Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium ** 1/2

The Empusium feels like a rough draft from the Nobel laureate Tokarczuk. The beginning and the end are fully fleshed out, but the vast middle is half-baked. There are many scenes of aimless conversation between ill-defined characters. A couple of times, a character speaks who I didn't realize was even in the room.

The setting is essentially the sanitarium from The Magic Mountain transported to the locale from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The book shares themes with both of these predecessors. The most obvious leitmotif is misogyny and a woman's place in the world: Tokarczuk includes an author's note revealing that the character's ideas are all paraphrases of esteemed writers ranging from St Augustine to William Burroughs.

Each person possessed a point of least resistance, a weakest point, this was the famous Achilles' heel, and it was like the law of the pearl: just as in a mollusk the grain of sand that chafes is neutralized by mother-of-pearl...so all the developmental lines of our psyche will arrange themselves around this weakest spot.... We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted. 

Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World ***

Herald of a Restless World is a biography of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. It attempts to explain his key ideas, make sense of his immense popular fame in the years before World War I, and account for his disappearance from our cultural memory.

Bergson's first fundamental insight was the notion of durée, the subjective experience of time. Bergson noted that physical laws treat time as something that can be cut up into measurable units, whereas we experience time as a continuous flow.

What would happen, Bergson asked, if, through some magic spell, the earth completed a rotation on its own axis every twelve hours instead of every twenty-four? What it every other natural phenomenon accelerated proportionally? To the elaborate equations the astrophysicist devises to predict celestial phenomena this major shirt in tempo would make no difference at all.

Bergson builds on the concept of durée to examine mind/body dualism and free will.

Bergson had a compelling style in both his writing and his speaking, rich with metaphor, and his lectures were open to the public. His ideas about the limits of scientific thought spoke to a populace that was feeling uneasy about the positivism of the times.

The same forces that made Bergson so popular in the early 20th century have ensured his lack of subsequent influence. He gave public lectures so he never developed the types of followers he would have as a professor. His views about the shortcomings of rationality got him labeled as anti-intellectual. His large female audience made people take him less seriously. During and after WWI, Bergson stopped lecturing and became part of the establishment, making him less attractive to the modernist movements that previously claimed him as inspiration.

I often found Herald of a Restless World to be superficial. I didn't feel like I got a good understanding of Bergson's philosophy nor a good sense of his reputedly electric speaking style. Notable events, such as Bergson's debate with Einstein and his role in getting the United States involved in WWI, are covered somewhat cursorily. We don't learn much about his lifelong health issues or his family. The author clearly conveys how popular Bergson was in his prime but can't really answer the critics who claim that most of his audience didn't understand his ideas. Nor does she provide compelling counterarguments against critics of his philosophy like Bertrand Russell or Albert Einstein.

Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists ****

My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture... She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class.

Asya and Manu are a young couple living in a foreign city, imagining possible futures for themselves as they search for an apartment to buy. They want to fit in with their "native" friends, stay connected with their families, and become a "tribe of our own." While in university, they would spend the day in town watching other people and envisioning themselves living similar lives. "We were only playing out our adulthood rather than committing to them." Do they need to accomplish something to make their lives meaningful, or are the everyday routines enough?

I found Asya's anthropological insights subtle and thought-provoking. I had to read slowly so as not to miss the point of the largely mundane events.

My experience reading The Anthropologists reminded me of my experience with two other books: Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation. They are all coming-of-age stories narrated by women with offbeat sensibilities. The (lack of) plot is beside the point. The Anthropologists and Department of Speculation also share an epigrammatic style.

Paul Richardson, Myths of Geography ** 1/2

The title, cover map, and introduction make this book something of a Trojan Horse. They conspire to suggest that Richardson will discuss "imagined geographies: understandings of the world...that exist in each of our minds...[and] inform how we both perceive and live in the world." However, only one and a half of Richardson's eight myths relate to physical geography: the myth of seven continents and the myth of Russia's quest for a warm-weather port. Most of the book is about the shortcomings of nationalism and capitalism when it comes to addressing our human needs.

Richardson is a professor of "human geography," and I suppose that our system of national sovereignty counts as a myth of human geography. I agreed with most of Richardson's (liberal) views, but I didn't buy a book called Myths of Geography to hear arguments about the need for universal action to deal with climate change or replacing economic metrics with other means of measuring well-being. 

James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store *** 1/2

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store has all of the elements it needs to be the masterpiece that many reviewers claim it is. In particular, it builds a detailed community from the diverse residents of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. However, the various story threads feel disjointed, resulting in an unsatisfying resolution to the mystery it introduces in the prologue. Spoiler alert: the skeleton ended up in the well for reasons unrelated to the main events of the book.

To me, the strongest aspect of the book was its sociological portrait of a small town in the 1930s, with its immigrants, Jews, Blacks, and white town elders living side-by-side and working to balance their concerns. McBride stacks the deck against the town elders by presenting their worldviews with less subtlety and less ethical value. ("But that's how it was!," you might exclaim. Maybe so, but I would still prefer less mustache twirling.)

Many of the side characters fail to transcend their role in the plot, with Doc Roberts and "Son of Man" especially being cardboard villains. The institution to which they send the deaf boy is cartoonishly evil: I think the story would have been stronger if the authorities actually felt they were doing their best to educate the boy.

Guy Maddin, Interviews (edited by D.K. Holm) ****

The ticket-holder's line for Sound of Falling snaked right past the store at the TIFF Lightbox. How could I not browse its impressive shelf of cinematic monographs? And how could I pass up the book about a Canadian director?

Guy Maddin has a distinctive film-making style, with comical and avant-garde narratives filmed using techniques from the silent era. He strikes me as a thoughtful and creative artist, which is why I was interested in hearing what he had to say in interviews. I was not disappointed: he makes numerous insightful comments about his work and about art in general.

So few people understand what melodrama is. It's not real life exaggerated. Really good melodrama is the truth uninhibited. ... These are not exaggerated feelings, they are repressed feelings liberated.

He is Canadian, so he also has opinions about hockey: 

I was always struck by early NHL photographs by how noir-looking they were... I guess it's because early sports photography was always done in those darkened arenas with the flashbulb and only the athletes in the immediate foreground were illuminated and everyone else seemed to disappear in thickest night, and so you got the idea that hockey was played more in a back alley, so it felt really lurid and frightening... It seemed like players could disappear into the murk and come back out with the puck in some surprising place and almost mug another player.

I feel as if I got a great sense of Maddin's artistic sensibility, of his career up through My Winnipeg in 2008, and of the persona he projects. Like his films, he is an entertaining mixture of the literate and the silly, the amateurish and the masterful.

My favorite Maddin film, by the way, is The Saddest Music in the World.