Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea *** 1/2

By the Sea is an earlier novel from 2021 Nobel laureate Gurnah, who most recent Afterlives I read a couple of months ago. It tells the story of two immigrants from Zanzibar who meet in a British seaside town and reluctantly discuss their shared history.

Gurnah's talent is telling stories about ordinary decent people living their lives, with major world events happening in the background around them. The first couple of chapters in By the Sea effectively convey the lonely sense of being a refugee by focusing on mundane details, with information about the British asylum system and Islamic rules of inheritance supporting Saleh's story rather than vice versa; Gurnah wants to tell the characters' story, not make a point.

I was engaged with the story throughout, but I felt the ending was too abrupt. The two main characters each know part of their shared story, but only Saleh gets to tell his full narrative, and the book ends before clearly showing us Latif's reaction.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet ***

I was familiar with Fernando Pessoa by virtue of the references to his work in José Saramago's novels, especially The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (whose title character is one of Pessoa's "heteronyms") and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (one of my favorite Saramago novels). I came across the Penguin edition of The Book of Disquiet and was captured by its title, the enigmatic photograph on its cover, and the legend of Pessoa.

The Book of Disquiet is composed from hundreds of unpublished fragments, compiled posthumously based on vague and contradictory notes from Pessoa. Editions vary widely in their content and organization, with Richard Zenith's being the most expansive and speculative. One of the book's major themes is how art inevitably falls short of its perfection in the author's imagination, so it's appropriate that Pessoa never settled on a final form for it.

The Book of Disquiet is a mixed bag. I believe there is a masterpiece lurking in this collection, but the reader has to extract it from the pile of fragments, notes, and alternative versions. Some sections are mere scraps, Pessoa's notes to himself; others are clearly variants of each other. Some are essayistic, others impressionistic. Insightful and near perfect sections hide among uninterpretable dross. There's a long section about tedium that lives up to its subject.

Overall it's like the critical edition for a book that never existed, comparable to Nabokov's The Original of Laura. The core novel is swamped by drafts intended to illustrate the author's intent and process. The effect of such a critical edition is usually to show how early drafts are not a masterpiece. 

As I read The Book of Disquiet, I couldn't help but imagine how I would select and organize the sections differently from Zenith. For example, there's a stretch where the tone and style becomes more academic; I would have banished those fragments to the "Disquiet Anthology" section at the end, or omitted them entirely since they do not appear to have the same author.

My favorite part of the book is the first 100 pages or so. The prose has a consistent mood and theme. The narrator stares out the window into the rainy dusk of the commercial Lisbon street where he works and lives. He ponders how our lived experience derives from our sensations, which don't differentiate between dreams and reality, and how dreams are more pure than actions. Reality always falls short of our imagination, so we should do everything we can to avoid pursuing or acting on our dreams.

Pessoa acknowledges the downside of the aloofness that he advocates, in terms that are a slight exaggeration of the way I feel about myself:  

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran me over and the funeral was on a rainy day. The logical reward of my detachment from life is the incapacity I've created in others to feel anything for me.

This edition of The Book of Disquiet would be a treasure trove for Pessoa devotees, but despite many impressive passages it failed to convert me into one.

William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels ****

The Rigor of Angels is about the unknowable nature of reality and how our "metaphysical prejudice" of continuous spacetime leads us into antimonies and paradoxes. It approaches these abstract subjects through the work of three men who demonstrated the irreconcilable difference between reality and our experience of it: Immanuel Kant, Werner Heisenberg, and Jorge Luis Borges. (So, an alternative title in the style of Douglas Hofstadter, would be Heisenberg, Borges, Kant.)

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that our concepts of space and time do not derive from experience but rather are necessary assumptions that our understanding projects onto reality. With his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg proved (in the mathematical sense) that spacetime is not continuous, that subatomic particles flicker in and out of existence. In his stories, Borges reflects on the limits of our understanding in the infinitude of the universe.

Egginton sets himself the ambitious and difficult task in this book. He essentially argues that we humans cannot conceptualize the nature of reality, because our understanding critically depends on assumptions (about space and time and causality) that fail us at their limits. He believes that his three protagonists managed to abjure those assumptions and accept, even celebrate, our limitations.

Egginton makes mind-expanding connections between quantum mechanics, ancient Greek philosophy, Kantian epistemology, and modern literature. He addresses Zeno's paradox, the question of free will, the origin of the cosmos, the riddles of quantum mechanics and special relativity, and more. However, I'm not sure his explanations would be clear (or astonishing) to a reader who is not already familiar with the thinkers and ideas involved. 

Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal ***

In order to read the preferred translation of Montaigne's Essays (by Donald M. Frame),  I bought the Everyman's Library edition of The Complete Works.  In addition to the essays, this volume includes Montaigne's posthumously published journal from his trip to Italy in 1580-1581 and a few dozen letters. The extra items serve as bonus features like you would find on the special edition DVD of a classic film. The Travel Journal in particular feels like a behind-the-scenes featurette for Book III of the Essays. 

During his travels (through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy), Montaigne pays particular attention to the unique customs of each place he visits. He records differences in the amenities at lodgings, such as the type of linens they provide, and notes variations in the content and order of courses. He invariably notes whether their inn serves meals on pewter, wood, or earthenware plates, and comments on the quality of the wine. Particularly in Germany, he investigates the distribution of Catholics and Protestants, the differences between their churches, and how they live together. He regretted not having his chef along to learn to prepare the local dishes he enjoyed. He complains about the prices. He was not impressed with the beauty of Italian women.

One impetus for his trip was to visit health spas to see how they might help his issue with kidney stones. He tries the local treatments, drinking and bathing in the healing waters, with diverse effects. He describes in detail his stay and treatment at the baths near Lucca, learning about the consistency of his urine and about the ball he held for the local peasantry at which he mishandles the awarding of prizes in cringe-worthy fashion.

Montaigne's wit and style show through every once in a while, where a long passage about his health or the wonders of a palace's fountains ends with an epigram ("Curiosity often gets in its own way, as do greatness and power") or funny non-sequitur ("This town is most abundant in pigeons, hazelnuts, and mushrooms.")

Andrea Barrett, Natural History ***

The stories is Natural History have the quietly relaxing and optimistic feel of Andrea Barrett's previous books, but most of them lack a clear narrative purpose. Over the years Barrett has become increasingly interested in building a shared universe for her work, with recurring characters and themes –– Natural History has an appendix with an extensive family tree diagram and a statement of purpose from the author. These stories felt to me like studies sketching in details for small corners of a larger canvas. Barrett counts on the reader being aware of the whole picture to feel the meaning of the events.

With the exception of the title story, Natural History takes place in Crooked Lake, New York in the period between the Civil War and the First World War (inclusive). This roughly corresponds to the lifetime of Henrietta Atkins, and the stories center on her and her sister's children. The title story takes place in 2018 and features Rose Marburg, a descendant of that family and a character in Barrett stories since 1994.

My favorite story was the first, "Wonders of the Shore." It felt most like a self-contained narrative, meaningful even to someone who hasn't read any other Barrett books. It's also the oldest story in the book, from 2016, which reinforces my sense that Barrett is now filling in the gaps in her shared universe rather than expanding it.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays *****

I found Montaigne's Essays every bit as entertaining and inspiring as Sarah Bakewell's biography led me to expect! It took awhile to make it through all 1,047 pages, but one of the book's virtues is that you can dip in and read one or a few of the 107 essays at a time.

The most notable aspect of the essays is that they are not intended to convince you of any point of view but only to describe Montaigne's point of view. As he says in his introduction, "I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament."

A typical Montaigne essay starts with a broad maxim ("Valor has its limits like the other virtues, and those limits once transgressed, we find ourselves on the path of vice") followed by quotes and illustrative stories from antiquity, then Montaigne's opinions on the matter. Not infrequently he also relates how other cultures think or act differently: he rarely misses an opportunity to describe shocking customs of "barbarous" people and declare them no worse than contemporary French customs. The titles can't tell you what to expect. "On Some Verses of Virgil," for example, is about sex; even when Montaigne starts on the announced subject he soon wanders away from it.

The seemingly aimless form gives the pieces a conversational quality, as if you are chatting with Montaigne at a dinner party. You learn a lot about his temperament and personal habits, and the winding tangents give a sense of how his mind works. It's remarkable how little it matters that five hundred years have passed since he wrote them. The main barrier to understanding is my near total lack of a classical education.

I am not blind to the shortcomings of this collection. Montaigne uses complicated sentence structures and takes too long to get to his point. Some of his attitudes have aged badly, notably his low opinion of women and medical science. Many people would find him too retiring, equivocal, or unfocused, and they wouldn't care to hear about his kidney stones or the type of bed he prefers. For me I love the book not despite its flaws but because of them.

I believe that Essays may be a book that I return to periodically for inspiration, the way some people return to the Bible or to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I can say for sure that Montaigne inspired me to start writing formless disquisitions of my own as a form of self-therapy as I approach retirement.

Olga Ravn, The Employees ***

The Employees advertises itself as "a workplace novel of the 22nd century." The workplace in question is the space vessel Six Thousand Ship, in orbit around a planet far from Earth named New Discovery. The crew consists of humans and humanoid members, both of whom react strangely to a collection of enigmatic objects taken from the surface of New Discovery. The story is told as a series of short interviews with crew members.

It's an experimental narrative that doesn't quite work but doesn't quite fail either. There are several intriguing things about it: the emphasis on the scent of the mysterious objects, the interpersonal dynamics between the humans and humanoids, the role of memories in our lives, what it means to be human. I felt like the objects were attempting to communicate with the crew in a way they didn't understand, like the planet in Solaris. Ultimately, though, I found it all too abstract. I couldn't follow exactly what happened on the ship nor how much of the conflict derived from the objects.

I learned after reading The Employees that the book was originally inspired as a companion to an art installation. It does have the chilly vibe of an art project.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Individuality ****

As a person nearing retirement, I have been thinking a lot about the question of personal identity. It's often noted that we derive a large portion of our identity from the work that we do. How will my identity change when I'm no longer a technical writer or a Googler? My mother's friends know me only as "Google Mike"!

I was attracted to The Ethics of Identity by the final word of the title, but as the second word makes clear it is a work of philosophy not of psychology or self-help.

The (small L) liberal conception is that each person should be free to autonomously craft their individuality, and that the state should support each person's flourishing according to their freely chosen definition of flourishing. The first complication is clarifying what the terms. What is "individuality" and how "autonomous" are we?

It may be helpful to consider two rival pictures of what is involved in shaping one's individuality. One, a picture that comes from romanticism, is the idea of finding one's self –– of discovering, by means of reflection or a careful attention to the world, a meaning for one's life that is already there, waiting to be found. This is the vision we can call authenticity: it is a matter of being true to who you already are, or would be if it weren't for distorting influences. … The other picture, the existentialist picture, let's call it, is one in which, as the doctrine goes, existence precedes essence: that is, you exist first and then decide what to exist as.

Either way, we don't construct our identities ex nihilo. Rather, we use values and experiences that flow from our membership in groups.

For many critics, the language of autonomy reflects an arrogant insularity; all that talk of self-fashioning, self-direction, self-authorship suggests a bid to create the Performance Art Republic.

The rhetoric of authenticity proposes not only that I have a way of being that is all my own, but that it developing it I must fight against … all the forces of convention. This is wrong… My identity is crucially constituted through concepts and practices made available to me by religion, society, school, and state, and mediated to varying degrees by family. … They are not constraints on the shaping; they are its materials. …

Given the diversity of concepts and practices that define people's values, how can –– and how should –– the state support everyone's inevitably conflicting definition of flourishing? This is where the ethical questions come in.

The book offers compelling insights throughout. I really appreciate Appiah's conclusion about how we can best reach each other across cultures and value systems: through specific situations rather than disputed abstractions. 

We often don't need robust theoretical agreement in order to secure shared practices… The humanism I have caricatured was right in thinking that what we humans share is important. It was wrong about the contours of what we share. Far from relying on a common understanding of our common human nature or a common articulation (through principles) of a moral sphere, we often respond to situations of others with shared judgments about particular cases. It isn't principle that brings the missionary doctor and the distressed mother together at the hospital bedside of a child with cholera: it is a shared concern for this particular child.

I share the view that there is a "basic level" of experience that we share as human beings. Different groups extract different abstractions (like autonomy) from those experiences, but we can bridge the gap between them by returning to the basic level.

To make sense of inequality or injustice, we often suppose that we need a positive account of equality and justice, taking those terms as conceptually primary. We may do better to accept that inequality and injustice are, in fact, the primary concepts. "No fair!" your four-year-old protests, and you see her point, even if you still can't offer a pervasive account of fairness…

I also found Appiah's thoughts about diversity thought provoking.

The rhetoric of diversity has risen as its demographic reality has declined… There are still seders and nuptial masses, still gefilte fish and spaghetti. But how much does an Italian name tell you, these days, about church attendance, or knowledge of Italian, or tastes in food or spouses? …

You might wonder, in fact, whether there isn't a connection between the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims. Those European immigrants, with their richly distinct customs, were busy demanding the linguistic Americanization of their children, making sure they learned America's official culture. One suspects they didn't need to insist on public recognition of their culture, because they simply took it for granted. Their middle-class descendants, whose domestic lives are conducted in English and extend eclectically from MTV to Chinese takeout, are discomfited by a sense that their identities are somehow shallow by comparison… 

Spectator-sport diversity would seem to have more aesthetic than moral force. I may fervently want there to be Amish driving buggies, Mennonites milking cows, and Shakers shaking on their exquisitely crafted furniture; but it would be a moral error to take measures, therefore, to discourage members of these picturesque communities from leaving and joining others.

George Saunders, Liberation Day *** 1/2

For all of their superficial differences, the stories in Liberation Day share a theme: we end up punishing ourselves when we lash out at others. Genevieve and Brenda let their personal animosity escalate and end up taking each other down in "The Thing at Work"; "The Mom of Bold Action" regrets her bold action in which she abandoned the spirit of forgiveness; the denouncers in the totalitarian society of "Ghoul" all get kicked to death by their peers. The villains exploit the heroes by replacing their memories of our common humanity with a simplified political agenda. You can definitely glean Saunders' view of contemporary society by considering the collection as a whole.

Liberation Day is similar to Saunders' previous collection Tenth of December. It has callbacks to his previous work –– "Ghouls" takes place in the same sort of amusement park setting as "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia", and the title story has people being used as props of social status like "The Semplica Girl Diaries" –– but the best stories are the most direct and realistic ones. Saunders is excellent at capturing the repetitions, false starts, and humor of our everyday thought processes.

No, she loved people. People were great. Even that dolt on the bus. He'd probably given her that cranky look because he'd had a bad day, which, given that ugly mug? No surprise there. Who'd marry that? Nah, even ugly folks got married. They married other uglies. It all worked out. Plus, she herself wasn't married. At the moment.

Lincoln in the Bardo proved that Saunders can infuse the wildest premises with emotional tenderness. The stories in Liberation Day reinforce his belief in the power of empathy and (even feigned) kindness.

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage ***

Based on reading this story collection and Severance, I would say that Ling Ma's specialty is using clever science-fiction premises to explore the influence of the past. 

The hook in Severance is an outbreak of Shen Fever, which causes people to mindlessly repeat routines, but it's main theme is the immigrant experience in a commodifying America. Most of the stories in Bliss Montage feature a fantastical element –– a drug that renders you invisible, a portal to another dimension, yetis meeting women in singles' bars –– and follow a woman who is in thrall to a past relationship. This pattern is explicit in the first story, "Los Angeles," where the narrator lives in a mansion with her husband and all of her ex-boyfriends. The story with the invisibility drug, "G," is about a woman attempting to leave behind her best friend from college, whom she has outgrown.

I admire Ma's metaphorical use of the outlandish but am often disappointed in how the narrative plays out. It seems like the author abandons the metaphor as the story progresses. My favorite stories in this collection turned out to be the most realistic ones.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz ****

The most notable effect of Sebald's style is a pervasive sense that the book is actually about something other than the eccentric preoccupations of its narrator, that there is a deeper theme that underlays the melancholic tone and obsolescent subjects. In The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, the deeper theme remains unspoken and repressed; in Austerlitz the subtext becomes text when its protagonist learns he was separated from his parents during the Holocaust.

Austerlitz shares many aspects of the Sebaldian style: a monologue about the history of fortification design, visits to nearly empty museums and towns, desolate photographs, chance encounters, and overlapping storytellers: 

From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell a tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of 1933...

Events span a time period from the 1930s to the 1990s, and it is purposely difficult to keep track of what happens when:

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like..

In many ways, the last half of book provides an exegesis of how to create the Sebald effect. Once Austerlitz is explicitly investigating the fate of his parents, you understand the source of his earlier obsessions. The focus on absence, inanimate objects, and personal identity makes sense.

Ultimately I prefer Sebald's more elusive and allusive books. The mystery is a large part of the appeal for me.  Austerlitz's  direct confrontation with the Holocaust feels too "on the nose," and the clear provenance of the photographs robs them of their enigmatic quality.

Hua Hsu, Stay True *** 1/2

Stay True is a memoir about the college years of a first-generation Taiwanese American. Hua cultivates an indie persona (thrift shop clothing, publishing zines, haunting independent record stores) while becoming close friends with Japanese-American Ken despite Ken's apparently mainstream tastes. Over the summer between their junior and senior years, Ken is killed in a robbery/carjacking.

On my reading, the main subject of Stay True is how and why we choose our personas. The growing friendship between Hua and Ken is largely a matter of negotiating their personas. Ken defers to Hua's musical taste while Hua allows Ken to drag him to social events that he publicly scorns. Their identity as Asian Americans comes into play, but I had no trouble identifying with their efforts at crafting a personality.

One source of my enjoyment is that Hua attends UC Berkeley. Despite the fifteen-year gap between our college experiences, I recognized many of the locales. As a freshman he lives in Ida Sproul Hall; I lived in Spens-Black Hall in the same Unit 3, not far from "the left-wing bookstore tucked inside the parking garage." Cody's, Amoeba, Cafe Roma, apartments on Channing. Hua manages to capture something vital about the group of friends you accumulate in college, a somewhat random collection of roommates and classmates and friends of friends with whom you establish meaningless rituals. In other words, the book brought back memories of my college days.

I thought Hua was less successful at conveying the impact of Ken's death. His prose in the last couple of chapters tends toward the cliché and lacks the specificity of the earlier parts of the book. 

I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention that Stay True received. It won a Pulitzer Prize and appeared on multiple lists of the 10 best books of 2022. It's good, yes, but it ultimately feels a bit too personal to speak to all of us.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives ****

I became interested in Afterlives when I heard an interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah on NPR around the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don't remember the details, but the interview left me with the impression that the story would offer a somewhat hopeful vision of characters rebuilding their lives after colonial wars in Tanzania.

Afterlives is a much lighter and less ambitious book than I expected given the weighty subject matter and the Nobel Prize. Gurnah describes the brutality and subjugation of the war in a matter-of-fact tone, without melodrama and with an even-handed acknowledgement of the impact on the German characters. The love story between Hamza (injured in the war) and Afiya (whose brother is missing) is sweet. Their lives are shaped by the competition between European colonial powers but personal trauma is not a defining trait of their characters. The story develops organically without any distortions introduced to promote the author's themes.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger *** 1/2

Naomi Klein is a journalist and author who writes books of cultural criticism on subjects such as climate change, globalization, and predatory capitalism. Naomi Wolf is a journalist and author who writes books of cultural criticism primarily about feminism. Due to their similar names, ages, and professions, the two Naomi's are frequently mistaken for each other. This confusion bothers Naomi Klein because "the Other Naomi" has become a prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories and frequent guest on Steve Bannon's podcast. People often attribute Wolf's problematic views to Klein.

In this book, Klein thinks about how she and Wolf ended up in such different places after similar early careers. Her investigation gets her thinking about what she calls "the Mirror World" where hard-right commentators ape the vocabulary and rhetoric of the left to diametrically opposed ends. She argues that our entire society has a doppelganger, a double that arises from the problems that we ignore or suppress.

Klein travels far afield, with chapters about COVID conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination crusades, anti-Semitism, climate change, capitalism, and colonialism. The common thread of right vs left discourse on these subjects is that the right favors individualistic explanations while the left favors systemic explanations; for example, manipulation by a shadowy cabal of billionaires vs manipulation by the capitalistic system. Her "hopeful" conclusion is appropriately leftist (i.e. systemic):

We live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves... If we want more people to make better choices...we need better structures and systems.

Her idea reminded me of a book I read many years ago called Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. The authors of that book investigated situations where a person had to decide whether to obey authority that asked them to do bad things: the My Lai massacre, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and more mundane tasks at work. Like Klein, they concluded that we needed better systems to support making moral decisions.

Klein sometimes seems to get off track, but she made several arguments that I found compelling: that our doubles represent an irruption of issues we have suppressed, that conservatives and wellness advocates share concerns about purity and perfectability, that our visceral reaction to the Final Solution derives from a recognition of the (suppressed) fact that European colonizers treated native populations similarly, that we can adjust our institutions to promote the common good rather than ruthless advancement. She alternates between sounding naive and despairing, as befits a doppelganger.

Louise Erdrich, The Sentence ***

The Sentence has a modest amount of plot, but the pleasures of the book have little to do with the story. The narrator works at an independent bookstore in Minneapolis that is owned and staffed by Indigenous women––just like the real-life Birchbark Books owned by the author. I enjoyed the camaraderie among the staff and the descriptions of everyday customer interactions (including book recommendations!). 

On All Saints Day 2019, they learn that their most annoying customer has died but she continues to haunt the store. A few months later, COVID-19 strikes followed by the killing of George Floyd. The characters react to these events in ways that are subtly but unmistakably Indigenous. It's those shadings that give the story its meaning and interest.

David Hajdu, Lush Life ****

Lush Life is a biography of the composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn is best known for his collaboration with Duke Ellington. He wrote Ellington's signature piece "Take the 'A' Train" among other classics such as "Satin Doll, " "Chelsea Bridge," and "Lush Life." As impressive as his list of songs is, it severely understates his contributions. He co-wrote many pieces credited to Ellington alone and arranged nearly all of the Ellington Orchestra charts.

Strayhorn purposely kept himself out of the limelight because it enabled him to live his life as he wanted. He was gay, which would have been a problem if he was a public figure like Ellington. He was a bon vivant well respected and liked among musicians and the black cultural elite of the time. He died young, age 51, of esophageal cancer.

Hadju's main goal is to give Strayhorn the recognition that he deserves. The cult of Duke Ellington tends to efface Strayhorn's contributions lest they undermine the case for Ellington's genuis. Ellington himself  always acknowledged the depth of their partnership when asked, but didn't raise objections when a profile (or song copyright) neglected to mention Strayhorn.

Lush Life is an enjoyable and well-written biography. Hadju conveys the characters of Strayhorn and Ellington effectively without resorting to imaginative psychologizing. He chooses apt quotes from supporting characters, giving us a sense of their personalities too. He covers Strayhorn's many projects without bogging down in exhausting details about recording dates and set lists. 

For your listening pleasure, I recommend the CD released with this biography and Duke Ellington's tribute album ...And His Mother Called Him Bill.

Oakley Hall, Warlock *** 1/2

Warlock is a Western, named after the fictional town in which it takes place. In 1881, the town is just beyond the edge of civilization, a day's ride from the nearest sheriff and courthouse. The Apaches have been subdued, but gangs of cattle rustlers still wreak havoc. The chamber of commerce hires a famous gunslinger as marshal to keep the peace.

The story features all the archetypes of a Western: gunfighters, deputies, rustlers, miners, whores, business tycoons, frightened townsfolk. The action is based on historical events such as the gunfight at the OK Corral and the Lincoln County War. The author's purpose is to show how these legends form. 

The characters carefully consider their actions, balancing the demands of their conscience, their job responsibilities, social expectations, and their reputation in posterity. The town council orders the marshal to throw four troublemakers out of town, three men who robbed the stagecoach and a union organizer from the local mine. How can the marshal justify "posting" the three thieves but not the union man? He has been hired to enforce the will of the town council not the law (he is a marshal not a sheriff). If he enforces rules based on no higher authority than his conscience, is he any more than a tyrant?

The best and most distinctive aspect of Warlock is its careful consideration of its characters' ethical dilemmas. That's also what slows the story down between its big action sequences. There are longueurs before and after each major event, with each character evaluating the consequences.

One of the major events in the book is a strike at the Medusa mine. I don't feel like this plot thread got the full attention it deserved.

Sterling Hayden, Wanderer **** 1/2

Wanderer is not your typical actor's memoir. Only 40 of its 400 pages discuss the author's Hollywood career, and his tone is entirely scornful. Far more time is devoted to Hayden's sailing adventures. He worked as an AB seaman, a dory fisherman, foretopman on a racing crew, schooner captain, and owner of various decrepit ships. He commanded sailing vessels in the Mediterranean during World War II and cooperated with the House Un-American Affairs Committee in the 1950s. He also got married a few times, but he doesn't talk much about that. In 1959 he defied a court order and sailed to Tahiti with his young children.

The first time I read Wanderer I was most struck by how much commercial shipping was still under sail in the 1930s. This time I was entertained by how often Hayden made bold decisions to change his life, and how quickly he regretted each of those decisions.

The best thing about Wanderer is not the adventures but its self-reproachful protagonist. Sterling Hayden is a fascinating, frustrating, unpleasant character. It's unusual to encounter such a personality in an autobiography. As author and subject, Hayden recounts parts of his story in the first person, parts in the third person, with some second person sprinkled in. There is a dissertation to be written about how he chooses which episodes to narrate in which form.

My copy of Wanderer is a worn pocket-sized Bantam Books edition with a cover price of 85 cents. Reading it in this format added to my enjoyment.

Mark Haber, Reinhardt's Garden ***

The précis of Reinhardt's Garden seems almost AI generated to get me to buy the book. An obsessive protagonist wanders through South America jungles in search of a legendary prophet of melancholy philosophy; comparisons to Nabokov, Borges, Aira, Bernhard, and Werner Herzog; a compact 150 pages.

I enjoyed Jacov's theory that melancholy, "the unspoken and spiritual sadness of the soul, is transcendental, divine, and nothing a wise person should run from, but instead something to meet head on, to aspire to." His expressed his enthusiasm on the topic in language that reminded me of Schopenhauer, including his philosophy's ties to the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. I also appreciated how architecture of his intentionally baffling castle reflected his mind.

However, the narrative is serviceable at best. Surprisingly little time is spent in the South American rainforest, and the story of Jacov pursuing his obsession is more absurd than compelling. The vague echoes of other stories increased the uncanny feeling that I was reading a generated narrative.

David Grann, The Wager ****

The Wager is a non-fiction seafaring adventure tale. The title is the name of a British ship that wrecked on a desolate Patagonian island in 1741. A year later, a boatload of survivors arrived in Brazil, telling a story about the descent into anarchy on the island and their heroic escape. The following year, another group of survivors turned up in Chile with a somewhat different story. Who caused the shipwreck? Was there a mutiny? Did the captain commit murder? Perhaps the truth would come out at the court-martial proceedings for all of them.

The flap copy explains that the narrative has three distinct parts:

Grann's re-creation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaway's desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court-martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller.

There is actually one further part of the story: the fate of the rest of the squadron of which Wager was a part. The book does not pay equal attention to each of these parts: the pre-shipwreck journey covers nearly half the pages, the court-martial just a single chapter. Grann's depiction of sailing on Wager is far more vivid than his accounts of the survivors' perilous journeys.

Grann tells the story in chronological order. I think he missed an opportunity to enhance the mystery and drama of his tale by interleaving chapters about the arrival of the survivors with flashback chapters about the disputed events on Wager Island. That's how Scott Turow would have done it,

Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris ***

Ex Libris is a small book consisting of short personal essays on the subject of books. Each essay is a bite-sized morsel written in an informal style, making it seem like a pleasant conversation with a friend.

A few of the essays inspired introspection, such as about what my library and its organization says about me. I related to Ms Fadiman's character––her impulsive proofreading, her love of bookstores and of reading books in the places they describe––but she didn't offer insights about bibliophilia. Enjoyable but not enriching.

Alan Furst, Night Soldiers **** 1/2

Night Soldiers was the first of Alan Furst's historical espionage novels, of which there are currently fifteen. It is probably a good place to start with this author: it introduces his trademark style –– a Central European protagonist gets entangled with anti-Nazi espionage in the years just before World War II, and their realistic spy business is told with a convincing evocation of the time and place –– and includes enough story for two or three books.

The hero in this case is Bulgarian. In 1934 the Germans are approaching his hometown on the Danube River, and his younger brother is killed by the emboldened local fascists. This event drives him into the arms of the local Russian recruiter who sends him downriver to train for the Soviet security forces. He eventually fights in the Spanish Civil War, supports French partisans, and reports on factory output in Prague before returning to the Danube for a final mission.

Night Soldiers differs from later Furst novels in a few ways. It is more epic, spanning more than a decade in locations all over Europe; the main character is trained as an agent rather than falling into the role by happenstance; and the overarching purpose of the espionage operations is more explicit. 

The best thing about Furst's novels is the atmosphere, which is best described by one of his titles: Kingdom of Shadows. But here's an interesting question from the Reader's Guide at the back of Night Soldiers: 

Critics praise Furst's ability to re-create the atmosphere of World War II-era Europe. ... How can you account for the fact that the settings seem authentic even though you probably have no first-hand knowledge of the times and places he writes about?

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel *****

I've known Up in the Old Hotel by reputation for many years and finally got around to reading it. It's a collection of pieces from The New Yorker in which Mitchell profiles colorful downtown New York characters; as the back cover has it, "saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old 'seafoodetarian." I procrastinated because I was afraid that its down-and-out milieu meant a romantic writing style akin to the Beats or Charles Bukowski, of which I am not a fan.

My apprehension was misplaced. Mitchell has a straightforward journalistic writing style, "curiosity without judgement." He presents each person in their own terms, as if they were bank presidents or celebrities for whom there is no question about the value of getting to know them.  "Even when Mitchell wrote about circus freaks or barroom types, there was no kitsch in his portraits." Collectively the pieces combine into a rich portrait of New York during the first half of the 20th century.

The first half of the book concentrates on the area around the Bowery during the 1930s when it was becoming seedy after losing its status as a theater district. After a brief foray into Mitchell's (less successful) fictional pieces, it turns its attention to the Fulton Fish Market and the then-dying culture of fisherman in New York Harbor. The last hundred pages revisit Joe Gould, one of the protagonists from the first section who was working on "An Oral History of Our Time."

Mitchell is a master at placing his subjects in their context. For instance, his piece about Commodore Dutch, a vagrant who considers the friends who give him money as constituents paying dues for membership in the Commodore Dutch Association, incidentally provides a view into the operations of Tammany Hall. Politics is also in the background of Mitchell's account of the lost traditions of "beefsteaks." He puts all exposition into the mouths of his characters, such as when he has Henry Lyons explain the mechanics of shad fishing from the deck of his barge to an audience that is occasionally distracted by the rhymes of schoolgirls jumping rope ashore. 

Writers would certainly benefit from studying and emulating Mitchell's approach. They would be greatly assisted in this task by the final piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," which provides something like a commentary track for the creation of the earlier profile "Professor Sea Gull" as well as giving substance to the idea that Mitchell identified with his subjects.

Susan Schaller, A Man Without Words ***

The titular Man Without Words is a deaf Mexican immigrant who reached adulthood without learning a language. The author meets him in a community college classroom where she is working as an ASL interpreter. She becomes intrigued by the question of how he understands the world and how she might bridge the yawning gap between them. She struggles, with no educational training, to find an effective way to communicate abstract concepts such as color and time.

I agree that these are fascinating questions, but was frustrated by Schaller's approach to them. Although she said she wanted to understand his worldview, she regularly implies that his languagelessness meant he couldn't have a worldview ("what would it be like to have to invent and project meaning onto the world without any information or clues, without any feedback?"). She imagines his mind as a blank slate despite the fact that he had survived as an agricultural worked for 10 years. Whenever she asserted that Ildefonso completely lacked a concept, say time, I thought, "He couldn't get along without some concept of time that is surely different from yours in interesting ways." Similarly, she believes that his lack of language means he can't communicate with people despite clear evidence to the contrary. I didn't feel like I could trust her interpretation of their interactions, and regretted that she didn't really try to plumb his point of view.

Imagining Ildefonso as a blank slate helps support Schaller's savior syndrome. "Compared to Ildefonso, I was a god"! In the latter chapters, she considers herself the sole advocate for languageless people and deaf children. Her author biography states that she is "currently revolutionizing education by using ASL storytelling."

Grace Paley, The Collected Stories ***

I came to Grace Paley's Collected Stories with high expectations. Paley has a reputation as "one of the great writers of voice of the last century." and that reputation comes almost entirely from her stories. I anticipated a deep sense of character and of place (mid-century Jewish Bronx).

Her stories are far more experimental than I expected. The subjects are mundane and realistic, but the style is knotty and literary. They strike me as being very much like poetry, not in the sense of being lyrical but in being concentrated and built around images rather than narrative. And like poetry, the stories require concentrated attention from the reader -- and often go over my head.

The prose is filled with unique perspectives and interesting turns of phrase, but alas I will forget them because the stories rarely kept my attention or built to a larger point.

Yossi Ghinsberg, Lost in the Jungle ****

A young Israeli backpacker meets three fellow travelers in Bolivia and they set out on a rainforest adventure. Do they seem ill-prepared for the challenges? Yes. Does the quartet get along as the going gets tougher? No. Does everything come out okay? The title indicates that it does not.

Ghinsberg writes clearly and straightforwardly about their exploits and motivations. In the early chapters I thought his style might be a bit too unadorned and wished for a more literary account, especially as the relationships begin to fray. (I found the intragroup dynamics at least as interesting as the outdoor adventure.) But as the problems and difficult decisions piled up, Ghinsberg's uncomplicated style turned out to be exactly right. I would have appreciated maps, photos, or illustrations though.

Paul Fussell, Class **

As a palate cleanser following The Magic Mountain, I picked up this short "guide through the American status system" written "with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit."

I am interested in the subject of social class for two reasons. First, I'm curious about how one's social class influences one's worldview and tastes (cf. Let's Talk About Love). Second, I see how today's political climate weaponizes class distinctions (cf. What's the Matter with Kansas?).

Unfortunately, Class has no insights about these or any other topics. It is merely a compendium of social class signifiers circa 1983, from accent to choice of musical instrument. Some of Fussell's general observations remain valid, but nearly all of the specific ones are painfully outdated. More importantly, though, he doesn't even attempt to address the role of social class (and judgements about social class) in American society. In the final chapter, Fussell offers the ludicrous idea that you can escape the class hierarchy by becoming a bohemian hipster.

A personal confession: I personally feel secure in my social position, which makes me upper-middle class by Fussell's definition. However, I do suffer from a form of class status anxiety: I'm in a different class than most of my peers, not in terms of wealth but culturally. I attend the Monterey Jazz Festival rather than Scorpions concerts; I go sailing rather than motorcycle riding; I favor art films over Marvel movies; I read things like The Magic Mountain. My theoretically higher status tastes don't make me feel superior, they make me feel out of place. I wish Class had had something to say about my predicament instead of just mocking people who wear baseball caps.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain **** 1/2

 I scaled this monument of international literature.

The Magic Mountain takes place in the years before World War I at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. It has an intimidating reputation due to its length (706 pages in English translation), Mann's byzantine writing style, and dated cultural touchstones. I understood it to be an allegory for pre-war Europe, which doesn't interest me, but also a "dizzyingly rich novel of ideas," which does interest me.

I enjoyed The Magic Mountain despite the frequent irruption of long, dense philosophical exposition from various characters. I loved the descriptions of the natural environment and especially of the daily routine at the sanatorium with its second breakfast and special system for wrapping blankets during the rest cure. Mann's prose, at least in John E. Woods' translation, is lightly satirical if a bit formal.

I would not go so far as to say that The Magic Mountain is an easy read. Mann never misses an opportunity to throw in everything he knows about, say, developmental biology, bringing the already sluggish narrative to a stop. The scientific and philosophical treatises were often too subtle or abstract for me, but they were usually followed by a section that integrated the ideas into the action. For example, the chapter "Operationes Spirituales" covers the Jesuit worldview in tiresome detail; the next chapter "Snow" recounts an adventurous ski trip during which our hero considers the question of spirit versus flesh.

The book has interesting things to say about our variable experience of time, divergent attitudes about illness, and Apollonian versus Dionysian ways of life. I understood it to be an allegory about finding the proper balance between contemplation and action, sensual and spiritual experience, individual and social development. If there's a lot about early 20th-century Europe, it went over my head.

Jean Muenchrath, If I Live Until Morning *** 1/2

The aspect I find most interesting in mountaineering stories is the psychology of the adventurer. The hook for these books is the remote locales and the joys/risks of testing our limits, but the narrator's personality is often more exotic than the expedition.

If I Live Until Morning doesn't start out as the same kind of book as, say, Beyond the Mountain. Jean Muenchrath's adventures are on a scale more relatable to us non-professionals. Skiing the John Muir Trail from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney is ambitious for sure, but it's not soloing Half Dome. The title and the back cover synopsis promise a story of resilience and personal transformation.

The first third of the book describes the ski trip in quite a bit of detail. The writing is serviceable but flat, as if Muenchrath took a community college course in writing non-fiction and applied the grammar lessons to the contents of her journal. I got whiplash from her sentence-by-sentence polarity switch between positive and negative sentiments:

The climb out of town and up to Duck Pass was fast and easy. Avalanche debris was the only thing that slowed us down. It was tiresome and time-consuming to navigate through a labyrinth of broken trees and chunks of snow.

We heard a whoosh sound as the poles quickly disappeared down the hill. A few moments of panic followed. Which way did the poles go? How far had they traveled? Would we ever find them in the dense forest below and in the fading light? After a long search we located the missing tent poles. Later we went to bed pleased with our progress: we had skied seventeen miles that day and crossed two high mountain passes.

Muenchrath suffers a life-threatening fall near the end of the trip. Her partner Ken behaves valiantly during the ordeal but weirdly distant afterward. She marries him anyway, even though he orders her not to talk about the incident, forces her into climbing with him (because he can't find other partners), and berates her for her physical limitations. "Our love for mountains kept us together"!

At this point in the story, I became entirely focused on the puzzle of Muenchrath's personality. She narrates her treks in the Himalayas with her trademark hot-and-cold details (sublime mountains alongside piles of human excrement) but I analyzed her relationships with traveling partners and eventually clients when she becomes a mountain travel guide. It culminates in a chapter where Ken announces "out of the blue" that their marriage is over and Muenchrath passive-aggressively cares for her sister who is dying from ALS. Funny-sad highlights:

Debby and I sought the nourishment of nature. I often took her to Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. During the winter it was nearly impossible to get her to the view point a few hundred yards from the parking lot. With the walker in front of her, I leaned against her back and pushed her across the packed snow.

She needed assistance with everything... My back hurt from the effort, but I kept this to myself so she wouldn't feel guilty.

Whatever this attitude is, it ain't the Buddhist one she attempts to cultivate in the final chapters of the book.

I've said before that I enjoy books with unreliable narrators, which require you to interpret how the real story differs from the warped version you're being told. I wasn't expecting that from If I Live Until Morning, but it's sorta what I got.

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America ***

Desmond's previous book, Evicted, looked at a pervasive social issue (the lack of affordable housing) through specific stories about entire communities. This book tackles the more general issue of poverty in a more journalistic way, with studies and statistics. Both of them ask the question "What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people, including ourselves?"

Poverty, by America reminded me of a series on income inequality I read many years ago on Slate: looking at various possible explanations for poverty and debunking them with data. Desmond concisely summarizes the ways that we exploit the poor, in employment, housing, education, financial resources, and argues that none of these situations are inevitable. He demonstrates how rich Americans receive more government assistance than poor Americans, with the assistance to rich Americans less visible (due to tax breaks for example) so that we can pretend it doesn't exist.

Frankly, I didn't learn anything new from Poverty, by America. I'm fairly well read on the subjects of housing, gentrification, and the economies of poor neighborhoods, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has provided similar summaries of, for example, payday loans. I was disappointed with the conventional nature of Desmond's suggested remedies. After clearly showing the insidious and intertwined nature of the problem, he recommends the standard progressive response to individual areas (raise the minimum wage, encourage unionization, change zoning laws, regulate cash checking services). The specific examples of exploitation all flow from a comprehensive American worldview, so I wanted a more comprehensive proposed solution.

One major point he does make is that we could enact the necessary changes without increasing the federal budget, by redirecting assistance from rich folks to poor folks.

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne *****

I haven't read Montaigne's Essays but know him (and them) by reputation. This biography makes the case that Michel Eyquem de Montaigne invented the essay form as a means of capturing the flow of thought and experience. He felt that his extensive classical reading addressed how one ought to live but no how one actually lives. His goal inevitably lead him to write wandering, discursive pieces that sometimes got too personal for his readers. The cumulative impact of his 107 essays is a portrait of a specific individual in which many people see themselves.

According to Bakewell, Montaigne's most distinctive features are his amor fati, his enthusiastic embrace of our limitations, and his keen interest in other's perspectives. In other words, he takes the world as it presents itself rather than trying to mold it to fit his preconceived ideas.

How to Live describes the major events in Montaigne's life, provides a précis of the classical philosophical doctrines that informed his worldview, performs literary criticism about the Essays, and reviews how different periods have responded to his work. Bakewell's organizational conceit -- with chapters based on various answers to the question of "how to live" -- doesn't quite work, but it's hard to hold this failure against her since Montaigne's essays rarely stuck to their stated topic either.

I found Bakewell's version of Montaigne inspiring. I am particularly taken with the idea of retiring from public life to write formless disquisitions on whatever catches my fancy. It's similar to the inspiration I felt when I read Marcus Aurelius. 

I will, of course, need to track down an edition of Essays.

Paul Doiron, Dead by Dawn *** 1/2

Dead by Dawn is the twelfth (!) book in a thriller series featuring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, but the first I have read. The story has two parts to it, told in alternating chapters. First, there's a traditional mystery about who committed a murder; second, there's a survival story after Mike is ambushed, crashes his Jeep into the Androscoggin River, and has to elude pursuers. The second story is more compelling than the first; there's more action, it's different from most detective novels, and it offers loads of Maine local color.

This genre of book follows a fairly rigid formula, so that reading one is like watching an episode of, say, CSI or Law & Order. Episodes differ in their quality for sure, but you can't help but watch/read it through the lens of genre conventions; for example, those conventions strongly influence who you think the murderer is and how you interpret a character's eccentric behavior.

In my opinion, the quality of this type of book is determined largely by how many of the annoying clichés it avoids. Is the detective haunted by a previous case? Do characters pause in the middle of a chase to have a heartfelt conversation? Dead by Dawn avoids most of them, until the final needlessly complex showdown where the perpetrators explain their motives rather than just killing the detective.

I read Dead by Dawn while the news is filled with stories about generative AI. I'm sure the current version of an AI chatbot could write a pretty solid detective thriller.

Gary Indiana, Fire Season ***

Fire Season is a collection of essays by Gary Indiana, a writer and critic whose work appears in publications like the Village Voice. Evelyn gave it to me as a gift based on a recommendation from Fran Lebowitz. A majority of the essays are art criticism/reviews, but there are also a handful of social commentaries.

Indiana is a good writer with a direct and acerbic style, but he's not much of a critic. His reviews don't provide me with any new insight into the artist; they report the accepted wisdom in colorful language. None of the essays about unfamiliar artists enticed me into discovering their work.

Outside of the reviews, the essays tend to come in pairs. There are two reports from high-profile trials, of Dr Kevorkian and the cops who beat Rodney King, published before the verdicts were reached. Two of the essays, condescending hipster visits to Branson and EuroDisney, sound like attempts to replicate David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" -- and indeed I see that they were published around the same time. Two essays grapple with famous true-crime obsessions, the JFK assassination and the Black Dahlia murder, and what they tell us about our society.

One final complaint I have is that the book nowhere provides details about the provenance of these essays, just the year of publication. In one of Indiana's essays he talks about how one's experience of a film is largely determined by the circumstances in which you see it, and context plays the same role in reading essays.

Colum McCann, Apeirogon ****

Apeirogon is a literary novel based on true events, like In Cold Blood or Executioner's Song. The central characters are two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who become friends and "Combatants for Peace" after each loses a daughter in the perennial conflict. They travel around the world together telling their story.

McCann tells the story in 1001 fragments, some of which advance the story while others provide natural or historical context. Lots of images of birds and walls. The overall effect is to build a mood similar to a Terrence Malick film, with a surprisingly hopeful tone.

My favorite pieces were those that describe everyday life, with all of its barriers and checkpoints. They provide a great sense of place and how people adapt to their circumstances. The book doesn't provide any new arguments for ending the Occupation, it just paints a picture of how it distorts the lives of people living there.

The title refers to a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. The author's intent is clearly to suggest that we're all complicit in the conflict. Given this expansive viewpoint, it's disappointing that we hear so little about the two men's families. The few pages featuring Bassam's wife Salwa were among the most touching, and Rami's son Elik goes through a political transformation largely offscreen.

Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth ****

Scattered All Over the Earth is a perfect title for this novel. Its characters converge on Scandinavia from around the world (Japan, Greenland, India); each chapter has a different narrator; elements of Japanese culture insinuate themselves into European culture (sushi, anime, umami); our band of heroes hops around Europe (Trier, Oslo, Arles); the plot spirals out of control.

The first half of the novel is filled with engaging thoughts about cultural identity, which makes up for the lack of story and for the missed opportunity to give each narrator a distinctive narrative voice.

• There is a TV panel discussion with people who grew up in countries/cultures that no longer exist
• Knut thinks that sushi is a Finnish dish
• Traditional Greenland culture involves fishing, but Nanook's parents work for an American call center
• Haruki teaches folk tales she remembers from her childhood, but has to translate them to use concepts that Danish kids will recognize
• Akash hosts an annual get-together for Marathi-speaking students in Germany
• The cultural center in Susanoo's home prefecture promotes its status as the Nuclear Power Plant Ginza

I spent the early chapters gnawing on questions about how our cultures shape our worldviews and what the consequences are of the gradual change and diffusion of that culture. Once all of the major characters are introduced, however, the pace of insights wanes, exposing the low stakes of the plot.

Tawada reportedly intends Scattered All Over the Earth as the first book in a trilogy. I'm not sure whether I'll follow up with the next two books.

Andrew Sean Greer, Less ***

Less sounds like a book I would love: a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an aging white guy traveling the world in an effort to forestall regrets. The fact that Greer has already published a sequel (Less is Lost) confirms that he intends Arthur Less to be a continuing character like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Ford's Frank Bascombe.

The fundamental shortcoming of Less is that Greer fails to make Arthur Less a distinctive or compelling character. He is generic and I was unable to invest in his adventures. The same is true of Arthur's round-the-world travels –– the descriptions of Mexico and Europe and India and Japan are clichéd and don't build toward any epiphany. It's what Evelyn would call a grandpa story: this happened, then that happened, and so what.

What did the Pulitzer folks see that I did not?

Greg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (eds), Neuroexistentialism ***

 Neuroexistentialism: meaning, morals, & purpose in the age of neuroscience is a collection of academic papers about "third-wave existentialism."

Existentialisms are responses to recognizable diminishments in the self-image of persons caused by social or political rearrangements or ruptures ... What we call neuroexistentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of persons... [the] clash between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons.

The classic (second-wave) existentialism of Sartre and Camus emphasized the role of human will and rationality in establishing a life's meaning and purpose. Modern neuroscience raises doubts about the existence of an integrated self and about how rational our decision-making is. How can a person heroically imbue their life with meaning if there is no self and our choices are all predetermined by our brain chemistry and past experience?

I am most interested in the challenge of finding meaning in a purposeless universe, but most of the papers in this collection address the question of justifying moral judgments (and criminal justice) in a society where individuals possibly lack responsibility for their (purely determined) actions. In other words, a lot of ink is spilled on the question of whether we have free will. The last paper, by Stephen J. Morse, correctly notes that neuroscience "raises no new challenges in these domains" because we've been imagining determinism since at least Laplace's demon in 1814.

Many of the contributors drifted away from the question of how we might retain free will into laments about the dire social consequences if hard incompatibilists are correct. The two most notable exceptions were the papers from well-known authors of popular science books: 

• Brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga makes an analogy between brain/mind and hardware/software: "Software depends on the hardware to work, but is also in some sense more fundamental in that it is what delivers function. So what causes what? Nothing is mysterious here, but using the language of 'cause' seems to muddle it."
  
  
• Physicist Sean Carroll looks to quantum mechanics, not as the locus for the indeterminacy necessary for free will to sneak in (in fact, he explicitly rejects this approach) but as an example of a purely physical predictive theory whose contributions to the "emergent" layers of reality above it are not understood at all.

Both of these contributors note that we just don't know how entirely materialist elements really work together to construct reality, and both offer ways to think about the "really hard problem."

Susanna Kaysen, Far Afield *****

Anthropology student Jonathan Brand spends a year living in the Faroe Islands. He is theoretically doing fieldwork, but has a hard time accomplishing much research. He struggles to fit in with the culture while worrying about how others, both locals and his professors in Cambridge, will judge him.

Far Afield is one of my all-time favorite books. It provides a vivid portrait of the remote islands with a perfect balance between realism and culture-clash satire. I first read it in the early 1990s when I was not far removed from my own graduate school experience; I empathized with Jonathan's unstable mix of hubris and self-doubt. Ultimately the main theme of the book is how we each balance our desire to belong to a community with our need to explore beyond that community.

This book is a clear example of how my ratings and reviews say more about me than about the book itself. Objectively, not much happens in Far Afield, and Jonathan's insecurity would surely grate on the nerves of many readers (such as my wife).

Susanna Kaysen is best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, published a few years after Far Afield. She has published very few books, making Far Afield something of a Confederacy of Dunces situation, a literary one-hit wonder.

Hisham Matar, The Return *** 1/2

The Return is a memoir from the writer and Libyan exile Hisham Matar about his efforts to discover the fate of his father, who was kidnapped and jailed by the Qaddafi regime in 1990 when Hisham was a nineteen-year-old university student. He returns to Libya in the aftermath of Qaddafi's fall to visit his extended family.

Matar's goal is to capture an emotion, a mood, so the story is told impressionistically through linked incidents from the present day, from Matar's childhood, and various points during adulthood as he advocates for international assistance in stopping the human rights abuses in Libya.

Several of the vignettes are powerful and effectively capture a complex feeling; I especially remember the time when Hisham befriended another Libyan student at a boarding school in England but had to do so under an assumed name, and (at the other end of the timeline) when he visited a memorial to the victims of the 1996 prison massacre where his father most likely died.

I would expect The Return to resonate strongly with exiles and those with families caught up in authoritarian oppression. It's a story about losing the country of your childhood as much as it is about growing up with uncertainty about your father's fate. As a person who has suffered neither of these misfortunes, I understand Matar's insights intellectually but don't really feel them.

Landon Beach, The Sail ***

The Sail is the epitome of a three-star genre book: a moderately engaging story comprised of reasonably well executed thriller clichés.

Robin Morris and his teenage son plan to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a thirty-six-foot sailboat, diving to famous shipwrecks along the way. They stumble upon sunken treasure and run afoul of the criminals who have been searching for it for decades. 

Were I Mr Beach's editor, I would recommend slimming down the setup. The sailing trip doesn't launch until page 100, they discover the jewels on page 173, and the bad guys show up on page 185 (of 223). The thriller portion consists of a single action sequence that occupies about as many pages as Robin's journal entries explaining life lessons to his son. The author wants to make us care about his characters and provide a sense of realism, but he uses too much mundane detail to do so.

I would also recommend a more straightforward villain. All the story requires is a ruthless thief or drug dealer, but we get a full-on Bond villain with a secret lair who kidnaps women and drugs them into being his mistresses. For the sake of the story I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about Robin's remarkable combat skills, but the hidden cave door and forced sexual initiations are too ridiculous.

Spoiler alert! Despite the setup I described above, the bad guys actually attack Robin and his son to recapture one of the kidnapped women. The jewels are a MacGuffin and turn out to be located within swimming distance of the villain's lair. 

I'll stop here before I talk myself into lowering its rating.

Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence ***

You couldn't formulate a more enticing title!

As our awareness has progressed alongside everything else, we have found ourselves outgrowing more comfortable, shortsighted narratives of life and moving into a realm in which there appears to be no clear narrative or reason at all, but rather, an absurdity and meaningless underpinning everything. This is perhaps one of, if not the greatest contemporary issue of mankind -- finding motivation and a sense of meaning in a period of time in which existence has revealed itself to be, or at least appears to be, meaningless.

Pantano's recommended approach is to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciate even your failings for what they reveal about yourself and the world. He constructs his argument by summarizing the thoughts of various philosophers and writers, mostly those of a pessimistic temperament (Seneca, Schopenhauer, Cioran, Sartre). Of course he also includes the schools of thought loved by writers of more conventional self-help books: Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism.

I generally agree with Pantano's suggested approach to life, and I like his attempt to ground it in the philosophical tradition. I applaud his choice of thinkers, but found most of his summaries too superficial and felt like he always chose the wrong quotes. I also thought he could use an editor; for example, I trip over several phrases in the paragraph quoted above and think it includes too many repeated words.

Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole ***

The Hole presents itself as a horror thriller, with comparisons to Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, but its main strength is as a psychological portrait of a man paralyzed in an accident. The accident killed his wife, and his mother-in-law serves as his caregiver... with questionable intentions. He sometimes feels hopeful about his recovery, sometimes despairing, and he re-evaluates his life choices.

The action and escalating dread are well handled but lack richness. Only the protagonist Oghi gets a name, with other characters being "his wife," "his mother-in-law," "the doctor," and his work colleagues M, S, K, and J. Oghi's life is similarly sketchy:

He'd taken an interest in other work outside of his department that was worth adding to his resume... He put together a research team with funding from a foundation, was on several academic committees... Books he'd published were being selected as recommended reads by different organizations...

I would be much more involved in the story if Pyun had just provided adjectives between "a" and "research team" and "foundation," or named one of the committees or books.

A major thematic element of the story is Oghi's evolving understanding of his wife and their marriage. However, their relationship seems strained from the start.

Dan Richards, Outpost ***

For my 40th birthday, we spent a few days in a cabin on out-of-season Orcas Island. For my 50th, we flew to Fairbanks to see the northern lights. For my 60th, nationwide bad weather kept us at home, so I read Outpost in hopes of vicariously experiencing Dan Richards' visits to "far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts... which have inspired writers, artists, and musicians."

I expected the book to describe the experience of spending time in remote places, but it's actually more of a travel book describing the experience of getting to those places. Richards goes to hiking cabins in Iceland and Scotland, a fire lookout, a lighthouse, a Shinto shrine, and Svalbard. The only locale he talks about spending time at is a writers retreat in Switzerland. The strongest passages are vivid images from along the way, such as this description from riding a ferry as night falls:

I bought a coffee and sat down amongst the diners, all of us gazing at the dark waters and red outlined horizons whilst the ship trembled beneath us. Eventually the windows welled into mirrors and the formica diner fanned out either side like wings spreading into the night.

Outpost is a haphazard collection of stories barely held together by the theme. Even the prose is haphazard, shifting swiftly between poetic natural descriptions and sarcastic asides. Some of the most interesting tidbits are relegated to footnotes, such as the fact that "polar bear hair is actually transparent and not white at all - it's hollow and merely scatters light, making them appear white - their skin is actually black." Reading the book feels like spending time at a bar with a raconteur.

Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle **

The White Castle is an early novel by the Nobel Prize winner Pamuk, his third book but the earliest one translated into English. For mysterious reasons, our local Barnes & Noble store had numerous copies spread across several "featured" tables; it obviously worked, since I purchased one.

A seventeenth-century Venetian is captured by the Turks. He is taken to Istanbul where he becomes the slave of a man who looks very much like him. They work together to influence the young sultan in the direction of science rather than superstition, but whose ideas are whose?

Most of Pamuk's books deal metaphorically with Turkey's twin desires for tradition and modernity, and The White Castle is no exception. (See also Snow and The Museum of Innocence.) This novel is more nakedly parabolical than the others, with no real attempt to flesh out the characters or the setting. 

Despite the book's brevity (161 pages), I found it a slog. The narrator and his master Hoja bicker as their identities s l o w l y intertwine, with no forward motion in the plot. The "twist" ending is telegraphed. All in all, the book felt like Pamuk juvenalia.