Gerda Saunders, Memory's Last Breath ** 1/2

A bait and switch.

Several years ago (in 2013, according to the preface), I read a few online articles by Gerda Saunders, a 60-year-old academic who had been diagnosed with dementia. The articles presented a view of oncoming dementia from the inside by an articulate woman. I expected Memory's Last Breath to be an expansion of those articles, but it is not, despite its subtitle "Field Notes on My Dementia." Rather, it is Saunders' memoir interspersed with notes from her reading neuroscience literature. She relates incidents when her memory lapses caused a complication, but I didn't find anything new or insightful about the experience of living with dementia.

Saunders has lived a fairly ordinary life, except for the exoticism of growing up in South Africa. For the most part she tells the kinds of stories you'd hear from friends over coffee: the family farm, meeting her husband, emigrating to Salt Lake City,  diets she has tried over the years, how lovely her grandkids are. Her narrative voice occasionally reveals a quirk in her personality, such as this tidbit from when an attacker struck her mother in the head with an axe(!):

Some of us siblings dropped our lives and carpooled or flew across the seven hundred miles to [the town of] George. I was not among them -- and not because I was too busy. With three of my siblings already on their way, I decided to save the trip.

 

Elliot Reed, A Key to Treehouse Living ** 1/2

The cover of A Key to Treehouse Living advertises its "unorthodox" approach to storytelling (in the form of alphabetical glossary entries) and features quotes from respected writers such as Padgett Powell and Joy Williams. I expected a formal experiment along the lines of Dictionary of the Khazars, with a plot and narrator akin to Huckleberry Finn.

The alphabetical organization is a gimmick that doesn't add to the book. The story remains fundamentally linear, and at one point the narrator implies that he wrote it in order. The headings are not strictly alphabetical and often strain to fit the scheme; for example, the section about Salisbury Steak is headed "Loose Meats: Salisbury Steak" to get it into the proper position, and many sections have arbitrary-seeming headings such as "Careful Entry of Neglected Forts."

The narrator is supposed to be a self-educated teenager living largely on his own in the South. However, Reed fails to craft a distinctive voice or point of view for his protagonist. I regularly came across thoughts that didn't seem realistic for the character (such as the discussion of l'appel du vide filed under "Mental Daddy of the Self") and did not come across thoughts that revealed a unique perspective.

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet *** 1/2

I've been planning to read a biography of Martin Luther for a few years now, at least since John Elliot Gardiner's book about Bach described the Lutheran world. Martin Luther is an extremely consequential person in world history, and I had the sense that he changed society in ways that go far beyond religion. I came across Renegade and Prophet, appropriately enough, at the Book Loft of German Village in Columbus Ohio.

The foremost thing I learned from Renegade and Prophet is that Martin Luther was an unpleasant character. He was quick to anger, vicious and foul-mouthed toward opponents and erstwhile friends, and approached theological questions based on how they affected him. He frequently turned on his closest advisors when they disagreed with him, and he had derogatory nicknames for his enemies. I'm tempted to call him Trumpian but I pray to God that Trump will have nowhere near the impact.

The ideas that spurred the Reformation were quite widespread at the time, with many thinkers arguing against the practices that Luther condemned in his Ninety-Five Theses. Roper does a nice job of describing the society Luther grew up in and the intertwining of religion and politics in the sixteenth century. She also explains the theological niceties that separated Luther from other reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli.

I started to lose interest in second half of the book as Luther retreats into isolation and gets ever more cranky. During this period, other participants take the leading role in the Reformation (most notably Georg Spalatin and Philipp Melanchthon), but this is a biography of Luther not a history of the Reformation.

Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved ***

What I Loved is the story of a friendship between two couples. The four of them are artists and/or academics who live in the same SoHo building and have sons at about the same time. We learn about Bill's art, Violet's book about hysteria, Erica's article about Henry James, and also about the couples' summers in Vermont and the boys' sibling-like bond.

The first half of the book feels very much like a conversation you'd have with a friend, catching up on the latest news about them and their families without any expectation of a narrative arc. The second half finds the couples dealing with tragedies involving their sons. The narrator's son dies in an accident at summer camp; the other couple's son shows escalating symptoms of an anti-social personality.

My reaction to What I Loved is similar to my reaction to previous Hustvedt novels.  She creates full-bodied intellectual characters and a realistic milieu, but her stories lack narrative drive. As Leo says about Lucille's poetry in this book:

I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the [book] allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the [author's] experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars - both physical and mental (p 177).

For example, in one scene our narrator visits a psychologist to discuss Mark, the anti-social teenager:

I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. ... Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots in its branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

Leo's distraction adds a level of realism to this scene but also detracts from the main point. I felt the same way about the elaborate descriptions of Bill's projects and the subplots involving the main characters' parents and siblings.

Hustvedt's realism falters in the final section of the book when she introduces an outlandish character (Teddy Giles) and sends Leo on a melodramatic mission to help Mark escape from his clutches.

 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations ***

Meditations is a collection of brief thoughts from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius which collectively sketch his views on how to live a good and rewarding life. He subscribed to a mostly Stoic philosophy with an emphasis on recognizing that you as an individual are part of an interconnected logos and that you control the equanimity with which you accept everything that happens to you - up to and including death.

The main inspiration I get from Meditations is its form. The book consists of thoughts and reminders that the Roman emperor wrote for himself. It's repetitive and unstructured, with references to incidents meaningful only to him. He didn't set out to articulate a consistent philosophy but only to write notes to reinforce ideas that are easy to forget in the heat of living, such as the need to be patient with people who are "meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly" and the fact that "Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both." Meditations remains popular because of its practical guidance, but I only agree with maybe half of its wisdom (mostly because I don't share the Stoic belief in a rational universe). On the other hand, I am inspired to start such a collection of my own.

A Meditations-type entry of my own:

• Consider the difference between water and jade.

This enigmatic statement triggers an entire train of thought for me about the nature of thought and reality, but would be completely obscure for most anyone else - especially if the works of the philosopher Hilary Putnam were lost.

The funniest thing about Meditations is how often Marcus Aurelius admonishes himself for being annoyed by other people:

The gods live forever and yet they don't seem annoyed at having to put up with human beings and their behavior throughout eternity. And not only put up with but actually care for them. And you - on the verge of death - you still refuse to care for them, although you're one of them yourself. (7.70)

People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter if they say x about you, or think y? (8.44)

I laughed on the very first page where he thanks his drawing instructor for teaching him "not to be obsessed with quail-fighting." This important lesson comes between his mother's "reverence for the divine" and his mentor's "recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character."

Let me finish my notes with a few more meaningful aphorisms:

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? (10.29)

People ask, "Have you ever seen the gods you worship? How can you be sure they exist?" Answer:... I've never seen my soul either. And yet I revere it. (12.28)

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita ** 1/2

I've seen The Master and Margarita on various lists of the best Russian novels, overlooked classics, and books with passionate cult followings.  It's a "fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life... during the darkest days of Stalin's reign."

Books and movies can feel curiously strained when their comedy falls flat, and that was my experience with The Master and Margarita. The tone seemed off. We can question whether to lay some responsibility on the translation (from Pevear and Volokhonsky), but it can't shoulder the entire blame: the fantastical and satirical elements come from the story and structure not the language. In my view, the Jerusalem chapters are tangential and neither title character nor Woland/Satan has a clear motivation for their behavior - in short, I missed the point. Not even the smoothest prose is going to fix that.

P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City ****

While describing the gentrification of four cities (New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York), Moskowitz shifts the focus from the gentrifiers to the displaced communities, from hipsters and bike shops to diverse working class residents and declining public services. Gentrification always comes at the expense of existing communities, even when gentrifiers move it to largely abandoned areas such as downtown Detroit.

Moskowitz makes a convincing case that gentrification is an inevitable consequence of neoliberal governance and rising property values, and that the process has accelerated since the 1980s as city governments have had to depend increasingly on maximizing land values (and property tax revenue) due to a severe decline in federal and state support. The gentrification of cities is the latest incarnation of the same process that lead to the development of post-war suburbs.

The author writes with a tone of righteous anger, which is justified even though I would prefer a more measured assessment of the systemic issues. I wish he had more to offer in the way of solutions; after spending a couple of hundred pages convincing me that it's an inevitable consequence of our current methods of governing, he has just four pages of traditional liberal policy suggestions. Throughout the book, as Moskowitz laments the deleterious impact of investment in troubled areas, I kept wondering about alternatives: How do we revitalize poor communities without triggering gentrification?