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 ****

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, not 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 an 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."