Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne *****

I haven't read Montaigne's Essays but know him (and them) by reputation. This biography makes the case that Michel Eyquem de Montaigne invented the essay form as a means of capturing the flow of thought and experience. He felt that his extensive classical reading addressed how one ought to live but no how one actually lives. His goal inevitably lead him to write wandering, discursive pieces that sometimes got too personal for his readers. The cumulative impact of his 107 essays is a portrait of a specific individual in which many people see themselves.

According to Bakewell, Montaigne's most distinctive features are his amor fati, his enthusiastic embrace of our limitations, and his keen interest in other's perspectives. In other words, he takes the world as it presents itself rather than trying to mold it to fit his preconceived ideas.

How to Live describes the major events in Montaigne's life, provides a précis of the classical philosophical doctrines that informed his worldview, performs literary criticism about the Essays, and reviews how different periods have responded to his work. Bakewell's organizational conceit -- with chapters based on various answers to the question of "how to live" -- doesn't quite work, but it's hard to hold this failure against her since Montaigne's essays rarely stuck to their stated topic either.

I found Bakewell's version of Montaigne inspiring. I am particularly taken with the idea of retiring from public life to write formless disquisitions on whatever catches my fancy. It's similar to the inspiration I felt when I read Marcus Aurelius. 

I will, of course, need to track down an edition of Essays.

Paul Doiron, Dead by Dawn *** 1/2

Dead by Dawn is the twelfth (!) book in a thriller series featuring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, but the first I have read. The story has two parts to it, told in alternating chapters. First, there's a traditional mystery about who committed a murder; second, there's a survival story after Mike is ambushed, crashes his Jeep into the Androscoggin River, and has to elude pursuers. The second story is more compelling than the first; there's more action, it's different from most detective novels, and it offers loads of Maine local color.

This genre of book follows a fairly rigid formula, so that reading one is like watching an episode of, say, CSI or Law & Order. Episodes differ in their quality for sure, but you can't help but watch/read it through the lens of genre conventions; for example, those conventions strongly influence who you think the murderer is and how you interpret a character's eccentric behavior.

In my opinion, the quality of this type of book is determined largely by how many of the annoying clichés it avoids. Is the detective haunted by a previous case? Do characters pause in the middle of a chase to have a heartfelt conversation? Dead by Dawn avoids most of them, until the final needlessly complex showdown where the perpetrators explain their motives rather than just killing the detective.

I read Dead by Dawn while the news is filled with stories about generative AI. I'm sure the current version of an AI chatbot could write a pretty solid detective thriller.

Gary Indiana, Fire Season ***

Fire Season is a collection of essays by Gary Indiana, a writer and critic whose work appears in publications like the Village Voice. Evelyn gave it to me as a gift based on a recommendation from Fran Lebowitz. A majority of the essays are art criticism/reviews, but there are also a handful of social commentaries.

Indiana is a good writer with a direct and acerbic style, but he's not much of a critic. His reviews don't provide me with any new insight into the artist; they report the accepted wisdom in colorful language. None of the essays about unfamiliar artists enticed me into discovering their work.

Outside of the reviews, the essays tend to come in pairs. There are two reports from high-profile trials, of Dr Kevorkian and the cops who beat Rodney King, published before the verdicts were reached. Two of the essays, condescending hipster visits to Branson and EuroDisney, sound like attempts to replicate David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" -- and indeed I see that they were published around the same time. Two essays grapple with famous true-crime obsessions, the JFK assassination and the Black Dahlia murder, and what they tell us about our society.

One final complaint I have is that the book nowhere provides details about the provenance of these essays, just the year of publication. In one of Indiana's essays he talks about how one's experience of a film is largely determined by the circumstances in which you see it, and context plays the same role in reading essays.

Colum McCann, Apeirogon ****

Apeirogon is a literary novel based on true events, like In Cold Blood or Executioner's Song. The central characters are two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who become friends and "Combatants for Peace" after each loses a daughter in the perennial conflict. They travel around the world together telling their story.

McCann tells the story in 1001 fragments, some of which advance the story while others provide natural or historical context. Lots of images of birds and walls. The overall effect is to build a mood similar to a Terrence Malick film, with a surprisingly hopeful tone.

My favorite pieces were those that describe everyday life, with all of its barriers and checkpoints. They provide a great sense of place and how people adapt to their circumstances. The book doesn't provide any new arguments for ending the Occupation, it just paints a picture of how it distorts the lives of people living there.

The title refers to a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. The author's intent is clearly to suggest that we're all complicit in the conflict. Given this expansive viewpoint, it's disappointing that we hear so little about the two men's families. The few pages featuring Bassam's wife Salwa were among the most touching, and Rami's son Elik goes through a political transformation largely offscreen.

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."