers to examine the historical record and to fill in the gaps, with some dialogue and invented scenes, but only when he cannot make the facts fit his tale. Fewer times, therefore, than expected, we learn how subsequent testimony by survivors accounts for both Nazi and enemy reactions, and from these, juxtaposed with Binet's reading and reactions, the novel slowly accrues.

Operation Anthropoid, as the English termed it with the Czechoslovak resistance, itself decimated under Heydrich, draws us into the antagonist. "It's as if a Dr. Frankenstein novelist had mixed up the greatest monsters of literature to create a new and terrifying monster." (99) Worse, for he kills not on paper but in person and through his minions.

How Binet conveys this may annoy some readers. He makes it personal, and mixes up his "visions with the known facts. It's just how it is." (105) But then, on the same page, he backtracks, and he admits his mistakes as he researches his storyline. He knows "fiction does not respect anything," but he also know that the drama inherent in his subject causes him to imagine what cannot be verified.

Real people are "both greater and more flawed than any fictional character." The chapters #250 + #251 prove gripping, even though--or because--I had visited the crypt in question and seen the place commemorated today in Prague. The climax shows courage amidst absurdity. "I think the world is ridiculous, moving, and cruel. The same is true for this book: the story is cruel, the protagonists are moving, and I am ridiculous. But I am in Prague." (320) In that city of a hundred towers, the power of the predicament that seven Resistance fighters choose in 1942 remains resonant, and poignant. Amazon US 9-25-13