Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships *****

The Long Ships is a Swedish adventure novel telling the saga of Red Orm Tostesson, a widely-traveled and notably lucky Viking in the years around the first millennium. Like The Island of Second Sight, it's a classic of world literature I'd never heard of before pulling from the bookstore shelf. 

From the Introduction to the NYRB edition, written by Michael Chabon:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Like traditional adventure novels, The Long Ships eschews psychological realism in favor of unadorned action. It is largely episodic but soon reveals a recurring theme about the role of religion in that world. On his first long voyage, Orm, raised with the old Norse gods, spends time captive in Moorish Spain, escapes to Christian Ireland, and comes home to find the King of Denmark converted to Christianity. Many of Orm's adventures, and even more of his moral reasoning, involve weighing the impact of each religion on the "luck" of the protagonists. They decide, for instance, that they should sacrifice a goat at the launching of a ship, because the sea gods are more powerful in this instance than Christ; on the other hand, they spare their injured enemies.

The joy of the book comes from the adventure and the dryly humorous way the story is told.

The year (1000) ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as a result of neighborly disputes.

Orm has a wise-cracking friend named Toke who is a particularly rich source of bon mots. 

The Long Ships is an entertaining way of learning about the state of Europe in the 10th century, with plenty of battles and violence when our heroes go a-viking.

David Toop, Ocean of Sound ***

Ocean of Sound advertises itself as a history of ambient music, with a particularly inclusive definition of the genre. As Toop says in his author's note, "I think of it now as a Trojan Horse, early-90s ambient music serving as a device to disguise a far more expansive narrative about twentieth-century experimental music of all persuasions."

For Toop, "ambient" refers to the interpenetration of (intentionally composed) music and the surrounding background. Ambient music in the Brian Eno sense is composed music intended to supplement or "tint" the environment; other musicians incorporate natural sounds and non-traditional instruments; yet others shift the listener's attention to the listening context, like Cage's 4'33". "This blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music" (R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World).

Toop extends his premise beyond its breaking point by interpreting other notable aspects of twentieth-century music as examples of the same tendency; for example the post-modern blurring of genres, boundless trance-like compositions, and electronic music in general. All of these innovations serve the contradictory impulses of listening to the entire soundscape as music and helping music lift free from its earthbound context. Twentieth-century music shifts the focus from the intentions of the genius musician to the active participation of the listener. 

Ultimately Toop did not provide me with a new way of listening or introduce me to new artists I am compelled to check out. 

Masashi Matsuie, The Summer House ****

The Summer House tells a low-key story about a small Japanese architectural firm creating a design proposal for a National Library of Modern Literature. To escape from the bustle and heat of Tokyo, they repair to a small village in the mountains.

The book is all about mood, with special attention paid to the soundscape. A light breeze carries bird song into the workshop where the architects work to get the curve of a banister just right, the only sound their pencils on paper. There is just enough plot to move us from one relaxing scene to another and to tie together the metaphorical conversations they have about craftsmanship and about balancing tradition with innovation.

The experience of reading The Summer House reminded me of watching a documentary about traditional craftsmen. It's a pleasure to observe their quiet artistry, to celebrate the care they take.

Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians *** 1/2

Like Herald of a Restless World, which I recently read, Time of the Magicians is a biography of early 20th-century philosophers that also seeks to capture the spirit of the times. The subtitle refers to "the decade that reinvented philosophy." The titular magicians are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger; the decade is 1919 to 1929.

Time of the Magicians improves on Herald of a Restless World by diving deeper into its subjects' ideas and, most importantly, by presenting them as idiosyncratic and compelling characters. However, Eilenberger failed to convince me that they, collectively or individually, "reinvented philosophy." Wittgenstein and Heidegger are surely influential figures, but they were inflection points within continuing traditions.

Despite Eilenberger's efforts to tie together the philosophies of his four protagonists, I didn't see them as asking the same questions, nor did I feel the importance of the issues they addressed. I remain mystified by Heidegger, but I can't fault the author for falling short on the impossible task of explaining Dasein. Philosophically, I was most intrigued by Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, despite Cassirer being presented as the old-school conservative of the bunch. 

A tangential point that I found interesting was about the Weimar Republic that ruled Germany at the time:

The republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States, France, and England... From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but...a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war.

Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium ** 1/2

The Empusium feels like a rough draft from the Nobel laureate Tokarczuk. The beginning and the end are fully fleshed out, but the vast middle is half-baked. There are many scenes of aimless conversation between ill-defined characters. A couple of times, a character speaks who I didn't realize was even in the room.

The setting is essentially the sanitarium from The Magic Mountain transported to the locale from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The book shares themes with both of these predecessors. The most obvious leitmotif is misogyny and a woman's place in the world: Tokarczuk includes an author's note revealing that the character's ideas are all paraphrases of esteemed writers ranging from St Augustine to William Burroughs.

Each person possessed a point of least resistance, a weakest point, this was the famous Achilles' heel, and it was like the law of the pearl: just as in a mollusk the grain of sand that chafes is neutralized by mother-of-pearl...so all the developmental lines of our psyche will arrange themselves around this weakest spot.... We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted. 

Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World ***

Herald of a Restless World is a biography of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. It attempts to explain his key ideas, make sense of his immense popular fame in the years before World War I, and account for his disappearance from our cultural memory.

Bergson's first fundamental insight was the notion of durée, the subjective experience of time. Bergson noted that physical laws treat time as something that can be cut up into measurable units, whereas we experience time as a continuous flow.

What would happen, Bergson asked, if, through some magic spell, the earth completed a rotation on its own axis every twelve hours instead of every twenty-four? What it every other natural phenomenon accelerated proportionally? To the elaborate equations the astrophysicist devises to predict celestial phenomena this major shirt in tempo would make no difference at all.

Bergson builds on the concept of durée to examine mind/body dualism and free will.

Bergson had a compelling style in both his writing and his speaking, rich with metaphor, and his lectures were open to the public. His ideas about the limits of scientific thought spoke to a populace that was feeling uneasy about the positivism of the times.

The same forces that made Bergson so popular in the early 20th century have ensured his lack of subsequent influence. He gave public lectures so he never developed the types of followers he would have as a professor. His views about the shortcomings of rationality got him labeled as anti-intellectual. His large female audience made people take him less seriously. During and after WWI, Bergson stopped lecturing and became part of the establishment, making him less attractive to the modernist movements that previously claimed him as inspiration.

I often found Herald of a Restless World to be superficial. I didn't feel like I got a good understanding of Bergson's philosophy nor a good sense of his reputedly electric speaking style. Notable events, such as Bergson's debate with Einstein and his role in getting the United States involved in WWI, are covered somewhat cursorily. We don't learn much about his lifelong health issues or his family. The author clearly conveys how popular Bergson was in his prime but can't really answer the critics who claim that most of his audience didn't understand his ideas. Nor does she provide compelling counterarguments against critics of his philosophy like Bertrand Russell or Albert Einstein.

Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists ****

My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture... She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class.

Asya and Manu are a young couple living in a foreign city, imagining possible futures for themselves as they search for an apartment to buy. They want to fit in with their "native" friends, stay connected with their families, and become a "tribe of our own." While in university, they would spend the day in town watching other people and envisioning themselves living similar lives. "We were only playing out our adulthood rather than committing to them." Do they need to accomplish something to make their lives meaningful, or are the everyday routines enough?

I found Asya's anthropological insights subtle and thought-provoking. I had to read slowly so as not to miss the point of the largely mundane events.

My experience reading The Anthropologists reminded me of my experience with two other books: Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation. They are all coming-of-age stories narrated by women with offbeat sensibilities. The (lack of) plot is beside the point. The Anthropologists and Department of Speculation also share an epigrammatic style.