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The Book of Disquiet is composed from hundreds of unpublished fragments, compiled posthumously based on vague and contradictory notes from Pessoa.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.