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.