Jay Parini, Borges and Me *** 1/2

I encountered Borges and Me in the Biography section of Mrs Dalloway's in Berkeley. It purports to be a true story of a week the author spent driving Jorge Luis Borges around the Scottish Highlands in 1970. Ian McEwan provides a rave on the inside cover, calling it "luminous with love of literature and landscape."

Parini's tale is pleasant and enjoyable, though the signs that it might not be strictly factual arrive early. The young Jay is unfamiliar with Borges' work but their trip starts with visits to libraries and labyrinths as Borges practically quotes his greatest hits. The descriptions of Scotland are lovely, and Borges comes across as an intriguing (if somewhat literary) character. 

Hernan Diaz, Trust ***

Like Diaz' first novel In the Distance, Trust uses the form and tropes of a traditional genre (in this case, the Gilded Age romance) in a way that simultaneously questions those tropes. The modernist trappings are more overt in Trust with its four unreliable narrators and overt concern about the slipperiness of the truth, and the result is less engaging.

The book consists of four parts: a bestselling novel about a 1920s tycoon and his wife; a draft of the autobiography of the real-life inspiration for the tycoon; a memoir from the tycoon's ghostwriter; and unpublished papers from the tycoon's wife. Each part complicates what we think we know from the previous parts.

My problems with Trust all flow from the initial novel-within-the-novel. It lacks the depth that would make it a believable bestseller, and it's not lurid enough to motivate the vindictiveness of the real-life tycoon. The wife dies in a Swiss sanatorium, but her character is presented sympathetically. Nor does the tycoon come off (to me at least) as evil or incompetent. In fact, I appreciated how the novel captured both characters' love of solitude and their strategies for protecting their privacy ("privacy requires a public facade").

The autobiographical section creates a compelling voice for the tycoon. He confidently states that his personal interests always aligned with the well-being of the country and that his success benefited everyone. On the other hand, it purposely paints an anodyne picture of his wife.

The third section cops to a problem that applies to the whole book:

My strokes were too broad and the stories lacked those little details... often used to bribe readers into believing that what they are reading is true.

This admission applies to the autobiography, which purports to be an early draft, but the most egregious example of missing detail comes from the novel-within-a-novel. As a symptom of the wife's mental illness, she engages in delusional monologues:

She could not stop talking because she could not stop trying to explain her illness––and her desire to understand her illness was, to a large extent, the illness itself. If [the doctor] listened and taught her to listen, they would find that her never-ending rant was full of ciphered instructions.

Sample dialogue please! 

The final section is a diary from the dying wife. Its revelations are unsurprising: People underestimated the woman. It answers some plot mysteries, but frankly I never cared about those mysteries.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind *** 1/2

I expected The Life of the Mind to present Arendt's late-in-life wisdom about the value of a contemplative life. However, it is a more traditional philosophical treatise on the nature of the human mind and the metaphysical conundrums that arise from it.

Arendt says that the mind comprises three distinct activities, each with its own ego: thinking, willing, and judging. She makes a distinction between thinking, which involves reasoning about abstract concepts, and cognition, which integrates data from our senses and performs "common sense" reasoning about the world of appearances. Cognition is concerned with truth and with knowing, while thinking is concerned with meaning. The book is divided in two, the first part about Thinking and the second about Willing; Arendt died before tackling the third part, Judging.

Arendt takes a traditional approach to philosophy in The Life of the Mind, by which I mean she reflects on her subject in a discursive manner and doesn't pretend to have answers. ("I hope that no reader expects a conclusive summary" [p 197]). I was especially struck by two insights:

• Thinkers throughout the ages have distinguished between the world of (mere) appearance and the world of (true) Being, and philosophical tradition has consistently considered Being as metaphysically prior or supreme. For example, we consider natural laws to be true and the behavior of the world to be an epiphenomenon. "Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances?" The world of appearances is much richer, and is not changed by new discoveries in the world of Being.
  
  I find the idea of flipping the metaphysical hierarchy quite stimulating.
  
  
• Socrates did not offer a particular philosophy. His method was to ask questions that "problematized" people's understanding of everyday assumptions, with the goal of making people as perplexed as he was. Arendt's discussion of Socrates made me want to track down her source, The Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Gregory Vlastos. Actually, I was intrigued by her entire chapter on "Pre-philosophic assumptions of Greek philosophy," especially the idea that the purpose of life was to put on a good show for the gods. (Notice that this idea favors the world of appearances over any sort of inner life.)

I found the "Thinking" section of the book far more stimulating. Frankly, I found the "Willing" section to be a slog. It features far less original thought from Arendt; just looking at the table of contents you can see that nearly every chapter summarizes another philosopher. Furthermore, the subject area is rife with impenetrable terminology: "Note the difference between the sheer isness of beings and the Being of isness itself, the Being of Being."

The edition I read includes a "postface" from the editor, Mary McCarthy. It includes enjoyable tidbits about the difficulty of editing a work of this complexity.

Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance ***

Irene Solà is a Catalan poet and writer. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a novel that takes place near a village high in the Pyrenees, with chapters narrated by storm clouds, mushrooms, ghosts, villagers, and visitors. To the extent that it has a story, it concerns the family of a farmer named Domènec who is killed by lightning in the first chapter.

As advertised on the cover, Solà's prose "emits light, hope, and vitality" even in translation. It celebrates the richness of life even when it's recounting a hunting accident or a tragedy from the Spanish Civil War. The best chapters use this bounty to deepen the emotion of an incident, such as Domènec's tragic demise (told from the lightning's point of view), the grief of his widow Sió, or the peevishness of a hiker who finds the town closed for a funeral. However, many chapters feel aimless, with little insight coming from its unusual perspective. The literal poetry in the one chapter narrated by a poet is rather pedestrian (perhaps the fault of the translation?)

In short, Solà has impressive technique, but it's not in service of much depth. The chapters I mentioned above show what's possible when she combines style and substance.

Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism *** 1/2

The central argument of this book is that our ideas about economics and economic policy have long-standing roots in religious thinking. ... The influence of religious thinking bears on how Americans today, along with citizens of other Western countries, think about many of the most highly contested economic policies of our time.

This statement of purpose from the introduction misrepresents the book. The book spends far more time providing a detailed history of (American) Protestant thought on the subject of human agency and destiny than it does on economic theory. It addressed the supposed influence on Americans today only in the last chapter, 29 pages out of 415. Most critically, though, Friedman fails to make the case that religious thinking exerted a decisive influence on economic thinking.

To be sure, most educated people in Adam Smith's time (the mid-eighteenth century) were clergymen, and there was no separation or antagonism between religion and science, seen as a way to "learn about aspects of the divine by studying the world God had created." Debates about predestination and the depravity of man were raging at the same time as Smith's explanation of markets, but rather than direct influence I see two areas of thought reacting to the Enlightenment's law-governed, human-centered Weltanschauung.

Friedman frequently notes how both religious and economic thought in America were influenced by its unique circumstances (a surfeit of land, no pre-established institutions, expanded economic opportunities, confident optimism). Again, I interpret the history as parallel responses to prior conditions. Friedman sometimes seems to agree:

The changes in the conduct of religious life in America were therefore of a piece with the democratic consequences of the Revolution... In one area of the nation's life after another... the authority of established elites eroded while new groups lacking professional training and credentials gained sway.

Luckily, I was interested in the religious history for its own sake. It was interesting to note the correlation between social pessimism and religious fatalism. One doctrine I was pleased to learn about was how our differing circumstances are a blessing from God:

For what other reason, do you suppose, has he given to different countries such different soils and climates and productions, but that they should freely exchange with each other, and thus all be happier and more comfortable? (John McVickar 1837)

It is evidently the will of our Creator, that but few of these objects, every one of which is necessary to the happiness of every individual, should be produced except in particular districts (Francis Wayland 1837)

In passing, I also just noticed the relationship between the words "vice" and "vicious."