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 and 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."

Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea *** 1/2

By the Sea is an earlier novel from 2021 Nobel laureate Gurnah, who most recent Afterlives I read a couple of months ago. It tells the story of two immigrants from Zanzibar who meet in a British seaside town and reluctantly discuss their shared history.

Gurnah's talent is telling stories about ordinary decent people living their lives, with major world events happening in the background around them. The first couple of chapters in By the Sea effectively convey the lonely sense of being a refugee by focusing on mundane details, with information about the British asylum system and Islamic rules of inheritance supporting Saleh's story rather than vice versa; Gurnah wants to tell the characters' story, not make a point.

I was engaged with the story throughout, but I felt the ending was too abrupt. The two main characters each know part of their shared story, but only Saleh gets to tell his full narrative, and the book ends before clearly showing us Latif's reaction.