Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance ***

Irene Solà is a Catalan poet and writer. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a novel that takes place near a village high in the Pyrenees, with chapters narrated by storm clouds, mushrooms, ghosts, villagers, and visitors. To the extent that it has a story, it concerns the family of a farmer named Domènec who is killed by lightning in the first chapter.

As advertised on the cover, Solà's prose "emits light, hope, and vitality" even in translation. It celebrates the richness of life even when it's recounting a hunting accident or a tragedy from the Spanish Civil War. The best chapters use this bounty to deepen the emotion of an incident, such as Domènec's tragic demise (told from the lightning's point of view), the grief of his widow Sió, or the peevishness of a hiker who finds the town closed for a funeral. However, many chapters feel aimless, with little insight coming from its unusual perspective. The literal poetry in the one chapter narrated by a poet is rather pedestrian (perhaps the fault of the translation?)

In short, Solà has impressive technique, but it's not in service of much depth. The chapters I mentioned above show what's possible when she combines style and substance.

Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism *** 1/2

The central argument of this book is that our ideas about economics and economic policy have long-standing roots in religious thinking. ... The influence of religious thinking bears on how Americans today, along with citizens of other Western countries, think about many of the most highly contested economic policies of our time.

This statement of purpose from the introduction misrepresents the book. The book spends far more time providing a detailed history of (American) Protestant thought on the subject of human agency and destiny than it does on economic theory. It addressed the supposed influence on Americans today only in the last chapter, 29 pages out of 415. Most critically, though, Friedman fails to make the case that religious thinking exerted a decisive influence on economic thinking.

To be sure, most educated people in Adam Smith's time (the mid-eighteenth century) were clergymen, and there was no separation or antagonism between religion and science, seen as a way to "learn about aspects of the divine by studying the world God had created." Debates about predestination and the depravity of man were raging at the same time as Smith's explanation of markets, but rather than direct influence I see two areas of thought reacting to the Enlightenment's law-governed, human-centered Weltanschauung.

Friedman frequently notes how both religious and economic thought in America were influenced by its unique circumstances (a surfeit of land, no pre-established institutions, expanded economic opportunities, confident optimism). Again, I interpret the history as parallel responses to prior conditions. Friedman sometimes seems to agree:

The changes in the conduct of religious life in America were therefore of a piece with the democratic consequences of the Revolution... In one area of the nation's life after another... the authority of established elites eroded while new groups lacking professional training and credentials gained sway.

Luckily, I was interested in the religious history for its own sake. It was interesting to note the correlation between social pessimism and religious fatalism. One doctrine I was pleased to learn about was how our differing circumstances are a blessing from God:

For what other reason, do you suppose, has he given to different countries such different soils and climates and productions, but that they should freely exchange with each other, and thus all be happier and more comfortable? (John McVickar 1837)

It is evidently the will of our Creator, that but few of these objects, every one of which is necessary to the happiness of every individual, should be produced except in particular districts (Francis Wayland 1837)

In passing, I also just noticed the relationship between the words "vice" and "vicious."

Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise ****

 Evening in Paradise offers "more stories" from the author of the surprise bestseller Manual for Cleaning Women. Like the earlier collection, Evening in Paradise features quiet stories with clear autobiographical elements. Most of them take place in the southwest or Latin America, with young women carving out a meaningful life with men (miners and musicians) who appear to give them little thought. They take a more personal approach to conventional short-story situations; for example, the story about a bullfight ("Sombra") is more about the people she meets than about the "elegance and brutality" of the sport.

I find Berlin's stories immersive and often moving. Her writing feels casual and rarely draws attention to itself, as if she were a neighbor telling you an anecdote whose well-defined structure isn't obvious until the end.

The book doesn't provide any indication of when the stories were first published. Some of the later stories (running from "The Wives" to "Rainy Day") feel more contrived and self-consciously literary. If we assume the stories are in roughly chronological order, I don't care for this period of Berlin's career.

There are things people just don't talk about. I don’t mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes or how it’s exciting to watch buildings burning.

George Packer, Our Man **** 1/2

Our Man is a biography of Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat most famous for brokering peace in the Balkans war of the 1990s, written by a journalist who knew him personally. The premise of the book is that Holbrooke's "ambition, idealism, and hubris" reflect the United States' own during the post-WWII era.

Packer uses literary devices to present Holbrooke as a complex character whose strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses and whose fatal flaw is a lack of self-awareness. Packer is not afraid to question the conventions of the typical biography; Chapter 1, for example, starts like this:

Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.

A little later:

I haven't told you about Holbrooke and women. There's a lot to say, for he was the kind of man who needed women and the need cracked him open, exposing tenderness and vulnerability and bad judgment. Since women were rarely his competitors, he allowed them to see him more clearly than men.

Packer includes excerpts written by Holbrooke himself, including a cringe-worthy rationalization for taking a vacation at a critical moment. Packer comes at familiar situations from less common perspectives, such as his descriptions of life in the colonial villas of Saigon during the Vietnam War: playing tennis and hosting dinner parties during the Tet Offensive. I liked the image of Slobodan Milošević heading over to the Timberland outlet during a break in Balkan War negotiations to buy his wife a pair of shoes. 

The book does a fantastic job of showing how power works at the highest levels of government: the tensions between political and military solutions to foreign policy issues, the competition between the State Department and the National Security Council, the role that personalities play in decisions that ultimately get made.  

It was interesting to read Our Man so soon after The Good American, which was also the biography of a long-time habitué of the American foreign service establishment written by a journalist who knew him personally. Holbrooke and Bob Gersony started their careers in Vietnam, and their contributions came near to intersecting in the Balkans. Holbrooke represents exactly the kind of policy wonk that Gersony (and his biographer Kaplan) despise. Kaplan appears in Our Man when President Clinton reads his book Balkan Ghosts.

As a writer, Packer is more suited to biography than Kaplan is. Kaplan's style is aggressively journalistic, just the facts and concise analysis. Kaplan has the advantage with respect to summarizing political situations; Packer's style is more literary, with more atmospheric descriptions and an emphasis on character. Both authors insert themselves into the story, with Packer handling it more deftly.

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This ***

I picked up No One is Talking About This because it appeared on several "Best of 2021" lists, described as a novel with a distinctive narrative voice. Lockwood's style reminded me a lot of Jenny Offill's, with this book being especially similar to Weather.

In the first half, Lockwood effectively portrays the modern experience of spending so much time browsing the internet. The random flow of subjects ("pictures of breakfast in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner..."); the flattening of moral distinctions ("Sometimes the subject as a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole"); the insincerity ("the generation spent most of its time making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis"); ultimate goal of posting things that are funny ("they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny"); the FOMO when you're offline for too long "(For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn't she? She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?").

Unfortunately, Lockwood also succeeds in capturing the fragmentation of the online experience. She regularly has cleverly worded insights, but they are disconnected and don't add up to anything deeper. 

In the second half, our heroine's sister gives birth to a baby with Proteus syndrome. Engaging with the miracle baby, who will never experience connection, drags her into the offline world, celebrating each little achievement and feeling untethered because, per the title, the internet can't tell her how to deal with the situation. This section reminded me of the Lorrie Moore story "People Like That are the Only People Here," which similarly revolves around a critically ill infant.

(What does it mean that I describe my experience of this book with references by other books? Surely it reflects on the Lockwood's theme of mediated vs unmediated experience?)

Robert Kaplan, The Good American ****

The Good American presents itself as a biography of Bob Gersony, a State Department consultant who consistently entered disaster zones to interview refugees and advise governments and NGOs about the truth on the ground. The book does indeed follow Gersony from Central America to Africa and Asia, but it's really a paean to the vanished breed of "realist" government officials who take action based on detailed local knowledge rather than political principle. Gersony encounters such people on every project he works on.

I learned a lot about the humanitarian crises of the past few decades. Kaplan is good at sketching the places and summarizing the political landscape. I appreciated reading the biography of a front-line guy dedicated to hearing from the people affected by government policies.

In Kaplan's telling, Gersony interviews hundreds of ordinary people, asking questions and synthesizing their answers without a hint of ideological bias, then gives extremely detailed briefings to the agencies that hire him. His recommendations emerge from the data. When Gersony successfully influences policy, it's because the officials are practical and data driven; when his suggestions are rejected or ignored, it's because the officials are letting ideological bias drive their decision making.

But of course Gersony has an ideological bias -- everyone does. The bias usually coincides with the bias of the people who hire him for an assignment, and it certainly coincides with Kaplan's. Later in his career, Gersony tackles some explicitly political situations, such as interviewing folks in the Green Zone in Iraq, and his recommendations do no naturally flow from the data he collects. Kaplan relegates most of the controversies about Gersony's reports to the footnotes.

I have on my shelf a biography of Richard Holbrooke, who crosses paths with Gersony in the Balkan conflict and who is exactly the sort of principled character that Kaplan compares unfavorably to practical realists like Gersony. It'll be interesting to hear the other side.

National Gallery of Art, Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited *****

During our recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., a painting in Gallery 31 grabbed my attention: The Fortress of Königstein by Bernardo Bellotto. 

It was the fortress itself that first caught my eye, with its rugged walls and crumbling facades, but I found intriguing elements wherever I looked. A mine shaft! Shepherd's cabins! Is that rain in the distance? I stood close enough to the nearly eight-foot wide painting that I had to turn my head to look at the view toward the bluffs mirroring the fortress on the right.

I wasn't familiar with the artist or the location. The sense of discovery contributed to this painting overshadowing the Vermeers and Sargents in the gallery, for this visit at least.

Back at our hotel, I learned from the Internet that the painting was part of a set of five and that all five had been exhibited together just last year at the National Gallery in London. An exhibition catalog was available... for $8.50!

Not only did the catalog allow me to see reproductions of the other four views in the series, it also outlined Bellotto's career in a way that captured the life of a court painter in the eighteen century. In fewer than 100 pages, with copious illustrations, the book manages to provide a fascinating explanation of Bellotto's working methods, an historical account of the fortress, and insight into the art market as it tracks the provenance of the paintings.

The painting I saw in Washington is more properly titled The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West, to differentiate it from the other two external views (from the north and south-west). I appreciate that my painting is the one that "locates the fortress in its wider context."