Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth ****

Scattered All Over the Earth is a perfect title for this novel. Its characters converge on Scandinavia from around the world (Japan, Greenland, India); each chapter has a different narrator; elements of Japanese culture insinuate themselves into European culture (sushi, anime, umami); our band of heroes hops around Europe (Trier, Oslo, Arles); the plot spirals out of control.

The first half of the novel is filled with engaging thoughts about cultural identity, which makes up for the lack of story and for the missed opportunity to give each narrator a distinctive narrative voice.

• There is a TV panel discussion with people who grew up in countries/cultures that no longer exist
• Knut thinks that sushi is a Finnish dish
• Traditional Greenland culture involves fishing, but Nanook's parents work for an American call center
• Haruki teaches folk tales she remembers from her childhood, but has to translate them to use concepts that Danish kids will recognize
• Akash hosts an annual get-together for Marathi-speaking students in Germany
• The cultural center in Susanoo's home prefecture promotes its status as the Nuclear Power Plant Ginza

I spent the early chapters gnawing on questions about how our cultures shape our worldviews and what the consequences are of the gradual change and diffusion of that culture. Once all of the major characters are introduced, however, the pace of insights wanes, exposing the low stakes of the plot.

Tawada reportedly intends Scattered All Over the Earth as the first book in a trilogy. I'm not sure whether I'll follow up with the next two books.

Andrew Sean Greer, Less ***

Less sounds like a book I would love: a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an aging white guy traveling the world in an effort to forestall regrets. The fact that Greer has already published a sequel (Less is Lost) confirms that he intends Arthur Less to be a continuing character like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Ford's Frank Bascombe.

The fundamental shortcoming of Less is that Greer fails to make Arthur Less a distinctive or compelling character. He is generic and I was unable to invest in his adventures. The same is true of Arthur's round-the-world travels –– the descriptions of Mexico and Europe and India and Japan are clichéd and don't build toward any epiphany. It's what Evelyn would call a grandpa story: this happened, then that happened, and so what.

What did the Pulitzer folks see that I did not?

Greg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (eds), Neuroexistentialism ***

 Neuroexistentialism: meaning, morals, & purpose in the age of neuroscience is a collection of academic papers about "third-wave existentialism."

Existentialisms are responses to recognizable diminishments in the self-image of persons caused by social or political rearrangements or ruptures ... What we call neuroexistentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of persons... [the] clash between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons.

The classic (second-wave) existentialism of Sartre and Camus emphasized the role of human will and rationality in establishing a life's meaning and purpose. Modern neuroscience raises doubts about the existence of an integrated self and about how rational our decision-making is. How can a person heroically imbue their life with meaning if there is no self and our choices are all predetermined by our brain chemistry and past experience?

I am most interested in the challenge of finding meaning in a purposeless universe, but most of the papers in this collection address the question of justifying moral judgments (and criminal justice) in a society where individuals possibly lack responsibility for their (purely determined) actions. In other words, a lot of ink is spilled on the question of whether we have free will. The last paper, by Stephen J. Morse, correctly notes that neuroscience "raises no new challenges in these domains" because we've been imagining determinism since at least Laplace's demon in 1814.

Many of the contributors drifted away from the question of how we might retain free will into laments about the dire social consequences if hard incompatibilists are correct. The two most notable exceptions were the papers from well-known authors of popular science books: 

• Brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga makes an analogy between brain/mind and hardware/software: "Software depends on the hardware to work, but is also in some sense more fundamental in that it is what delivers function. So what causes what? Nothing is mysterious here, but using the language of 'cause' seems to muddle it."
  
  
• Physicist Sean Carroll looks to quantum mechanics, not as the locus for the indeterminacy necessary for free will to sneak in (in fact, he explicitly rejects this approach) but as an example of a purely physical predictive theory whose contributions to the "emergent" layers of reality above it are not understood at all.

Both of these contributors note that we just don't know how entirely materialist elements really work together to construct reality, and both offer ways to think about the "really hard problem."

Susanna Kaysen, Far Afield *****

Anthropology student Jonathan Brand spends a year living in the Faroe Islands. He is theoretically doing fieldwork, but has a hard time accomplishing much research. He struggles to fit in with the culture while worrying about how others, both locals and his professors in Cambridge, will judge him.

Far Afield is one of my all-time favorite books. It provides a vivid portrait of the remote islands with a perfect balance between realism and culture-clash satire. I first read it in the early 1990s when I was not far removed from my own graduate school experience; I empathized with Jonathan's unstable mix of hubris and self-doubt. Ultimately the main theme of the book is how we each balance our desire to belong to a community with our need to explore beyond that community.

This book is a clear example of how my ratings and reviews say more about me than about the book itself. Objectively, not much happens in Far Afield, and Jonathan's insecurity would surely grate on the nerves of many readers (such as my wife).

Susanna Kaysen is best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, published a few years after Far Afield. She has published very few books, making Far Afield something of a Confederacy of Dunces situation, a literary one-hit wonder.

Hisham Matar, The Return *** 1/2

The Return is a memoir from the writer and Libyan exile Hisham Matar about his efforts to discover the fate of his father, who was kidnapped and jailed by the Qaddafi regime in 1990 when Hisham was a nineteen-year-old university student. He returns to Libya in the aftermath of Qaddafi's fall to visit his extended family.

Matar's goal is to capture an emotion, a mood, so the story is told impressionistically through linked incidents from the present day, from Matar's childhood, and various points during adulthood as he advocates for international assistance in stopping the human rights abuses in Libya.

Several of the vignettes are powerful and effectively capture a complex feeling; I especially remember the time when Hisham befriended another Libyan student at a boarding school in England but had to do so under an assumed name, and (at the other end of the timeline) when he visited a memorial to the victims of the 1996 prison massacre where his father most likely died.

I would expect The Return to resonate strongly with exiles and those with families caught up in authoritarian oppression. It's a story about losing the country of your childhood as much as it is about growing up with uncertainty about your father's fate. As a person who has suffered neither of these misfortunes, I understand Matar's insights intellectually but don't really feel them.

Landon Beach, The Sail ***

The Sail is the epitome of a three-star genre book: a moderately engaging story comprised of reasonably well executed thriller clichés.

Robin Morris and his teenage son plan to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a thirty-six-foot sailboat, diving to famous shipwrecks along the way. They stumble upon sunken treasure and run afoul of the criminals who have been searching for it for decades. 

Were I Mr Beach's editor, I would recommend slimming down the setup. The sailing trip doesn't launch until page 100, they discover the jewels on page 173, and the bad guys show up on page 185 (of 223). The thriller portion consists of a single action sequence that occupies about as many pages as Robin's journal entries explaining life lessons to his son. The author wants to make us care about his characters and provide a sense of realism, but he uses too much mundane detail to do so.

I would also recommend a more straightforward villain. All the story requires is a ruthless thief or drug dealer, but we get a full-on Bond villain with a secret lair who kidnaps women and drugs them into being his mistresses. For the sake of the story I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about Robin's remarkable combat skills, but the hidden cave door and forced sexual initiations are too ridiculous.

Spoiler alert! Despite the setup I described above, the bad guys actually attack Robin and his son to recapture one of the kidnapped women. The jewels are a MacGuffin and turn out to be located within swimming distance of the villain's lair. 

I'll stop here before I talk myself into lowering its rating.

Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence ***

You couldn't formulate a more enticing title!

As our awareness has progressed alongside everything else, we have found ourselves outgrowing more comfortable, shortsighted narratives of life and moving into a realm in which there appears to be no clear narrative or reason at all, but rather, an absurdity and meaningless underpinning everything. This is perhaps one of, if not the greatest contemporary issue of mankind -- finding motivation and a sense of meaning in a period of time in which existence has revealed itself to be, or at least appears to be, meaningless.

Pantano's recommended approach is to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciate even your failings for what they reveal about yourself and the world. He constructs his argument by summarizing the thoughts of various philosophers and writers, mostly those of a pessimistic temperament (Seneca, Schopenhauer, Cioran, Sartre). Of course he also includes the schools of thought loved by writers of more conventional self-help books: Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism.

I generally agree with Pantano's suggested approach to life, and I like his attempt to ground it in the philosophical tradition. I applaud his choice of thinkers, but found most of his summaries too superficial and felt like he always chose the wrong quotes. I also thought he could use an editor; for example, I trip over several phrases in the paragraph quoted above and think it includes too many repeated words.