Orhan Pamuk's latest novel is the best kind of erotic writing: suffused with loss and painfully light, and reminiscent of both Proust and Kundera in i...moreOrhan Pamuk's latest novel is the best kind of erotic writing: suffused with loss and painfully light, and reminiscent of both Proust and Kundera in its psychological acuity, in its chronicling of the desperation and anguish of longing (like those other two authors, Pamuk paints its stubbornness and perversity, but not its energy). Moreover, the novel's central conceit, of a narrator showing readers around a(n) (impossible?) museum (dedicated to the woman the narrator has loved and lost, and comprised of objects associated with her in the narrator's mind), and providing the very context that museum visitors are typically bereft of, perhaps does nothing so much as demonstrate the impossibility of ever fully accounting for any object, of completely exhausting its meaning and significance. And doubly so where the context is lust, love, the spectrum of the erotic -- each object is simply charged with too much meaning for one to do justice to it, and to the secret it testifies to...(less)
Mahfouz's three novels on ancient Egypt aren't especially distinguished in terms of theme or depth (the first was published in 1939; the last in 1944...moreMahfouz's three novels on ancient Egypt aren't especially distinguished in terms of theme or depth (the first was published in 1939; the last in 1944, when Mahfouz was not yet thirty-three). But they are marked out for genius by Mahfouz's ability to render a completely plausible Egypt for his reader, to the point where one doesn't feel one is reading historical novels, but novels set in the only time that is. These three are as close as the novel gets to the timeless art of the storyteller. (less)
An excerpt from Darkness at Noon was included in an English class anthology in middle school, and I had always meant to follow up on Rubashov's travai...moreAn excerpt from Darkness at Noon was included in an English class anthology in middle school, and I had always meant to follow up on Rubashov's travails in the face of the Communist purges of the late 1930s. A chance glimpse of this bright red cover at McNally Jackson nearly two decades later served as my madeleine, and who can resist nostalgia?
Rubashov, it turns out, was not the innocent I had imagined from my textbook excerpt, but instead, a lynchpin of the Revolution and the Communist Party, who had helped build the very system that in time would devour him (and who has himself sacrificed many an innocent on the altar of Revolution, and the redemption-by-history it promises). Yet his is no mere youthful revolutionary fervor turned sour: rather, Rubashov remains a true believer almost to the very end, and even as he faces conviction and death remains open to the possibility that "No. 1" (a thinly disguised Stalin) might even be right in liquidating the Rubashovs who represent the Revolution's founding generation.
Rubashov's uncritical acceptance of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, in particular the "objective" nature of the Marxist-Leninist view of history, makes Darkness at Noon seem more than a little dated, but the book's representation of a system where the notion that the ends justify the means has been taken to its logical (and monstrous) conclusion, where the individual is a mere speck against the backdrop of History (and the favorable verdict it promises), remains permanently relevant. As does the dramatic tension of Rubashov's various interrogation sequences. But the novel seems a bit abstract when it moves away from those sequences, as if Koestler were working out an intellectual puzzle rather than recounting the the fate of Rubashov (and in him, that of an age). Indeed, this reader found himself wondering whether the book might not have worked better as a play consisting only of the interrogation scenes: their distilled terror and intensity (by virtue of their representation of a looming inevitability that is simply a function of the absolute pitilessness of the system, and of the juxtaposition of the frail individual with that system) is ideally suited to the theatrical space. (less)
"After Tamerlane" is great, even if the author never fully justifies the title (and sets (too?) much store by the "accidental" emp...more"After Tamerlane" is great, even if the author never fully justifies the title (and sets (too?) much store by the "accidental" empire thesis). [But that doesn't mean Darwin is basically another Maya Jasanoff; indeed he seems to me to be implicitly critical of her thesis.:] Ultimately the book is more a sweeping "generalist" history of empires over the last half-millennium, that seeks to disturb and subvert the Euro-centric and teleological agendas/theses governing the "standard" accounts, rather than advance a very hard thesis in their stead (that is welcome indeed, but does raise questions about why the book is called "After Tamerlane")...(less)
Africa's World War, Gerard Prunier's fantastic exercise in a sort of double contextualization -- of both the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing trans-co...moreAfrica's World War, Gerard Prunier's fantastic exercise in a sort of double contextualization -- of both the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing trans-continental Congo conflict, involving at least half a dozen countries and yet more non-state militias and organizations -- is essential reading. Prunier analyzes the causes and course of the conflict in significant detail, without losing sight of his non-specialist audience, and all the while going beyond the glib explanations (of the "ancient ethnic hatreds" variety) much loved by the international community when it comes to many conflict situations, especially African ones. Prunier is rightly skeptical of the "New World Order" that emerged in the wake of the Berlin Wall's fall, not to mention the neo-colonial "old" order championed in Africa by the likes of France; at the same time, he eschews the facile (and condescending) anti-imperialism of many on the left, tending to deprive African political actors of agency. But perhaps most notably, Prunier seeks to correct the record when it comes to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, and the movement he leads (the Rwandan Patriotic Front ("RPF")), presenting a far more complicated and disturbing picture of the RPF's activities in the Great Lakes region than readers of Philip Gourevitch's one man pro-RPF lobby would be familiar with. This isn't simply an academic question for Prunier, as he strives to demonstrate how Rwanda's post-genocide government shrewdly (and cynically) exploited the Clinton Administration's guilt over its inaction in the face of the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Rwanda's (then Hutu-led) regime -- with disastrous consequences for the rest of the region, as Rwanda used the excuse of pursuing the genocidaires in the neighboring Congo (then called Zaire) to invade its gargantuan neighbor, fueling a conflict that has been estimated to have claimed four million lives over the last decade -- the deadliest conflict since World War II.
Africa's World War is a lot more nuanced than the above has probably made it seem. For instance, Prunier's debunking of the myth of the virtuous RPF does not lead him to ignore the very real security threat that the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the RPF's 1994 victory over the genocidaire regime, continued to pose to the new government; but he rightly questions the offensive conflation of the Hutu refugees in general with the genocidaires. Nor does he pull any punches when discussing the RPF's own gross violence and its own blatantly discriminatory attitude towards the Hutus. Finally, the international community's combination of moralistic posturing, cretinous imbecility, and hypocrisy comes in for its share of the flak too. This isn't a book with "good guys" (although this reader found himself wishing Prunier had spent more time fleshing out the character of Joseph Kabila, the seemingly callow successor (and son) of Laurent Kabila, whose prior career had been devoid of anything suggesting that he would turn out to be the shrewd and capable customer he has turned out to be in running a country that was in dire straits when his father took it over from the West's erstwhile Cold War ally (and kleptocrat supreme) Mobutu Sese Seko, and no less so when Mobutu's successor died), but one that highlights the shifting complexities of the region's politics. For instance, taking the "international" dimension of the Congolese wars as an example (one among many), the reader quickly learns that it is impossible to engage with the Congolese wars that brought down the Mobutu regime in 1996-97, and then continued to rage for years due to a variety of reasons, local, economic, and international, without engaging with the history of the Congo's neighbors, including (apart from Rwanda), Uganda (where Kagame and the RPF cut their teeth in the 1980s in that country's civil wars), Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and Angola. The complexity of the situation chronicled in the book can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially given Prunier's habit of frequently using acronyms that aren't collected in a key to the various organizations; an appendix at book's end to that effect would be immensely helpful, and one hopes that future editions spare a thought to this effect for the lay reader.
But no caviling can detract from the fact that Prunier's is the indispensable English-language book for understanding the Great Lakes wars of the last decade, combining empathy and engagement with cynicism regarding the motives of the players that borders on the ruthless. In the final analysis, and despite the book's title, Prunier sees his subject as more analogous to Europe's seventeenth century Thirty Years' War rather than to World War I, both in terms of the conflict's structure (with much of the momentum provided by private/princely interests and greed rather than reasons of state per se, and in terms of its wide-ranging impact. Prunier's thesis is that the conflict has gone a long way toward consigning the "old" African "system" -- a relic of the Cold War and half-hearted de-colonization -- to the dustbin of history, much as the Thirty Years' War paved the way for the Westphalian system that would dominate Europe in subsequent centuries. Especially in the Great Lakes region, the old world, born of imperialism, ethnic conflict, economic pressures, Cold War ripple effects, and the weakness of the nation-state (a weakness, nowhere greater than in the Congo, transforming just about every civil war into a conflict with trans-national ramifications, as everybody's enemy set up shop in the Congo, where the central government was too weak to keep anybody out). As to whether the new beast slouching towards Bethlehem is "better" or "worse" than the dying animal, there are no easy answers -- if the Thirty Years' War is any guide, the jury might remain out for a few centuries yet.(less)
**spoiler alert** The fictional autobiography of a SS officer devoted to his duty -- whatever that may be and however unpleasant the work, such as, um...more**spoiler alert** The fictional autobiography of a SS officer devoted to his duty -- whatever that may be and however unpleasant the work, such as, um, mass murder -- The Kindly Ones is not a great novel, principally because it isn't clear whether Littell subscribes to the notion of the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt put forward in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as opposed to the notion that the Nazi perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities were evil in some larger than life or monstrous way. This incoherence mars Littell's characterization of the novel's chief protagonist, and hence the book itself: Maximilien Aue is at one level a conscientious and capable Nazi functionary, and if he has a "flaw", it is that he is too honest and sincere, and is thus insensible to the various political currents around him, mastery of which is essential to advancing one's career in any bureaucracy. Aue is also wracked by a traumatic childhood love, namely his sister's; the two were separated by their mother and step-father after their illicit relationship was discovered. Moreover, Aue cannot, even as an adult, seem to forgive his mather for re-marrying after her husband (a World War I veteran drawn to German's burgeoning right wing political scene in the 1920s) goes missing. This Aue -- the vehicle of some rather obvious psychoanalytical cliches -- ends up drawn to Hitler as a sort of replacement father-figure, and winds up a true believer. When exploring the former, Littell's novel is a superb and compelling recreation of the Nazi SS structure, deepening one's appreciation of what Arendt might have meant by her now famous phrase; when exploring the latter, i.e. the erotic/psychological life of Aue, however, The Kindly Ones is just, well, banal, and simply does not justify its thousand-page length.
The above notwithstanding, The Kindly Ones is nevertheless one of the most important novels in years, and ought to be read, principally because of a stunningly plausible recreation of the atmosphere of "total war", and the mentality that enables and implements it. For that achievement, one might forgive the novel its many flaws, not least of them its flimsy and unconvincing evocation of Greek myth (the "kindly ones" of the book's title are the Furies) in a world where industrialized mass slaughter has drained the life from those myths, making them seem quaint. Littell's ability to position his imagination within the Nazi regime is remarkable, leading to a tour de force that is comprehensive and necessarily claustrophobic. Not to mention historically sound: much of the novel makes for a worthy companion-piece to Mark Mazower's indispensable Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rules Europe; both books take the reader deep within the monumental cruelty and imbecility of the Nazi regime, but also within the "normalcy" of the regime. Mazower's work is the more clear-sighted, but Littell's novel is more wounding, imprisoning the reader in a world that is unacceptable, and seemingly inescapable. When we finally do escape from it into Aue's inner life, we are disappointed: his pining for his lost love/sister, his parental baggage, are rather uninteresting, and a weak denouement to a narrative that has taken us from Germany to Ukraine, the Caucasus, Stalingrad, and back to Berlin, all by means of a vantage point that is alien to us. Littell undoubtedly has a point with the Aue family romance, but this reader was past caring by the point The Kindly Ones concludes by delving into it, the novel's anti-climax all the more feeble given the hundreds of pages of "total war" narrative that have preceded it.(less)
One might be forgiven for thinking that a book that is half-devoted to the archaeological expeditions and discoveries in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth...moreOne might be forgiven for thinking that a book that is half-devoted to the archaeological expeditions and discoveries in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century, and the subsequent attempts of linguists to crack the linguistic "code" that ultimately led to the recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, would be dry. One would be wrong: Damrosch writes with velocity and poise, yet does not sacrifice scholarly heft, weaving in issues of pertaining to colonialism, culture, race, and the arbitrariness of history, as he hurtles backward towards ancient Mesopotamia. Along the way, he attempts to set the record straight by shedding new light on the (unlikely, and remarkable) career of Iraqi archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam, so central to the Western re-discovery of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian pasts, and so often shunted to the side by his British colleagues, whether as an archaeologist or a diplomat; Damrosch's rescue of Rassam's work from oblivion seems to me as much an ethical act as one of scholarship.
But the book offers other pleasures too: Damrosch has a novelist's gift when it comes to characterization, and vividly sketches nineteenth century scholars like George Smith and Henry Rawlinson to life. But most rewarding of all is Damrosch's evocation of the ancient milieu of the epic, and his account of the functionings of the Assyrian court and bureaucrac; not to mention his engagement with the poem itself, and with its abiding relevance. It is man's fate to die, the poem seems to tell us, and even at such great remove, the uncompromising clarity of that insight unsettles.
(less)
A deeply moving and insightful account of one of the most "liminal" and persecuted groups of people in the world, the "Gypsies" or...moreA deeply moving and insightful account of one of the most "liminal" and persecuted groups of people in the world, the "Gypsies" or "Roma" (though neither term is apparently in wide currency among the people themselves). Few communities can have been so unassimilable, so resistant to modernity -- yet to frame things in that way suggests that the Roma constitute a "problem" (that's certainly how any number of nation states, old and new, have regarded them; and it isn't surprising, given that the Roma's "marginal" status, and the spectre of unstable borders their traditionally nomadic lifestyle suggests, combined with their cultural difference vis-a-vis "Europe", all make the group transgressive of the mindset for which nation-states are the political horizon par excellence) -- Fonseca, certainly addresses that "problem"; but equally valuable is her attempt to present people as they are (as opposed to as symbols pointing elsewhere)...(less)
Loading...
