Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo **** 1/2

Time's Echo is a work of history centered on four composers who wrote major works responding to the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. The author's thesis is that music transmits complex emotions across time, and that

musical memorials are therefore more meaningful and enduring than stone monuments or new church railings.

I approached the book with some trepidation. Books relating to the Holocaust tend to be uncomfortably impassioned, and the prose in the introduction tended toward the abstract phraseology of Continental philosophy ("Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us."). I needn't have worried, though: Eichler manages to stay grounded in realistic detail despite the enormity of the subject and the non-representational nature of music.

Eichler effectively describes how contemporary events and attitudes shaped the music and the audience response to it. I especially appreciated how he shows the meaning of a piece of music seeping in from the Zeitgeist rather than flowing from the composer's explicit intension. For example, he explains how important music is to the German identity and how intertwined were Jewish contributions to that sense of self.

The book presents a clear case for the importance of art in our responding to the world around us. Time's Echo often reads like particularly comprehensive chapters of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, a book that continues to rise in my esteem due to how often I think about it. Both books are filled with incidents and episodes that enrich their musicological analysis. My favorite episode in Time's Echo is the world premiere of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw performed by the amateur Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra. I am also inspired to visit Coventry Cathedral, whose destruction inspired Britten's War Requiem, and to learn more about the European exile community in Los Angeles during the war.

The only thing standing in the way of a full five-star rating is that I am not moved by the music in focus (Strauss' Metamorphosen, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Shostakovich's "Babi Yar" Symphony, and Britten's War Requiem). The only affecting piece that I discovered was Shostakovich's Piano Trio #2.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper ***

This enjoyable book is a compendium of musings on the various uses of notebooks. Sketchpads, ships' logs, business ledgers, common-place books, zibaldoni, travel journals, recipe collections, artist/scientist notebooks, diaries. Allen believes that the advent of paper notebooks in the 14th or 15th century enabled new forms of thought; in particular, he believes that notebooks made possible the artistic innovations of the Renaissance.

The subtitle shines a light on the use of notebooks as an extension of our thinking, but many of the included examples show different purposes, such as aides-memoire, contemporaneous record keeping, and social connection. Allen establishes the value of notebooks to the historian more convincingly than he shows their value as tools for self discovery. Expressive writing (like in diaries) is a surprisingly recent development, as is the detailed ship's log. (The log of Magellan's circumnavigation, for example, is notably sparse.)

My favorite sections of the book were those describing the notebooks of specific people, such as the Venetian Michael Rhodes (1434), Adriaen Coenen the King of the Herring (1570), Leonardo da Vinci (1519), and Charles Darwin (1837).

I picked up this book hoping to be inspired to maintain my own notebook(s). There is a chapter that extols the health benefits of writing about your feelings and the psychological benefits of thinking on paper. I didn't find myself inspired. Although after retirement, I may try Julia Cameron's "morning pages" exercise from The Artist's Way (write three pages of stream-of-consciousness each morning).

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings ****

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a kaleidoscopic epic about rival posses in 1970s Jamaica and the wider forces that fueled their violence. It is not brief (686 pages) and features countless killings. The story covers a couple of decades, but it swirls around one central event: the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976.

Numerous characters take turns as narrators. Their distinct voices and points of view are the best thing about the book. Many of them use Jamaican patois, with a few explicitly calling out the differences between American and Jamaican slang. The sense of time and place is strong. When we're introduced to the CIA section chief in Kingston, for example, he vividly describes the knock-off fast food restaurant King Burger: Home of the Whamperer. One stylistic decision I found distracting was always referring to Bob Marley as The Singer. It felt like an abstraction in the midst of palpable concrete details.

The story takes place over four time periods: 1976, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The portion in 1970s Jamaica is far stronger with its Cold War politics and local color. When the story moves to 1980s America, it simplifies into a story about the drug trade and loses its distinctive flavor. The narrative voices start to all sound the same; for example, I had a hard time telling the two gay characters apart even though one was a Jamaican and the other was a white guy from Chicago.

Franz Nicolay, Band People ***

Driving home one evening, I heard the author interviewed on KQED's Forum. The book is about the life of working musicians, and the discussion about group dynamics in a (rock) band immediately resonated with my feelings about what's missing in my work groups. Thinking of the technical writer as the bass player in a band is a great metaphor for communicating my views on proper collaborative behavior.

Some bands consider all of their members to be equal partners, others have a core of members supported by "hired guns." Who gets recognized as the artists and who are the (mere) support personnel? The distinction has an impact on how the music develops and, of course, on how the various players feel about their contributions. There is a hierarchy among the instruments, with singers, guitarists, and keyboardists being more recognized as artists than the rhythm section is. (Interesting fact: this discrepancy is enshrined in copyright law, which allows copyrighting of lyrics, melody, and harmony, but not rhythm.) Lou Reed is considered the writer of "Walk on the Wild Side" even though its most distinctive feature is its bass line. In short: session players are vital contributors to the success of a song, but they are sometimes seen as replaceable service providers.

Band People consists of excerpts from interviews with over 50 working musicians, interspersed with material from sociological studies of "cultural production" and workplace relations. The book is written and organized like a college research paper that had one editorial pass. Nicolay arranged his voluminous source material into categories, found an academic epigraph for each category, and threaded the interviews together. The musicians have interesting insights, but Nicolay doesn't construct any arguments or extract any explicit lessons from them.

I found myself attracted to two of the bibliographic sources from which Nicolay quotes: the academic Art Words by Howard Becker and This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm.

Daniel Mason, North Woods ****

The main character in North Woods in a plot of land in the forests of western Massachusetts. Each chapter tells the story of the occupants of the land, starting with lovers who flee a Puritan colony and including non-human protagonists such as a catamount, a scolytid beetle, and invasive plants. There are murders, abductions, sibling rivalry, artists, ghosts, a con man, a schizophrenic, stories told in a variety of styles from poetry to conference lecture. It's an enjoyable amalgam whose theme is ecological succession.

The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.

 

Ian McEwan, The Innocent ****

When Evelyn and I visited England in 1990, tube stations and bus panels were filled with advertisements for Ian McEwan's new novel The Innocent. It seemed unusual for a book to get so much attention, and in one of my then favorite genres (spy novel). I was excited, but had to wait nearly a year for the book to appear in paperback in the United States.

The Innocent follows a young Englishman assigned to a secret project in the classic espionage setting of 1955 Berlin. A joint American-British team is digging a tunnel into the Russian zone in order to tap their telephone lines. Our hero needs to learn his role and navigate the competing loyalties of his co-workers. He starts an affair with a German woman whose motives we readers are more skeptical about than he is.

The espionage is well handled, although spy novel aficionados might feel there's too much distracting romance. The story takes a genre-shifting turn about two-thirds of the way through, but the twist felt organic rather than a gimmick.

A very entertaining genre novel.

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities *** 1/2

A History of Future Cities tells the stories of four cities that were deliberately designed to bring modernity to a self-consciously per-modern society: St Petersberg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. All four of these cities are Asian, and they all adopted European models of modernity, so Brook characterizes them as being "purposely dis-orient-ed."

The history of each city is fascinating. I was particularly taken with the story of Peter the Great working incognito as a shipbuilder in Amsterdam, earning his carpentry certificate and determining which aspects of Dutch success to import to Russia. He had his forces capture a Swedish seaport and built St Petersberg.

Making connections between the four histories is left largely to the reader. Brook explains his premise in the introduction but leaves his arguments implicit during the narratives. I enjoyed discovering the similarities in how the cities developed but would have liked to hear how Brook interprets the variations. For example, St Petersberg and Dubai were created by their rulers while Shanghai and Mumbai were colonization projects; how does this difference affect their development?

The book raises two main questions:

• Is "modernization" equivalent to "Westernization"?
• Can traditional societies and authoritarian regimes modernize without losing their traditions or power?

Brook does not attempt to answer these tough and still-relevant questions.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World ****

Bringley worked for a decade as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He took the job as a form of therapy after the death of his brother. "Could there really be this loophole by which I could drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day tarrying in an entirely beautiful one?"

All the Beauty in the World offers sketches of the art treasures in the Met and the day-to-day work of its guards. It captures the contemplative balm that Bringley sought without becoming too metaphysical or pretentious. The author responds to art emotionally even as he learns about the artists. The vast range of art in the Met hints at the breadth of human experience, as does the diversity of the guard staff; the insider's details about the job ground it all in daily life.

It sure made me long for an unhurried visit to an art museum!

I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn't discharge the feeling by talking about it––there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint––silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest.

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X ***

Biography of X presents itself as a biography of a controversial artist named X whose work encompasses music, literature, film, painting, and performance art. The author is X's widow, who starts the project to rescue X's legacy from a bestselling hack biography.

X was best known for embodying numerous personae that rendered her true self unknowable even to those closest to her. Her widow tracks down the truth of her birth: X was born in and escaped from the Southern Territory, the theocratic region that split from the Northern and Western Territories in 1945 before Reunification in 1989. Yes, X's story plays out in an alternate reality.

I applaud Lacey's ambition. I wish, though, that the book more closely resembled an actual biography. We don't start with enough information about X or her work to know why we want to read about her. The "author" (X's widow) foregrounds her adventures while researching the book rather than X's life and times. X comes across as an unpleasant character with none of the charisma that would attract her many admirers.

I read one of Lacey's previous books several years ago. It too dealt with the splintering of one's social presentation, and it too felt overly ambitious. To quote myself: "I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from."

One aspect of Lacey's alternate reality is that since "the Painters' Massacre of 1943 ... [in which] Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock" were killed, the art world is dominated by women. In our world, it used to be said that all of the ambitious writers were male; David Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar American fiction."  Reading Biography of X soon after Creation Lake and Kairos, I feel like we have plenty of women taking on the big themes.

John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar *** 1/2

Cosmic Scholar is a biography of Harry Smith, the mysterious polymath best known (to me anyway) as the compiler behind the influential Anthology of American Folk Music. He was an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker hovering around the edges of the avant-garde art scene. He was "always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible," and surviving on the generosity of his friends such as Allen Ginsberg.

Smith (1923 - 1991) was a downtown New York characters whom everyone in the artistic demimonde seemed to recognize and loan money to, but few people knew more than one facet of his interests. He was a pack rat who loved to collect things –– obscure records, Seminole patchwork clothing, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He fascinated friends with his wide-ranging abstruse knowledge. He sought insight by seeing patterns in his collections. In his art he attempted to bridge modalities, with paintings based on jazz recordings and films incorporating folk art. He spent a decade making a film that he hoped would be understandable to every human culture.

Cosmic Scholar makes stimulating connections between anthropology and modernist art (as attempts to understand alternate worldviews), and illustrates the fine line between mental illness and artistic genius. The author Szwed does an excellent job of presenting an overarching artistic vision that links all of Smith's diverse obsessions. He is less successful at capturing Smith's personality. People describe Smith as charming and temperamental, but we rarely hear what this translates to in practice.

Harry Smith reminded me of "Professor Seagull" Joe Gould from Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Szwed notices the similarity as well.

Gould managed to survive as long as he did by entertaining [Greenwich] Village people with his bizarre and antic behavior on the streets, in bars, and at parties that he crashed. ... Harry Smith is sometimes unjustly included among such colorful Village failures. But he, in contrast, succeeded at much of what he attempted.

I think it's entirely fair to compare Gould and Smith, and that it's arguable whether Smith succeeded. Both of them did field work with Native American tribes, befriended modernist artists, struggled with alcoholism, spent time in mental institutions, and pursued impossibly ambitious projects (Gould's Oral History of Our Time; Smith's Materials for the Study of the Religion and Culture of the Lower East Side).  I would say that Smith lived the kind of life that everyone assumed Gould was living.

Smith was awarded a special Grammy in 1991. He brought five kittens with him because he wanted them to experience the ceremony. When he accepted the award, he left the kittens in the care of the parapsychologist he had invited along as his guest.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake ***

I started Creation Lake with high hopes, so high that I bought the hardcover on its publication day. I had been impressed with the memorable scenes and thematic depth of Kushner's earlier book The Flamethrowers, but felt that it lacked narrative drive. Creation Lake promised to address this shortcoming with an espionage plot: an American woman infiltrates a group of French climate activists.

Alas, Creation Lake doesn't use espionage to generate suspense; instead, it uses it to explore more cerebral questions of personal identity and responsibility. The balance between action and reflection is tilted decidedly toward the latter. The narrator Sadie Smith doesn't meet her surveillance target Pascal Balmy until page 146, by which time we have heard more about the crackpot theories of Pascal's mentor than about her assignment. 

My favorite image in the book comes early. Sadie is driving from Marseille to the rural French district where Pascal's group lives:

I was on toll roads, pulling over to drink regional wines in highway travel centers, franchised and generic, with food steaming under orange heat lamps... I sampled these wines from the vantage of plastic seating overlooking fuel pump and highway. I sipped rosé from the Luberon at a clammily air-conditioned Monop' off the A55, a chaotic place where children screeched and a haggard woman dragged a dirty mop over the floor. The rosé was delicate and fruity, crisp as ironed linen. I found a Pécharmant from the oldest vintner in Bergerac at the L'Arche Cafeteria on the autoroute A7, a wine that was woody with notes of ambergris and laurel and maybe dried apricot.

I love the contrast between the industrial setting and the rich human experience, and I appreciate how the scene reflects the theme of modernity vs traditional ways of living. Another vivid image occurs about halfway through the book as Sadie walks home from the group's commune:

It was seven p.m. and the hottest part of the day, the peak temperature spike, at least forty degrees Celsius, maybe 105 in Fahrenheit, and by any measure hot as balls. Up ahead, something dropped from above and landed on the road. It was a snake. Snakes in heat waves don't coil up on tree trunks. They sleep hanging down from a branch; it's a tactic for staying cool...

I walked in the middle of the road, instead of the shade of overhanging trees, in order to avoid falling snakes.

Kushner regularly offers these kinds of meaningful images alongside her sophisticated themes. However, Creation Lake reinforces my impression that she's not great at plotting.

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story ****

Shteyngart's books come festooned with blurbs extolling his "linguistic exuberance" and proclaiming their satire to be "wildly", "snarkily", "devastatingly" funny. The title Super Sad True Love Story is at odds with this reputation, signaling that Shteyngart won't be going for a joke in every paragraph.

Super Sad True Love Story takes place in an alternate America, one that is extremely online, undoubtedly repressive, and deeply in debt to foreign creditors (notably China, Saudi Arabia, and Norway).  Our hero Lenny Abramov falls in love with a Korean woman half his age. The tenderness of their relationship provides a refuge from the demands of society.

When I read Shteyngart's previous novel Absurdistan, I felt a huge tonal mismatch between the smart satirical commentary and the cartoonish plot. Super Sad True Love Story is much better balanced, its main story as insightful as its dystopian backdrop. Lenny and Eunice make a believable couple because they provide each other with a salve for their insecurities. They are also both children of immigrants, which feels relevant despite the vast differences between their Russian and Korean parents.

Despite the warning in its title, Super Sad True Love Story is funny.  I was fond of the animated otter that serves as the mascot of the American Restoration Authority. The key words in the title turn out to be True Love.

Alex Ross, Listen to This ***

Listen to This is a collection of essays from the music writer for The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise. Ross primarily covers classical music, but this book covers topics ranging from Mozart and the conductor Esa-Pekka Solonen to Radiohead and Björk. 

Each piece is a pleasant profile, and most have an interesting insight or two, but they lack a clear point or point of view. "I Saw the Light," about Bob Dylan, is emblematic. Ross describes the scene at contemporary (circa 1999) Bob Dylan shows, provides a potted history of his career, and quotes a few Dylanologists. Then he notes that "Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms. His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification." Ross spends a page analyzing Dylan's musical approach, then returns to the pablum. In my opinion, he squandered his unique angle.

I found Ross to be at his best when describing the day-to-day life of classical musicians: touring with a string quartet, searching for a conductor with an orchestra's board of directors, attending a summer camp "finishing school for gifted young performers."

Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil ***** / **

Here is what I said when I read The Death of Virgil twenty years ago:

The Death of Virgil was published in German in 1945. When the Vintage International edition was published in 1995, I picked it up in a bookstore and read the first paragraph:

Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left. And here, as the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever the sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.

I was extremely taken with the poetic description, especially with the images of the water. However, I could tell that this 400+ page novel would require the kind of careful attention you need to read poetry, so it was a few years before I got to it.

This first paragraph sums up what's good and bad about the novel. On the plus side, it creates a mood using detailed, vivid images. On the minus side, the sentences can be long-winded, roundabout, and overly "profound." The heart of the novel is Part II, which chronicles a long night during which Virgil ponders the meaning of life and of art. While it contains a number of interesting ideas and deep images, it hides them amongst pseudo-profound prose along the lines of "the forecourt of reality was merely a sham-reality." 

I have to admit to frequent bouts of impatience. I feel sure The Death of Virgil would reward closer reading.

On that closer rereading, I find Part I even more astonishing, as close to poetry as prose can get. Its bewitching mood and evocative imagery of transitions (from sea to land, day to night, clamorous to silent) have, as the translator says in her afterward, "at the same time a concrete and metaphysical meaning."

And I find Part II even more impenetrable and interminable, with its esoteric nighttime visions  untethered to any concrete action. The exposition of Part III, as Virgil speechifies with his friends and with Caesar Augustus about the goals of art, is also tiresome. 

Mystery of time! Saturnian mystery of perception! Mystery of fate's commands! Mystery of the pledge! Light and darkness, united in the two-toned dusk unfold of themselves to the seven colors of the earthly creation, but when the transformation in being will have reached to universal perception, having become unalterable by virtue of being whole, only then will time come to a standstill, not immobile, not like a lake, but like an all-embracing moment, an unending sea of light, lasting through all eternity...

I have to give The Death of Virgil a split rating. The 73 pages of Part I are a five-star revelation. The rest of the book is a two-star slog.

Giles Tremlett, Isabella of Castile ***

Isabella of Castile is a biography of "Europe's first great queen," the woman who seized the throne of Castile at age 23, merged the kingdoms of Spain through marriage and conquest, funded Columbus' voyages to the New World, kicked off the Inquisition, and expelled both Jews and Muslims from her dominion. She might more accurately be called "Europe's first ruthless queen" or "Europe's first consequential queen."

Isabella reigned for 35 years, providing a surfeit of momentous events and decisions to cover. As is typical for a general-audience royal biography, too much of the book is hastily sketched political intrigue.

The Grandees were self-interested and fickle, making them faster to jump ship and easier to manipulate than the cities. The Stunigas had been among the first of La Betraneja's supporters to swap sides. But her rival's two main backers were Lopez Pacheco and the archbishop of Toledo. ... Isabella decided to divide and rule, offering pardons to some in order to weaken Lopez Pacheco himself. The first to come over was his cousin Juan Tellez Giron, Count of Unreuna....   (zzzZZZ...)

As if Isabella's life isn't packed enough, Tremlett includes (admittedly entertaining) chapters on Columbus' disastrous follow-up voyages and the colorful debauchery of the Borgias in Italy. 

Tremlett does his best to insert tidbits that illuminate Isabella's personality and/or the significance of key decisions, but he doesn't have time to linger on anything in particular. The two subjects that I wanted more detail about were her relationship with Ferdinand and her gradual ratcheting up of pressure on religious minorities. A closer look at either of these would provide a clearer picture of Isabella as a person.

She chose Ferdinand over the objections of her advisors, demonstrating her strong will. Their innovative marriage contracts revealed her political acumen, and their lifelong collaboration showed unqualified trust. The most dramatic scenes in the first half of the book revolve around the couple. Ferdinand is off fighting in Aragon when Isabella first claims the crown, and everyone expects him to assert his masculine rights when he returns; instead they withdraw from the pressure of their advisors and jointly draw up a marriage contract. A few years later, Isabella publicly berates Ferdinand for retreating from a battle against Alfonso of Portugal, and he quietly but firmly explains how patience was the smarter course of action.

When Isabella came to power, Spain was known as a place where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in harmony. By the end of her reign, all Jews and Muslims had been expelled or forcibly converted, and Christians suffered under the Inquisition. To what extent were her various actions driven by sincere religious conviction versus political calculation? Why, for example, did she support forced conversions for Muslims in Granada but not for Muslims in Aragon where they were an integral part of the economy? Did she insist on the authority to reform the Spanish church because she was disgusted by its licentiousness or to increase her power?

By reforming in advance, Isabella can also be credited with helping prepare Spain to resist the impact of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. As a result, it remained an almost universally Roman Catholic country that would spread the faith through the Americas and to other Spanish lands like the Philippines.

Dag Solstad, T. Singer ***

Dag Solstad is among the most respected and influential Norwegian novelists, although his highly literary style and penchant for prosaic characters makes him less well known internationally than some of his peers. I was impressed with his novel Shyness and Dignity, so I browsed Solstad novels in the "Norwegian authors in translation" section of the various bookstores we visited in Norway. I chose T. Singer based on the online critical consensus.

The title character sets aside an aimless youth to take a job as librarian in a small Norwegian town. His explicit goal is to lead an incognito life. He marries a local woman and helps raise her daughter, and eventually moves back to Oslo for a job at a more prestigious library. That's it; that's the whole story. The real action of the book is watching Singer struggle to understand himself and his relationships with others.

The first pages find Singer remembering with shame incidents where people judged him for behaving inauthentically. His fear of judgment leads him to pursue an invisible life. He wants to connect with other people but has anxiety whenever he is the center of attention.

It meant that they were talking about him, discussing him and his relationship with his deceased wife and his stepdaughter, in numerous places when Singer was not personally present, nor was he aware of what they said. Because that's how it is with the person who is the subject of gossip...

In the later stages of the story, Singer worries about his stepdaughter when she appears to have inherited the same reserve.

T. Singer shares many Solstadian trademarks with Shyness and Dignity: a regular-guy protagonist in a low-level intellectual job, meandering passages about the character's feelings, a plot whose details are beside the point, a title that tells you nothing about what to expect. It covers a whole life rather than a single fateful day, which is perhaps why it felt unfocused to me. While I empathize with Singer's warring inclinations, I didn't connect to him. 

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos ****

Kairos is the story of a love affair between a young woman and an older man in East Berlin during the late 1980s. Their relationship is clearly a metaphor for the collapse of East Germany and Unification, but it's not a simple parallel and Erpenbeck doesn't twist the outcome for Katharina and Hans to make larger points. She captures the love that the characters feel toward their daily routines and the disorientation they feel when the society that supports those routines suddenly vanishes.

In the early chapters Erpenbeck has an engaging way of alternating between the viewpoints of the two lovers nearly sentence by sentence:

On that Friday in July, she thought: Even if he comes now, I'm still going. 

On that Friday in July, he spent all day over two sentences. Who knew writing was this hard, he thought.

She thought: I've had it up to here with him.

He thought: And it's not getting any better.

She grabbed her jacket and bag and went out.

He picked up his jacket and his cigarettes.

She crossed the bridge.

He walked up Friedrichstrasse.

She builds an evocative vision of East German life through specific locations and props such as the Ganymede restaurant, Café Arkade, Rotkäppchen sparkling wine, and Duet brand cigarettes. Hans delivers cultural commentary on the radio, so he provides lots of local color. Katharina takes a trip to visit her grandmother in Cologne, giving us readers a view of West German culture from the East German point of view.

The middle section of the book includes numerous references to people and events that went over my head. I could follow the story but not the deeper points that Erpenbeck was surely making. The vividness returns after the Wall comes down and the characters adjust to the disappearance of their culture.

Kairos won the International Booker Prize for 2024. I was surprised to learn that it's the first German novel to win the prize and the first with a male translator. 

Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm ****

Blockchain Chicken Farm is a collection of essays about the use of technology in rural China. Wang correctly notes that the stereotype of rural culture is it's backward and technologically ignorant. Her pieces present various initiatives that use technology to revitalize rural communities and integrate them into the globalized world. The title essay visits a chicken farm that tries to overcome supply-chain trust issues by tagging its organic product with a blockchain-protected ankle bracelet. Others describe using AI to monitor pig farms, drones to deliver pesticides in a targeted fashion, and an online shopping platform to provide villages with additional sources of income. Most of the projects are part of a government-sanctioned Rural Rejuvenation program.

Wang describes their visits to these projects in a casual tone that manages to feel authentic and to make its points without feeling didactic. The independent chapters did not attempt to work together toward a single argument, although Wang does repeatedly point out that techno-optimism assumes we can improve human flourishing through automation. 

Eliza Clark, Penance ** 1/2

Penance is a fictional true crime story, about a 2016 case in which three teenage girls tortured and burned a classmate. It purports to be the republication of a book that was pulled when the journalist was accused of misrepresenting the statements of the participants.

The theme of Penance –– and of the fictional book at its center –– is that our cultural obsession with true-crime stories derives from an unhealthy identification with criminals that leads to further violence. The perpetrators suffer from the usual pressures of being a teenage girl, and their exposure to true-crime fandom provides an unhealthy outlet for relieving the pressure, and they end up being consumed by it. It's not unlike the stories one hears about people getting radicalized through online communities.

One of the reviews excerpted on the back cover credits the author as "a genius with voice," but that was not my experience. Each girl gains a distinctive personality but they share an identical way of expressing themself. The fictional journalist author is presented as a hack and the prose supports that characterization. My biggest problem with Penance was that its style and organization felt nothing like an actually published book; rather, it seemed like a collection of materials that might be massaged into a book.

I expected Penance to investigate the ethics of the true-crime genre and of literary embellishment from the bare facts. These questions do come up in the author interview that make up the final 10 pages, but they are merely raised and not examined.

Clark –– the actual author –– convincingly creates a milieu in which the girls adapt their personae to their peers amid ever-shifting alliances. Her treatment of the class structure of Crow-on-Sea is less nuanced. We learn more details about the crime as we go along, but nothing that truly deepens our understanding.

Roy Jacobsen, The Unseen ****

My foray into Norwegian literature continues with The Unseen, the story of the Barrøy family living on their small island in Nordland. The book was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

The book starts with the local pastor paying a visit to Barrøy island, and the first chapter pulls off an elegant shift in point of view when "his eyelids close and his breathing becomes heavier" and the next sentence remarks on "a priest asleep in their home," making it clear that our protagonists are the family not the priest. Subsequent chapters describe the annual routines of farming and fishing. The outside world impinges on their lives in the form of flotsam from all over. They are not shut off from the world but do not approve of its ways.

The Unseen would have been a perfect book to read while cruising the Norwegian coast, passing islands very much like Barrøy. It paints a clear picture of the joys and difficulties of island life and tells its story with lovely imagery and Scandinavian reserve. But I bought my copy in Tromsø after our cruising was done, so I read it at home with nostalgia for our recently completed trip. I enjoyed it quite a bit, although it didn't seem to have anything to tell me beyond the story itself.

Jacobsen followed The Unseen with three sequels that follow Ingrid, the daughter who comes of age in The Unseen. I'm inclined to feel that The Unseen left us at an appropriate stopping point.

Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero **** 1/2

Our recent vacation in Norway was bookended by visits to two very fine polar exploration museums, the Fram Museum in Oslo and the Polar Museum in Tromsø. It was clear from both of them that Fridtjof Nansen was the most compelling character in the annals of Arctic explorers. He approached his expeditions with a scientific mindset and introduced many innovations in polar travel; he was charismatic but lacked leadership skills. Beyond his adventuring, he made significant contributions in neurology and oceanography, evangelized the sport of skiing, was a good artist, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping with the refugee crisis that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

Huntford does a great job of capturing Nansen's depressive temperament and complicated relationships without resorting to imaginative psychologizing. He places Nansen's achievements in the context of the times. The heart of the book details the (first) Fram expedition, using material from the diaries of several participants to build a well-rounded portrait.

The idea behind the Fram expedition, by the way, was to purposely get frozen into the pack ice and drift to the North Pole with the natural current. It didn't happen, but they were able to prove that the Arctic Ocean was deep, without any land at the center, in contrast to Antarctica. Nansen eventually left the ship with one companion to attempt to reach the Pole by custom-designed sledge; the rest of the crew was happy to see him and his moods go. He reached the farthest north for the time, and coasted on his fame and success for the rest of his life. All subsequent expeditions consulted with Nansen for his insights into the design of sledges and skis, avoiding scurvy, or just to get his blessing for fundraising purposes.

While Huntford does a solid job of describing Nansen's routes and innovations, I would have liked more illustrations and better maps. The sections covering Nansen's post-expedition political career were less compelling. Perhaps that was inevitable, but I felt like Huntford's prose regressed to the mean of biography writing. Norwegian independence, the League of Nations, and the Russian Revolution are dealt with in a somewhat cursory manner, with the typical parade of names and dates.

Fascinating if a bit draining at times.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star ***

I was an unexpected fan of The Wolves of Eternity, Knausgaard's most recently translated book. The final section of that book revealed it to be a sequel of sorts to The Morning Star, so I chose The Morning Star as my locale-appropriate "loose baggy monster" to read during our trip to Norway.

The Morning Star is more conventional than The Wolves of Eternity. It has a more conventional plot and the key event of the story, the emergence of a new star, happens on page 45 (of 666 pages). There are strange, possibly supernatural events such as unusual animal behavior and the continued survival of people who should have died. The point-of-view characters are mostly interesting people.

These virtues should provide more traditional reading pleasure than The Wolves of Eternity's drawn-out tale. For some reason, though, I was not as engaged with The Morning Star. The sections devoted to each of its loosely connected characters are a mere 50 pages long, which doesn't provide the same level of immersion as the 400 pages granted to Syvert in The Wolves of Eternity. 

The book makes a surprising turn away from realism in the final 80 pages, with Jostein having an extended... dream? vision? hallucination? It ends with a cliff-hanger:

"So much has happened these last two weeks [while Jostein was in a coma] that I'm not sure anyone cares anymore..." 
"What do you mean?" I said. "What's happened that could possibly be bigger than that?"

Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic **** 1/2

The Rebel's Clinic is a biography of Frantz Fanon. I started it knowing nothing about Fanon except that he's frequently cited in discussions about colonialism, racism, and psychiatry. Recently, his name came up in stories about the Israel-Gaza conflict and in The Best Minds. The glowing reviews for The Rebel's Clinic made me decide it would be an excellent introduction to the man and his thought.

The book traces Fanon's intellectual development, showing how it was influenced by and differed from the larger cultural currents of the time (post-war France).  Shatz describes incidents in Fanon's life only to the extent that they impact the evolution of his ideas. For example, we get more detail about his correspondence with Sartre than about his relationship with his wife and son.

Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, trained as a psychiatrist in France, participated in the lively post-war conversation about racism, and became radicalized by his involvement with Algeria's war of independence. His major influences were the then-ascendent movements of existentialism and Négritude, to which he added a psychiatric perspective.

At the heart of Fanon's analysis is the insidious psychological impact of colonialism. All of society accepts and internalizes the value system of the colonizer, which denigrates the colonized and alienates them from their own culture and identity. The colonial system deforms the psyche of both the colonizer and the colonized. The cure is to "disalienate" the oppressed by replacing the imposed value system with one that is more in line with the colonized people's lived experience.

The most controversial aspect of Fanon's vision is his belief that only a violent revolution is capable of overthrowing a colonial mindset. He compared Algeria's violent struggle to his homeland Martinique's peaceful abolition of slavery. In his view, Martinique did not transcend its colonial past because it achieved its ends through the favor of the colonizing power. Fanon is associated with this apology for violence by both his admirers and his critics, even though his most widely-read work, The Wretched of the Earth, recognizes the many ways that violence results in trauma of its own.

Fanon differs from his peers in his vision of post-colonial culture. Most commentators imagined the post-colonial society returning to a pre-colonial way of life, whereas Fanon favored a more existentialist reinvention. His issue with the Négritude movement was that it promoted a return to a core vision of "Blackness." He was appalled by the Islamic fundamentalism that arose during the Algerian war of independence.  Personally I see this naive view as an example of young Fanon continuing to internalize the value system of left-wing European intellectuals.

The final chapter outlines Fanon's legacy. People tend to pick and choose which of his ideas to adopt, with the result that both sides of an argument claim his support. No wonder I never formed a sense of his philosophy from the various citations.

Ken Kalfus, Equilateral ***

In the late nineteenth century, the astronomer Sanford Thayer convinces the international community to support his plan to construct a huge equilateral triangle (300 miles per side) in the Egyptian desert and light it on fire, to telegraph our presence to the canal builders on Mars. He has lofty expectations about communicating with the strange beings on Mars (through geometry), but is having a hard time communicating with his Arab workers and the women who care for him. Nor does he notice the wonders around him here on Earth.

This short novel was enjoyable enough, with its satirical formal writing style. ("The sun's forced march toward its solstice point brings longer days and greater heat... The fellahin demonstrate commensurately amplified lassitude.") It felt thin to me though: its ideas about human ambition and empire building were shown early and didn't have much depth.

I didn't appreciate the book as well as I did the first time I read it. I've freed up some space on my bookshelf.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind ***

The main thesis of this book is that research in moral psychology (distinct from moral philosophy) supports the view that moral judgments are made intuitively rather than rationally, and that societies/political communities use a small set of fundamental moral concepts to construct conflicting but equally sincere moral codes. Haidt provides a fairly clear exposition of ideas I already shared.

The first third of the book argues that people make moral judgements intuitively rather than rationally. In Haidt's formulation: "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second"; in David Hume's formulation: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." He points out that the most prominent moral philosophers––John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant––prioritize, even fetishize, rationality over other aspects of human flourishing.

The middle portion of the book identifies six moral "taste receptors" from which we build our moral intuitions. In Haidt's view, WEIRD liberals rely almost exclusively on two of the tastes (care and fairness) while WEIRD conservatives appeal to a wider palate. He doesn't explicitly make this point, but I noted that care and fairness are the easiest receptors to justify with dispassionate rationality. They don't carry the taint of irrational emotion that, say, loyalty and sacredness do. Like Mill and Kant, the liberal view prioritizes rationality. 

I wish I could say that the final section addresses the mechanisms that result in cultural variation and/or methods for communicating across moral matrices. How do cultural norms become pre-rational intuitions? Alas, Haidt instead tries to explain the evolutionary origins of the fundamental concepts. Early in the book he mocks evolutionary psychology for providing "just so stories," but here he indulges in the vice himself. The material is simplistic, obvious, and felt condescending toward conservatives and religious believers. He also suggests a genetic basis for political orientation despite earlier complaining that psychologists try to "explain away conservatism."

One insight I gleaned from The Righteous Mind is that liberal "egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se." Commentators often suggest than liberals equate fairness with equality while conservatives equate it with proportionality, but Haidt suggests that both sides equate fairness with proportionality, but that liberals believe inequalities to be largely the result of external factors. I was also intrigued by the studies regarding "altruistic punishment," which show that the ability to punish slackers is an important ingredient in fostering cooperation.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo *** 1/2

Pedro Páramo is a classic of Mexican literature, "one of the best novels in Hispanic literature" according to an entire generation of Latin American literary giants -- Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa. The recent Grove Press edition (with English translation by Douglas Weatherford) includes a forward from Gabriel García Márquez about the immense influence the book had on his own writing.

A man swears to his dying mother that he will track down his estranged father. He travels to the rural town of Comala but finds it essentially a ghost town. No worries though because the dead still whisper to him and tell the tragic story of the town's downfall.

Why has Pedro Páramo remained mostly unknown to English-language readers? I would guess that it's because Rulfo's writing is experimental and prioritizes mood over story. Pedro Páramo reminded me of later Faulkner with its blend of memory, allegory, and rural themes told non-sequentially. It also reminded me of Tarkovsky's film Mirror, which creates a similar oneiric mood for a story about a man seeking his father. Mirror is a favorite Tarkovsky film among filmmakers but not his most popular ("While highly acclaimed, Mirror continues to be viewed as enigmatic" [Wikipedia]); Pedro Páramo is canonical among Spanish-language writers and critics but is too rarified to be popular.

Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds *** 1/2

The Best Minds blends memoir, biography, and social commentary in a way that reminded me of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.  Like that book, The Best Minds traces the life of a man who overcomes adversity to achieve success at Yale before his demons inevitably come to claim him. Both books were written by friends of the protagonist, at least partly as a means of coming to terms with the tragedies.

Michael Lauder was a charismatic and brilliant young man who graduated summa cum laude from Yale in three years. Not long after college he suffered a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nonetheless, he completed Yale Law School and became an advocate for the mentally ill. Ron Howard's production company started developing a film based on his life, with the theme of removing the stigma from schizophrenia. But then Michael murdered his pregnant girlfriend.

While telling the story of his childhood friendship with Michael, Rosen subtly notes the cultural changes taking place in our understanding of mental illness. The Beats popularized the idea that madness is a reasonable response to the oppression of the wider culture; Michel Foucault presented mental illness as a construction of the powerful; Derrida and the deconstructionists used mental illness as a metaphor for all "texts"; the de-institutionalization movement promoted community care over hospitalization. Unfortunately, the idea that mental illness is controllable combined with the lack of a viable community care network lead to our current situation where people get hospitalized only for being (potentially) violent rather than for being sick.

I appreciated Rosen's well-rounded assessment of the difficulties in knowing the right things to do. He clearly believes we've strayed too far in honoring the rights of severely ill people (whose denial of any problem is a symptom), but he also recognizes that it may be impossible to tell when a person's delusions are truly disabling or dangerous.

Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity ****

Shyness and Dignity is a short novel about a fateful day in the life of Elias Rukla, a Norwegian secondary school teacher. It starts as a portrait of the discontents of an ordinary man and builds gradually into a powerful vision of how life passes one by.

The story has three distinct sections that could almost stand alone as short stories. 

In the first, Elias teaches a class about Ibsen's The Wild Duck. On this particular day, Elias feels like he's on the trail of an epiphany about the import of one of the play's minor characters but recognizes that his students couldn't care less about it. This contrast causes him to reflect on the role of teachers in passing culture on to the next generation. The section ends with an unexpected burst of frustration.

The second section flashes back to Elias' own student days and his friendship with a promising philosophy student Johan. The story focuses on Johan's development but you can feel Elias trying to apply his Wild Duck insight to himself, to assess his own import as a minor character in Johan's life. This section too ends with an unexpected burst of frustration, from Johan.

In the final section, Elias thinks about his relationship with his wife, built on shared intimacies and reference points, which leads him to think about how he no longer shares intimacies or cultural reference points with the larger society. He feels left behind. He has a moment of joy when a fellow teacher references The Magic Mountain, but alas it doesn't evolve into a closer friendship. This section, and the book, ends with the reader understanding the previously unexpected bursts of frustration.

I related to Elias' feelings and was moved by them. You can––and should––read Shyness and Dignity in a couple of sittings.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus ****

Doctor Faustus is one of those books that I admired more than enjoyed. Like The Magic Mountain, it's a "dizzyingly rich novel of ideas." However, the ideas in Doctor Faustus are much heavier and (consequently?) presented less satirically. It was perhaps difficult in 1947 to be light-hearted about the rise of Nazism and the destruction of German culture.

The most consequential aesthetic decisions Mann made were using music as its foundational metaphor and having a first-person narrator. The first decision pays off brilliantly, because the music theory is interesting for its own sake as well as embodying Mann's ideas about intellectualism versus sensualism, barbarism versus culture, and progressivism versus conservatism. These antitheses wrap around to meet each other. The second decision is less successful, because Mann is stylistically trapped in the humorless temperament of his narrator Serenus Zeitblom. 

(As an aside, I did find humor in many of the character names. Griepenkerl the bassoonist, Helmut Institoris, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Rudiger Schildknapp, Deutschlin and Dungersheim. These may be ordinary German names but they struck me as overly elaborate and funny.)

The title of the book foregrounds the composer Adrian Leverkühn's supposed pact with the Devil. My hot take is that the pact is not fundamental to the story. Leverkühn's artistic development flows from the powerful cultural forces that Mann examines, and his personal development flows from his character and his syphilis; his meeting with the demon changes nothing.

Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries *** 1/2

I'm a sucker for books that explain the societal forces shaping unexamined aspects of our daily lives. The Secret Life of Groceries looks at various parts of the supply chain that enables "the dark miracle of the American supermarket."

The words "secret" and "dark" imply that the book might be an investigative exposé about the abuses required to ensure that Americans have cheap roasted chicken. Lorr acknowledges uncomfortable truths about food safety and the exploitation of workers, but he is more interested in the day-to-day reality of laborers involved –– truckers, buyers, food marketers, retail clerks –– and the reasons their jobs take the form that they do. The answer is almost always the modern tyranny of logistics and human capital management.

In the best parts of the book, Lorr does a passable imitation of David Foster Wallace's style and approach. He embeds himself with a worker, describes their life in an immersive and slightly ironic way, and explains how the details fit with broad underlying themes about the human condition, conveyed with complex sentence structures and discursive footnotes. I appreciated many of his conceptual insights, such as how the nature of the product changes as it moves through the system:

In the same way the fecal shrieking bird ceases ceases being an animal and becomes food, an item within the grocery matrix loses its identity as food and becomes a product. ... Now it is defined by the cubic inches of its packaging, its price per unit...

Far from being a muckraker, Lorr wants to present a balanced view of the conflicting motivations in the system. 

When he rides along with a long-haul trucker, he shows how tiring and dangerous the job is and how the economic setup makes it nearly impossible for her to succeed, but he doesn't demonize the trucking companies and notes that the truckers themselves value their freedom.

It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation... "This job is a misery, but it's the only thing in the world for me."

What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans' behalf. ... The result is both incredible beyond words ––abundance, wish fulfillment, and low price––and as cruel and demeaning as [work slavery]. To me, this is as hopeful as it is depressing. 

The most intriguing sections to me were those about crafting a retail identity that helps the consumer (i.e. me) find meaning in consumption. The first chapter is about Trader Joes, and the penultimate chapter is about a retail consultant who helps stores find "bliss points" for themselves and their customers. 

The tone and thoughtfulness fade the farther Lorr gets from the American consumer experience. The final chapter travels to Thailand to see shrimp aquaculture at "the bottom of the commodity chain." Lorr makes good observations about the impact of treating something as a commodity, but there's no balance to be found in a situation involving slavery, overfishing, and shrimp eyeball ablation. It felt like a chapter he had to include, but it retrospectively cast a pall over the rest of the book.

Knut Hamsum, Mysteries ****

Knut Hamsun is a Nobel Prize-winning author from Norway. I re-read Mysteries in honor of our upcoming trip to Norway and my recent experience with a more contemporary Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard.

My review from 20 years ago holds up pretty well. Mysteries definitely feels like a modernist novel rather than one published in 1897. The enjoyment comes from trying to puzzle out Nagel's behavior, to determine the method behind his apparent madness. The main shortcoming is a lack of narrative progress.

Kelly Link, White Cat Black Dog ***

Kelly Link has a sterling reputation as a writer of "strange, surreal short stories" that riff humorously on genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, and hard-boiled noir. The stories in White Cat, Black Dog are modern versions of fairy tales.

I have now read two Link collections and I find her stories to be... fine. The narratives hold my attention, the tone is mildly amusing, the conclusions are never what I expect. I'm entertained. They often include a sentence that jumps out as an important message, as fairy tales should:

He was discovering that being loved could be as productive of anxiety as the lack of it was. ("The White Cat's Divorce")

We all want things it would be better not to want... We pursue them anyway, don't we? ("Prince Hat Underground")

They are monsters, I think, because we do not understand why they do what they do. ("The White Road")

You cannot always be the person you thought you were, no matter how badly you want to be her. ("The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear") 

   However, they don't engage my imagination as I hoped they would.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite ** 1/2

Super-Infinite is a biography and appreciation of the Elizabethan-era poet John Donne. The title refers to Donne's typically expansive rhetoric, full of intensifiers and transformations.

The book is clearly pitched at readers like myself who know nothing about Donne beyond "no man is an island" and "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Rundell presents him as the ultimate love poet whose work blends the sacred and the profane, the soul and the body. During his lifetime, Donne was best known for the quality of his sermons as the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

Rundell regularly praises Donne's uniquely sensuous style, going so far as to make the "case that Donne was one of the finest writers in English; that he belongs up alongside Shakespeare." However, she doesn't  provide sufficient examples or close readings to back up this claim. The snippets of his work are too short to properly illustrate his supposedly distinctive style. At other times, Rundell emphasizes the density of his writing: "He is at times impossible to understand." Bottom line: the book didn't entice me to read Donne.

Nor does Donne the person "come off very magnificently." He wrote his love poetry to entertain his smart-ass friends, made a poor marriage, spent years obsequiously courting the favor of various patrons, and treated his children badly. His biography is more interesting for what it tells us about his times than about him. For instance, everyone in Donne's social class was a poet; poetry was the social media of the day. Donne didn't publish his poetry; our primary source for it is his friends' commonplace books, which were essentially personal scrapbooks of knowledge. Just as she did with Donne's work, Rundell passes over these topics too superficially.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity ****

With many writers, it's easy to see what makes their work captivating: intricate plotting, immersive world-building, fascinating characters, realistic dialogue, sophisticated themes. Other writers are magicians, in that it's not clear how they achieve their effects. The notable facets of Knausgaard's writing style are all traits usually considered negative. His descriptions are overloaded with quotidian minutiae, his characters are mundane, and it's not clear where his story is going. And yet, somehow, the book is consistently compelling. How does he do it?

The story and themes of The Wolves of Eternity emerge very slowly from the day-to-day activities of Syvert, a 20-year-old Norwegian trying to decide on a direction after returning home from his military service. When Syvert's Russian half-sister Alevtina takes over as narrator, she brings an apparently different set of themes. Meanwhile Alevtina's friend Vaslisa is writing a treatise about early Soviet-era efforts to achieve immortality. It's only in the last 100 pages of this 792-page book that the threads come together. The primary theme, I suggest, is the question of what we lose when someone dies and whether we can resurrect any of it.

At the level of plot, I appreciated parallel scenes wherein Alevtina and Syvert each contend with chatty fellow travelers. The scenes naturalistically captured the experience, illustrated the differences between the two characters, and foreshadowed their meeting in Moscow.

The last two chapters introduce a link to Knausgaard's previous book The Morning Star. I'll likely pick up that book soon, unless I'm deterred by Knausgaard's typical intimidating length and by the fact that two more related books have already been published in Norwegian.

C. J. Box, Dark Sky *** 1/2

Evelyn typically includes a well-reviewed popular thriller among the books she gets me for Christmas. Coincidentally, the hero of this year's selection, Joe Pickett, is a game warden just like Mike Bowditch, the hero of last year's selection Dead by Dawn. Joe is in Wyoming, Mike in Maine, but perhaps they'll meet someday at a game warden convention.

In this 21st Joe Pickett adventure, Joe takes a controversial tech billionaire elk hunting. Another set of hunters is out to kill the billionaire, and they end up tracking Joe and their prey through the Bighorn Mountains. Dark Sky is not a mystery: we learn who the bad guys are and what they're planning right up front. It's an survival thriller featuring realistic Western action. The fashionable contemporary villains, I noticed, were out-of-touch liberals (the social media mogul and, in the B story, an antifa activist).

Dark Sky reads like the screenplay for a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. (Actually, the cover says it's on Paramount+ :-) The prose is as straightforward as the characters' motivations and as lean as their inner thoughts. The story has A and B plotlines to keep us engaged with the peripheral characters. People are introduced with a minimum of fuss, and past events are obliquely referred to, all as appropriate for an episode in a later season.

Edward Frenkel, Love & Math ** 1/2

Edward Frenkel is a mathematician who wants to introduce us to the "hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance" that is mathematics. Sounds great! I am totally on board for this project. Unfortunately, Frenkel fails to engage me despite my receptivity to his message.

The problem is that Frenkel doesn't explain why we should care about the discoveries he presents. He excitedly reports that difficult problems in one area of mathematics, such as number theory, can be solved using methods from another area, such as harmonic analysis. But who cares that the study of automorphic functions can shed light on the counting of solutions of equations modulo primes? I understand the satisfaction that comes from making connections, but without knowing the significance of equations modulo primes or automorphic functions (or Riemann surfaces or braid groups or...) it feels like empty puzzle-solving rather than a view into the mind of God.

Frenkel reserves his most ardent enthusiasm for a research project called the Langlands Program, "considered by many as the Grand Unified Theory of mathematics. It's a fascinating theory that weaves a web of tantalizing connections between mathematical fields that at first glance seem to be light years apart: algebra, geometry, number theory, analysis, and quantum physics." In later chapters he finally attempts to bring the abstractions back down to Earth through connections to physics, but alas the "reality" of the quantum world is just as hard to imagine as multidimensional reduction. I got a better sense of the importance and beauty of symmetry from Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question, even though I won't claim to have understood Wilczek.

Love & Math includes sections of memoir, which I found more engaging because more relatable. Frenkel's reminiscences give a fine sense of the life of an apprentice mathematician and of growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Colleen Hoover, Verity **

Evelyn keeps me in touch with popular literary culture by including books by zeitgeist-y authors among those she buys me for Christmas. Colleen Hoover is a hugely successful, and hugely divisive, author who gained her fame via BookTok, the literary portion of TikTok. She's best known for romance novels targeted at a young adult audience, although Verity is a psychological thriller with romance overtones.

Verity has a solid genre setup. Our heroine Lowen is a writer hired to help finish a best-selling series of books by Verity Crawford, who is unable to finish them due to a suspicious car accident. Lowen travels to Verity's estate in Vermont, where she starts falling for Verity's husband and questioning the official narrative about what happened to Verity and her family. Is Verity really as incapacitated as she appears? Did her two children die in accidents or under more nefarious circumstances? Everything is in place for a moody mystery: the big house in the woods, the suspicious nurse, sleepwalking, the dark basement, the questionable motives.

Unfortunately, Hoover is a bad writer. She seems unable to wring suspense out of the creepiest premises, and her heroine wildly overreacts to everything. The story and characters become increasingly unbelievable, leading to the twist ending that makes no sense at all. I gather that the unusual character names (Lowen, Verity, Chastin, Crew) and the obsession with oral sex are Hoover trademarks.

The title character in Verity is treated as a villain, a psychopath, when she's revealed to have suffered from postpartum depression and jealousy over her husband's attachment to their children. This callous attitude exemplifies Hoover's blunt understanding of psychology, which is probably also the source of the controversy over domestic violence in her earlier books.

Ethan Gallogly, The Trail ***

My second book in a row about walking a long distance trail. The Salt Path was the South West Coast Path in England; The Trail is the John Muir Trail in California. Both books also feature a terminally ill hiker who (spoiler!) goes into remission.

The Trail misleadingly bills itself as a novel. Sure, it's fictional, but its clear intent is to capture the experience of hiking the John Muir Trail rather than to tell an evolving story. There are three pages about picking up their permit, just three paragraphs about waking up to a salivating bear. There's a bibliography and historical timeline at the end, with heaping helpings of Sierra history throughout.

The book consists of chapters named after the twenty-eight days of their hike, with an illustrated map and mileage summary for each one. The book is filled with mostly good advice about backcountry travel, although I question their wisdom in climbing Forester Pass in a storm. Their trip is filled with encounters that are no doubt based in fact but likely occurred over the author's thirty years of backpacking. 

Gallogly forms the book into a quest narrative, with the young narrator and his older, more experienced companion each having emotional issues to work out. Unfortunately, character development is the weakest and least convincing aspect of the story. Gil is a reluctant neophyte, Sal his master, the other hikers embody diverse stereotypical wayfarers. The characters don't develop over time, and their insights are trite and exactly the ones you'd expect from hiking literature.

I take it back. Dialogue is the weakest and least convincing part of the book. Young Gil is prone to questions like "Why was John Muir famous?" and "You said yesterday that Solomons had a barometer for measuring altitude, and I forgot to ask you how it worked." Former professor Syd readily supplies the exposition in well constructed paragraphs. Gil restates the main point in terms of kung fu movies, eventually earning him the trail name Po after the star of Kung Fu Panda.

I found the clunky prose embarrassing in the early going but eventually learned to roll with it.

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path ****

The Salt Path is marketed as the inspirational story of an English couple who "lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path"; a British Wild. I found it to be something quite different from that. Winn rarely rhapsodizes about life-affirming nature or the healing power of physical endurance. Their impulsive decision to walk the 630-mile path was driven by a desire to postpone thinking about the future, not to bring themselves face-to-face with it. A big part of their motivation seems to be that the trip provides an admirable gloss on their homelessness. They are "wild camping" rather then "rough sleeping."

The South West Coast Path travels along the rugged Cornish coast and through popular tourist destinations. Winn describes the natural beauty but gives more attention to their personal challenges: hiking through pain, finding campsites, the logistics of surviving on an extremely limited budget. I appreciated seeing the vacation spots from their perspective as penniless outsiders.

Almost every decision the Winns make seems understandable but ill-advised. The husband has a degenerative illness that causes constant pain; their sleeping bags are inadequate; they spend their food budget on fudge and ice cream; they're never sure when to expect the next deposit to their accounts. Many readers find their poor judgment exasperating (a representative example), and they are not wrong. For some reason, I enjoyed the un-self-conscious way that Winn describes their adventures. She didn't seem to question whether she was torturing her husband or whether pasties and wine gums were the best dietary options. I could imagine knowing these people.

Louise Kennedy, Trespasses ***

Trespasses tells the story of an affair between a young Catholic barmaid and an older Protestant barrister during the "The Troubles" in Belfast. Kennedy creates a convincing sense of the time and place, of the mental calculations necessary during everyday life. The narrative is generic and predictable, following the contours of any number of tragedies involving extramarital affairs and star-crossed lovers. 

R.F. Kuang, Babel *** 1/2

Babel advertises itself as a fantasy novel about the power inherent in the act of translation, but it's really an alternate history about the moral complexities of colonialism and revolt. The fantastical element is an energy generated when one inscribes each side of a silver bar with related words from multiple languages: the bar manifests the difference in meaning. It's an interesting idea, the physical manifestation of an incorporeal force like the daemons in His Dark Materials, but it's a MacGuffin. The story is an alternate version of events leading to the Opium Wars between Britain and China.

The full title is Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. The writing level and style are comparable to the Harry Potter books, with Oxford standing in for Hogwarts and Empire in place of Voldemort. Kuang does an excellent job of showing the radicalization of its main character Robin, and of communicating the tangled motivations of the colonizers and colonized. Our heroes' dilemmas have real weight. 

Reinhold Messner, My Life at the Limit ***

Reinhold Messner is as well known for his controversies as he is for his mountaineering exploits. He established the lightweight "alpine" style for high-altitude mountaineering and was the first person to summit all fourteen 8000-meter peaks –– many of them solo because he alienated all of his climbing partners.

Messner is listed as the author of My Life and the Limit, but it really a collection of interviews with the journalist Thomas Hüetlin. That's both good and bad. On the plus side, Hüetlin asks challenging questions that Messner would surely have glossed over in a traditional autobiography. On the down side, the format prevents Messner from elaborating on his worldview.

I've said before that the most interesting part of mountaineering stories is the psychology of the adventurer. My Life at the Limit assumes some familiarity with Messner's achievements and gives him the opportunity to explain his side of various controversies. Collectively, his answers paint a picture of a driven man who so relishes overcoming difficulties that he creates difficulties for himself. How is it possible that so many former partners tell lies about him?

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone ***

I loved the first two chapters of Go, Went, Gone. In the first chapter, our protagonist Richard ponders his retirement as a classics professor.

He doesn't know how long it'll take him to get used to having time. In any case, his head still works just the same as before. What's he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head? ... The thinking is what he is, and at the same time it's the machine that governs him. Even if he's all alone with his head now, he can't just stop thinking, obviously. ... All these objects surrounding him form a system and have meaning only as long as he makes his way among them with his habitual gestures –– and once he's gone, they'll drift apart and be lost.

The second chapter introduces the group of African refugees protesting in front of Berlin Town Hall and sees them from a variety of perspectives, including the Berliners in the health club across the square.

Behind the windows they would see people on bicycles and people running, bicycling and running toward the enormous windows hour after hour, as if trying to ride or run across to Town Hall as quickly as possible, to declare their solidarity with one or the other side...

These chapters quietly establish parallels between the plight of the refugees, Richard's retirement, and the disappearance of East Germany. 

This introduction and Erpenbeck's reputation gave me high hopes for the novel. After the strong beginning, though, the story doesn't have much new to say and becomes one of those stories where a rich white guy learns compassion from the trauma of black immigrants.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars ****

A City on Mars is an entertaining overview of the many ways in which we humans are not ready to settle space. Its subtitle is, "Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?"

With its focus on space settlement rather than space exploration, the book addresses questions about living somewhere other than Earth more than about getting there. For example, our knowledge about the physical effects of living in lower-gravity environments comes from short-term excursions into space by carefully screened astronauts at the peak of health. Would a human child born on Mars develop properly? We have never built a self-contained sustainable ecosystem on Earth much less in the hostile environments of the Moon or Mars. Do you know much much stuff and how many specialists we'd have to deliver there just to get started? Think about all of the infrastructure required to keep an Earth city running!

The Weinersmith's writing is snarky but enthusiastic, similar to the narrative voice of Mark Watney in The Martian. (Appropriately, they have an endorsement from Andy Weir on the cover: "Scientific, educational, and fun as hell.") The style changes a bit in the second half of the book, when they begin to cover the social, legal, and geopolitical ramifications of space cities. These topics are less cool and more controversial, and the tone of the writing is less overtly comic. I found these sections to be the most thought-provoking.

The key takeaway from A City on Mars is that we are a long way from being able to settle space, but need to start thinking through the issues realistically. Evangelists for space settlement are typically aspirational; in particular, they usually imagine a united harmonious human race that has transcended its truculent nature. The Weinersmiths politely suggest that we shouldn't count on it.

Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter *** 1/2

I love the premise of Time Shelter: A therapist creates a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating the past decade in which they feel most secure, and the idea of living in the past becomes increasingly popular for everyone. I appreciate how the plot makes literal the idea that we escape from the anxieties of the present through nostalgia for the past.

The first section of the book tells the stories of several patients to illustrate the importance of memory to our self-consciousness. For example, a man with dementia forms a strong bond with the secret policeman who monitored his activities in the Soviet era. Gospodinov emphasizes how scents and mundane details are most evocative of the past.

In the middle portion of the book, the countries of the European Union hold a referendum on which decade of the past they will return to. Various factions campaign for their favorite decades, using tactics that are familiar from political campaigning of all sorts. (The parties in any election are asking voters to decide based on their idealized version of the past.) In the end, nearly every country votes for the 1980s, not coincidentally the decade during which most voters were young.

I was disappointed that the final section didn't address the post-referendum world. The narrator briefly notes that people balk at giving up their smartphones and the complications of different countries being in different times, but the bulk of the conclusion deals with the narrator starting to lose his own memory.

Time Shelter has thought-provoking ideas about the links between the past and the present, but they felt like isolated insights that didn't develop over the course of the narrative.

Susan Casey, The Underworld ***

Susan Casey writes books about the ocean that combine science and adventure, with a pronounced tilt toward the latter. The Underworld deals with deep-sea exploration, rich men with impressive resumes who build submersibles and visit trenches seven miles below the surface of the waves.

Her books remind me of articles in Outside magazine*. The protagonists are scientific explorers, yes, but more importantly they are extreme sports enthusiasts mounting dangerous expeditions. Early on, as Casey is interviewing Terry Kirby, operations director for the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab and raconteur, she notes: 

Even his offhand comments had stories trailing behind them like party streamers. He'd throw out a phrase like "After we left Eel City..." and I'd cut in with "Wait a minute, what is Eel City?"

I have this same experience with Casey, but can't cut in with my questions. For example, just a few pages earlier, she describes a Pacific sleeper shark as having "an oddly gentle vibe, a body as brindled as old granite, and blind-white eyes thanks to a parasite that eats its corneas." Wait, what? A parasite that eats shark corneas? 

She regularly describes fascinating scientific phenomena –– say, the discovery of massive white pinnacles whose "chemistry made it a front-runner in the search for life's origins" or the nocturnal migration of a quadrillion creatures to shallower waters for feeding–– but quickly moves back to expedition logistics or the subjective feelings of the submersible pilot. 

It seemed to me that an experience so existentially big and phantasmagorically cool would change a person forever. ... I wondered what prompted Vescovo to put so much on the line... "Basically, it's the adventure."

I had a similar complaint about Casey's earlier book The Wave: the books whet my appetite for scientific insight while valorizing intrepid thrill-seekers.

The Underworld was published before the Titan submersible implosion. Casey wrote an article about Titan for Vanity Fair that may well become the afterward for the paperback edition.

* Look what I found in the acknowledgments! "It's been a pleasure to write for Outside magazine over the years."