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PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2022
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JamesFoster 2022 Page count
June 2655. Honoré de Balzac, L'auberge rouge [1831] 49 pages [in French]
56. Honoré de Balzac, Jésus-Christ en Flandre [1831] 15 pages [in French]
My last two readings in the Comédie humaine, for the time being, although I am planning to read a couple of other independent works to finish out my Balzac project. Both are short early works which he placed in the Études philosophiques.
L'auberge rouge is a story of a man who judges another man he considers, on very little evidence, to be guilty of a murder many years in the past. Jésus-Christ en Flandre is a legend about an appearance of Christ on a small boat during a storm. Neither are Balzac's best work.
June 2757. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo [1955] 118 pages [in Spanish]
Next month's book for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Pedro Páramo is one of the most important modern Mexican novels and was a major influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and magical realism. It is a very difficult novel to understand even at the literal level of events. The novel begins, "Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivia mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo." ("I came to Comala because they told me that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.") The narrator, we learn later, is named Juan Preciado. (Midway through the novel he is apparently replaced by another narrator, Dorothea; in fact the ostensible narrators are not really that important given that much of what happens is presented in short independent episodes without any obvious connection to the narrators.) His mother Dolores was the wife of Pedro Páramo, who married her because his recently deceased father owed her family a large debt; when she realized that he didn't really want her, she hated him and left him to live with her sister in another town. On her deathbed, she told Juan to seek his father and try to get what he owed her.
On the route to Comala, Juan meets a man named Abundio, who tells him that Pedro Páramo has died some time before. The town seems to Juan like a ghost town, and we find that it is, in more ways than one. Abundio advises him to seek out and stay with a woman named Eduviges Dyada, which he does for the first night. Eduviges tells him that his mother, a close friend of hers from childhood, has told her he was coming and the day he would arrive; he thinks she is crazy. She also tells him that Abundio has died long ago. After he falls asleep, we get a flashback which we assume at first is his own memories of childhood, but are actually the childhood memories of the father, Pedro, flying kites with a girl named Susanna; we find out later how important she was to the events which make up the novel. Throughout the book, we are led to think that we are being given memories of one character only to find that they are another character's.
He is woken up by cries that seem to come from nearby, but he sees no one around; the next morning another character (Damiana Cisneros) comes and gets him, telling him that Eduviges had committed suicide many years before and wondering how he got into the locked house. Later this character disappears when he thinks to ask her if she is alive or dead. This is all in the first few pages.
The book is told entirely in short episodes, stories told by the characters and memories completely out of chronological order and seemingly without connection. There are references to the Mexican Revolution and to the Cristero war. I will not try to summarize the plot, not just to avoid spoilers but because it is so intricate that I would have to basically retell the entire book. We eventually with a great deal of effort can piece together what happened and the life of Pedro Páramo. And then we have to interpret what it all means . . .
June 2958. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion [1976] 273 pages
This is a history of ancient Mesopotamian religious beliefs and mythology, not religious practice; there is virtually nothing about the rites and rituals, priesthoods or temples. Although Jacobsen constantly quotes primary texts, which are interesting for the facts of what the Mesopotamians explicitly said they believed, his interpretations of the origins and development of the underlying ideas is very speculative; especially since the surviving texts are nearly all much later than the periods he is discussing. He begins with the concept of the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (published in 1917), that religion is based on an experience of a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, a sense of the numinous, of an unintelligible power beyond man, and that religious ideas, myths, and so forth are metaphors for this experience of the numinous. This more or less put me at a distance, as I have never been very impressed with the theories of Otto (or his better-known student, Mircea Eliade, not mentioned here.)
Jacobsen identifies three complexes of metaphor, the gods as providers (fourth millennium and earlier), the gods as rulers (third millennium), and the personal god as parent (second millennium). He considers the first millennium to be a time of degeneration and relegates it to a brief Epilogue.
He describes the original metaphor of the gods as being in a way identical with the internal powers of the vegetation, animal life and so forth -- some might say, in effect, as a development from pre-animism and animism, although he doesn't put it in those terms and derives it directly from an encounter with the numinous in the vegetation and so forth -- without any real personalities or activity beyond what is natural to those embodiments. He describes this as "intransitive", which seems like a strange use of the word. He suggests that the gods were originally conceived in inanimate or at least non-anthropomorphic shapes, which ultimately came to be considered as their "emblems." His example for this stage is the myth-complex of Dumuzi and Inanna, which he develops in much detail. He describes Inanna as having been the personification of the communal storehouse, and Dumuzi originally as the power of the date palm. The marriage of Dumuzi with Inanna represents the bringing of the date harvest into the storehouse. A bit later, as the villages of the date producers, farmers and herders joined together to form the first cities, their cults were merged so that Dumuzi became a more general fertility figure, representing other crops and dairy products as well as dates; this explains the myth of the death of Dumuzi (he "dies" when the crops are harvested) and the descent of Inanna (she goes into the underworld as the products in the storehouse are used up.) He uses these ideas to interpret the texts and it was quite interesting.
The second metaphor of the gods as rulers and protectors is of course more familiar, and he attributes it to the rise of the empires after Sargon. After a short summary, he then gives brief descriptions of all the major deities and their myths. The third metaphor, which he assigns to the second millennium, is that of personal gods who care for individuals as strict but loving parents. He considers this the "highest achievement" of Mesopotamian religion, undoubtedly because it is most similar to Christianity although he never says that. He follows this up with interpretations of the Enuma elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh which were very interesting; the book would be worth reading just for these two chapters alone. He finishes up with an epilogue about the first millennium, where in response to the constant warfare with the Arameans, the Assyrians, and the eastern tribes as well as among the cities themselves the ruler-aspect of the gods ceases to be that of protectors and becomes one of arbitrariness and hostility, and the religion degenerates into superstition.
July 159. Jean Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia [1998, Eng. tr. 2001] 246 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Having just read Thorkild Jacobsen's The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion from 1976, I decided to read this more recent book on the same subject. I'm not sure how much more recent it is, because although it was "thoroughly rewritten" in 1998, it is actually based on Bottero's earlier book on the subject written in 1948. Neither book references the other; Jacobsen's in not in the rather meager bibliography of this book, and his book has no bibliography at all.
Although both books begin with Rudolf Otto's idea of the "numinous experience" at the beginning of religion, they come to very different conclusions, and in fact Bottero often seems to be directly contradicting Jacobsen. For example, where Jacobsen's first "metaphor" is non-anthropomorphic personifications, which later became the "emblems" of the anthropomorphic gods, Bottero says repeatedly that Mesopotamian religion was anthropomorphic from the beginning and never conceived of the gods in any other way, and that we have no way to understand why various gods were associated with certain emblems; where Jacobsen's second "metaphor" of the gods as rulers originated later, Bottero says that the gods were always considered as rulers although they were only later arranged in a hierarchy.
Most importantly, where Jacobsen considers his third "metaphor" of the gods as parents to be the highest achievement of Mesopotamian religion, Bottero explicitly denies that the Mesopotamians ever did, or ever could have, conceived of a personal, loving relationship to the gods, who were too far above and too indifferent to man to inspire anything but fear and awe.
The one respect in which Bottero seems more recent is in his emphasis on the limitations of our knowledge and the fact that he needs to defend the project of writing about the subject, undoubtedly a response to post-modern criticisms of the enterprise of writing history at all.
The book has seven chapters, but the first four are short preliminaries, on the history of the region, the nature of the sources, and the idea of numinous experience, and the last is a brief and superficial account of survivals and influence, mainly on the development of Mesopotamian astrology into astral religion in the Hellenistic age (He argues that in Mesopotamia astrology was in the context of other forms of divination, and represented signs or omens that the gods used to indicate their decisions, which could be appealed or averted through "exorcism", rather than the later fatalism in which the stars were the cause or at any rate an unchangeable sign of what would necessarily happen.) The bulk of the book, more than half, is composed of chapters five and six, "Religious Representation" and "Religious Behavior". The fifth chapter deals with the same subject as Jacobsen's book, although with different emphases; the sixth chapter deals with the things Jacobsen didn't include, that is the actual religious cult in the temples and the practice of divination and exorcism.
July 460. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.3 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
The third supplemental volume, this contains the additional tales which are in the Galland translation but not found in the MSS used by Burton in the text. The tales of "al-Zaynab" and "Aladdin" he located in Arabic MSS, the others in various sources. Among other tales this includes "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves". There is also a long appendix by Clouson giving the translations or paraphrases of various analogues to the included tales. As with the other Project Gutenberg e-book volumes of Burton (very atypical of PG) it was difficult to read because of typos in almost every line, despite claiming to have eight different proofreaders.
July 661. Boubacar Boris Diop, Le Cavalier et son ombre [1997] 240 pages [Kindle] [in French]
Diop's fourth novel, like the first and second (I haven't read the third) has a very experimental style with a frame and an included story. The book is divided into three "days". It opens with the narrator, Lat-Sukabé, just having arrived in a town opposite the village of Bilenty, where his girlfriend Khadidja has been living for eight years since she "disappeared". She has sent him a letter telling him to come "before it is too late." He has arranged with "le Passeur" to carry him across the river in a pirogue, but there is some mystery on the part of this businessman, who appears not to want to take him across. During the first day, he remembers his life with Khadidja in Nimzatt, a poor quarter of the capital, and the part-time job she got as a story-teller to a mysterious person she never actually sees. Khadidja herself is an enigmatic personality with a strong imagination; we learn that she has had mental health issues in the past and has been confined in an asylum for the insane.
In the second day, which takes up almost the entire novel, he recounts her last story, the Cavalier and his shadow, which begins as a mythical tale of a knight who rescues a princess from a lake monster thousands of years ago but later incorporates the genocide in Rwanda and other events in recent African history.
On the third day, he has a conversation with le Passeur and embarks for the other side, and we are left as we were with the story of Queen Johanna in Les tambours de la mémoire questioning what has actually happened and what is only imagined.
July 662. John Wyndham, The Chrysalids [1955] 127 pages
"In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction." "Life is change; that is how it differs from the rocks." I was surprised to discover that these memorable lines from the Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation are actually quotations from John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (American title, Rebirth). I read this novel probably more than fifty years ago, and thought I must have totally forgotten it, but when I re-read it for our library's book club, as soon as I read the first page I remembered some of the most striking episodes: the girl Sophie with the extra toe, the bigoted religious father getting irate when the son says, "if I had another hand I could have done it myself", the arguments as to whether the religious cult could recognize what the original forms of plants and animals actually were. . .
John Wyndham was one of the early masters, if not the originator, of the science-fiction subgenre of "post-apocalyptic" fiction. While his earlier novels, The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes begin with the catastrophe and people from our world have to adjust to the new life without civilization, The Chrysalids takes place thousands of years after the "Old People"'s nuclear war which destroys most of the world. The scene is a small town in Labrador, where the surviving community believes in a religion based on their two oldest books, the Bible, which of course dates from before the "Great Tribulation", and Nicholson's Repentances from a few centuries after it. This second "scripture" contains a definition of "the image of God", that is humanity, and emphasizes maintaining the "purity" of the race against "blasphemy", the minor mutations which appear from generation to generation. But when a new favorable mutation arises, it turns out that the "Old People" (and their conservative imitators) were not, after all, the crown of creation.
Besides being a good story about change and evolution, this is also about the religious fear and hatred of those who are in any way "different" from the God-given "Norm", unfortunately still very relevant after almost seventy years.
July 963. Giaconda Belli, El ojo de la mujer [1991] 246 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
When a non-Nicaraguan thinks of Nicaraguan poetry, we think of Ruben Dario (on my reading list for next month) or perhaps Ernesto Cardenal; but we should also think of Giaconda Belli. While she is perhaps better known as a novelist (I plan to read a couple of her novels in the next two months, as well as her autobiography), she is an incredible poet, and I am not generally so enthusiastic for contemporary poetry. This collection contains about 135 poems, mostly one or two pages long. The first few poems are about her experience as a woman, followed by a number of love poems. The collection then becomes somewhat more political with poems from her exile, and about the absence of her lover who is fighting in the mountains. The climax of this section is "Patria Libre: 19 de julio de 1979". There are then poems about building the new country and remembering the dead. The collection then continues with more love poems.
I enjoyed nearly all the poetry in the collection. The poems are all very original and full of striking images, but never seem obscure; they are very personal, but I never felt as I sometimes do with modern poetry that I was left outside without the key.
July 1164. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence [1996] 216 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Another novel by Gurnah about an immigrant worker, this book alternates between Zanzibar and London. The first-person narrator admits that he is often making up stories about his life. A well-written book but many of Gurnah's novels all seem to be describing the same situation.
July 1565. Pablo Neruda, Residencia en la Tierra [1935] 178 pages [Kindle, Biblioteca Cervantes] [in Spanish]
Residencia en la Tierra, Neruda's first "mature" poetry according to the critics, and his last before the experience of the Spanish Civil War and his turn to political poetry, is actually two collections of poetry which were originally published separately, Residencia en la Tierra 1 (1925-1930) and Residencia en la Tierra 2 (1931-1935). Both are about equal in length, about 90 pages each in the print edition. They were written over a decade in various parts of the world (especially the Far East) while Neruda was in the diplomatic service. A third volume, called "Tercera Residencia" was published a decade later and has more political poetry, so I will read that later on (maybe next month, if I get to it.)
This collection was mostly (with a few exceptions, mainly poems that were inspired by particular people) the type of modern poetry I do not enjoy reading, what the editor calls "hermetic", where the images are so far from what they are intended to represent that I usually had no idea what Neruda was talking about. To some extent, it seems to be like a code: Ocean, sea, salt represent time in its negative, destructive sense; "useless swords" represent I don't know what, but they are present in many of the poems and the editor calls attention to them in the footnotes each time. What little I could understand was very metaphysical with an almost existentialist sense of alienation from reality, of "Geworfenheit", which I expected from the title, "Residence on the Earth," as if the poet was put here to "reside" rather than truly being rooted here. There were a few poems that were more comprehensible, and which I liked (I actually do like poetry which is a bit "hermetic" as long as I can see what it is trying to say.) My favorites were "El fantasma del buque de carga", "Tango del viudo", and "Enfermedades in mi casa".
The editor contrasts the first and second collections, saying that the first was this kind of idealist alienation but that the second was "materialist". I frankly couldn't tell the difference, except that the second had a few more poems about specific people and was perhaps a bit more understandable. I was rather suspicious of the editor's explanations, because he claims that this type of idealist, metaphysical "Angst", which reappears from time to time in his later works, is the "real" essential Neruda and (although not in so many words) that the political and social poetry, which makes up most of Neruda's work and which he himself considered his real contribution, should be passed over in embarrassed silence. It's that poetry that I look forward to reading.
(By the way, I had forgotten about the Biblioteca Cervantes, which I will now add to my list of free e-book sites. It has an incredible selection of Spanish language authors.)
July 1966. Popol Vuh: Las antiguas historias del Quiché [ca. 1544, Sp. tr. 1952] 185 pages [in Spanish]
When the Christians conquered the Quiché and other descendants of the Mayans, the first thing they did was to destroy all their books and try to eliminate their culture, just as their fathers had done with the Moslem literature of Grenada a few decades earlier, and as the ancient Christians had done a millennium before to the literature of the Greeks and Romans. While some (a pitiful few) of the ancient books survived the burning of the libraries -- just enough to let us imagine how much was lost -- the vandalism in the New World was far more thorough; essentially nothing survived. One of the books that was lost (mentioned in this book) was apparently a book of the kings called the Popol Vuh, which meant something like the book of the community. Sometime after the Conquest (probably about 1544), an unknown Quiché author tried to reconstruct part of what had been lost by writing this compendium of Quiché myth and history. It is not the Popol Vuh, and we have no way of knowing whether it is an attempted reconstruction of that book, or what its written or oral sources may have been. The use of the title Popol Vuh for this book comes from a later French translator (Brasseur) and is certainly inappropriate, as was his subtitle Le Livre Sacré et les mythes de l'antiquité américaine (the original Popol Vuh may or may not have been a "sacred book", if that even has any meaning in the context of a non-scriptural religion, but this compendium is not) although it has been known as the Popol Vuh for so long that it is too late to object to the title. Fortunately, the Quiché manuscript of this book fell into the hands of an unusually intelligent Spanish priest, who instead of destroying it transcribed the Quiché and translated it into Spanish, and published it under the name Las historias del origen de los indios de esta provincia de Guatemala. This is not that translation, but a modern version translated by Adrian Recinos from 1952.
The edition I read had a brief introduction and notes, but I could have used much more background, especially to the historical parts, and at least a map showing the many places named in the text, which the notes identify with modern cities or villages. The text itself is divided into four parts; the first part is the creation story, the second part is a long myth primarily about two brothers, Hunapu and Ixbalanqué, who fight with and eventually overcome with magic the inhabitants of Xilbaba, a sort of underworld, the third and fourth parts describe the origins and subsequent history of various tribes and families, from the viewpoint of the Quiché. The narrative is occasionally difficult to follow and there are inconsistencies, as one might expect in myths; some details may reflect contamination with Christian teachings, although it is hard to rule out that the Mayans and ancient Hebrews may have independently come upon similar mythical explanations of various phenomena. In any case, this is unfortunately the closest we will ever be able to come to the pre-Conquest beliefs of one the handful of autochthonous civilizations in World History.
July 2167. Miguel Angelo Asturias, Leyendas de Guatemala [1930, 2nd ed. 1943] 117 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
Popol Vuh meets the Surrealists: this collection of eight legends, or poetic stories, and a play, all inspired by Mayan mythology and in particular the Popol Vuh, and written in a poetic and surrealist style, were Asturias' first published literary work. The Leyendas (including the play which was added in the second edition), were written in Paris in the 1920's, where Asturias was studying anthropology and he and his close friend Alejo Carpentier were involved with surrealist circles. Actually, the stories of the Popol Vuh, like most genuine myths, are "surrealist" in themselves, with their transformations of humans, plants and animals and their events which do not follow the normal logic of everyday life, but Asturias also uses European surrealist stylistic devices such as associating words through similar sounds and bringing together objects which are not normally associated. He has reworked the myths in various ways, in some cases retelling the pre-Columbian myths in post-Conquest settings or combining various myths.
The first two legends are introductory or "frame" stories. "Guatemala" opens in the present (1920's) with an elderly couple with goiters approaching a city. He then turns to describe the country as made up of various layers, cities beneath cities, which of course is archaeologically true in some cases, but here he presents it as if the older cities were still alive and inhabited, like the stories of a large building, an allegorical way of saying that the Mayan cultures and the colonial Spanish heritage are still part of modern Guatemalan culture. The breath of the trees, rooted in all the cities of the past, awakens the Cucu de los Sueños (the Cuckoo of Dreams) which gives people the view of a great city, that is the city made up of all the layers of the past. The remainder of the legend gives brief descriptions of the past cities and what is happening in each of them. The legend ends with the repeated exclamation, "My country! My country!"
The second legend, "Ahora que me acuerdo" (Now that I remember) returns to the elderly couple of the first paragraph, Don Chepe and la Niña Tina, and introduces a first person narrator whom we learn is called "Cuero de Oro" (Golden Skin). Allegorically, the elderly couple, who are magicians, represent the Mayan culture and Golden Skin the present-day mestizo culture. The couple mention a tree and a bird which annul time, and then Cuero de Oro launches into a narration of how he has gone into the forest at night and his adventures therein, culminating in his meeting with the Tiger of the Moon and his rescue by feathered serpents, which is essentially an initiation myth. After they hear this, the couple recount to him the following legends.
The next five legends ("Leyenda del Volcán", "Leyenda del Cadejo", "Leyenda de la Tatuana", "Leyenda del Sombrerón", and "Leyenda del tesoro del Lugar Florido") are relatively short and concentrated, and I recognized some elements from the Popol Vuh which I had just finished reading although Asturias is also using oral traditions. They are all quite interesting and written in poetic but fairly understandable language, but I won't try to summarize them all.
The eighth legend, the last in the first edition, is "Los brujos de la tormenta primaveral" (The sorcerers of the spring storm), which is very long and divided into six parts, is about a river-spirit named Juan/Juana Poye and features struggles between metals and vegetation, vegetation and humanity and so forth. It is all quite allegorical and difficult to understand. "Cuculcán", the play added in the second edition, is also divided into six parts (scenes, named for colors: Yellow, the color of the morning, Red, the color of the afternoon, and Black, the color of night, each repeated twice), and is also difficult. It is quite explicitly about reality and illusion. The title character, whose name means "Plumed Serpent", is the god the Mexicans called "Quetzalcoatl"; here he claims to be "like the Sun"; the deceitful Guacamayo (Macaw) tries to get him to claim he IS the Sun. (In the Popol Vuh there is a story of a sorcerer who claims to be the sun and is destroyed by the heroes.) There is also a plot about a girl named Yellow Flower, who is also a flower and an arrow, who is intended as a sacrifice.
The book ends with a series of alphabetically arranged notes by Asturias on some of the words and phrases used in the legends.
July 2368. Miguel Angel Asturias, El Alhajadito [1961] 104 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
Written about the same time as Leyendas de Guatemala and El Señor Presidente, that is to say in the 1920's in Paris, but first published (with some reworking) in 1961, the novella El Alhajadito is also written in surrealist style. It is from the consciousness (although in third person) of a boy who has (apparently) been kept from any knowledge of his parents, who have mysteriously "disappeared", and has been brought up by servants "with long braids". He discovers a "little corridor (corredorcito)" hidden behind the walls of his room. No, it doesn't lead to Narnia or anything like that; in fact it doesn't literally lead anywhere, and seems to have no function at all. However, when in "his" corredorcito, the boy gives himself over to imagination, or possibly dreams, which in surrealistic fashion are difficult to distinguish from reality, but express his hopes and anxieties.
In the first part, which is most of the book, after his discovery of the corredorcito, he is next with a group of fisherman mending their nets, then meets up with a stranger, an ill-dressed old man with a cane. There is a storm which floods the area, and he rescues the old man and takes him to his corredorcito. The man apparently dies, in the care of the servants, and the boy realizes in typical dream fashion that he has had breakfast with the old man every morning and that it is his grandfather. When he asks about him he is told that he has "disappeared" like the rest of his family. The next morning, a circus suddenly appears in the back yard, and the head of the circus seeks him out and asks his permission to set up their tent, as with the death of his "grandfather" he is now the owner of the house. He is treated as an honored guest, and the circus is about to begin when a torch falls and kills the head of the circus, which is then postponed. The next day, the various performers wage a civil war over who will be the new head of the circus, between the daughter of the old head and the lion tamer, who threatens to loose the lions and tigers if he is not made the new head. There is much fighting over the keys to the cages, which are eventually stolen by a monkey who gives them to his "brother", a Black man who is apparently some sort of janitor, who then becomes the new head of the circus.
I would have to dock the story by a couple stars because of the offensive way in which this character is presented, with ungrammatical and mispronounced dialogue that could be rendered as "No hurt neglo . . . Neglo not bad, neglo sweep with broom . . . No laugh, monkey, this how neglos smoke cigar at wedding . . . " and so on ad nauseam. The Chinese cooks are also treated in the same racist fashion; no one can understand them because they speak "chino o cocino" (Chinese or kitchen-ese). Asturias was well in advance of his time in his recognition of the human dignity of the Indians and mestizos, but unfortunately doesn't seem to have applied the same insight to Blacks and Chinese.
Meanwhile, a "counterfeit fisherman" for no apparent reason is attacking the circus performers with a slingshot, until they put aside their internal dispute to beat him almost to death. The Black man eventually decides to set him free and he ends up somehow in the corredorcito. The following night there is a second performance, but as soon as it begins the fishermen capture the performers in their nets. Without any transition, we are back in the corredorcito the next morning and the circus is leaving. One of the fishermen from the battle, sitting in the corredorcito, tells the boy the story of his (the boy's) family, who are pirates captained by the devil himself but will all eventually return. He then tells the boy the story of how his great-great-grandfather, whom the boy says is his great-grandfather and is apparently the same old man who was the grandfather before, married a girl who was a flying barrel, and then describes the casting of a giant bell that instead of sounds gave out odors.
There follow two shorter parts. In part two, the boy is on a small boat searching for a ghost ship. This was by far the most boring part of the novella. In part three, we are apparently in the real world, and the boy remembers two women he lives with who are called his mother and sister but whom he cannot tell apart. He makes friends with a gardener and his blind son, who overhears a conversation between his father and the boy's "mothers" which reveals his real situation, and the boy realizes that everything he has apparently experienced before, including the large house, the servants with braids and even the corredorcito itself may have been all dreams. The book ends in an ambiguous way.
If not for the unfortunate racism, which could perhaps be ignored if it had been published when it was written in 1929 but is clearly unacceptable in a book revised for publication as late as 1961, this would have been a wonderful introduction for students to the style of surrealism, with just enough plot to make it somewhat understandable.
Giaconda Belli, Waslala: Memorial del Futuro [1996] 331 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]A novel by the Nicaraguan author Giaconda Belli, one of whose poetry books I read earlier this month, Waslala is a near-future science fiction story with elements of fantasy, or perhaps magical realism. The novel is set in a tropical rain forest in a place called Faguas, primitive and abandoned by the developed world (which has shut itself off from the poorer countries by a wall -- as with many near-future science fiction stories, not only is much of the futuristic technology already now commonplace, but also unfortunately many of the dystopian elements). The premise is the search for a lost utopian colony called Waslala. One of the central characters, the first we meet, is Melisandra, whose grandfather Don José was a founder of the colony but was unable to find it after leaving to get his wife, and whose parents were lost when she was three trying to find it again. Not only is the colony lost, but the valley in which it was located has also disappeared entirely; one theory that her grandfather has proposed is that it was inadvertently built on some sort of fissure in space-time. The idea of Waslala has become a myth to the people in the region, a hope for salvation from the poverty and violence of their daily lives. Now in her early twenties, Melisandra has decided that the time has come for her to search for Waslala and perhaps find her parents. A little later in the first part (the book is divided into parts, subdivided by short chapters) we meet a journalist named Raphael (as Don José notes, the name of the discoverer of Utopia in More's novel) from the developed world who is apparently also trying to find Waslala, although we learn very soon that this is a cover for investigating the trade in filina, a hybrid of marijuana and cocaine. To complete the set-up, we learn that the region is subject to endemic warfare, originally between political groups, which has degenerated into a self-perpetuating struggle for survival between the remnants. The official government has no real presence, and the main power is a gang of drug lords led by the Espada brothers (espada = sword, obviously symbolic).
Rafael proposes that Melisandra go with him as a "guide" to search for Waslala, and they set out up the river into the interior of the country. Of course, they soon become lovers. The next two parts are devoted to the trip upriver and their stay in the city of Cineria (again symbolism, "cineres" is Latin for ashes; compare also the English "cinders" and "Cinderella"), where we meet Engracia, who is engaged in the lucrative but dangerous enterprise of sorting out and burning or burying trash from the developed world and is the major opponent of Los Espada. This subplot reminded me very strongly of two more recent books by Asian authors, the fantasy Familiar Things by Hwang Sok-yong and even more the science-fiction novel Waste Tide by Chen Qiu-fen. The majority of the book is dominated by the struggle between Engracia and Los Espada. Finally, Melisandra and Raphael set off again to find Waslala and there are unexpected revelations.
According to Wikipedia (not always a trustworthy source) Belli was a guerilla with the Frente Sandinista and after the Revolution became the FSLN's international press liaison in 1982 and the director of State Communications in 1984; she was later one of the founders of the Sandinista Renewal movement, which attempted to return to the original ideas of the Sandinistas after the FSLN abandoned them during the presidency of Daniel Ortega. (Her autobiography is one of the next books on my reading list.) The novel was begun in 1990, shortly after the defeat of the Revolution. I think the book was a way of coming to terms with that failure. Waslala in a sense represents the socialist society which the Sandinistas tried to achieve, which has been "lost" but remains in the memories of the people as an inspiration to new generations of activists, as a "memorial of the future". This is not to say that the novel is in any way an allegory, or that the history of Waslala is similar to that of the Sandinista Revolution; the plot is imaginary and follows its own logic as a story
July 3170. Carl Sagan, Cosmos [1980] 365 pages
The best-known and most influential popularization of nineteenth-century science was Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos; based on lectures given in 1827-1828, it was published in five volumes between 1845 and (the fifth volume posthumously) 1862. It covered most of the known science of the time, from astronomy and geology to botany and zoology and a bit of anthropology, as well as devoting one volume to the history of science from antiquity to the time it was written. I don't know whether Carl Sagan chose the title Cosmos with reference to von Humboldt's earlier work, but it covers much of the same ground, although it is obviously less detailed, and the various sciences and history are mixed together in a more discursive fashion. It was also like the earlier book based on another media, the television series of the same title. Both books were criticized for not discussing God; in the case of Sagan, who never disguised his atheism, I was glad to see that he did not, like so many other popular science books recently, feel it necessary to devote any space to direct anti-religious polemics -- the science and history speaks for itself, to anyone who is willing to hear. In fact, he is very respectful of traditional mythical explanations of the cosmos, and many of the illustrations are of Mayan, Aztec and other non-western mythologies.
Although von Humboldt's work continued to be read and influenced science as well as literature and art for much of the remainder of the century, in some respects it quickly became out of date; the year after the fourth volume was published, the last in von Humboldt's lifetime, Darwin published The Origin of Species, and the discovery of the ice ages came about the same time. Likewise, after some forty years, Sagan's book has become out of date in many respects, especially in astronomy, with the discovery of dark matter and dark energy. Other discoveries were clearly expected by Sagan, such as extra-solar planets, and he constantly mentions ongoing and planned research, such as the projects for space telescopes and Mars rovers. Nevertheless his book is still worthwhile reading, not for the scientific details but for the general viewpoint of humanity within the cosmos. Much of the book is concerned with the possibilities of life elsewhere in the galaxy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, one of Sagan's major interests. It ends with a very moving chapter on our capacity for self-destruction and a plea for nuclear disarmament.
July 3171. Pablo Neruda, España en el corazón: himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra [1937] 65 pages [in Spanish]
In 1936, Neruda was assigned to the Chilean consulate in Madrid, where he was shocked by the brutality of the fascist war and the murder of his friend, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. As a result, he abandoned his previous metaphysical style of poetry for a very direct political poetry. This book will not be to the taste of those who prefer their poetry to be abstract, anodyne and obscure, but I found it very moving. I believe he later achieved a more balanced compromise between politics and literature, although since I am reading him chronologically I cannot be certain, but to the end his poetry remained committed.
Aug. 372. Scientific American, What Makes Us Human [2013] 111 pages
I'm not sure whether this was intended as a book or as a single-theme issue of the magazine; on the one hand it says volume 22, number 1, winter 2013, on the other it lacks the usual columns and most importantly, it doesn't have any ads. Perhaps it is an issue of the magazine re-issued as a book. In any case, at only nine years old it is the most recent thing I've read, other than short articles on the Internet, about human evolution, and there was much that was new to me. The contents consists of sixteen articles by eleven authors (five of the articles are by Kate Wong, one of the magazines senior editors.)
The first article, by Wong, is "Lucy's Baby", about the finding of the most complete yet fossil of Australopithecus afarensis, officially called "Selam" but dubbed "Lucy's baby" by the media (Lucy was the previously most complete specimen; Selam dates from some 2.3 million years ago, approximately 100,000 years earlier than Lucy.) At an estimated age at death of about three years old, Selam is the oldest well-preserved juvenile hominin ever found (apparently the correct current term for our line which branched off from the other great apes is "hominin" rather than the earlier "hominid", which has now been redefined to include gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos as well as hominins) and gives us an idea of how our early ancestors developed individually. It also preserves bones which have never before been found in a fossil this old, including a shoulder blade and the inner ear, which may indicate that although A. afarensis was as previously known fully bipedal, it was probably not adapted for endurance running and was still somewhat adapted for climbing trees. This contradicts some theories about how and why bipedalism arose in our lineage. An endocast of the brain also shows that the brain may have developed in size more slowly (in the individual) than in chimpanzees, which is a trait of modern humans as well.
The second article, "First of Our Kind", also by Wong, is also about a recently discovered, rather well-preserved australopithecene fossil, a new species which was found in South Africa and named A. sediba. It is estimated at an age of 1.977 million years old. It has a mixture of australopithecine and Homo-like features, and its discoverers (of course) considered it to be the ancestor of the genus Homo, which would locate the origin of our genus in southern rather than eastern Africa. Needless to say, this was very controversial; critics pointed out that there were more apparently Homo-like fossils at an earlier age in East Africa, but Berger replies that they are too incomplete to tell and that in any case A. sediba as a species may be much older than the particular fossil he discovered. As with any popular science book not written in 2021 or 2022, I am left wondering what the present consensus is or if it is still controversial. Whatever the decision on that, it is certainly a major discovery and indicated the "mosaic" nature of human evolution, with different "human" features evolving separately and at different rates rather than as a group. One interesting feature was that although the brain was similar in size to a chimpanzee, it seems to have had an expanded frontal cortex.
The third article, "The Naked Truth" by Nina Jablonsky, discusses when, how and why early hominins lost their fur coats. (Hint: pace Elaine Morgan, it wasn't because we became aquatic.)
The fourth article, "What Makes Us Different?" by Katherine Pollard, compares the genomes of modern humans and modern chimpanzees (more than 99% identical) to identify which regions are different and what they encode.
The fifth article, "Cooking Up Bigger Brains" by Richard Moeller Gorman, discusses the theory (which I had already read something about in a 2010 book, Almost Chimpanzee) that larger brains became possible because of the discovery of cooking. The author points out (as I did in my review of Almost Chimpanzee) that most of the growth in our brains had already occurred by the time we have firm evidence of the use of fire, and discusses possible responses to that criticism, as well as possible alternatives; he does not come to any definite conclusion.
About 30,000 years ago, relatively late in the history of modern humans, for some reason not currently known, the human lifespan suddenly and very dramatically lengthens, allowing for a significant proportion of living grandparents in the population. "The Evolution of Grandparents" by Rachel Caspari discusses the possible selective advantages of having older surviving members of modern human populations in competition with earlier groups such as the Neandertals which became extinct around this time.
The seventh article, by David Buller, attempts to refute "pop evolutionary psychology"; while I agree with him, this was probably the weakest article in the compilation.
The eighth article, "When the Sea Saved Humanity" by Curtis Marean, begins by asking why H. sapiens has so little genetic diversity, and postulates that we nearly became extinct soon after we evolved as a species, only a few hundreds living in caves on the southern coast of Africa, which the article describes. This was the most surprising article to me, not just because I had never heard of this theory -- there are many things I haven't heard about -- but because I had always thought that H. sapiens was considered a very diverse species. The idea that all humans were on the south coast of Africa also seems odd since everything else I've read, including the next article, has our species migrating out from eastern Africa. I will need to read more before I comment on this.
The ninth and tenth articles, "Traces of a Distant Past" by Gary Stix and "The First Americans" by Heather Pringle, use DNA analysis to follow the migrations out of Africa and into Europe, Asia and the Americans. In the last things I read about the populating of the Americas, the hypotheses that it occurred long before the Clovis culture and possibly in part by sea were new and still minority views; they have since been confirmed by both archaeology and DNA studies and more details are being learned.
The next three articles, all by Kate Wong, are about our more recent competitors. "Twilight of the Neandertals" considers the two main hypotheses about their extinction, climate change and competition with modern humans. The decline of the Neandertals coincides with both the beginning of the last ice age and the first migration of modern humans into their range. While the Neandertals evolved in ice age conditions, had survived a previous ice age and were probably more adapted to the cold than their competitors, the period of their extinction was marked by rapid swings (on the order of decades rather than centuries) between very cold and very much warmer conditions, with attendant changes of flora and fauna, which could have caused major stress on a population which specialized in big game hunting. On the other hand, there is some evidence that Neandertals occasionally consumed smaller game and even seafood. Modern humans, however, made much more use of smaller game and thus may have out-competed a population which was already stressed and declining. "Our Inner Neandertal" presents the DNA evidence that, contrary to what was previously believed, modern humans interbred significantly with Neandertals and perhaps other earlier populations in the course of their migrations. "Rethinking the Hobbits of Indonesia" is about H. floresiensis and is the most interesting in the book. While it was originally thought that this species, nicknamed "Hobbits" because of their small size and large feet, which became extinct as recently as 17,000 years ago, evolved from H. erectus through the process known as "island dwarfism" known in many other kinds of animals (if they were not, as some still believe, just present-day humans with a genetic disorder.) However, further studies have shown that they have many features which are far more primitive than H. erectus and closer to the australopithecines, and that their stone technology is close to the Olduvai level associated with H. habilis. This may indicate that their was a much earlier migration out of Africa before the ones currently known (H. erectus and modern humans). There is a chart included which gives two possible family trees for the hominins if this is true.
"Why We Help" by Morris Nowak is about the reasons for altruistic behavior and has nothing much new. "How We Are Evolving" by Jonathan Pritchard and "What May Become of Homo sapiens by Peter Ward give rather different views about the rate at which we are currently evolving (the first, that we have largely ceased to evolve and the second, that we are evolving faster than in the past.)
A very interesting collection, which has me looking for something reasonably current that presents human evolution as a whole rather than specific problems or topics.
Aug. 673. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [1962, tr. 1966] 290 pages
Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Savage Mind, a translation of his La Pensée Sauvage, is a difficult book to summarize; for a structuralist, he seems to be somewhat lacking in structure in his writings. It is a very discursive book, and full of analogies and metaphors which to me at least obscure rather than clarify what he is trying to say (although sometimes interesting in themselves). To do my best: "Savage" or pre-literate peoples are experts at classification, at producing taxonomies of natural and social phenomena at every level; their classifications are based on structures of differences rather than resemblances; they postulate homologies between systems of differences at different levels, including behavior (marriage rules, food or verbal prohibitions and so forth) which have been mistakenly linked by ethnologists in the concept of "totemism" (the book by him which I read last, Totemism, published the same year, he describes as a kind of preface to the current book); these homologies combine to form coherent "totalizing" conceptions of the world; the very different systems of different pre-literate cultures are formed from similar structures of classification by "transformations" which give different contents to the same structural forms. He illustrates these theses in the first eight chapters by examples taken from many cultures in Africa, Asia, and especially the Americas and Australia.
The ninth and last chapter is a polemic against Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique (of which I have read only the preface, published separately as Questions de Méthode) over the nature of dialectical reason, its relationship to analytical reason, the nature of history, and the relations of history and dialectic. While this was very interesting, I'm not sure I would agree with either of their views on dialectic; while both Lévi-Strauss and the later Sartre consider themselves within the Marxist tradition, they each combine Marx differently with other viewpoints, e.g. de Saussure and structural linguistics, Freudian psychology, and the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger. Obviously, an understanding of both Lévi-Strauss and Sartre is necessary to understand many of the trends in contemporary social thought, but it is also more fundamentally necessary to understand the concepts of Marx, which most American academics (to say nothing of the general populace) are far from possessing.
Aug. 774. John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos [1957] 189 pages
While waiting for the next two books on my reading list, one checked out and on hold at the library and one on order at Amazon (which turned out to have been left two days before it was supposed to arrive on the front step in the pouring rain and was totally ruined) I decided to read another classic science-fiction novel by John Wyndham.
The Midwich Cuckoos is similar in theme to The Chrysalids, but reversed. After a mysterious flying object lands in the village of Midwich, England (poor England was already the preferred site of alien invasions well before Doctor Who arrived on the scene), all the women of childbearing age simultaneously become pregnant, and have children who are a bit different . . . The conflict ends up being the same, between the old and new, but here the story is told from the viewpoint of the normal villagers and the Children (capitalized) are the agressors, consciously deciding to use their psychic powers to replace our species, while the normals try to bring them up and educate them as their own children, as other birds do to the newly hatched cuckoos introduced into their nests.
This book was not nearly as good as the earlier novel, even leaving aside the too similar plot. Even without a knowledge of DNA which would make some of the plot impossible later, there are too many improbabilities in the details (apparently the biological minimum age for having babies is seventeen in England), and the narrator is not a really well-developed character -- in fact none of the characters are particularly well-rounded.
Aug. 1275. Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of the World [1926, tr. 1928] 397 pages
Like Piaget's first two books, which I read earlier this year, The Child's Conception of the World is the first part of a two-volume work, of which the second part is The Child's Conception of Physical Causality, which I will hopefully get to next month. The first two books dealt with the development of language and logic in children, while according to the introduction these two deal with the evolution of their beliefs concerning reality and causation, but the distinction is not really all that sharp and the basic ideas are the same: egocentrism, syncretism, animism, pre-causality and so forth. The method in these two books is less based on recording spontaneous behaviors and statements by the children than in the previous books and more on questioning them, which leads to more uncertainty as to the validity of the results; there is also a certain amount of reliance on anecdotal memories of adults about their childhood beliefs, which I would almost entirely disregard. As in the previous books he divides the process into "stages" which are sequential and roughly (on average) correlated with various ages.
He admits that the method used does not justify placing particular individuals in particular stages, but argues that the existence of the stages can be discovered by statistical averages, and confirmed by the fact that what is not understood at one stage is in fact understood at later stages. I think that he is strongest in the negative aspects, that children in a lower stage are not able to make distinctions which are obvious at a later stage; I think he is weakest in his claims as to how "we", that is educated European adults, think -- there is in my opinion a strong bias toward idealist and perhaps even Christian conceptions, which is probably to be expected given the date at which he was writing.
He begins by trying to discover what children think that "thinking" is, and concludes that originally (stage one) children identify thinking with making an effort to understand something, to figure something out, rather than considering the ordinary obvious thinking which goes on all the time, and identify it as a kind of speech, saying that we think with our mouth or less frequently with our ears. Actually, I don't think that is so difficult to understand, since the word "thinking" outside philosophy classes is usually used in that sort of context (I'll think about it, that will take some thinking about, and so forth) and that sort of effort of thought does often take the form of an imaginary conversation in words even in adults. Thoughts being speech are made of air. In the second stage, children have learned from adults that thinking is "in the head" or that we think with our head or brain, but still consider it as a form of speech and that thoughts are air. In the third stage, they arrive at the "adult" conception of an immaterial mind. (Note what I said above about the idealist bias.)
Of course, what he is really interested in is not what they think thought is, but whether it is considered subjective or objective, whether it is in his words "internal" or "external". He gets at this by asking where the name of something is. In the first stage, the children say the name is where the thing is; the name of the sun is in the sky and so forth. He explains that they do not consider it as some sort of label, but rather that the name is a part of what the thing is. Children of this stage will say that the name could not be different; that the sun has to be called "sun" because it is yellow, because it shines and so on. We know it is called "sun" by looking at it and seeing what it is. His theory is that for children in the first stage, there is no separation of thought from reality; whatever we think is real, whatever we see is real. They also think that everyone knows what they think because everyone thinks the same things. In the final stage, they know that our thoughts are just "in our heads" and that they may not be correct. The intermediate stage is transitional.
He also has a chapter on beliefs about dreams and where they come from; again the first stage thinks they are real images outside the person (there may be an even earlier stage where they are considered as real happenings), the second stage is transitional and the last stage understands that they are "in the head" (subjective).
He then outlines the view that because of this "egocentrism", this failure to distinguish the world from the self, they believe there are "participations" between themselves and things, which leads first to "magical" beliefs that their activities can directly but remotely influence things, and later to "animism" or the view that things are conscious. Again there are stages: everything is conscious; only things which move; only things which move spontaneously; only animals. He also has a short chapter on what children understand as life, which is also connected to spontaneous movement. He says that this animism is abandoned as the child becomes more conscious of itself as a "self". It is not entirely clear to me whether he believes this change in the child's sense of self is sufficient in itself to cause animism to be abandoned or whether it just eliminates the resistance to accepting adult ideas derived from interaction with adults; I'm not sure he even considers the question or considers it important.
He then discusses the question of "artificialism", or the idea that everything is made by people (or God; he says there is really no difference because the child who assimilates religious instruction in his own way interprets the idea of God as a powerful man). This leads him to the ideas children have of the origin of natural phenomena such as the sun and moon; in stage one, they think they were made, in stage three they try to find natural explanations (or often simply say there is no way to know) and stage two as usual is just a transition where the two views are mixed together. This section struck me as strange (actually much of the book, but this especially); while I am sure he is reporting accurately what the children said, I find it hard to believe that children of eight or nine, or even older, still have the kind of conceptions he is reporting. Perhaps the Swiss educational system in the 1920's did not include grade school science classes, and boys that age did not read books on science, but I'm sure children that age in present-day America would know what the sun and moon are, for example.
A couple things that I wondered about as I read this:
Firstly, he explicitly denies that he intends terms like "animism" and "magic" to have the same meanings they have for ethnologists studying non-literate cultures, and says that the phenomena may be different in the two cases, and I certainly don't doubt that they are -- in the second case we are talking about a systematic worldview elaborated by adults over at least tens of thousands of years. Having recently read some (early) books about anthropology I could not help wondering, however, if the attempt to find the origins of animism or the "origin of religion" may not be misplaced; if children spontaneously adopt an animist and artificialist view of the world, and are only later able to abandon it (perhaps due to adult influence) it may be that "religion" is not based on any sort of "numinous" or other sorts of experiences but is simply the original spontaneous human conception of the world and that the real problem is how some adults at some point were able to arrive at the idea of inanimate matter; in other words, the real problem may not be the origin of religion but the origin of materialism. (I don't mean materialism as a conscious systematic worldview; that came very recently with the so-called "Pre-Socratics". But when Thales took the giant step of replacing the gods of the sea and fresh water with ordinary material water, that presupposes that there was an already long-standing concept of water as a material, inanimate substance.) Unfortunately, anthropologists (who at the beginning of anthropology were very much concerned with the question of the "origin" of religion -- e.g. Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim and so forth) looked for examples of animism, but never tell us about what the cultures considered as inanimate -- that was just taken for granted.
Secondly, some of the examples he gives of "magical" ideas of participation seem very similar to what we call OCD; I wonder if his examples were from children with OCD or conversely, whether the seeming increase in such disorders in children is caused by our confusion of an adult disorder with a normal stage of child development.
All in all, whether Piaget's theories are right or wrong -- or somewhere in between -- they are very thought provoking.
Aug. 1376. Naguib Mahfouz, The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural [1999, tr. 2005] 151 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
This is a fantastic (in both senses of the word) collection of thirteen stories written between 1973 and 1999 by one of my favorite fiction writers, Naguib Mahfouz. All involve strange events, and several involve death or the afterlife.
The title story, which accounts for about a third of the book and is undoubtedly the best, begins with one of the two main characters, named Raouf, coming out of a strange "cloud" to realize that he has been killed by his friend Anous as a result of a love rivalry. He arrives in the afterlife, and we are treated to brief statements about the after-death fates of a number of historical figures, from Gandhi and Lenin to Hitler and Stalin, although most of those named were from recent Egyptian history and I did not know who some of them were. This part is similar in a way to Dante, although the afterlife described is certainly not Christian (nor is it Islamic or ancient Egyptian); it is the product of Mahfouz' own imagination. Later, Anous is also killed, and the two return to Earth as spiritual guides, in the process changing names and roles. The theme is that what matters is not "virtue" or even belief in God but truth and resistance to evil in the form of oppression of the weak by the powerful.
The other stories are much shorter (the last few being only a couple pages each) and are ambiguous both as to the endings and what has actually happened, and as to their symbolic meanings. One, "Room No. 12" was made into a movie which was popular in Egypt. The book was fun to read and as with all of Mahfouz' work provokes thought.
Aug. 1677. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character [1963] 355 pages
A somewhat older book from the Library, this was one of the best books about the Sumerians when it was written and is still worth reading; although some of the details have been superseded according to the more recent books on Mesopotamia which I have read this year, none of them is as full in describing the Sumerians, since they all covered the much longer period of Semitic rule from Hammurabi on as well. Kramer begins with an account of our sources and the history of the archaeology of Sumer, then has a chapter on the history largely based on documents from Lagash, followed by chapters on the socio-economic and political organization of the cities, the religion and mythology, the literature, the educational system, the "character" of the Sumerians, and finally the legacy of Sumerian culture throughout the Near East, and especially the influence of Sumerian ideas on the Bible. Throughout the book he quotes extensively from the original texts in his own translations, and there are more texts given in the appendices which make up more than a tenth of the book.
Aug. 2578. Giaconda Belli, El país dentro de mi piel [2002] 431 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
I am currently reading Giaconda Belli because one of her novels is the reading for a group I am in on Goodreads; after reading a book of (excellent) poetry and an earlier novel, I decided to read her autobiography before starting the novel for the group. As often with someone who was both a writer and a political activist, there was actually very little about her writing; one short chapter on her earliest poetry and a few brief mentions of her other books. Essentially, this is a memoir about the Sandinista Revolution, and about her complicated love-life (three marriages separated by two other major relationships.) I will concentrate my review on what she says about the Revolution.
Belli was from a bourgeois (or more exactly upper petty bourgeois), "aristocratic" milieu, but from an early age became a supporter of the FSLN, eventually carrying out important tasks in foreign relations and publicity at a level somewhat below but in direct contact with the central leadership. While from participating in the solidarity movement with Nicaragua in the 1980's I was very familiar with the "outside" history of the Sandinistas and their struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and later Reagan's terrorist "Contras", and had read books by Sandinista leaders about the guerilla struggles (Tomas Borges' Los Primeros Pasos and Omar Cabeza's La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde, among others) I knew nothing about the internal dynamics, which I found very shocking. Apparently the Sandinistas split in 1975 into three mutually hostile factions which functioned as separate organizations for four years until they reunited through the mediation of Fidel Castro a few months before the victory over Somoza. Thus the Directorate which assumed the power in 1979 was composed of former "opponents" -- to use a leftist term I have never liked -- who did not fully trust each other, and was according to Belli dominated by the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto.
First recruited by Camilo Ortega, Belli was initially part of the "Insurrectionist" or "Tercera" faction led by the Ortega brothers, but eventually became disillusioned by what she considered the unscrupulous behavior of the leaders and joined the "Prolonged People's War" faction led by Tomas Borges, Bayardo Arce, and Henry Ruiz (Modesto) -- later one of her lovers. (The other faction was the "Proletarian" faction led by Jaime Wheelock.) Much of what she writes about the period of the Contra war is a polemic against the Ortegas and their suppression of criticism within the movement. Given the later trajectory of Daniel Ortega as basically a reformist politician, what she says seems believable, although I also have to wonder how much of it is based on hindsight. In any case, while I could agree with some of her positions, others were just obviously and totally wrong; she expresses a very naive opinion that if the Sandinistas had been less "incendiary" in their rhetoric, the U.S. intervention could have been avoided -- I think it is obvious there was nothing the Sandinistas could have done, short of totally betraying the Revolution, which would have prevented Reagan and the U.S. government from doing everything possible to overthrow them as they did with much less radical social-democratic and liberal regimes in Latin America from Arbenz to Allende. The fact is, all mistakes aside -- and she does not deal with what I think was one of the most important, the lack of attention to the Indians on the Atlantic coast -- the Sandinista Revolution just came at a time in history when the objective conditions were all against its success.
Since the end of the Revolutionary period in 1990, Belli has lived mainly in the United States with her North American husband Carlos. At the end of the book, she briefly mentions that she is part of the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, which was founded in 1994 by Sergio Ramirez and other former Sandinista leaders, which according to its program intends to restore the original Sandinista ideas.
While this is a book that needs to be read critically, it does have interesting information and should be a part, but only a part, of anyone's reading on the Sandinista period in Nicaragua.
Aug. 3079. Giaconda Belli, El infinito en la palma de la mano [2008] 237 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
The novel which is the reading for next month for the group I'm in on Goodreads, El infinito en la palma de la mano is a retelling of the myth of Adam and Eve. In addition to the short version in the book of Genesis, she used various books of pseudepigrapha and the Talmud, a literature with which I am not very familiar, so I don't entirely know what is from those sources (I found some details in Wikipedia) and what is from her own imagination, though I would assume that the basic idea that Elokim, the name she gives to the Creator, wanted Adam and Eve to have liberty and consciousness as a kind of experiment is probably not in any ancient source. Ever since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution with its emphasis on freedom and the positive evaluation of revolt, the myth of the disobedience of the first couple has been subjected to various reversals and re-evaluations, as well as the role of the serpent (as Blake pointed out, Satan was really the hero of Paradise Lost). El infinito en la palma de la mano is in that tradition.
The novel begins with the creation of Adam and then of Eve, and their lives in the Garden until they discover the two trees in the center of the Garden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Serpent (always capitalized as a proper name) is the guardian of the latter tree; more honest than his Biblical counterpart, he warns Eve that Elokim has forbidden to eat the fruit and that the result will be death, but he also suggests that Elokim may really want her to eat the fruit and make use of the freedom of choice she and Adam have been given, alone of any of Elokim's creations. Up to this time, she has not heard the name Elokim or known that he created Adam and herself; they have felt that someone they called "The Other" has been observing them, but they have been unable to find him (in fact they discover the trees while trying to discover where he is). Of course as in the Bible they eat the fruit; Adam is very afraid of Elokim and what he will do to them (throughout the first half of the novel he is the timid, fearful one, who wants to be reconciled with Elokim) and takes Eve to a cave where they spend the night making love for the first time. They are woken up in the morning by an earthquake and great storms, and when they manage to get out of the cave they find that they are outside the Garden, which is now surrounded by a deep abyss. They interpret this as punishment for eating the fruit (or perhaps, Eve wonders, for having sex) but Eve later comes to think that rather than a punishment it was always part of the plan, the experiment, to see whether creatures with freedom and knowledge would be able to survive in nature.
We then see them trying to survive and learn more about their environment, and eventually having two sets of twins (Cain and Luluwa, Abel and Aklia). According to a very short Wikipedia article, the idea that Cain and Abel had twin sisters is in some of the ancient sources, and the idea that Cain's killing of Abel was because God had decided they should marry cross twins and he wanted to marry his own twin is apparently from Moslem tradition (although the bibliography of the book does not include anything Moslem, there are some secondary works that might have mentioned the idea). One interesting difference of the novel from the Bible is that Adam and Eve never actually see Elokim, and while they believe they have heard him it is always in dreams or ambiguous signs; on the other hand they frequently converse with the Serpent, and nearly everything they suppose about Elokim is from him (although Eve ultimately suspects that he actually pretends to know much more about Elokim than he actually does.) The real essence of the novel, however, is in Eve's constant questioning of everything, her desire, from even before eating the fruit, to know the truth about everything. The novel ends with Cain and Luluwa leaving and Aklia following her own destiny, which I won't reveal because it is the one really unexpected turn in the book.
Aug. 3180. John Wyndham, The Trouble with Lichens [1960] 160 pages
I have sometimes thought about what would happen if someone invented an effective anti-aging drug, and considered it likely that it might be legally suppressed; and I have also thought that a way to disguise it might be as a cosmetic process, in beauty parlors. That in a nutshell is the plot of John Wyndham's 1960 novel The Trouble with Lichens, which as far I can remember I have never read before. Science fiction novels about immortality or extremely long lifetimes and the problems that would cause in society are of course common enough today, and when I read one a couple years ago for a Goodreads group I did some research and found a long list of them, unfortunately now a dead link, but Wyndham was an early pioneer, as in many other subgenres of science fiction. As always, he excels at the social analysis.
Diana Bracken discovers an anti-aging drug, as she calls it an "antigerone", derived from a rare species of lichen, and hopes that the extended lifetimes it makes available will lead to a feminist revolt, because no one could accept two hundred years of the trivial pursuits which are considered suitable for women in twentieth-century middle-class society.
I was surprised by the feminist theme at such an early date; not only is the main character a strong intellectually brilliant woman, but she is always pointing out things like the way society (and the beauty industry) cons women into basing their self-image on physical beauty, and the waste of intellect caused by tracking women into marriage, maternity and domestic life which she characterizes as a "dead end career." Of course, this doesn't prevent some internet reviews of the novel from calling it a "chauvinist" book, apparently because of a very understated romantic substratum -- as if a strong female character could not have feelings (at least not heterosexual.)
Sept. 481. Miguel Angel Asturias, Hombres de maiz [1949] 438 pages [in Spanish]
While the fame of his first and best-known novel, El Señor Presidente, for a long time eclipsed Asturias' later works, today many critics consider his second novel, Hombres de maiz, to be his most important book. He returns here to the mythical style of his first book, the story collection Leyendas de Guatemala, in a complex novel which is one of the founding sources of "magical realism". The title means "Men of Corn" (in the American sense of maize, not the British meaning of "grain".)
It is a difficult work, both because of the style and because of the language, based on Guatemalan rural dialect and with many Indian words. This is not a book one can read with a dictionary, because most of the unfamiliar words are not "dictionary words", but represent the actual dialect pronunciation of normal Spanish words; rather it is necessary to try to imagine the Spanish words that are presented in dialect form. The dialogue is also very elliptical and uses idioms which are not found in more standard Spanish novels. The Indian words are mostly for plants and animals, or items of Indian cuisine and culture, and probably do not have Spanish (or English) equivalents; some are explained in the short glossary at the end but many are not, and I could not do any better than, "It's a tree, it's a fruit, it's something they ate." Nevertheless, it was not too hard to follow what was actually happening, although why things were happening the way they were is often not explained until later on, in some cases not until the last two chapters which tie everything together.
The exact setting in both place and time and the chronology are deliberately vague, although I think it would be safe to say it is set somewhere in rural Guatemala over a period of perhaps twenty or thirty years beginning somewhere near the opening of the twentieth century; some of the action also takes place in a mythical subterranean space. The situation it presupposes, and which we put together somewhat later, is that the region it is set in, called "Ilom", has been inhabited by Indians or "Men of Corn" (an allusion to the myth of the Popul Vuh in which the Indians were created by a pair of creator deities from corn), who regard corn as sacred and use it for the nutrition of themselves and their families, but recently a class of poor farmworkers, the "maiceros" (which ironically could also be translated as "men of corn") have begun clearing the forests to raise it as a cash monocrop.
The novel opens in a very surrealistic style with El Gaspar Ilom, whom we eventually find out is the chief of the Indian tribe in the area, and his wife sleeping on a "petate" or sleeping mat on the ground; he has a dream, or rather a vision, in which the spirits of the Earth call to him and accuse him of allowing the "eyes of the land" to be put out, or as we ultimately realize is meant, the trees to be cut down or burned. The mythical style is represented by frequent repeated phrases, in particular involving "yellow rabbits"; as the book goes on we eventually find out some of the symbolic meanings of the yellow rabbits (the moon, the ears of corn, and especially fire) but in this first chapter it is a mysterious phrase. The next morning, he decides to wage war on the maiceros, killing them whenever they are alone or in small groups. I had a problem with this, in that the novel obviously considers the war against these poor farmworkers to be just, when obviously (to me) the problem was with the imperialist companies they were working for and being exploited by.
Not surprisingly, the cavalry then shows up and massacres the Indians. A group of shamans called "the witches of the fireflies" then puts a curse on everyone concerned. From then on, everything that happens in the novel is overdetermined; in addition to the "natural" causes of events, they are also the working out of this supernatural curse, although this is not always obvious to the reader at the time they are happening. I won't go into the details to avoid spoilers. The plot of the fifth part (the book is divided into six parts) and its continuation in the last part in particular seem to have little relation to the rest of the book, which is one of the problems the earlier critics had with the book; later it was realized that the unity of the novel is at a different level than the surface plot.
Although not always acknowledged, this novel and the work of Asturias in general was a major influence on later Latin American writers, especially the earlier works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa; all three are Nobel Prize winners.
Sept. 882. Giuseppi Bellini, Mundo mágico y mundo real. La narrativa de Miguel Ángel Asturias [1999, Sp. tr. 2008] 242 pages [Kindle, Biblioteca Cervantes] [in Spanish]
Since I will probably not be reading more of Asturias for a while, I decided to read this book which summarizes all his novels and story collections in chronological order, to get an overall picture of his work. It is by an Italian scholar who knew Asturias and specialized in Latin-American literature; the book I read is the Spanish translation of a book written originally in Italian. I have read four of Asturias' books, chronologically from Leyendas de Guatemala and El alhajadito through El Señor Presidente and Hombres de maiz; this book also summarizes the Banana Trilogy, Week-end en Guatemala, Mulata de tal, El espejo de lida sal, Maladrón, and Viernes de Dolores. Many of these seem interesting, but before I get around to reading them, if I do, I want to read some of Quevedo and Pio Baroja, who are apparently important influences, so it will be a while.
Bellini is very much a defender of Asturias' work; much of the discussion here is in response to other critics of his novels and of him personally for his political positions (he was, according to Bellini, "marginalized" by other writers because of his acceptance of an ambassadorship). There is therefore very little in the way of negative criticism in the book. Probably the most useful part of the book was the appendix containing short lectures by Asturias himself explaining his works and his view of literature and language.
Sept. 983. Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, le livre des ossements [2000] 206 pages [Kindle] [in French]
Probably Diop's best-known novel, Murambi is a fictional history of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It is very different from any other of Diop's novels in being written in a more or less traditional style rather than the highly experimental style he is generally associated with. It was written as part of a 1998 project by authors from many countries to document the genocide in literature. Unlike many books on the massacre, which focus on the horrors of the killings (although there is plenty of that; this is not a novel for those with weak stomachs), Diop tries to provide insight into the history and context of the event. One of his characters complains that people in other countries considered it a spontaneous product of long-time ethnic hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi and as an extreme case of events which are endemic in recent African history (if not even a mutual massacre), which is certainly the way it was and still is presented by the media, but says instead that, while the Tutsi did oppress the Hutu at one point under colonial rule, there was little friction between them before 1959, when a fascist movement known as Hutu Power began a campaign against the Tutsi consciously modeled on the Nazi campaigns against the Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust. Many of the characters -- the book is written from multiple perspectives, although four characters, Simeon Habineza, Dr. Joseph Karakezi, his son Cornelius Uvimana, and Jessica Kamanzi are the central figures -- refer to previous massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu Power militia, the Interahamwa, the most important of which, in 1973, caused the (fictional) exile of the then twelve-year-old Cornelius to Barundi and eventually to Djibouti and the (historical) growth of the guerilla struggle of the mostly Tutsi FPR (Rwanda Patriotic Front). The fact that these earlier massacres were never punished certainly encouraged the "Final Solution."
According to the novel, far from being spontaneous, although many thousands of ordinary Hutu were ultimately involved, willingly or not, in the killings (as great numbers of ordinary Germans were in the Holocaust), the massacres were carefully planned and well-organized, beginning the day after the assassination of President Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose his private plane was shot down by missiles. The assassination was blamed by the Hutu Power on the FPR guerillas, while the Tutsi characters blamed it either on foreigners or on the Hutu Power group itself, as a kind of Reichstag Fire -- not improbable, given how quickly the subsequent genocide occurred and how well-planned it was from the beginning, and that the first actions of Hutu Power were to assassinate the moderate Prime Minister and other moderate Hutu politicians before beginning on the Tutsi.
The genocide lasted for about three months -- conventionally referred to as the "Hundred Days" -- before the FPR guerillas captured the capital and the leaders of Hutu Power escaped into exile with the help of the French army; the number of Tutsi killed is uncertain, but probably about a million give or take a couple hundred thousand. While it lasted, as the Hutu Power characters brag, it was more efficient than Hitler's Holocaust, killing an average of 10,000 a day. What was most unsettling in the novel (although not really surprising) was the role of the French; the main Hutu leader in the book seems to have expected the French to intervene against the FPR, as they had done in each of the two previous years, and the impression from the French military character is that they were prepared to do so again but the scope of the genocide and the widespread international publicity made it politically impossible.
The novel's most continuous narrative element is the return of Cornelius from exile two years after the genocide and his discovery of what happened to his family. We see the results of the massacres through his consciousness, especially the mass slaughter of the Tutsi of Murambi in the École technique. The novel is considered by some to end on a note of hope, because the FPR did not follow up by a revenge genocide against the Hutu, which is hardly the most convincing reason (and really amounts to accepting the ethnic hatred explanation); in fact, Diop ends the book (leaving aside the Postface to the 2011 reprinting) by suggesting that much of the population, both survivors and killers, are psychologically "dead".
While I am not qualified to say whether all his facts and analyses are correct, the favorable critical responses to the book and the international recognition and prizes it has received suggest that at least it not considered wildly wrong. In any case, a very moving and impressive novel.
Sept. 1284. H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon: A sketch of the ancient civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates valley [1962] 535 pages
An older book, but very comprehensive for a popular work and one which is still found in bibliographies of recent works. Despite the title, it does not focus entirely on Babylon or the Babylonian period but covers the entire Mesopotamian history from the earliest times through Sumer and Akkad and up through the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires to the capture of Babylon by Cyrus, including the regions outside Mesopotamia in the periods in which they were part of the Empires. Definitely a good starting place to read about ancient Mesopotamia provided that one follows up with more recent work as a corrective to the points on which it is outdated.
Sept. 1485. James Wellard, Babylon [1972] 223 pages
Another old book about the ancient near east -- I'm reading the books which have been on my shelves for thirty or forty years; this was published about a decade after Saggs' The Greatness That Was Babylon but doesn't seem any more up-to-date (Saggs' book is the most recent item in Wellard's bibliography.) To some extent, this doesn't actually matter, because Wellard's book is largely about the history of the archaeological exploration and excavation of the region, which occupies about the first half of the book and occasionally is mentioned in the second half. This is certainly the most interesting part of the book, although to tell the truth it is mostly anecdotes of the hardships of the excavators.
When the book gets to the history of Babylon itself, it is rather poor, with many old theories that even the earlier book by Saggs describes as obsolete and less facts than the author's annoying pontificating remarks. Perhaps this is because the author unlike the other authors I am reading on the subject is a popular writer on archaeology and ancient history rather than an archaeologist or Assyriologist himself. Not a book I would recommend even if it were more recent.
Sept. 1586. Joan Oates, Babylon [1979] 215 pages
A much better book than the above; I read the original edition which I happened to have but there was a revised edition published in 1986, only seven years later. For once, this is a book called "Babylon" which actually focuses on Babylon, both the city and the empire, although there is some background on the history of the region from Sargon to the time of Hammurabi (or Hammurapi, as she spells it.) The title page has a line under the title, "With 137 illustrations" and the many photos were undoubtedly one of the major attractions of the book when it came out; today black and white (halftone) illustrations are not a major selling point.
Sept. 1887. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener [1853] 40 pages
Often I find that when reading a contemporary novel I end up reading or re-reading a classic which is alluded to; for example No One Writes Back caused me to read The Moon and Sixpence and Death Is Hard Work sent me back to As I Lay Dying. In this case, reading Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea which alludes constantly to Bartleby the Scrivener resulted in my pausing that to read Melville's short story. I'm not sure whether I had ever read it before; if so it was probably fifty years ago in high school. Bartleby is the ultimate type of someone who simply says no to all the normal obligations of society: "I prefer not to". There is no explanation of why; it is simply a given.
88. Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea [2001] 245 pages
Two refugees from the same city in Africa meet in England and discuss the quarrels of their families in the past, when each accused the other of using fraud to steal their houses and inheritances. The older of the two, whose perspective and memories make up most of the book, is a former political prisoner who just wants, like Bartleby, to be left alone. I enjoyed this more than Admiring Silence, but whether because it is a better novel or just because I was in a different mood when I read it I can't really say. Gurnah reminds me more of Balzac than anyone else.
Sept. 2488. Rubén Darío, Azul. . . [2nd ed., 1892] 334 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
I'm going a bit farther back in my Latin American reading to read the turn-of-the-century Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Azul . . . (the points are part of the title) was his first important work and one of the initiating works of the Latin American style known as modernismo (not to be confused with the English meaning of "modernism" as applied to writers like Joyce and Kafka), and was the runner-up for the Nicaraguan reading in the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads (the winner was Giaconda Belli, a contemporary poet who like nearly all Latin American poets was influenced by Darío).
The book began originally (1888) with a prologue by Darío's friend Eduardo de la Barra; the second augmented edition of 1892 was prefaced by two letters by the Spanish writer Juan Valera. The version I read has both, which make up almost a third of the book. I was surprised that the book is just over half prose; it begins with ten short stories, followed by a dozen sketches of life in Chile (where he was living at the time) and two more stories. The poetry is divided into three sections, "El año lirico", "Sonetos aureos", and "Echos" (seven poems about the seasons, nine in sonnet form, and three poems written in French, respectively.) Some of the more radical poems in terms of style were added in the second edition. Apparently, according to a secondary essay I read (see the next review), Azul. . . represents a transition from the Romantic style of Victor Hugo to the style of later French poetry, in particular Verlaine. I can't really judge because it's been half a century since I read any of Hugo's poetry and I haven't made it to the later poets at all (my current French literature project is just finishing up with Balzac.) In any case, he was trying to replace the Spanish influence by a more "modern" French avant-garde influence. The book includes the original notes by the author.
Sept. 27
89. Rubén Darío, Antología [1992] 236 pages [in Spanish]
This anthology consists of a long critical article by Octavio Paz, "El caracol y la sirena", which was more illuminating than most literary criticism, and a selection of poems from each of Darío's major collections (chosen on the basis of being discussed in the essay by Paz.) There are seven poems from Azul. . ., fifteen from Prosas profanas ("prosa" here doesn't mean "prose", but a form of poetry from the Catholic liturgy), twenty two from Cantos de Vida y Esperanza, Los Cisnes y Otros Poemas, five from El Canto Errante, two from Poema del Otoño y Otros poemas, including the title poem, excerpts from his longest poem Canto a la Argentina and three poems not included in any of his books. I felt that I got a good idea of what he was about.
Sept. 2991. Ann Druyon, Cosmos: Possible Worlds [2020] 383 pages
Two months ago, I read Carl Sagan's now classic popular science book Cosmos, written in 1980 on the basis of the television series of the same name. Since Sagan's death in 1996, there have been two more series called Cosmos dedicated to the same task of popularizing science to a lay audience; this book, by Sagan's widow Ann Druyon, is based on the third series. Like Sagan's book, and its nineteenth century namesake by Alexander Humboldt, this book covers a lot of ground; unfortunately it has somewhat of a miscellaneous feel with the episodes not really being integrated well into a whole, and I felt as though nothing was dealt with in enough detail to really understand. It does have the advantage of being up-to-date for the present, and some of the anecdotes about individual scientists were fresh (not the usual suspects) and interesting.
The book is organized around the conceit of the Cosmic Calendar, running from the Big Bang at midnight January 1 to the present at midnight December 31. After a first chapter which is an overview of the Calendar, and touches on Ҫatalhöyük, pollination, gravitational waves and the projected Starshot mission, there is a chapter which is a mini-biography of the Indian king Asoka (perhaps the most miscellaneous thing in the book), a chapter focusing on Victor Moritz Goldschmidt and his research on the mineral olivine, a chapter on Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov and the first seed depositary, a chapter on the evolution of the brain and the invention of the EEG (and on her son's brain surgery), a chapter divided into mini-biographies of Gerard Peter Kuiper and Carl Sagan, a chapter on the new findings about the mycellium and the communication between plants, and the evolution and behavior of bees (which anthropomorphizes both plants and bees), a chapter on the Huygens-Cassini mission to Saturn and its moons (which anthropomorphizes the probe), a chapter on the building of the atom bomb and the eruption of Mt. Pelée in 1902, and a gosh-wow chapter on how humanity might flee the end of the solar system which reminded me of my least favorite science popularizer, Michel Kaku. Just as the first Cosmos ended with a plea for nuclear disarmament, this ends with a plea for doing something about global climate change. Not as good as Sagan's book and rather "lite" but a lot of interesting material.
Sept. 30
92. Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Stepmotherland [2022] 119 pages
This seems to be my year for reading contemporary poetry. Stepmotherland is this month's book for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads (the reading for Panama.) The book begins with poems about the author's childhood and adolescence in Panama and the American invasion to oust General Noriega, then deals with his experiences as an immigrant and Hispanic-Black man in the United States. There are many love/erotic poems, some straight and some gay; many pop-culture references (rap stars, Beyoncé, Rihanna and so on) and poems based on works of art. Nearly all the poems were good, although there were a few -- one with sado-masochistic imagery -- that I couldn't relate to.
Sept. 3093. H.W.F. Saggs, Everyday Life in Babylonia & Assyria [1965] 207 pages
Saggs' books are generally good; although much of this book, in the "Everyday Life" series, just summarizes material already presented in his The Greatness that was Babylon, there is some additional material about the agricultural methods and other technologies of the Mesopotamian civilization. Both books have later revised editions, The Greatness that was Babylon in 1988 and this one in 1987.
Oct. 294. H.W.F. Saggs, Babylonians [2000] 192 pages
The most recent book I have found by Saggs, and probably one of his last (he died in 2005), Babylonians is a volume in the "Peoples of the Past" series, originally published by the British Museum. Probably this is also for now one of the most up-to-date popular books on early Mesopotamia in general, since archaeological investigations in Iraq have only recently been renewed after a more than twenty year hiatus following the barbarian invasions of the late twentieth century.
While much of the information here is similar to his earlier and more comprehensive books, there are also some differences, both major (the theory of the changing sea levels in the Persian Gulf which were considered a wrong hypothesis after about 1950 have now been largely confirmed, there is far more attention given in general to changes in climate and their influence on Mesopotamian history, and there is also much more about the Aramean migration and the Chaldean period) and minor (e.g. the "Laws of Ur-Nammu" are now known to be from his son and successor Shulgi).
I have one more book left in my ancient history reading project from 2018 focusing on Babylon specifically (this book covered the entire period from the Sumerians on, although it does not cover the Assyrians in any depth, because they have their own book in the series) and a few on special topics before I move on to the periphery (counterclockwise, Nubia and northeast Africa, Arabia and Bahrein, Iran, Anatolia, the Phoenicians and so forth, skipping Palestine for the time being) and eventually get to my goal of Greece and Rome.
Oct. 595. Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of Physical Causality [1927, tr. 1930] 309 pages
Just as Piaget's first two books were essentially one book in two volumes, so his third book (The Child's Conception of the World) and this fourth book are essentially one book; he ends this, as he did the second book, with a "Summary and Conclusions" of both volumes. In The Child's Conception of the World he described the child's ideas of the world and nature in general; in this one, he goes into detail on a few specific areas.
Section I on Movement describes experiments/observations of children concerning air and wind, the clouds and sun and moon, and water currents, and ends with a theoretical account of children's ideas of "force" (élan) which introduces the ideas of "assimilation" and "imitation" which will become central in his later work (according to the introduction.) Section II is on floating boats, the level of water when things are put into it, and shadows. Section III is on children's explanations of machinery, especially bicycles and toy steam engines.
Section IV is the summary and conclusions to both volumes, and also deals with "imitation" and "assimilation" and discusses the relationship of his work to various philosophers' and psychologists' ideas from Maine de Biran to M.E. Meyerson (a philosopher of science who is -- unfortunately in my opinion -- rarely read today.) I wish I had read this book, particularly the conclusions, back when I was studying epistemology and philosophy of science in college.
Oct. 7 96. John Wyndham, The Infinite Moment [1961] 159 pages
The Infinite Moment is a collection of six science-fiction stories by Wyndham about time travel. The first and longest story (sometimes considered a novella), "Consider Her Ways", written in 1951, seemed very familiar, but I am not sure whether I read it previously or more likely just saw the 1964 television adaptation on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The plot is that a woman is transported into the body of another woman in the future, where there are no men. It is an attack on extreme feminism, and contrasts strongly with the best writing on the subject of all-women future societies, Joanna Russ' story "When It Changed" and novel The Female Man, which are perhaps a feminist reply to this as well as to other similar stories and novels. (I now want to re-read Russ' novel after some forty or fifty years.)
Four of the remaining five stories were good fast reads, but all five use a formula which has been very much overused and so seems a bit trite; perhaps, as in so many other areas, Wyndham came first and so was more imaginative than I am giving him credit for in these stories. Unlike his earlier novels with strong female characters, these seem a bit traditional or even misogynistic, particular the last and weakest story, "Time Out".
Oct. 797. Naguib Mahfouz, Before the Throne: Dialogues with Egypt's Great from Menes to Anwar Sadat [1983, tr. 2009] 164 pages
In his slightly earlier short story "The Seventh Heaven", Mahfouz described the judgement in an afterlife of his own imagination of a number of figures from modern Egyptian history (and a few world figures including Gandhi, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.) This book is based on the same idea, with major figures of Egyptian history being judged by the Osiris court.
He returns to ancient Egypt (for the first time since his early "Egyptian trilogy" of the nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties) beginning with Menes, the legendary founder of the first dynasty, and continuing with the most famous Pharaohs (and a few sages like Imhotep and Ptahhotep) of the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom and Late Period. He introduces one probably fictional figure, the revolutionary Abnum who allegedly lead a peasant revolutionary in the largely undocumented time of the First Intermediate Period, in order to provide a spokesperson for criticism of the later rulers from a populist standpoint.
Each figure in turn is commented on by some of the earlier personages, who are symbols of various tendencies in history: Menes of unity, Ahmose I of independence, Tuthmose III of military domination, Ramses II of megalomania, and Akhenaten of spiritualism (Mahfouz presents him as a sort of proto-Moslem, ignoring the nature of his "monotheistic" God as the sun-disk.)
The style is reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue (or perhaps better, as the translator maintains in his "afterword", of a dialogue by Lucian.)
Mahfouz continues the history of Egypt through the Middle Ages; I don't know whether all the figures he introduces are historical, since my knowledge of mediaeval history is almost entirely confined to Western Europe.
The novel (if that is the appropriate description) then goes through the modern leaders of resistance to the Ottoman, French and British colonialists, ending with Nassar and Sadat. Apart from the last two, I know of most of these people only through his own earlier novels. The Pharaonic figures are defended by Isis and judged by Osiris, while the later figures are only evaluated before being referred to the judgement of their own Christian or Moslem religions.
The judgements seem quite objective (although, as in the earlier trilogy mentioned above, historical accuracy is less important than the implied applications to current politics) and most of the figures, after being reprimanded for their faults, are judged leniently and allowed into Paradise (or recommended positively to their own religious judgements in the case of the later figures.)
The largely positive, though critical, evaluation of Anwar Sadat and the Camp David accords, which represents Mahfouz' own opinions, is of course very questionable and largely why many writers, such as Nawal el-Saadawi, who were victims of the Sadat regime, were (perhaps not unjustifiably) rather hostile to Mahfouz, although we should remember that he was a novelist and not a political leader (and he is much harder on Sadat in his later novel, The Day the Leader Died).
The book ends with general comments by several of the personalities giving recommendations to modern Egyptians. Considered as a literary rather than a political work, the book is very good.
Oct. 1698. Pablo Neruda, Canto General [1950] 532 pages [Kindle] [in Spanish]
Canto General is considered Neruda's opus magnum, as much for its content as for its length. It is divided into fifteen sections or "cantos". The first canto is basically geographical, describing the land, the flora and fauna of Central and South America; the second canto, "Las Alturas de Machu Pichu", based on a visit by Neruda to the ruins, is the best known, often being published as a separate book, and serves as a kind of introduction to the work. The next two cantos, "Los Conquistadores" and "Los Liberadores" are essentially a history of Latin America during and after the conquest, although by no means "narrative" poetry. The rest of the cantos mix descriptions of the land with current politics, especially focusing on opposition to the Chilean dictatorship of the time the book was written (the seventh canto is called "Canto General de Chile"; originally the whole book was to have been about Chile only, but Neruda realized that it would make more sense in a continent-wide context).
The ninth canto is the real heart of the book, the best and worst poetry. The best, because it dramatically expresses the struggle of the workers and peasants for a better life and the confidence in their ultimate victory; the worst, because of one jarring factor: the adulation of Josef Stalin. Neruda, from the time of the Spanish Civil War, until his death probably though not certainly at the hands of the Pinochet dictatorship, was a member of the Communist Party; like most of the left of his time (apart from the small number of Trotskyists, too divided and mostly too sectarian to be a real pole of attraction), he found it impossible to separate the achievements of the Soviet Union from the person of Stalin and the misleadership of the Soviet Communist Party. He viewed the USSR not as it was in reality, but as he thought -- as he wanted to believe -- it was, as it should have been. This is not something which can be separated from his work as some sort of anomaly; the confidence he shows in the ultimate victory of the working class was bound up with his belief that there was one country, or rather one part of the world (he is writing here immediately after the victory of the Chinese Revolution, when Mao was still closely aligned with the Soviet Union), where the working class was in power. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, after the fall of the Soviet Union and so many partial victories ending in defeats (often in part due to the betrayals of those very followers of Stalin) when no one in the West except a few Enver-Hoxha-quoting sectarians any longer believes in the myth of Stalin, we can form a more realistic estimate; this is a good thing certainly, but also makes it more difficult to have the kind of confidence Neruda expresses here. We know that the way forward is more difficult and more complex, and the outcome less certain. Nevertheless, for those who still believe in the possibility of victory, these poems are very inspiring.
Oct. 1899. Boubacar Boris Diop, La nuit de l'Imoko: Récits [2013] 131 pages [Kindle] [in French]
La nuit de l'Imoko is a collection of seven short stories written in French between 1998 and 2012, all set in present-day Sénégal. They are in a less experimental style than most of Diop's novels.
"La petite vieille" is about a rather simple man from a village who has the misfortune to incur the hostility of the mistress of a high official; I have read too many novels and stories, as well as non-fiction works, which center around interrogation and prison brutalities to respond to them with any kind of original feeling.
Myriem is about a woman who tries to help the street children of her city and ends up being framed up as a trafficker; the theme is that the government becomes so embroiled in popular fictions that it is unable to acknowledge the truth which is apparent to everyone involved.
"Retour à Ndar-Géej" has no real plot; the narrator and his wife return to his native city of Saint Louis to find it very changed, and the story simply uses his recollections and meditations to provide a history of the development of the city in the years after Independence.
"Me Wade ou l'art de bâcler son Destin . . ." is about the results of an election and would probably make more sense to someone who is familiar with the recent history of the country.
"Comme une ombre" is the internal monologue of a street sweeper. "Diallo" is the internal monologue of a night watchman who has just killed his boss, trying to understand his own motivations.
The title story, which is the longest of the seven, is about the visit of a governmental official to a local ceremony and what results from it. Most of the stories are about human dignity in some way or another.
Oct. 21100. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart [2017] 269 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah's ninth novel, from 2017; he has written one more since (Afterlives), which I may read later on, but for now I am moving on to the 2022 winner, Annie Ernaux. This was a good, well-written novel, one of his best, but does follow what I have come to see as Gurnah's formula, the boy from a dysfunctional family who grows up in Zanzibar, emigrates in his late teens or early twenties to London, struggles to make good despite poverty and racism, and ultimately has a revelation about his family.
Oct. 25101. Annie Ernaux, Les armoires vides [1973] 181 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
The first novel by this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Les armoires vides is a first-person story of a girl growing up in a family which owns a small café and grocery store who is embarrassed by her family's lack of culture and education and tries to escape by becoming a university student. The novel begins and ends with her having an abortion, and the rest of the narrative is her reflections on how she ended up in that situation. The psychology of the protagonist seems very realistic and the style is interesting, although the use of different sorts of slang made it somewhat difficult to read; I will be reading more of Ernaux's books over the next few months.
Oct. 29102. Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life [1999] 540 pages
After recently reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the second Cosmos by his widow Ann Druyon, I decided to read the two biographies of Sagan which I had in my garage, this one by science journalist Keay Davidson and the one by William Poundstone. Both are from 1999, two years after Sagan's death. This one I read first.
Sagan's life was very interesting; he was a pioneer of planetary science and heavily involved in the unmanned space probes to the planets, author of a science fiction novel which became a successful film (Contact) and an activist against nuclear weapons, but more importantly he was a popularizer of science to the general population via a number of books and the Cosmos television series.
Davidson gives a good account of all these facets, although I would have preferred more detail about his scientific work, but concentrates a bit too much on his supposed personal failings, his "arrogance" and his two divorces. The book is obviously well researched but somewhat repetitious.
Oct. 31103. Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories [1998] 91 pages
Last year for Halloween I read five anthologies of horror/fantasy stories by H.P. Lovecraft, but this year I was too far behind on other projects to read more than this one short collection by Ambrose Bierce. The book contains twelve stories, selected by the modern Dover editor from the Collected Works. The stories themselves were written around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. I have to admit that I read so many books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the horrors of our dystopian real world, especially in third-world dictatorships, that paranormal or supernatural horror (which I don't have any belief in) generally doesn't seem all that scary to me. However, Bierce is obviously a master of the genre, and all these stories are well-crafted, several with plot twists I didn't expect.
104. John Wyndham, Chocky [1968] 191 pages
My last reading in Wyndham for the time being, as my science fiction reading goes on to other authors. This is Wyndham in a much milder mood than anything else I have read by him, with no civilization-destroying catastrophes. The plot begins with a couple of ordinary parents, David and Mary Gore, suspecting their son Matthew is inventing an imaginary friend, Chocky, an extraterrestrial. It soon becomes apparent to the reader, and eventually the parents, that there is more going on here. The alien in this case is not evil but well-intentioned although a bit clumsy. The basic idea, as with many of Wyndham's novels, has been used often since, including one Star Trek episode. Not as significant as other novels by Wyndham, but an enjoyable quick read to finish out the month.
Nov. 10105. Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo, el Supremo [1974] 612 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
Yo, el Supremo is undoubtedly one of the most difficult novels I have ever read; it took me almost three weeks to finish (although I did read other things at the same time.) It is essentially about the Paraguayan founding father and "Perpetual Dictator" Dr. José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, who ruled from 1816 to his death in 1840, although it is anything but a straightforward historical novel.
According to this review in the London Times -- https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n... -- Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa in 1967 challenged a number of Latin American authors to write a "dictator" novella; the proposed anthology never came about, but three of the authors went on to write rather long novels on the subject, which are often considered a sort of trilogy. This book was one of them; the other two, which I read last March, were Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del método and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's El otoño del patriarca. Vargas Llosa himself contributed a long novel to the genre in 1969, Conversacion en la Catedral, which I read several years ago and was sure would be the most difficult book I would ever read in Spanish. Not so. If Vargas Llosa's novel is sometimes referred to as "the Latin American Ulysses, Yo, el Supremo could well be called the Latin American Finnegan's Wake.
What follows are my first impressions of the novel.
The novel, like that of Joyce, is full of paronomasia (and every other rhetorical figure ever invented.) Both authors create new words by blending or deforming normal words; in addition, Roa Bastos frequently uses unusual compounds modeled after the syntax of the Guarani language (Paraguay more than any other Latin American country is bilingual.) Nearly every sentence of Yo, el Supremo contains puns, Spanish/Spanish, Spanish/Guarani, Spanish/Latin, French, Portuguese or English, as well as alliteration, assonance, and cognate (or false cognate) complements. The novel pushed my Spanish to the limit (and occasionally beyond the limit), but on the other hand I can't imagine that a lot would come through in translation (although according to reviews on Goodreads, Helen Lane did an excellent job). The novel also has a very complex structure; as Milagros Ezquerro explains in the 94 page introduction (without which I would have been totally lost) the book is presented as a compilation of various types of sources, including notes dictated to his secretary Policarpo Patiño, dialogue between the two about the notes, the "Perpetual Circular" ostensibly intended to be sent to officials throughout the country, in which el Supremo outlines an apparently very distorted version of Paraguayan history, a private notebook kept by el Supremo himself, marginal arguments in an unknown hand within the private notebook (some of which he attributes to the ghost of his dog Sultan), and notes and citations supposedly added by the unnamed "compiler". There is a certain amount of blending so we are not always sure which level we are reading or who is speaking. Also according to the introduction, Roa had a very postmodern theory about the nature of literature, denying that the author produces an original work and maintaining that all works of literature are selections from the surrounding culture, a view which is mentioned in some passages of the book but also exemplified in the structure of the novel as a "compilation".
The book presents the life of Francia out of order through his memories, especially but not entirely in the Perpetual Circular, but the present of the novel is apparently supposed to be the last few days of his life, although there is a suggestion (at the very beginning, he receives a description of his funeral services in one of the rural areas, and in a few places he refers to his death as a past event) that he may in fact already be dead, or perhaps in a Schroedinger's-cat-like superposition of the two states. In any case, he is presented as increasingly mentally confused as he reaches the end. The novel is full of deliberate anachronisms, some that were obvious and some I wouldn't have noticed without Ezquerro's notes.
Dr. Francia is presented in a rather ambiguous light in the book. Roa, again according to the introduction, had a lifelong fascination with the Perpetual Dictator; his first story written when he thirteen was about him, and he is mentioned in some of his earlier novels (Yo, el Supremo was written in his late fifties.) Francia in the novel, and perhaps in historical reality, was a different sort of dictator than the right-wing, greedy, power-for-its-own-sake dictators satirized in the other two books mentioned above; rather, like some left-leaning leaders in our own time, he thought of himself as making a revolution on behalf of the "masses", but considered them as too backward and ignorant to make their own decisions democratically without his superior knowledge and guidance. In short, a Stalin rather than a Hitler, the kind of top-down, bureaucratic revolution that ends up being as bad or worse than what it replaces. Throughout the Perpetual Circular he anachronistically uses modern left-wing arguments. In fact, he actually carried out many progressive reforms early in his regime but became much more tyrannical near the end of his life, according to what little I have been able to find out about him. The book itself, apart from an "appendix" about his mortal remains, ends with a condemnation presumably by the unknown corrector, addressed to El Supremo, saying that he never believed in the people and that was the root of his failure and that of the revolution. Unfortunately, like most people in the United States (where our high school "world history" courses are just English and European history), I know very little Latin American history and nothing at all about Paraguay. If I knew more the novel the book might have been somewhat more understandable. The title of "Perpetual Dictator" is historical; it is the title assumed by Julius Caesar shortly before his assassination. It would have seemed like an oxymoron both in ancient Rome and in nineteenth-century Paraguay, since the essence of the Roman office of Dictator was that it was for a limited time to accomplish a particular task. (Which by the way explains the generally misunderstood phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marx's writings; he was intending to emphasize not that it would be an absolute rule but that it would be a temporary rule for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and thereby eliminating all classes including the proletariat itself.) In the novel, there is also a play on the two meanings of "dictator" as the ruler of the country and as "dictating" his notes to his secretary.
In addition to its "trilogy" with the other two authors, this book is also apparently the second in a loosely related trilogy of Roa's own novels, between Hijo de hombre (1960) and El Fiscal (1993). I may eventually go back and read the other two, but for now I don't really have the time or energy. Yo, el Supremo is not a book that I would recommend to what C.S. Lewis rather pretentiously calls the "nonliterary reader", who reads books for the story; most of the one and two star reviews I have seen of the book seem to be by readers who complain that the "story" was not clear and they could not follow it, which isn't what the book is about. For those who enjoy experimental style and thinking about aesthetic theory, as well as the nature of political power, this is a book that they should make time for. It would also help to be more fluent than I am in Spanish and to know a bit about Paraguay.
Nov. 15106. Waltharius: lateinisches Gedicht des zehnten Jahrhunderts [ca. 920?; edd. J.V. Scheffel and A. Holder, Latin text with paraphrase and commentary in German, 1874] 180 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Waltharius manu fortis is a mediaeval Latin epic of 1456 lines, or about 50 pages of a modern printed book. The date and author are apparently controversial. The first two modern editions (the book was rediscovered in the late eighteenth century), the first by Fischer and Molter and the second by Jacob Grimm, describe it in the title as a sixth-century poem; this 1874 edition by Joseph Victor Scheffel and Alfred Holder, which I think was the fourth (I chose it because it was the one that was free on Open Library), calls it a poem of the tenth century. The monk from St. Gall whom modern scholars call Ekkehard IV states in his history of that monastery that it was written by his predecessor, whom modern scholars call Ekkehard I; on the other hand several manuscripts have a dedication by a Geraldus to Bishop Erchambald. The editors of this edition explain that it was written by the young student Ekkehard as a homework assignment and corrected by his teacher, Geraldus, who then sent it on to Bishop Erchambald, and that it was further worked over later by Ekkehard IV. A selection from the epic was included in Harrington's Medieval Latin (1925) as a tenth-century work by Ekkehard; in the second edition, revised by Joseph Pucci (1997) the same excerpt is described as a ninth-century work by an "unknown" Gerald. The two internet resources I consulted gave no indication that there was any controversy: Wikipedia calls it simply a tenth-century poem by Ekkehard, and Britannica Online simply says, a poem by Gerald.
Whenever and by whomever it was written, it is an interesting poem. I read it because of its historical importance as a forerunner of the later vernacular mediaeval epics and as a specimen of the Latin writing of the period (and to be honest because I wanted to get some more practice in mediaeval Latin before attempting the plays of Hrotsvita) but I was surprised to find that it was actually a good story. Unlike many works of mediaeval fiction it was well constructed, varying the pace without ever bogging down and building to a climax, after which it has the sense to stop, with only one stanza about the hero's return home and marriage, which many works (not just mediaeval) would have described at boring length. Although obviously modelled on the Aeneid, it reminded me much more of the Iliad (of course unknown at that time and place).
The poem is set in the fifth century, at the time of Attila the Hun's first invasion of the West. The kings he comes in contact with, either defeated or afraid to resist, make peace and send hostages: King Gibicho of the Franks, whose son Guntharius (Gunthar) is still a baby, sends a teenage relative named Hagan; the king of Aquitania sends his teenage son Waltharius; and the king of Burgundia sends his daughter, Hiltgunt. Waltharius and Hiltgunt have been betrothed since birth. The three are well-treated and brought up in the Hunnish court; the two boys by their strength and skill become leaders of the Hunnish army, and Hiltgunt is entrusted with the supervision of the Hunnish treasury. As they reach their twenties, they decide they want to escape and return home. Hagan leaves first, then a couple weeks later Waltharius flees with Hiltgunt, taking with them a large part of the plunder Attila has taken from the three kings. When the arrival of the couple is announced at the Frankish court at Worms, now the court of King Gunthar after the death of his father Gibicho, Hagan rejoices, but the immature and spoiled Gunthar immediately decides to attack them and steal the treasure, with the excuse that some of it was taken as tribute from his father. He selects twelve champions from his army to accompany him, including the unwilling Hagan.
Meanwhile, the fleeing couple has taken shelter in a cave high in the Vosges forest. King Gunthar and his knights arrive, and he sends a message to Waltharius, arrogantly demanding that he give over the treasure to save his life. He offers to give a part to King Gunthar as a gift for passing through Frankish territory, but Gunthar demands it all; Waltharius refuses. Hagan, with his loyalties divided between his friend Waltharius and his duty to King Gunthar, withdraws like Achilles and refuses to take part on either side. The other eleven champions attack Waltharius in a series of single combats and he defeats them all. One of the successes of the poet is the way that he manages to make all eleven combats sufficiently different to maintain the interest of the reader. One of the eleven champions is the favorite nephew of Hagan; Waltharius tries to dissuade him from fighting but he insists and Waltharius has no choice but to kill him. This decides Hagan to enter the contest on the part of Gunthar (cf. Patrocles and Achilles). Gunthar and Hagan leave the battlesite, but return the next day to follow Waltharius and Hiltgund. When the couple realize they are being followed, Waltharius approaches the other two and there is a final hand-to-hand combat among the three which leads to the resolution of the poem.
The Scheffel and Holder edition is bilingual, like a Loeb or Teubner Classics edition, with the Latin and German on facing pages (which doesn't really work in e-book format.) Unfortunately the German is not a real translation, but more of a loose paraphrase with much left out, so it isn't much help in reading the Latin. Fortunately, the Latin is fairly simple for poetry, with a reasonably straightforward word order influenced by German. (The editors speculate that the Latin poem is based on a lost German original.) Most of the words I didn't know were in my small Latin-English dictionary, although it sometimes took some searching given the mediaeval spellings, and I had to search for a few rare words on the Internet. The text and translation take up about 100 pages, and then there are about 80 pages of explanatory material divided into five chapters. The first chapter describes the poem and puts it into the context of the literature of the period; the second chapter discusses the date and authorship questions and gives mini-biographies of Ekkehard I, Gerald (not unknown after all), Bishop Erchambald, and Ekkehard IV; the third chapter discusses and classifies the manuscripts; the fourth chapter tries to identify the particular site in the Vosges where the poem is set; and the last chapter is the text and translation of the two small existing fragments of the Old English poem Waldhere, which is apparently a version of the same story.
107. William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos [1999] 473 pagesThe other 1999 biography of Carl Sagan on my list (last month I read the one by Keay Davidson), science writer William Poundstone's book has less speculative psychologizing about Sagan's personality, less detail on his divorces and other personal affairs, and more detail on his scientific work. I won't say this is totally a better book, but it is more what I am looking for in the biography of a scientist (or anyone else who has actually done something besides being famous.)
Nov. 17108. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) Suppl. v.4 [1888] ca. 360 pages [Kindle, Project Gutenberg]
The fourth supplemental volume to Burton's translation, this contains the additional stories from the Montague manuscript. These are fairly typical stories, many are just variants of stories in the more "canonical" versions. A book essentially for those with completeness demons.
54. Juan Rulfo, El llano en llamas [1953] 136 pages [in Spanish]
A collection of sixteen short stories set in the llano, the plains in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. (Some editions have a seventeenth story which was not in the edition I read.) The title story is about the series of peasant rebellions which took place in the area following the Mexican Revolution; two of the later stories, "Anacleto Morones" and "El día del derrumbe" are rather humorous, but the rest are stark descriptions of peasant life in the arid rural areas, full of hardships and violence.