My Literary 2018: An Analysis

2018 was a fairly typical reading year for me in terms of quantity, with an average of just under one book a week. It was an unusual year in terms of the balance between fiction and non-fiction: I read almost twice as many fiction books (31) as non-fiction (17), whereas I'm usually closer to 50-50.

The average rating was 3.3, which means my reading slightly exceeded my expectations. My only five-star book was non-fiction (Nature's Metropolis), but I read multiple four-and-a-half star novels (Lincoln in the Bardo and Exit West).

Ben Marcus, Notes from the Fog *** 1/2

Like the author's earlier collection of stories Leaving the Sea, Notes from the Fog starts and finishes with fairly traditional stories and hides its most experimental ones in the center. The stories in part 3, "Critique," "Lotion," and "Omen," eluded me, but most of the others have a human warmth despite their bleak scenarios. "Cold Little Bird," for example, is about a 10-year-old boy who starts refusing affection from his parents, and how this embargo affects his father. Many of the stories also address failures of language, with characters deciding it's better to stop speaking.

My favorites were "Cold Little Bird," "A Suicide of Trees," and "Stay Down and Take It."

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel ****

The Ego Tunnel provides an overview of recent findings in neuroscience and what they tell us about the nature of consciousness. Metzinger is a (German) philosopher, which makes his approach different from, say, Antonio Damasio. Metzinger is interested in how the subjective experience of being conscious arises from brain mechanics. In the later chapters, he also ponders how our worldview and ethical systems will change as we discover neural correlates for increasingly subtle states of being and learn to manipulate our consciousness.

Despite writing in a language not his own, Metzinger creates direct and clear analogies that shine through the technical jargon. (Except for the metaphor that gives the book its title; that one I don't care for.) Like William James, who was also interested in subjective experience, Metzinger soberly considers disreputable subjects such as out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming.

Bruce Sterling, Distraction **

I picked up a used copy of Distraction on the occasion of its 20th anniversary because of a fawning review on Slate.com.

"It offers a densely textured, plausible alternative reality layered on top of our own...Distraction is alarmingly predictive in the way it depicts a world in which America has gone deeply off the rails."

I did not find either of these claims to be true. On the contrary, Distraction felt to me as if it were composed by a writing workshop exquisite-corpse style. The action flows along but doesn't have a central animating logic. Sterling introduces an interesting idea, a character has some exposition about what makes it interesting, and the plot moves forward without pursuing the idea. Characters' motivations change within a single scene.

This frustrating style starts on the very first page. Our main character Oscar Valparaiso is watching video of a "riot" in which an apparently undirected crowd materializes, tears down a bank, then vanishes as mysteriously as it appeared. Oscar is obsessed with learning what happened: How was it coordinated? What was the intent? Who was behind it? How did they keep everyone silent afterward? Oscar closes his laptop on page 4 and pursues other matters; the riot is not mentioned again until page 194, and it never becomes a plot point.

The same thing happens when it appears the book is going to be about the breakdown of the U.S. federal government, or the influence of politics on science, or biogenetic manipulation of human nature, or decentralized societies run on "reputation credits" instead of money. Interesting topics all, yet they never coalesce into a coherent narrative.

Distraction drove me to distraction.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States ****

O'Gieblyn was raised as an evangelical Christian in the Midwest. She lost her faith while attending Moody Bible College and eventually became a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her background gives her an insider's understanding of the Midwestern worldview and the coastal cultural elite worldview. Her main goal in these essays is to show how each side of this divide oversimplifies the views of the other, and that a lot of liberal secular culture shares basic concerns with traditional Christian culture.

The first essay, "Dispatch from Flyover Country," starts with a nice metaphor. From the porch of their trailer in the western Michigan woods, O'Gieblyn and her husband look out over Lake Michigan at the unusual but beautiful sunset. The haziness is caused by wildfires in California. The essay goes on to describe how Midwesterners feel left behind by the cultural vanguard at the coasts, but that the cultural changes filter into their lives whether they like it or not.

The best essays ("Dispatch from Flyover Country," "Contemporaries," and "Hell") are the ones that capture her betwixt feeling without trying to explain it too much. All of them offer a subtle and respectful demonstration of cultural conservatism.

Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American *** 1/2

What I appreciate most about Hustvedt as a writer (of both fiction and non-fiction) is her rational approach to fundamentally emotional subjects. She and her characters gain empathy through understanding how others feel and why. As one reviewer said, "She takes unapologetic delight in intellectual characters who understand their lives through far-ranging reading and lively conversation."

The Sorrows of an American doesn't really have a story. The first page suggests that the book will be about a family uncovering secrets about the newly deceased patriarch, but the narrator shows very little urgency in pursuing the mystery of "Lisa" who sent his father an enigmatic letter, and when they track down the answer his sister says, "It was a secret, all right, kept for years and years, but it doesn't explain much about Pappa, does it?"

The theme of the book is how a person's secrets are simultaneously the part that is missing from his or her life story and the part that influences his or her motivation. The narrator is a psychoanalyst, so it's not surprising that he believes we can overcome our discontents though talking about it. The emotional stakes remain low, because the characters are not suffering from trauma but are merely discontented.

Sam Munson, Dog Symphony ** 1/2

I recovered from the dense door stop Reconstruction with this short atmospheric novel. An American professor of prison studies travels to Buenos Aires to speak at a conference. When he arrives, he can't locate his sponsor and manages to lock himself out of his room at the B&B. He notices that each home has a pair of bowls at their front doors, one with water and the other with raw meat. As night falls, he sees quiet packs of dogs roaming the streets.

Dog Symphony establishes a foreboding mood whose elusiveness contrasts with details that make the story feel Argentinian (references to Borges and Cortazar; surprisingly clear geographical descriptions). But the transparently allegorical story doesn't go anywhere. It's like Munson built his world but forgot to populate it.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877 *** 1/2

I am attracted to stories about the aftermath of cataclysmic change. How does a society reconstruct itself when everything is destroyed? Earlier this year I read Embracing Defeat, about post-WWII Japan; other examples include Ten Days that Shook the World and Red Star Over China.

Reconstruction is the name given to the period immediately after the Civil War, when the country had to grapple with the question of how to re-integrate the Confederate states into the Union. As in Japan, the victors had to determine how to deal with those who had been in power during (and before) the war and how to modernize the decimated economies. They had the further issue of how to support the newly freed slaves and integrate them into society.

Reconstruction presents the period largely as an attempt by the North to prevent the South from returning to its plantation society, for both moral and economic reasons. Reconstruction ended when economic considerations no longer pulled in the same direction as the moral ones, due to a deep depression in the mid-1870s. Traditional Southern society retrenched at that point, a process they referred to as Redemption.

It was a fascinating time in history. The Republican and Democratic parties are reversed from their positions today, with the Republicans being the radicals who want equality for blacks and the Democrats being the conservative voice for state's rights. (The Republicans are still the party of capital, though, which explains their policy shift once white unions start making demands.) Reconstruction also brought a huge expansion of federal power.

Foner calls out the major currents driving events forward, from a liberal perspective. Unfortunately, he is also an academic attempting to write the definitive account, which means he buries his themes under a wealth of detail that can make the book a slog to read. His account of the last few years is particularly dense as tactical political maneuvering replaces larger goals. Nonetheless there is a lot of great material in here that illuminates the original sources for discussions we're still having today about state's rights, civil vs societal equality, and interpreting the intent of the writers of the Constitution.

Kirsten Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs ***

Start with a riff on Frankenstein, with a nineteenth century mad scientist creating creatures who escape and ponder the meaning of their existence. Add Animal Farm-style social commentary, with a race of enhanced animals rising against their oppressors. Finish with a soupçon of satire about celebrity culture. Whip it into a frenzy that ends with a decadent three-week party, madness, and explosions.

Part One of Lives of the Monster Dogs sets up the bizarre scenario nicely with a touch of gothic atmosphere despite its 21st century urban setting. Part Two focuses on the monster dog revolution and hints at racial commentary. Part Three goes off the rails and fails to follow up on the promise of the first two parts. The book sets itself up as an allegory but doesn't have anything new to say.

Patrick O'Brian, The Yellow Admiral ***

The end is nigh. The Yellow Admiral is number 18 of the 20½ volume Aubrey-Maturin series. Naval officers are beginning to lament the lack of advancement opportunities associated with the imminent end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The story starts ashore with a Tolstoyan discussion of land-use policies in nineteenth-century England. Jack Aubrey prevents the inclosure of the commons near his estate. Unfortunately this success leads to complications when the admiral for Jack's next assignment is the uncle of his opponent in that dispute.

The Yellow Admiral illustrates O'Brian's talent for relevant but oblique titles. Aubrey spends the entire book concerned about being "yellowed" -- promoted to admiral without a squadron to command -- but his concern is an undercurrent that doesn't directly relate to the plot. The book also illustrates that the publisher W.W. Norton is not worried about spoilers. The summary on the back cover says "Aubrey receives an urgent dispatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba." This event happens more than halfway down the very last page!

Reihan Salam, Melting Pot or Civil War? ***

Reihan Salam was the conservative voice at Slate for a while, and I always found his pieces to be insightful and well-reasoned. Melting Pot or Civil War? is about immigration reform, a subject about which I would very much like to hear insightful and well-reasoned proposals; it's the source of wild rhetoric from right and left even though both sides agree we need reform.

Salam comes at the question of immigration from a unique angle. In his view, low-skill immigrants who come to the United States for work are typically better off than they would be in their home countries even if we pay them poverty-level wages. So you could make the moral argument that we should let in as many immigrants as our job market can support. However, our moral commitment is different to the children of those immigrants. They are American citizens who should not be forever stuck in low-wage ghettos. In the current environment, though, children of poor immigrants are exceedingly unlikely to rise very far. We need to limit low-skill immigration not because immigrants are stealing native workers' jobs (they mostly aren't) but because we can't adequately provide their children with the American dream.

I applaud the moral seriousness with which Salam takes the plight of immigrants and his acknowledgement that much of the rhetoric about immigration is not based in fact. His "what about the children?" argument is thoughtful, but ultimately a red herring I think. I would have liked more evidence for the claim that 21st century immigration is qualitatively different from early 20th century immigration.

The book wasn't as tightly presented as Salam's journalistic pieces. Several of its most interesting tidbits are not well integrated into the final argument. Thankfully, though, the tone doesn't fall to the level of its sensationalistic title.

V.S. Pritchett, The Pritchett Century ***

You see them in your grandmother's house or in model homes that aspire to class up their libraries. Faux-leather-bound books with the names of vaguely remembered authors in gold lettering on the spine: Horace, Trollope, Richardson, Bellow. In its musty pages you find a collection of poems, biographical excerpts, chapters from novels, and essays from defunct periodicals. V.S. Pritchett is a well-respected mid-century author that no one reads anymore, and The Pritchett Century is just this kind of miscellany collection, with short stories, autobiography, literary criticism, and excerpts from novels. The title derives from the fact that Pritchett was born in 1900 and died in 1997.

Pritchett has a clear smooth prose style. He is best known for his stories, many of which get their drama from a narrator slowly coming to realize that his assumptions about another character are wrong. For example, in "When My Girl Comes Home" a woman returns home after the Second World War and her family and friends believe she suffered hardship overseas; they have a hard time adjusting as the real story of her time away contradicts the picture they've had of her.

The autobiographical sections were entertaining, especially his childhood visits to Yorkshire, and it was fun to spot the details that made their way into the stories. His travel pieces and literary criticism seemed insightful, although they were often about places or authors I don't know well.

Overall, The Pritchett Century was a reminder of the many fine authors who once enjoyed a substantial (and deserved) reputation but are drifting out of fashion. Not just Pritchett himself, but also several of the writers he discusses: Walter Scott, Tobias Smollett, George Meredith, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman.

Martin Amis, Time's Arrow *** 1/2

Time's Arrow recounts a man's life in reverse, starting at his death in the early 1990s and ending with his birth in the 1920s. The man is a doctor; the narrator is an ill-defined consciousness (with a wide vocabulary) that has access to the doctor's feelings but not his thoughts. The narrator knows the doctor has a secret in his "past" that causes him some anguish, but has to wait until the past arrives to learn what it is.

The backwards time gimmick is fascinating and sometimes comic. At restaurants, the waiter brings a dirty plate to the table, which the diner slowly fills with food taken from his or her mouth; before leaving, they reminisce about the meal by reading the dishes from the menu. The doctor treats patients by introducing injuries, after which the patient timidly knocks on the door before leaving. The less said about using the bathroom the better.

One notable thing about the reverse chronology is that most of the changes are positive. The doctor gets younger and stronger over time, the air gets cleaner, and people are less traumatized after calamities than they were before (i.e. after) them. The story is journey from corruption to innocence.

Things take a serious turn as World War II approaches with the doctor's (somewhat predictable) secret. In reverse, the Holocaust is a miraculous process of conjuring Jewish lives from the air and dust.

I read Time's Arrow immediately after Evelyn did, like a private book club. She really enjoyed the first half, especially for its comic effect and slowly improving world, but felt like she didn't understand the ending. Her major complaint was that Amis never explains who the narrator is or how he ends up associated with the doctor. She waited in vain for that secret to be revealed.

I wasn't as concerned about the nature of the narrator, but I too struggled to understand what Amis was trying to say. He sees most human activity as corrupting, and is saying something about the relationship between morality and cause-and-effect. I appreciated the effect of the reverse perspective and the big ideas that the story makes us ponder, but ultimately I couldn't tell whether Amis' ideas about destiny, morality, and humanity are subtle or muddled.

P.S. This analysis from the Time's Arrow chapter in the book Understanding Martin Amis attempts to answer Evelyn's question about the provenance of the narrator.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis *****

Nature's Metropolis is a history of the relationship between Chicago and the rural areas to its west during the nineteenth century. Its primary thesis is that you can't understand one without the other.

No city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the mid-continent during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago. Conversely, one cannot understand the growth of Chicago without understanding its special relationship to the vast region lying to its west. ... The central story of the nineteenth-century West is that of an expanding metropolitan economy creating ever more elaborate and intimate linkages between city and country.

In other words, the nature of the landscape around Chicago shaped its development as a city, and Chicago's development shaped the landscape around it. Wisconsin has dairy farms and Iowa has cornfields because of business decisions made in Chicago.

It sounds like a dry subject perhaps, but I was fascinated by the interplay of natural and social forces, intentional and unexpected consequences, that defined the course of history. Chicago's founders thought their city would be the gateway to the west because of its "natural advantage" of being near the divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, but ultimately its biggest advantage (over St Louis) was that its main Eastern trading partner (New York) wanted its supply lines to be to its north because its main rivals were to its south. There was also the Civil War, which cut St Louis off from its main trading partner New Orleans.

The heart of the book covers the three major commodities that flowed through Chicago: grain, lumber, and meat. In these stories too there are intentional and unexpected consequences. The coming of the railroad had its expected major impact; the invention of the automated grain elevator unexpectedly shifted the entire economy.

My discovery of Nature's Metropolis is an advertisement for the value of used book stores. I came across it at The Book Exchange, a used book store in Ashland Oregon. It seems unlikely I would ever have seen it at any other place. 

Otessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation *** 1/2

I picked up My Year of Rest and Relaxation based on my admiration for Otessa Moshfegh's writing style and the hilarious cover art. The narrator is a privileged young woman who feels an emptiness in her life. She decides to hibernate for a year in her apartment under the influence of a dangerous combination of drugs, in hopes of emerging as a new person.

Moshfegh very effectively conveys the narrator's emotional attachments, which the narrator denies having. Her relationships with her (dead) parents and her friend Reva are touching even through the haze of her cynicism and depression. The book maintains an ironic "control of distance" between the narrator's point of view and the reader's, similar to what Jane Austen does in Emma (as famously described by the critic Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction).

However, I did sometimes grow tired of the repetitiveness of the narrator's actions. Wake up, go to the neighborhood bodega, watch Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, take a wild combination of drugs, fall asleep. As I did when reading Eileen, I felt like Moshfegh could have tightened up the story.

The story takes place from mid-2000 until September 11, 2001. What's the significance of that?

Annie Lowrey, Give People Money *** 1/2

I am fascinated by the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), an unconditional cash transfer given to everyone. I have a lot of questions about how we could make it work in practice, but the concept serves as a basis for deeply satisfying thought experiments. Considering it as an alternative to our existing social welfare programs exposes the assumptions that underlay the existing system. For example, many people immediately recoil from the idea of a UBI because undeserving people would benefit from it or because poor people would squander it. What does it mean to "deserve" benefits? Would poor people really squander their cash?

Give People Money promised to be "the best study yet of the world's experiences with UBI." However, it is remarkably light on details about the various experiments that have been tried around the world (aside from some unexpected technical glitches in India). Each chapter talks about a social/economic issue that we face today -- technological unemployment, misdirected charity, the unfair distribution of paid and unpaid work, systemic racism -- and asks us to consider how a UBI could "disrupt" the issue. I appreciated the book for looking at the possibilities of a UBI from angles I hadn't considered before, but Lowrey is much better at presenting the issues than at making a convincing case for how UBI might solve it. Lowrey also notes that the idea is attractive to people across the political spectrum from libertarians to socialists, but she almost exclusively presents the liberal arguments.

The argument for a UBI that came through clearest to me is how equitable it would be. Our current means-tested programs attempt to assess what a population needs and the situations in which they deserve help, and they inevitably miss the mark about the needs and discriminate in unfair ways. Giving people money, rather than food stamps or housing vouchers, enables them to spend it in a way that works for their specific situation.

I don't expect the United States to ever implement a UBI. But I think the idea can be a valuable tool when designing social safety net programs. How and why is the proposed program better than just giving people money?  

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities ***

In a One Thousand and One Nights type of scenario, Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan about cities he has seen during his travels across Khan's empire. The descriptions are allegorical and attempt to convey what the cities feel like rather than what they look like. Each one runs about a page and a half, written in a style that splits the difference between prose and poetry.

It's an enjoyable, dream-like book that gets three stars for being almost exactly what I expected.

Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air ****

Based on my previous experience with Mr Antrim (The Verificationist), I expected The Emerald Light in the Air to be a collection of Donald Barthelme-style surrealistic stories. The first story, "An Actor Prepares," seemed to confirm that expectation: it was a disappointing comic romp about a college professor with outlandish ideas about how to stage a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But then something surprising happened. The rest of the stories are fairly conventional accounts of couples struggling to maintain relationships in the face of their personal baggage. The characters are unpleasant people for the most part, but I found them strangely endearing. The stories were love stories along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Patrick O'Brian, The Commodore ****

My enjoyment of a book in the Aubrey-Maturin series is typically proportional to the amount of seafaring adventure it contains, and inversely proportional to the amount of time the characters spend ashore. The first half of The Commodore takes place in England, and the only sea battle takes place in the closing pages, so you would expect me to find it one of the weaker entries. However, it feels like O'Brian has taken a leap forward in his ability to engage me with the character-driven material. People have compared O'Brian to Jane Austen (who was writing during the time these books take place), but this is the first time I've understood the comparison.

Aubrey's mission in The Commodore is to disrupt the slave trade off the west coast of Africa. It provided a unique perspective on the trade, although the exposition was particularly overt. "I have no experience in this area," says Aubrey, "so pray, Mr Whewell, be so kind as to tell me all about it."

Eric R. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science *** 1/2

Eric Kandel is a Nobel-Prize-winning neuroscientist who clearly has an amateur interest in art and art history. In this book, he talks about the neurology of human vision, non-figurative modern art (especially Abstract Expressionism), and how the former can help explain the special aesthetic effects of the latter. The title of Chapter 8 encapsulates the heart of his project: "How the Brain Processes and Perceives Abstract Images."

Kandel argues that our visual system consists of both bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing happens earlier in the neural pipeline and relies on innate capabilities that have evolved to help us with our most important needs, such as recognizing faces and differentiating objects against a background. Top-down processing is linked to memory and the emotional centers of the brain, and therefore varies more between people. In Kandel's view, abstract art bypasses the intermediate stages of bottom-up processing (because it lacks the elements usually constructed there) and leans more heavily on top-down processing. The unique pleasure of abstract art derives from a fuller engagement of these higher-level brain functions.

I found Kandel's scientific descriptions clear and especially liked his explanation of the brain mechanisms that underlay learning. (That was the subject of his Nobel research.) I liked his choice of artistic examples too, such as the side-by-side paintings from J.M.W. Turner, one figurative and the other abstract. He didn't really say much (on either subject) that I hadn't heard before, but it was enjoyable to revisit the art from this perspective.

Katie Kitamura, A Separation ** 1/2

I believe I may have completely misinterpreted A Separation. The story is about a woman who travels to Greece to track down her missing husband, despite the fact that they have been secretly separated for months. The woman is an unreliable narrator who says on the first page that people find her reserved. From the very beginning I suspected that her interpretation of other people's actions was a projection of her feelings about her own situation; for example, she imagined a romantic triangle among the staff at the hotel that largely paralleled her own situation. I expected that we would eventually discover that she had completely misinterpreted others' intentions, but we never did. Her interpretation may have been a projection, but as the reader I guess I was supposed to be learning about her own feelings from it.

In line with the narrator's personality, the prose was more admirable than engaging.

Jim Crace, Continent ***

Jim Crace's first story collection was advertised as a "novel in seven stories" about "an imaginary seventh continent." I expected a Borgesian account of the geography and sociology of the unnamed land and/or interlocking stories where main characters recur as minor ones. Continent didn't fulfill either of these expectations; instead, it is merely a pleasant set of stories about people in a vaguely colonial setting.

A couple of the stories are tall tales, about a race between a man and a horse ("Cross-Country") and about the world's largest ceiling fan ("Electricity"). The best stories are about traditional crafts adjusting to the modern world ("Talking Skull" and "Sins and Virtues").

Elif Batuman, The Idiot *** 1/2

As with the Joy Williams collection I read last month, I don't quite know how to rate The Idiot. Batuman's prose is brilliant, quirky and funny with countless offbeat insights. The main character, Selin, comes across as an authentic and interesting person trying to find her way as a college student.

However, The Idiot entirely lacks narrative drive. It's a low-key coming-of-age story, as Selin adjusts to Harvard and drifts into love with an older Hungarian math student.

I'll read this book again in a few years and expect to gain new insights from it.

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law ***

The Color of Law argues that residential segregation in the United States is largely attributable to de jure governmental action at the local, state, and federal levels. For example, the FHA wouldn't ensure mortgages for African Americans, and local governments used zoning laws to control where African Americans could live. Rothstein makes this specific argument because several Supreme Court decisions, not to mention public opinion, assume that segregation results from de facto prejudice on the part of individuals and is therefore not entitled to remedy by governmental action.

Rothstein makes a convincing case, although he does sometimes rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence. His examples are all from the past, which opens him up to the objection that we're all better now. He clearly explains how past discrimination has led to current wealth discrepancies, but such an argument won't persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

I picked The Color of Law because I've wanted to read something about the history of U.S. housing policy and I'm interested in the ways that well-intentioned programs can have unexpected negative side effects. I got neither of these. The governmental actions that Rothstein describes were all too conscious of their racial impact, and US housing policy is a small part of the story.

As an aside, it was painful to be reading this book during a week where the Supreme Court upheld President Trump's travel ban, which is just the kind of government action Rothstein laments: racially motivated under a cloak of fair-mindedness. Then Justice Kennedy announced his retirement...

Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath ***

Most of the stories in this collection blend realistic everyday activities with an edge of the uncanny. In "Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom," for example, a daughter writes letters to her dead father in an attempt to make peace with her estrangement from him... and implies in passing that her mother was a vittra. They are narrated in a straightforward style, with supernatural elements taken for granted.

The name Ove Lindstrom and references to vittra confirm that Tidbeck is Swedish. Scandinavian touches such as holiday villages, cloudberry jam, and dansband music contribute to the slightly exotic atmosphere for an American reader. Tidbeck translates the stories herself, and she includes a short essay at the end of the book about how that affects their "taste."

I enjoyed the book. The stories were pleasurable and short enough not to wear out their welcome. The final few stories were more completely fantastical, and I found them less interesting.

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia ***

The Vintage edition of In Patagonia refers to it as "the book that redefined travel writing." I'm not sure I would characterize it as travel writing at all. It's certainly not a book to read to learn about the country or its people. Chatwin approaches Patagonia as a mythical land that attracts restless wanderers and displaced Europeans.

The landscape descriptions are short and tend to the primary colors. Nearly everyone Chatwin meets is European: Welsh in the north, English in the south, with Germans in the middle. The indigenous population plays a decidedly supporting role in the stories he tells about people trying to recreate home in a remote part of the world. There's far more about Butch and Sundance than about gauchos; the ringleaders in the Socialist rebellions were exiled Russians.

Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege ***

Frankly, I'm not sure how to rate The Visiting Privilege, new and collected stories from Joy Williams.

How would you describe the tone of this passage?

They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—

     This beautiful bud to us was given
     To unfold here but bloom in heaven

or worse!

     Here lies Aimira Rawson
     Daughter Wife Mother
     She has done what she could

The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.

Kinda dark but sharply funny. Whatever it is, I love it. I'm also impressed with Williams' prose, interesting characters, and ability to direct the reader's attention to multiple tableaux at the same time. (For example, "White" takes place at a party, but the main character Joan also notes the goings-on of the dog next door.) All arguments for a high rating.

But there wasn't a single story whose narrative arc made sense to me. Literary short stories are often more like sketches than self-contained accounts, but that's not what is happening here. Williams' stories go in a more unpredictable direction than that. For example, "Congress" starts as a relationship drama, shifts gears when due to a hunting accident "a large portion of [the man's] brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent's coat," becomes a travelogue through the Southwest (with a hilarious party scene), and ends with the woman taking over a famous taxidermy museum. I enjoyed almost all of it, but the conclusion didn't bring it home.

If it's about the journey and not the destination, The Visiting Privilege gets four or five stars. 

David van Reybrouk, Against Elections ***

Against Elections reminds us that elections are not synonymous with democracy, despite the rampant "electoral fundamentalism" that treats them as the same. "After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states as such: 'the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of government; this shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections....'" Van Reybrouk argues that the current problems with our democracies stem from a disconnect between the governors and the governed, and that elections can do nothing to ameliorate that disconnect.

He recommends that we return to the Athenian method of sortition, aka the drawing of lots. Appointing (certain) officials in the same way we create juries would be far more democratic and would also increase engagement. Van Reybrouk provides several examples, both ancient and modern, where aleatoric methods have been incorporated into decision making.

The book does a good job making me question unexamined assumptions about democratic governance, and it describes the current crisis well (especially for Europe, since the author is Belgian). I find the recommendations less convincing. None of the modern examples, such as revising the Icelandic constitution or Canadian electoral reform, was an unqualified success. The description of van Reybrouk's preferred system sounds like the summary of an alien civilization. After pointing to jury selection as a model, the author should have explicitly addressed the problems in that system such as unrepresentative juries, outrageous verdicts, and everyone's desire to get out of jury duty.

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West **** 1/2

Exit West follows Saeed and Nadia as they fall in love while their home city descends into civil war and deal with the complications of living under the threat of violence. It is written in a very Saramago-esque style: the tone of a folk tale, long sentences, social commentary, offhand acceptance of magical elements, an empathetic take on terrible circumstances.

I especially enjoyed the first half, in which everyone continues with their day-to-day lives as the situation worsens. I also appreciated how Hamid tells Saeed and Nadia's story from beginning to end, and that their story was ultimately neither a fairy tale or a tragedy.

The apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now.

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows ***

The final selection from my Kyoto collection of Japanese literature is this essay about Japanese aesthetics. I chose this particular Tanizaki book based almost entirely on its title.

The middle section of the essay is an interesting and atmospherically written mediation about how the spareness of Japanese taste in art and architecture flows from an appreciation of darkness, which contrasts with the Western tendency to illuminate everything as clearly as possible. This idea made me think about three artworks that we saw on Naoshima during our recent trip to Japan:

• The dark room below the lobby of our hotel, which displayed Hiroshi Sugimoto photos with titles like "Coffin of Light" in purposely low light
• The Chichu Museum, which is entirely underground and uses only natural light
• The Ishibashi house that was part of the Art House Project, with its abstract landscapes on its traditional paper walls

In Praise of Shadows starts with a surprisingly long discussion of Western toilets and ends with a questionable hypothesis about a racial dimension to Japanese preferences. The essay enhanced my appreciation of Japanese art and architecture while also making me think of Tanizaki as a grumbler.

The Westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain ****

How do you extend a vacation to Japan? By reading classic Japanese literature at home!

Kawabata was the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Sound of the Mountain is a mid-career novel from the early 1950s. The main character, Ogata Shingo, is an old man pondering his life as his friends are dying, his memory is failing, and his children are dealing with difficult marriages.

The Sound of the Mountain is a very Japanese book, in the same sense that Ozu films are very Japanese. The "action" consists of small domestic incidents and the passing of the seasons; the themes concern our responsibilities to each other and the disappointments of a lived life.

The cover says, "Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata's is the closest to poetry," and refers to the book as "lyrical and precise." I would describe is as delicate and lovely. Most of the short chapters describe quiet conversations about the garden or everyday minutiae, but the details feel freighted with meaning. It's much more hopeful than expected with a fading elderly protagonist.

My one complaint is that the language is often awkward when it means to be oblique. I suspect a too-literal translation from Edward Siedensticker. Mr Siedensticker translated a lot of classic Japanese literature, but I would be very interested in reading a new translation of this one.

Yasuko Kubo, Swords of Japan ****

Swords of Japan is an impressively comprehensive Beginner's Illustrated Handbook about Japanese swords. It covers the different types of swords, their evolution over the centuries, the parts of a sword, the stylistic variations from period to period and craftsman to craftsman, the manufacturing process, and evaluation criteria. Sprinkled throughout are tidbits about sword-related terms that made it into everyday language; for example, "tsuke-yakiba" means a blade that can't hold a cutting edge, and can also describe a person whose skills are not deep enough.

The volume of Japanese terms can be intimidating for a foreign reader, although it's not surprising that most of the very specific sword-related words haven't been translated. I spent a lot of time flipping back to the glossary or to an earlier diagram to decipher sentences like "blades from this period...are generally wide with little or no difference between the moto and saki-haba, [and] have an extended chu-kissaki."

I feel like I could appraise swords with this book in my hands, figure out when and where it was made and what type of person carried it. I would have liked it if the book had more information about the evolving social contexts for the swords, beyond letting me know that you carry a tachi with the cutting edge down and a katana with the cutting edge up and that a formal daisho must have a plain black lacquered saya.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another *** 1/2

The Face of Another is the first (alphabetically and in reading order) of the Japanese literature I bought from the impressive foreign-language section at Maruzen in Kyoto. I know Kobo Abe from the film adaptation of The Woman in the Dunes.

In The Face of Another, a scientist has his face deformed in a laboratory accident and sets out to design an undetectable mask to cover his scars. As he does so, he ponders the relationship between a person's face and his or her self: society interacts with you through your face, and your personality determines which expressions shape your face, so a different face means a different personality.

From the plot description, I expected a horror novel with the scientist gradually finding himself acting differently when wearing his mask. However, it is more philosophical than that. The scientist understands the potential consequences from the beginning, and he considers the relationship between one's face and one's self from every angle. The book also spends a considerable amount of time describing the difficulties of designing the mask. Abe uses evocative descriptions and analogies to keep the abstract philosophizing grounded.

Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four *** 1/2

Six Four is an unusual crime novel in that it deals primarily with (Japanese) police department politics. The main character, Mikami, is director of Media Relations, and he's trying to satisfy an unruly press corps while the two major branches of the police, Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations, are engaged in a civil war. Meanwhile, the commissioner is coming down from Tokyo to pay his respects to the victims of an unsolved kidnapping/murder from fourteen years previous. "Six Four" is the detective's slang for that case, because it occurred in the sixty-fourth (and final) year of the Showa period.

Most of Mikami's "detective" work is figuring out what's going on between the departments, and there's no current crime until four fifths of the way through. If you accept this offbeat angle, Six Four is well plotted, and the author is thorough about making Mikami's reasoning explicit. When the new crime finally kicks in, many of the small details from earlier become relevant. The prose is a bit stiff, which may be Yokoyama's fault or the translator's.

I really like the packaging of the Picador edition, although it suggests a different type of book. I would say it's the opposite of "Cinematic," as Entertainment Weekly called it; and the endorser who compares Yokoyama to James Ellroy has completely misunderstood the appeal of one or both authors.

Amy Goldstein, Janesville: An American Story ****

Janesville, Wisconsin was home to a General Motors assembly plant for close to a century before it closed during the 2008 recession. The book Janesville describes the impact of the plant closing on the community over the following five years.

Goldstein makes the wise decision to focus on a dozen or so personal stories rather than presenting statistics. It makes for a more compelling narrative and allows the reader to apply his or her own theories to the situation. Goldstein manages to stay fairly even-handed about the political divide.

Goldstein's major policy-type conclusion is that job re-training programs are not effective. In fact, none of the initiatives that the community undertakes are effective across the board: the division between winners and losers and between political viewpoints feels inevitable.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore ***

Kafka on the Shore features many of the same Murakami trademarks as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: missing cats, parallel realities, Western music and popular culture, and elusive meaning. My reaction to the book was similar too; I was intrigued by the mysterious early chapters but ultimately lost track of what the story was trying to tell me.

All that was visible was the rear of the building next door. A shabby, miserable sort of building... the kind Charles Dickens cold spend ten pages describing. The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set afloat in the sky. Regardless, it was going to rain. (p 301)

Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen ***

It's appropriate that Eileen is titled simply with its narrator's name, because it's a character study more than anything else. Eileen is a young woman struggling with loneliness and insecurity in a small New England town in 1964. Moshfegh captures her plight very effectively and realistically, if at a bit too much length. It's easy to believe that Eileen would respond to the attentions of the glamorous Rebecca even as they lead her into trouble.

Eileen might have been more impactful as a short story. Homesick for Another World proves that Moshfegh can build characters efficiently; I think she could have shown Eileen's neediness and her evolving feelings about Rebecca in at least half as many pages.

Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island ** 1/2

I've intended to read a Houellebecq novel for quite some time but couldn't decide which one to choose. Evelyn solved the problem for me by giving me The Possibility of an Island for Christmas.

The Possibility of an Island alternates between narrators: a caustic comedian from (roughly) the present day and two of his clones from two millennium hence. The current Daniel is present at the inception of a new religion that promises eternal life through cloning; the future Daniels show how immortality has worked out.

I can sum up the main theme of the book in one sentence: The primary driver of human life is sex and related instinctual drives, while the aspects of our personalities that we want to retain are the more rational ones. That's an interesting idea but I wasn't impressed by Houellebecq's presentation of it. Too much sex and self-pity, not enough insight. (Just after typing this paragraph, I found a similar verdict at the review-summary site Complete Review: "interesting scenario and ideas, fairly ponderous and crude presentation.") Furthermore, the narrative doesn't start to get interesting until nearly halfway through.

Ian McGuire, The North Water ***

Behold the man.
He shuffles out of Clappison's courtyard onto Sykes Street and snuffs the complex air—turpentine, fishmeal, mustard, black lead, the usual grave, morning-piss stink of just-emptied night jars.

The North Water is an adventure tale that leans heavily on its grimy atmosphere. The author takes particular pleasure in describing scents and bodily functions, as shown by the very first sentences quoted above. The story involves a ragtag collection of miscreants headed into the North Sea on what is ostensibly a whaling expedition but may involve insurance fraud as well. One of the harpooners is a sociopath; the surgeon is a disgraced veteran of India; the captain sunk his previous ship by colliding with an iceberg.

The pull quotes on the cover come from Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, and Colm Toibin, all suggesting a British book (correct) with literary pretensions (not really). The North Water is a well-told adventure, but it doesn't address literary themes beyond the typical action movie question of whether goodness can ever compete with evil.

Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall ****

A perfect companion to Essays After Eighty, this slim volume is Hall's personal choice of his own favorite poems. It starts out strong with "My Son My Executioner":

My son, my executioner.
   I take you in my arms.
Quiet and small and just astir
   And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
   Of immortality.
Your cries and hungers document
   Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
   Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
   And start to die together. 

The poems appear in roughly chronological order (I would have liked writing or publication dates), which enables you to see his development as a poet. He experiments with different styles, but his themes remain consistent: as he says, he writes about "love, death, and New Hampshire." More specifically, many poems contrast the endurance/recurrence of nature with the transience of human life. There are also a few about how our stuff outlasts us. Are these themes reflective of Hall's seven decades of writing or of his current preferences as an editor?

I don't like (or understand) every poem, but the hit percentage is high. The book is full of striking images and is the perfect digestible length for poetry.

Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women ****

This essay collection shows how certain questionable unexamined assumptions shape our thoughts about art, science, and social issues. Most notably, the unresolved philosophical mind-body problem "has shaped and often distorted or confused contemporary thought in neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary psychology." How do ideas (in the mind) exert influence on the physical brain (in the body), as they clearly do in cases such as false pregnancy, PTSD, and the placebo effect? No one has a clear idea of where the dividing line is between the mental and the physical, the psychiatric and the neurological, or even whether such a dividing line exists; however, researchers usually act as if the division is clear. Hustvedt argues for respecting the mystery as a key aspect of the human condition, and illustrates numerous ways that the mystery manifests itself.

I had never before noticed how the mind-body problem is the same as the nature-nurture question, nor how many of our gender prejudices flow from a presumed hierarchy between the two terms (mind = male, body = female). Hustvedt effectively asks core questions (How does the placebo effect work?) before discussing abstract philosophy, and keeps the discussion grounded in her own experience. She also applies the ideas in a variety of contexts ranging from art appreciation to evolution to suicide.

As you have to expect in a collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women repeats itself, making the same point in multiple contexts. The long piece in the middle, with the excellent title "The Delusions of Certainty," starts out strong but wears out its welcome about halfway through.

I found the book engaging and exhausting.

Patrick O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea ****

No creative sea battles in this one, but several prizes, a volcano, icebergs, and a high-altitude trip across the Andes. (The title refers to the strange conditions that preceded the volcano.) The early chapters include an interesting extended treatment of equality versus hierarchy. An enjoyable entry in the series.

Tom McCarthy, Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish ***

Tom McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, is one of my all-time favorites. Nothing else he has written comes close to it. The essay collection Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish is my first look at his non-fiction work.

Taken together, the essays form a full-throated defense of high modernism, of the sort epitomized by Ulysses and attempted by McCarthy in his novel C. He argues that these works reflect reality better than "middlebrow fiction" with its conventions of naturalism and authenticity. "The twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteenth-century realists ever did." I can see many of the obsessions that underlay Remainder.

McCarthy makes his points clearly and effectively. Unfortunately, though, those points tend to reiterate fairly standard critical insights about the constructive nature of all reality. McCarthy's main subjects are the canon of modernism and pre-modernism (Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Proust, Tristram Shandy), and his arguments summarize the giants of critical theory (Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes). The essays about other art forms (Gerhard Richter, David Lynch) apply the same principles.

The only time I felt like McCarthy enhanced my appreciation was his two discussions of Zinedine Zidane. In addition to an alluring description of the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, he cites the French writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint talking about the infamous head butt:

Like everyone else in the ground, the author missed the incident itself (it took place off the ball), but saw it on the replay screen: always-already mediated, even for those present.  ... Zidane, who had announced prior to the game that it would be his last ever, wanted...to stop the ninety minutes running their full course, to short-circuit finitude itself.

Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown ***

Persons Unknown is the follow-up to Missing, Presumed, featuring most of the same characters (excluding the wrongdoers, of course). It leans more heavily on the domestic drama than Missing, Presumed did: in this one, Manon is pregnant and largely on the sidelines of the case. The frankness with which the characters reveal their insecurities is the most distinctive aspect of both books.

The murder victim is Manon's sister's ex-husband, which doesn't really fit with the rest of his background story but is necessary so that the plot can make Manon's adopted son the prime suspect. As in Missing, Presumed, the most interesting character is a tangential one: in Missing, Presumed it was the missing girl's mother; in Persons Unknown it's the shopkeeper who shelters the girl at the center of the mystery.

And boy, they sure seem to have CCTV cameras everywhere in Britain!

Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed ***

Missing, Presumed is a solid but generic police procedural in which Cambridgeshire policewoman Manon Bradshaw searches for a missing woman while also dealing with personal feelings of loneliness. Steiner adds a dollop of ambition to the book by having many of its characters dealing with perceived missing elements in their lives, giving the title a double meaning.

Several characters take turns as the point-of-view character. Authors typically use this device to add tension because each character knows different things or to offer distinctive voices, but neither of these tricks happen here.

I received Missing, Presumed for Christmas along with its follow-up Persons Unknown. More Manon on the horizon!

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat ****

It might seem odd that I bought this book about "Japan in the Wake of World War II" from the bookshop at Pearl Harbor, but it was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner sitting alongside what seemed like mostly jingoistic tourist bait. I'm also interested in the subject of forming new societies after violent overthrows, such as in Ten Days that Shook the World and Red Star Over China.

Embracing Defeat covers the American occupation of Japan from August 1945 to April 1952, mostly from the Japanese point of view. It is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with major sections about Japanese popular culture, the promulgation of its new constitution, and the Tokyo war crimes trials. Dower is able to show how the Japanese felt about the major events and to provide clear analysis, so I felt like I got a good sense for the time and place even though I wasn't familiar with most of the incidents he described.

The main message I will remember is that many consequences of the occupation flowed from General MacArthur's single decision to retain the emperor. That decision dictated the shape of the constitution, who got tried as war criminals, and how far the Americans allowed indigenous social movements to go. In the latter half of the occupation, Cold War considerations started to take precedence.

The book didn't cover economic issues very thoroughly because Dower has apparently covered this subject elsewhere.

Catherine Lacey, The Answers *** 1/2

Mary Parsons suffers from an unknown full-body illness that resists treatment until she tries Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing). To pay for the expensive treatments, she finds a second job as part of a social science Girlfriend Experiment: a team of researchers divide up the various roles of a girlfriend (emotional support, mundane day-to-day tasks, maternal assistance, fights) among different women and measure the participants responses to learn how to build the perfect relationship. Mary is the Emotional Girlfriend, even though her emotional responses are somewhat odd due to her strange parents.

I appreciated that The Answers doesn't have a typical structure and that it asks big questions about who we are and what we want from relationships. However, I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from. Every character and every story strand was off-kilter, so it was hard to think about the real-world implications of its ideas. Some of its ideas were intriguing, though ("Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person").

I might take another crack at this book in a few years to see whether it fits together when I look at it from a different angle.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo **** 1/2

I actually listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, rather than read it. The story is narrated collectively by over 150 characters, so the audiobook seems like a more natural way to experience it. Hearing the different readers helped provide distinct personalities for each character, not to mention adding emotional color to the old-fashioned diction.

Lincoln in the Bardo takes place the night after Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie is buried. President Lincoln uses the prerogative of his office to get back into the cemetery after dark, to mourn alone. But he's not alone, because a variety of spirits live there and witness his unprecedented visit. They narrate the story while also telling us their own stories. It's an innovative and unusual structure, leading to review headlines like this one.

Saunders captures the tone in the very first chapters. The most prominent spirit, Hans Vollman (Nick Offerman in the audiobook), describes how he married a much younger woman, treated her with great tenderness, and was about to consummate the marriage when he "fell sick" from a ceiling beam to the head. He has been waiting ever since in his "sick box," which he reluctantly admits that he pooped in when he first arrived here. His narration is old-fashioned, compassionate, and just a little bit silly.

The book addresses big subjects like the meaning of life and death, and builds its own cosmology from an amalgam of Buddhist and Christian ideas. (The bardo is a Buddhist concept; one of the lead spirits is a minister.) The fancy structure distances us enough that Saunders can show us the most extreme emotions without tipping into melodrama.

His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content, all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities **

I picked up Imaginary Cities based on a year-end recommendation from the A.V. Club. I expected it to describe imaginary cities (from Atlantis and Xanadu to Metropolis and New Crobuzon from Perdido Street Station) and examine what their construction tells us about our attitudes towards real cities. I hoped it might also compare purely fictional world-building to the literary presentation of "real" cities like Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul or The Third Man's Vienna.

Unfortunately, Imaginary Cities takes a different approach. Anderson writes in an epigrammatic style that moves (too) quickly from point to point while tossing out unattributed references to high and low culture. It feels like Anderson is trying to disguise his jejune observations with a thicket of allusions and lit-crit theory to make them seem profound.

"Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!" wrote François Villon, the finest poet ever to have killed a priest in a knife fight...

The control of space and those within it is crucial to dystopias. The manual for tyranny is essentially a guide to the manipulation of architecture. 

A disappointing start to 2018. On the plus side, I did learn about the existence of hoboglyphs.