(2006)

Colm Tóibín:
     The Master
Judy & Tashi Tensing:
     Tensing and the Sherpas of Everest
L. Frank Baum:
     The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Gregory Maguire:
     Wicked
Wilfred Thesiger:
     Arabian Sands
Robert Solé, Dominique Valbelle and W.V. Davies:
     The Rosetta Stone
Jean Rhys:
     Sleep it Off Lady
O.R. Gurney:
     The Hittites
Ann Patchett:
     Bel Canto
J.M. Cook:
     The Persians
Nigel Davies:
     The Incas
Norman Hammond:
     The Maya
Jean Rhys:
     Voyage in the Dark
Frank Schätzing:
     Der Schwarm
Nigel Davies:
     The Aztecs
Anne Brontë:
     Agnes Grey
Charlotte Brontë:
     The Professor
Anita Desai:
     Clear Light of Day
Raymond Chandler:
     Trouble is my Business
Robert Louis Stevenson:
     The Master of Ballantrae
Jared Diamond:
     Collapse
Colin Higgins:
     Harold and Maude
Reinhold Messner:
     Mount Everest: Expeditionen zum Endpunkt
Thomas Cochrane:
     Memoirs of a Fighting Captain
Sarah Waters:
     The Night Watch
Kenneth Cook:
     Wake in Fright
Tracy Chevalier:
     The Lady and the Unicorn
Philip Roth:
     The Plot Against America
Haruki Murakami:
     Kafka on the Shore
Timothy Hemion:
     Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes
Kiran Desai:
     The Inheritance of Loss
Zadie Smith:
     On Beauty
David Mitchell:
     Cloud Atlas

The Master, by Colm Tóibín

    This book is totally different from Tóibín's earlier book The Blackwater Lightship, which I just read at the end of last year, before getting onto this one. It is dignified, elegant, almost ponderous in style, imitating the style of Henry James, whose more-or-less fictional biography it is.
    I have already gone on too much about my problems with Henry James in earlier reviews. But despite the ponderous nature of this book - something which was necessary in order to do its subject justice - I found it to be much more enjoyable than Henry James' own writings. Tóibín has obviously done much research on his subject, and so I was constantly looking up the sketches of the various characters which make their appearances in the book, in wikipedia, or whatever. In fact Tóibín writes in his short "Acknowledgments" at the end of the book that he "has peppered the text with phrases and sentences from the writings of Henry James and his family". Given this, I was particularly interested in the (perhaps imagined) criticism which his brother William - a real-life Harvard professor - had for Henry's writings during a stay at Henry's house in Rye. William says: "I believe that your style has suffered from the strain of constantly dramatizing social insipidity. I think also that something cold and thin-blooded and oddly priggish has come to the fore in your content." How true!
    Yet reading Tóibín's book gives us (at least those of us who have not read all the countless biographies, volumes of letters, and what have you) a clearer view of what Henry James was all about. To begin with, James was homosexual, but extremely celibate. This lead to a life of loneliness and unfulfilled longings. Perhaps longings which he was unable to acknowledge even to himself. An amusing scene in the book describes an episode when he was a young man, visiting cousins for the summer. He had been a mama's boy, pretending to be sick in order to avoid doing anything in particular other than lying in bed, reading. So he had avoided the American Civil War. Yet he admired the various manly heroes which that war had produced. For example, the family friend Oliver Wendell Holmes - who had become a war hero. The scene is that they arrive at the cousin's place in New England, but for the first night there is only one room with a single bed for both men. Oliver Wendell Holmes takes off all his clothes and stands naked in his heroic manhood before climbing into bed. A trembling Henry James then climbs in after him, spending sleepless hours, afraid of the slightest movement throughout the night. The next day, they go to the female cousins and admire all of their fine womanly qualities. And so I imagine Henry James went on and on through life like this, approaching people, making countless friends, yet turning away from them to seek loneliness and to write complicated, involved stories of all these people, coldly observing their qualities. Such are the books of Henry James.
    Tóibín also shows that Henry's brother William, the Harvard professor, (and also Henry himself) believed deeply in the reality of ghosts, of clairvoyance, of personal visitations by the Devil. So that book which we read last year, The Turn of the Screw, can be understood - incredible as it seems - as a true statement of the religious beliefs of the author Henry James!
    In any case, much of James' writings revolve around the theme of Americans (that is, people from the U.S.A.) visiting "Ye Olde Europe" and experiencing one thing or another here. These Americans are characters from James' own New England background. They come from extremely rich families, living spaciously in Newport. Yet all of their wealth leads simply to loneliness, to Weltschmerz. James' friend, the American novelist Constance Woolson (wikipedia still has no article on her life; other on-line encyclopedias say that her writing is so outdated as to be almost unreadable these days) is driven to suicide by Henry's constant approaches, and then retreats, from her emotional neighborhood. Her last days are spent in Venice. According to Tóibín's story, Constance has, with all her American wealth, retained her own personal gondolier, in oder to row her out away from Venice, into the Lagoon. But also to constantly take her to the parties of the other members of the American "colony" in Venice. After her death, Henry surreptitiously goes through her papers in order to burn anything which might embarrass him. But then he disposes of the dead Constance's clothes with the aid of the gondolier, who is portrayed as being totally grief-stricken, almost as if it were his own mother who had died. Surely Tóibín has taken all this poignant loneliness too far at this point! In reality, any Venetian gondolier, either today, or 100 years ago, has at most a tolerant contempt for these arrogant American tourists.

Tensing and the Sherpas of Everest, by Judy and Tashi Tensing

    Tashi Tensing is the son of Pem Pem, who is the daughter of Tensing Norgay, who, together with Sir Edmund Hillary, was the first person to climb Mt. Everest to the top. Tashi himself has also climbed it. His wife is Judy, who was also a mountain climber and leader of trekking expeditions in the Himalayas. She is Australian, and so they now live in Sydney where they have a travel agency for trekking tours.
    Actually, I didn't read the original version of the book, which was published in Australia. Rather I read a German translation which I had received for Christmas. It has the title Im Schatten des Everest: Die Geschichte der Sherpa. Why do translators, or at least the publishers of translated books, so often find it necessary to change the title to such an extent that it no longer describes what it is to any sensible extent? One sees this with movies too. Often a movie has a very simple and fitting title, yet the translated version ends up with a complicated title which doesn't fit the movie at all! Anyway, this book mainly describes what has been going on in the Solu Khumbu region of Nepal, which is on the South side of Mt. Everest, and thus not in its shadow. Furthermore, it is concerned primarily with the great Tensing Norgay, his relatives, and short descriptions of other famous Sherpa mountain climbers. It is not concerned with a general history of the Sherpa peoples of the Himalaya. So I hope that the publishers - Frederking & Thaler - have only managed to garble the title of the book, leaving a cleaner translation of the actual text.
    But this is really a most interesting book. There is a Foreword by the Dalai Lama, and also another one by Sir Edmund Hillary. Also it has many photos which one can study to see the characters of the people being described. It is different from most books of this genre in that it describes things from the perspective of the Sherpa.
    One interesting point is that Tensing Norgay was born in Tibet, but then his family migrated to Nepal, and then in later life he settled in Darjeeling. But why did his family leave Tibet? When listening to the Dalai Lama, one gains the impression that in earlier times (before the Chinese invasion), Tibet was an earthly paradise. It was "Shangri La" - heaven. Why would anyone possibly want to leave these heavenly realms to migrate out of the shade of Everest and into the more earthy regions of Nepal and India? This book provides an answer to this seemingly paradoxical question.
    The answer is that the Dalai Lama has been misleading us to some extent!! Tibet was, in fact, not a pure "heaven upon earth" in the old days. No! In reality, the common people were living in the condition of serfs - or slaves - under a few feudal landowners. And, according to this book, common punishments included not only whippings, but also being chained naked outside in freezing weather until the victim died, or also being buried alive with only the head protruding from the ground for days on end. So the Tensing family escaped from this personal hell of Tibet into the more peaceful regions of Solu Khumbu - just avoiding the pack of hunters sent to kill them. But of course these memories of a violent and oppressive Tibet were only included in the book since they are a part of the biography of Tensing Norgay.
    He certainly must have been an extraordinary climber with almost superhuman energy. He most enjoyed the Swiss expeditions, culminating in the climb of 1952, where he, together with his wonderful friend Raymond Lambert were only just defeated at 8613 meters by the storms which have cost so many lives at these altitudes. But Lambert remained a great friend of Tensing. The Swiss, who are also people of the mountains, considered the Sherpas to be as their brothers. This was different from the attitude of the British who still expected the natives to call them sahib. But then, after his historic climb with Sir Edmund Hillary, the leading figures of that climb also embraced Tensing as one of them, and 30 years later, when Hillary became New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, they became close personal friends. (Of course Sir Edmund Hillary has distinguished himself with his projects for the advancement of the Sherpa, over many years.)
    The book is really very well worth reading. It also shows the nature of the "zone of death" in the regions above 8000 meters. Even today, if you are prepared to fork out 75,000 American dollars for the Nepalese climbing tax, and further tens of thousands for equipment, hiring of Sherpas, etc., you are still quite likely to die at the top. Don't sit down to take a rest! Even while "resting", the body continues to run down in the direction of death, just somewhat more slowly. Apparently, if you are successful then you will have had the pleasure not only of spending huge amounts of money, but also you will have had the interesting experience of stepping over numbers of frozen corpses of less successful mountain climbers which continue to litter the top of Mt. Everest!
    So this shows how magnificent was the achievement of Reinhold Messner (whose name is only mentioned once in this book, in a list of ten other names or so). Not only has Messner climbed to the top of all the 8000 meter mountains in the world (including Nanga Parbat - the "mountain of death"), but he did it all without oxygen bottles, and he climbed Everest totally alone, from bottom to top in one go, without any helpers at all! Perhaps only Babu Chhiri Sherpa, whose achievements are described in this book, could be considered to be Messner's equal as a high-altitude mountain climber.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

    The reason I read this one is that our next book is Wicked, which seems to be based on the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book which I had certainly never read before. So now I have read this Gutenberg etext edition (which is pleasantly formated in html). I had vaguely placed this Oz business somewhere around Babur the Elephant, and other such half-remembered children's books from the 1950s. But it seems clear that, in fact, I had never encountered the actual Oz story before. I have also not seen the 1930s movie with Judy Garland, although I have seen short clips on TV, and I have enjoyed listening to her rendition of the song Somewhere, Over the Rainbow, which I believe was in the movie. There was an interesting film called Zardoz, with Sean Connery, which was worth seeing, but which had only the most rudimentary connection with the book. And also Australians are fond of calling their country "Oz", as a sort of abbreviation of the first syllable.
    Anyway, the story is that Dorothy, a little girl, is living in a farmhouse in Kansas. A tornado comes and sweeps it up into the air; she floats gently along for a long time - so long that she falls asleep - then the house lands in Oz, waking her up. It happens that the house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East, and the Good Witch of the North comes in to congratulate Dorothy on this good deed. She gives Dorothy various presents, however Dorothy simply wants to return to her home in Kansas. For this purpose she is sent to the Wizard in the Emerald City of Oz, in the middle of the country. He is actually an impostor who was blown here in his balloon, and he would also like to return to Kansas, or Texas, or wherever he came from. But he doesn't know how. So in order to confuse things, he sends Dorothy and her companions off on a quest to kill the remaining Wicked Witch (of the West). She has little trouble doing this, dissolving the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water which melts the poor witch into a puddle of brown organic slime. Eventually she visits the Good Witch of the South, who tells her that since she is wearing the magic silver shoes, she need only say a few magic words, and the shoes transport her back to Kansas in only three steps.
    Fair enough. I thought the story was Ok. As I understand it, people have made a great thing of the Judy Garland film being an allegory of the triumph of World Socialism, or something. Or of the power of Homespun America. Be that as it may, I detected no very profound social messages in the book. The story seemed to me to be better than the average fairy tale, somewhat longer, but not overly so. I was able to get right through it while remaining amused and not particularly bored.
    While all of this witch business seems to be nothing but harmless nonsense in the present day and age, it is worth remembering that a few hundred years ago it was the source of much human suffering. The question of the tradition of witches riding on broomsticks is something which should not be dealt with in polite society.

(Note: I have now been told that the story is actually a satire on the political situation of the world at the beginning of the 20th century, in the style of Gulliver's Travels. In this interpretation, the heartless tin man stands for Industry, the yellow road to Oz stands for the Gold Standard, the cowardly lion stands for England, etc. This may well be true. But quite frankly I only saw a simple children's book when I read it. In contrast to this, the writings of Jonathan Swift are so obviously satirical that I have to laugh about them. Nothing in the Wizard of Oz struck me as being so funny that I actually laughed at it.
    In fact, I think that an even better case can be made for the proposition that the Wizard of Oz is really a satire on the situation of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. The Wizard, who is an impostor who has been blown into power through no fault of his own, owing to the vagaries of the wind blowing his balloon to Oz, is obviously George W. Bush. The Wicked Witch of the West is Condoleezza Rice. The scarecrow with no brains, filled with straw, is Alan Greenspan. The tin man who seizes up without lubricating oil is Modern Society. The flying monkeys which the Wicked Witch of the West calls in to attack her opponents are the airplanes swarming out of their aircraft carriers to drop bombs of death on the Arabs. And so forth.
     However, somehow I do not believe that L. Frank Baum was able to see into the future to the extent that he could knowingly write such a fitting satire on our present world situation. So, for me at least, this just serves to prove that it is not always sensible to read too much into a story. I prefer to take all of these stories at their face values.)

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

    The link here is to the Broadway musical, which was based on the book. Maybe the musical is Ok. For me, the book isn't. I have to admit that I stopped reading it after just 60 pages. Somehow there simply are better things to do with the time one has in life than reading this sort of stuff. The book, which I have spent 14 euros on, has a section of color pictures of the Broadway musical in the middle. I suppose the actors look to be nice sorts of people who are doing their best. Perhaps it even has nice music. Perhaps it is even based on the actual Wizard of Oz story rather than this book. Who knows?
    But it wasn't just the fact that the book is itself a kind of glossy advertisement for the musical. All the pages have silly little pictures in the top corners, in the style of those fantasy books for children. It has sold over 1,000,000 copies. So the author, Gregory Maguire, has struck it rich. As far as I know however, he is not as rich as the woman who has written those "Harry Potter" books. For that, you have to motivate millions of shrieking children to get their parents to come with them to a bookshop and excitedly wait till midnight, when they are then allowed to buy the book - which I understand is even longer than the 409 pages of this one - and which costs even more than 14 euros!
    The worst thing is that this book has a section of 14 exercises at the end, which are called a "Reader's Group Guide". For example, consider exercise number 13, namely:

      "Who or what is Yackle?
       Where does she appear in the story, and what role does she serve in Elphaba's life?
       Is she good or evil - both or neither?"

Frankly, I simply couldn't care less about the answer to this question! Forget it. Give me the flunking mark, please. (The other 13 exam questions are longer than this one, but they all share this general tone. Namely the basic assumption is that this book is not something which should be chucked into the rubbish bin; rather it is assumed to be something which should be learned as part of the work of our lives! In the context of a fairy story such as this, such arrogance on the part of the author and the publishers seems to me to be totally intolerable!)
    In the first 60 pages of the book, almost nothing happens. Just a collection of horrid little ideas from everyday life. The husband is a kind of traveling salesman for religion. He is physically beaten by a mob of dumb people. His wife betrays him when he is away. Her sexual adventures are described in the breathless tones reminiscent of an American high school. As God's punishment for her wicked ways, she gives birth to a green baby with sharp teeth which bites everything it can. What a horrid little thought to give nightmares to the women readers of this book who had been thinking how nice it might be to breast-feed a baby.
    I thought that the book might pick itself up and become an amusing satire on modern life when Maguire began referring not to the "Wizard of Oz", but rather to Ozma! How interesting. I hadn't before considered the connection between Oz and that Emanuel Goldstein of the modern age. Indeed, the green color of the baby, and even of the Emerald City of the original Oz, is the color of Islam, isn't it? But no. Whether intentioned or not, this book avoids all controversial points of that nature. According to various blurbs on the cover, it is supposed to be concerned with the origins of evil. But the fact is that I simply cannot appreciate a book of this nature, produced by a citizen of the USA at a time like this when that country is the source of much of the evil in the world.

Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger

    A fantastic book. This link is to a website which has many more photographs which Thesiger took during his travels. Having all these pictures really gives a more complete picture of the whole thing. Take a look at the photos of Salim bin Ghabaisha, as a boy at the time he accompanied Thesiger across the Empty Quarter, and then during a sobering visit to Oman in 1977. What characters these are!
    Thesiger wasn't the first European to cross the Sands of the Empty Quarter of Arabia. That honor goes to Bertram Thomas, who crossed them in 1930. A few months later St. John Philby also crossed the sands. But they crossed along the shortest traverse. Between 1945 and 1950, Thesiger traveled all over the Empty Quarter in extensive tours. His first tour was undertaken at the request of the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit, whoever they were. The idea was that there might be unknown regions at the far end of Arabia where the locusts gather before forming their plagues. Thus he had the support of the governments throughout the region - such as they were in those days. In particular, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia gave him free passage in his realm.
    While the heat and lack of water makes travel unpleasant in such places, that was not the real difficulty. The Empty Quarter was, in fact, not empty of people. It is the home of the Bedouin. (But Thesiger says that is a double plural. Apparently it is more correct to call them the Bedu.) So the Bedu consist of various tribes, with shifting alliances, constant plunderings. Thesiger preferred the Rashid as traveling companions. But for various stages, it was necessary to take along members of other tribes to prevent attack. It is fascinating to read of the system of loyalties - the laws of the desert - which applied in those days. Thesiger mentions that at least one historian has developed the theory that the rules of chivalry in medieval Europe were derived from the Bedu warriors.
    In any case, one rule was certainly that the Sands were not for the Infidel. Many of the tribes were extremely angry that a Christian was wandering around Arabia. But Thesiger's first excursion was made easy by the protection of the kings and sultans which he enjoyed, owing to the locust eradication project. His second crossing of the Sands was much more difficult. It was private; his own adventure. He was keen to map things and to see many of the places of legend, such as the quicksands of Umm al Samim or Jabal al Akhadar, a mountain which was the only feature on the otherwise blank maps of the region in those days. He did have his companions from the first crossing, but now all the important people were against him. King Saud strictly forbid him to enter Saudi Arabia. From Yemen, a large party of tribesmen was sent to kill him. Upon arrival - half dead - in Hassi, the townspeople could only spit on him. His companions were put in stocks and declared to be even worse than the Christian, since they, as believers, freely traveled with him. A radio message was sent to King Saud in Riyadh who lost himself in a dreadful fit of temper. But the situation was saved by Philby, who intervened on their behalf and gained their freedom. Thus they were driven from the town without food or water, and without a guide to take them further over the featureless Sands with which the Rashid were unfamiliar. And so it goes on. A great book.
    I will restrain myself from commenting further here on the tragedy which George W. Bush and his kind have brought to Arabia. Indeed, in those days the tribes recognized the fact that these Christians would destroy their lives. That is the reason they tried to prevent Thesiger from traveling with them. One can only say, as the Bedu are often quoted in this book, "Let the curses of God be upon them!".

The Rosetta Stone, by Robert Solé, Dominique Valbelle and W.V. Davies

    I've given the link here to the relevant web page of the Folio Society, since this book came from them (but I'll have to link to their main page once the special offer expires). Also, since I have put off re-joining for a long time this year, they have sent me increasingly desperate and generous offers to entice me into doing so. Thus I get all the other books illustrated on this web page, plus the corresponding books on the American Indian civilizations of the Maya, Aztecs, and the Incas, all for free! Good, isn't it? So there will be much material for writing interesting reviews here in the next few months. I will try to read slowly, in order to extend the enjoyment as long as possible.
    As far as the present book is concerned, it is really two short books, combined in this one book of the Folio Society. The first book was written by the first two (French) authors, and published in France in 1999 with the title La Pierre de Rosette, in order to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the discovery of that famous stone. The second part is the book (or booklet) Egyptian Hieroglyphs, published by the British Museum Press in 1987. Both books are very clearly and concisely written - a good change from the usual overly complicated style of books on such subjects as this.
    I assume that all readers of this review (assuming that there are any readers in the first place!) know what the Rosetta Stone is. I had always understood that it was de-coded by Champollion, and that was that. That's what it says in the encyclopedia, as far as I remember. Whenever mention is made of the Rosetta Stone, then in the next breath comes Champollion, whose wonderful achievement was the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, thus making all those Egyptian writings again readable for the modern world. But it turns out that the story is much more complicated than that.
    Not only the French, even the Egyptians are sometimes irritated by the fact that the stone is sitting in the British Museum. Yet even the French authors of the first book acknowledge the fact that that is a sensible place for it to be. Champollion was only one of many people who contributed to the task of learning about hieroglyphs. The good thing about these Folio books is that they have lots of illustrations, so you can see the characters of the various people. It is amazing how egotistical many of them were. But it is understandable. Anything related to ancient Egypt seems to attract hordes of esoteric people, all of whom tend to publish their esoteric books in the thousands, claiming to be the first to have understood the divine SECRET of something or other. A great secret of the world which THEY, in all their sublime wisdom, have been the first to discover. And so forth.
    Towards the end of the present book, short passages of the writings of two of the people working on the Rosetta stone at the beginning of the 19th century are reproduced. It is clear that Champollion drove himself to an early death by his tremendous ambition to be the name associated with the Stone in present-day encyclopedias. So fair enough. People have been kind enough to honor this ambition, which is expressed very clearly in the quoted passage. Nevertheless, Thomas Young - who distinguished himself in many other fields of scientific research (for example in optics) - contributed much as well. And his quoted passage on this subject is much calmer and clearer, describing simply what was known, and what was unknown at that time.
    But the fact is that at the time of Champollion's death, it was not possible to simply read all the hieroglyphs. In fact it was hardly possible to read any of them! Even today, some of the writings remain unclear. Gradually, as more and more hieroglyphs were read, the basic system of writing became more and more clear. In fact, later in the 19th century, a much better stone than the Rosetta stone was found, containing the same text, but including most of the missing parts which are broken from the the Rosetta stone. In any case, at that stage, the Rosetta stone had already become rather irrelevant for the advancement of Egyptology. In an appendix to the book, the text itself is reproduced (in English, of course). This is the most boring part of the book. It goes on and on, for page after page of nonsense. The striking thing is that all of this huge text is contained in the mere 30 or so lines of demotic script in the middle of the stone. Thus demotic seems to have been much more efficient than the corresponding Greek script, which is written in much smaller letters, over more lines, perhaps 50 or so.
    As far as the hieroglyphic writing itself is concerned, it seems to be a combination of word pictures and symbols for sounds. This is similar to the joking sort of texts one often sees in children's books. For example:

"We prefer to go to the S  on a b rather than using the v since that way, we can go through the  P , even though we might thereby end up in an h. (Not to mention the possibility of !!)"

Perhaps such writing would not have been difficult for Young, Champollion, and the rest to understand. However old Egyptian is much more complicated than this since it is mixed in with lots of things which, unfortunately, this hieroglyphic system for html - called the "webdings" font (hopefully your browser has it) - is not rich enough in possibilities to illustrate here. For example Davies says that an analogous idea in the English language would be to have hieroglyphs being pictures of a bee and a leaf. Then the text consisting of those two pictures together would be the word "belief".
    So hieroglyphics remained complicated and obscure, and the vast majority of the old Egyptians were illiterate. Contrast this with the much more sensible system developed by Sequoyah, of the Cherokee tribe of North American Indians in 1821. Before this time, the tribe had found no need for a written language. But then Sequoyah isolated the 86 noises which constituted the spoken Cherokee language. He gave each of these its own unique printed symbol. Thus learning to read consisted in memorizing nothing more than the 86 letters of the alphabet. Once learned, reading and writing was trivial. Almost immediately the entire Cherokee tribe became literate and began printing newspapers, books, and so on. This shows the superiority of such a system to the extremely complicated hieroglyphic system.

Sleep it Off Lady, by Jean Rhys

    According to this link, the present book was Jean Rhys last one, and it was not supposed to be of the same importance as Wide Sargasso Sea, and her other earlier works. Well, I thought it was good. Very good.
    It is a collection of short stories in different original, varied, direct styles. Very soon one realizes that these are episodes from the life of the author, or at least they are episodes which illustrate the times of the authors life. The first stories are things happening to a little - gradually not so little - girl in Dominica (the West Indies). These aren't just nice little stories of childhood. They really make you think. Then she is in a boarding school in cold England. And in the end, she dies a rather lonely, sordid death in a gray, cold, windswept house in England. The book made a strong impression on me. Jean Rhys was a great writer.

The Hittites, by O.R. Gurney

     The first edition of this book appeared in 1952. Yet the author, who was born in 1911, seems to be still alive, and he made further revisions to the text at the time this Folio edition came out in 1999. So his active longevity and devotion to his subject reflects the ancient theme of the book. But to be honest, I must tell you that I almost think that you can get more out of clicking through a web page such as the one I have referenced here, rather than reading this book. On the other hand, of course reading a book is a more peaceful process than clicking nervously away at a computer. And this book certainly has much, much more information than can be found in these often unreliable internet things.
    Our knowledge of the Hittites stems from reading their tone tablets. Apart from that, little is left. In fact, according to the first chapter of this book, it used to be thought that the Hittites were nothing more than one of the obscure little tribes mentioned in the Bible, in particular in Genesis: 15:18-21 (which is sometimes considered to be important in dealing with questions of modern-day real estate). But then, in 1812, Burckhardt, in his travels through the Near East, spotted some unusual stones in a bazaar at Aleppo. Only in the 1870s were they looked at more closely by the experts. (The natives had objected to them being investigated further. In particular they attributed to one of the stones the power of curing ophthalmia when it was rubbed by the sufferer.) Anyway, it gradually became clear that the language on these stones was similar to things being discovered on the high plateau in the middle of Turkey. And so people realized that the Hittites were not an obscure tribe, but rather they were one of the great powers of the world back then in the period from 1700-1200 B.C., or so. At the end of that period, they were destroyed by the "Sea Peoples". The Hittite tribes of the Bible were perhaps just scattered remnants - disconnected from their original lands - with only a vague memory of the distant past.
    So what is known? It seems that in the period before the Hittites, the warriors of old rumbled along in their primitive chariots with solid wood wheels. I can imagine that when traveling in such slow-moving contraptions, they must have been very vulnerable to people jumping at them with spears, swords, and what have you. Thus, some military genius of the ancient world meditated on the heaviness of contemporary chariots and suddenly realized that all of that wood in the wheels wasn't really totally necessary. By substituting spoked wheels, it was discovered that the chariots still worked, and they were not as cumbersome as the previous solid-wheeled variety. This was the basis of Hittite military prowess.
    Actually of course, the other peoples of the world during that epoch also tried to copy the Hittite design of chariot wheel, but without quite the same success. For example, the Egyptians apparently adopted spoked wheels, but perhaps they were afraid that those flimsy-looking wheels couldn't support all that much weight. Thus they only equipped their chariots with two operators, namely the driver and the fighter. The Hittites, on the other hand, being more confident in the art of making spoked wheels, occupied their chariots with three operators, namely (i) the driver, (ii) the offensive warrior, and (iii) the defensive warrior. So a single Hittite chariot had twice the firepower of an Egyptian one. The texts on their tablets, many of which come from the city of Hattusas in Anatolia, describe these military matters, and the lives of the kings, and so on.
    Then most of the rest of the texts are concerned with religion. The main god of the Hittites was called the Weather-god. So whereas the Egyptians, perspiring constantly under the burning desert sun, thought that the Sun was the big thing, the Hittites, shivering in the cold winter snows of Anatolia, being struck by violent strokes of lightning, thought that the universe was ruled by the Weather. (In this sense, they seem to have anticipated the modern cult of weather worship which has so angered Michael Crichton.) Thus, when the kings describe their great military campaigns, they are constantly invoking the Weather-god.
    But then, each Hittite town had its own temple, with its local god. That was generally a wooden statue covered with gold leaf, or perhaps a smaller gold or silver, or even just bronze statue. Gurney explains how it was thought that the relationship of the king, or the priests, to the god was similar to the relationship of servants (or slaves) to their master.
    A servant must always try to please his master, who may, from time to time, be subject to difficult whims, or even cruel outbursts. Yet the house must be kept clean. The master must also be cleaned, fed, and what have you. Throughout all of this, the servant must always avoid offending his master. If, at any time, the servant were to allow himself some inappropriate outburst, then the master will have him severely punished, even killed.
    In the same way, if the King of the Hittites did not serve the Weather-god faithfully, then he might well be punished. Ditto the local kings of the towns, or the priests of the temples. If the routine of cleaning the temple, feeding the god, and so on, is not properly observed, then the god may show his wrath and punish his servants. Obviously the Weather-god has many ways of doing this. The god can also make everybody sick. There are lots of things these angry gods can do. One great problem which society faced in those days (and indeed today) was that it was difficult to understand what the god was thinking. If you just asked him a question, then he would refuse to answer, at least in an audible way. One practical method of dealing with this problem was to dump the intestines, and other organs, of a freshly sacrificed animal on the ground in front of the god, while at the same time asking the god a question. Sort of like playing "20 questions". If the shape of the liver, or the intestines, was something or another, then that meant "yes". Another shape meant "no".
    And so life went on in the ancient world. I imagine that if, in the year 5500 A.D., the People of the Future were to discover the artifacts of the present epoch of world history, then they would not say that we occupy ourselves with serving the wishes of a statue. No. They would say that we serve the wishes of Money. Yet I wonder if serving the Money-god is more satisfying than serving the Weather-god?
    But to be quite frank, I must admit that I would find it to be rather boring to spend a life reading these obscure Hittite tone tablets relating to such subjects. So I admire O.R. Gurney and all those other archaeologists for their perseverance in these studies. Of course they are not bored. On the contrary, as with all academic studies, the various opinions on one subject or another are attended with bitter controversy. For example, the realm of the Ahhiyawans plays a big role in Hittite texts. Early investigators breathlessly identified this with the Homeric Achaioi. That is the Mycenaean Greeks. But of course this has led to endless disputes, depending upon  the differences between such words as: Achaiwiā, Ahhiyawā, Achaiwiā, etc., and on the Greek side, such words as Achaiis, Achaiia, Achiiê, or perhaps Achaïa. Such are the great subjects of contemporary archaeological dispute in this field of academic research.

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

     According to this link, the present book is one of the greatest novels which has been written, at least in recent times. The Pen/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize (and I suppose the Yellow, Green, Red, Brown, and whatever further colors of the rainbow you can think of Prizes), the National Book Critics Circle Award, etc. What a great book!
    I had thought that all of this excitement was just these (United States) Americans whipping themselves up into a frenzy of hysterical acclaim. But then I noticed - as part of the blurb on the back of the paperback edition of the book which I read - that even Alex Clark of the Guardian has allowed himself to become carried away in the hype. Well, readers of my website (if there are indeed any such people) can be assured that I confine myself to living simply in reality. The reality is that I only read this book because it was suggested as the next book for our reading circle. And the reality behind the story of this book is the Japanese Embassy Hostage Crisis, which you can read about, for example, here.
    So the author of this book has taken the story and placed it in "a South American Country", having a fictitious president with a Japanese name. According to her version of reality, it all started in the wonderful house of the Vice President of the "South American Country" where Roxane Coss, the greatest soprano singer of all time (who - like the author - is  an American woman) is giving a recital to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese industrialist. Many foreign people: diplomats, further industrialists, politicians, and what have you, most of whom cannot speak Spanish, are attending the party. Suddenly, after the American soprano sings her last song, thereby overwhelming all present, the lights go out and in come the terrorists.
    After the initial shock and uncertainty, it turns out that they are all extremely lovable people. Since hardly anybody can speak the language of anybody else, but, on the other hand, Gen, the Japanese translator, can speak everybody's languages, we live vicariously through all the otherwise speachless love affairs by means of his translations. Gen also falls passionately in love with Carmen, the lovely young terrorist whom everybody had at first mistaken for a boy. While love gushes everywhere to the accompaniment of the breathtaking vocal performances of Roxane, we learn that we are also in the presence of Cesar, who, although he has grown up in the jungle to be an illiterate terrorist, still, he is potentially the greatest tenor singer of all time. And so forth.
    So the moral of the story is that - ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE! The second moral of the story is that even terrorists have their positive sides.
    Great! I am sure that this is a message many U.S. Americans want to hear. In fact, by agreeing to this thesis, we show that we are existing on a higher plane than such people as Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney, who constantly tell us that it is forbidden to love the terrorists. Thus, by saying that this book is wonderful, and by awarding it all these wonderful prizes, we are showing the world, or at least ourselves, that we are nicer people than those horrible neocons. Therefore I leave it to all you U.S. Americans to celebrate this book.

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

    Let us now turn to reality. First of all, it is obvious that almost all the people attending such a party in Peru would be able to speak English to a greater or lesser extent. Furthermore, it may well astonish Ann Patchett to hear this, but unlike the practice in her country, the reality is that the ambassadors of France, Germany, England, and what have you, have not been selected on the basis of how much money they have paid in bribery for the position. No! Strange as it may seem to her, they have actually been selected on the basis of their qualifications! Therefore they would be capable of speaking both English and Spanish. In fact, I suspect that most French and German (and, of course, English) ambassadors are more familiar with English literature than Ann Patchett herself!
    According to this book, the reason the terrorists took all the people hostage is that they would also like to live a nice life like everybody else. For example, all the privileged people in the "South American Country" look at a particular soap opera on television. But the poor terrorists have only seen broken television sets. Thus they had thought that televisions are - in fact - inferior mirrors to look at yourself in the curved, broken glass. (Apparently the era of broken flat-screen TVs had not yet reached the jungle at that stage.) So they are themselves astonished by the experience of seeing a working TV, with a soap opera. And so forth.
    But is this the real reason that people joined the Shining Path movement in Peru? Ann Patchett has probably never heard of the School of the Americas, which is situated in her country, and where all of the U.S. American torture methods are taught. She would not want to know about the various democratically elected presidents of South American countries who have been assassinated by the CIA for refusing to follow the policy of the U.S.A., which is to keep a few wealthy despots in power who pay money to their U.S. backers, while at the same time keeping the mass of poor people under control.
    So this brings us back to the central figure of this book, Roxane Coss, the American soprano who is the center of this great love-in. Now it is true that a great soprano can create an overwhelming emotional experience. When I was a student in Canberra I heard Kiri Te Kanawa singing Strauss' Four Last Songs. Not only was I overwhelmed. The whole audience exploded with a tremendous outburst of loving emotion. But why did we all love her? It was not only her voice, which was totally overwhelming in itself. We also loved her for her Maori background, for the freedom of the wide Pacific, and for her giving us the wonderful thoughts in the songs.
    Are there any good American soprano singers? I suppose there must be some who have a mastery of all the techniques. They may even be appreciated by the wealthy South American despots who have the money to pay them to come and sing for them. But I hardly think that the victims of U.S. policy in South America would like to hear them.

The Persians, by J.M. Cook

     In my ignorance, before reading this book, I had not realized that the two names Iran and Aryan (or Ariane) are the same thing. Like the fact that Peking is now supposed to be Beijing, reflecting merely the circumstance that it is difficult to know how to spell these foreign names. Therefore we see that the Nazis of Germany 70 years ago entertained the strange fantasy that all non-Jewish inhabitants of their country were actually Persians, or at least Iranians! This is similar to the fact that the present-day inhabitants of the United States, as far as they are of predominately European ancestry, apparently believe that they are actually inhabitants of the Caucasian Mountains in Central Asia! Indeed, those mountains did form part of the northern boundary of the Persian Empire. But somehow, I wonder if it would be a sensible thing for such an inhabitant of the U.S.A. to claim to be an Aryan? Particularly considering the fact that at the present time these Central Asian inhabitants of the U.S.A. seem to be consuming themselves with the fantasy that the Aryans are, in fact, Nazis! But so much for the absurdities of modern life.
    (Actually, according to this book, the Arab geographers called the Caucasus Mountains the "mountain of languages". It was a refuge of forgotten peoples, and Strabo wrote that 70 different languages were spoken there. Cook asserts that even in the present day, at least fifty different languages are reported as being spoken in the Caucasus!)
    In any case, the link I have given here gives a broad history of the Persians. On the other hand, the present book is only concerned with the very narrow time-frame from 560-330 B.C., which was the time of the Persian Empire. At the beginning of this time, Persis was an obscure trouble spot up in the Zagros Mountains to the east of Babylon. But then Cyrus the Great became King of Persis and proceeded to conquer the known world (except for Egypt, which his son Cambyses conquered). So perhaps we can say that this achievement of Cyrus was even greater than the achievement of Alexander, who conquered Persia in 330, at the end of our period. After all, Alexander started off with a hardened Macedonian army, whereas Cyrus really began from scratch with just a few primitive tribesmen to help him. Furthermore, Cyrus has gone down in history as a very tolerant ruler - in contrast to both Alexander and to Cambyses. Also he had a long and happy rule, down to 530 B.C. This was also something which neither Alexander, nor Cambyses was able to achieve.
    So why is history so full of Alexander, while Cyrus remains obscure (at least for me, in my general ignorance of history, in addition to my ignorance of the names which the various peoples of the world like to call themselves)? Well, the answer to this seems to be that in order to be famous in history, you have to be a part of history. And in order to be that, you have to have an historian who is prepared to write down your history. Without that, as in the case of the Hittites, there is nothing much to write about.
    Of course Alexander was surrounded by historians, writing down all his various deeds, and then the Romans and the scribes of the Middle Ages kept this history alive so that we can read about all the juicy details. This sort of journalistic writing of history seems to have been a Greek invention. Since the Greeks spent much of their energies in fighting the Persians, a few of them were sufficiently interested to write such histories about the Persians as well. So this is the basis of our knowledge of Persian history.
    But I was surprised to read of the paucity of such historical sources. There is Herodotus, and then that is just about it. The author of the present book devotes a whole chapter to "The Sources", discussing the problems with Herodotus, and then the much greater problems with Xenophon, Ctesias, Strabo, and a few even more obscure sources. Of course the Persians, living in this period, a thousand years later than the Hittites, did leave more relics. In particular there are the remains of Persepolis, which was initially burned to the ground by Alexander. But without the Greek authors, we would be left with simply a collection of inscriptions, describing how wonderful this or that king was, or else this or that god.
    Therefore the modern academic field of studies of the Persians seems to reduce to endless debates on the meaning, or reliability of the various passages in Herodotus. For this reason, I found the book to be heavy going. Rather than simply saying that Xerxes number I or II, or the respective Darius, did something, the author of the present book describes the controversies surrounding the given assertion, quoting one author against the other, with extensive footnotes. Often the author of the present book frames his descriptions of these controversies in more or less obscure ironies, making the whole thing even denser than it would otherwise be.
    But it would seem that in the end, the Persian Empire was falling apart from its own internal weakness. Half of the soldiers - the ones who were most effective - were Greek mercenaries. They had just succeeded in recapturing Egypt for the Persians. And Phillip of Macedonia was already well into his preparations for invading Persia when he died, giving the crown to his son Alexander. Thus Alexander's various conquests were not all that wonderful, or even unexpected. Particularly given the fact that Darius III simply ran away at each encounter.
    When looking at photos of the ruins of Persepolis, one is struck by the fact that it is sitting in the middle of a totally barren desert. How did the people live there back in those days, 2500 years ago? The answer is that 2500 years ago it wasn't a desert! It was full of gardens, orchards, and what have you. Therefore we have here a practical example of climate change.
    What caused the climate to change at Persepolis? Modern scientists might propose the theory that it is caused by people driving their cars too much. Or the burning of coal. However these explanations are soon discovered to be inadequate when one realizes that the climate at Persepolis became dry even before the industrial era of western civilization. J.M. Cook, writing in the year 1982, said that this is an example of desertification. Yes. That was the popular theory back in those days. It was thought that climate change was caused by the grazing of domestic animals. Then came the theory of the nuclear winter. And now we have global warming. So all of these people in the "soft sciences" sway back and forth, publishing their various papers about climate change. But in reality, the climate is always changing, whether we like it or not, and in fact it even had the audacity to change itself before the time when humans existed on the earth!
    For example, on the one hand the carbon dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere was around 4400ppm - that is more than ten times the present level - during the Ordovician period of geological time, yet global temperature was as low as it is today. (That is to say, in comparison with the average temperature over the last 600 million years, it was extremely cold. Then, as now, the world was going through a phase of ice ages.) On the other hand, during the early Carboniferous period, CO2 levels were almost as low as they are today, yet global temperatures were almost 10°C higher, on average! This higher temperature is more the norm in terms of geological time.

The Incas, by Nigel Davies

     The thing about the Incas is that they - along with their predecessors in the Andes of South America - had no system of writing. So I suppose a society without writing is analogous to a person with no long-term memories. Short-term memories are just brain-waves of electro-chemical activities, sloshing around within the skull, only to be replaced by new brain-waves in the presence of new stimuli. In the process, the old memories are lost. In contrast, long-term memories are "hard-wired" by the creation of new synapses between the brain cells. So a society without writing quickly forgets what happened a couple of generations ago. Thinking about this, I imagine that most of us have little idea what our grandparents did, and know almost nothing of our great grandparents, and beyond. Only if those earlier generations took the trouble to write things down - and if the intermediate generations bothered to preserve such writings - do we have any real idea of the lives of our direct ancestors.
     But in a way, this lack of writing of the people under investigation tends to improve the writing of history. Rather than wading through tedious lists of kings, battles, absurd religious rites, and so forth, the author can concentrate on what has been left to us in the way of archaeological artifacts. So I enjoyed the first part of this book more than the second part. In the first part, the cultures of Moche, Nazca, Tiahuanaco, Huari, and all the rest are dealt with. They were all beyond human memory at the time of the Spanish conquest. This circumstance has lead to hoards of esoterical people descending into Peru, and Davies does describe some of their theories, and also various theories of the more professional types of theoreticians in this whole field. (But the esoteric types may derive some satisfaction from the fact that the professionals also have an extremely varied range of opinions.)
    The thing that seems curious to me is the question of how those old South American people were able to get their stone walls to fit together so nicely. Unfortunately Nigel Davies is not interested in this question. I suppose it was just a matter of banging stones together, gradually wearing them down and seeing if they fit, then by seeing the impression on the stone dust of the worked stone, getting a feeling where to bang them down a bit more to get a nearly perfect fit.
    In the end, the study of the history of the Incas boils down to studying the manuscripts which a few Spanish people wrote down, after questioning the natives, a generation or two after they had conquered them. And so historians quibble about the differences between this manuscript and the next. Perhaps one manuscript was copied from another, and so on.
    We all know how brutal the Spanish were. But the Incas and their predecessors were also brutal. Much of the art of the Andes was (as indeed it is the case with the numerous crucifixes which fill the schools of Bavaria) concerned with scenes of torture. If the Spanish enslaved the Incas to force them to work in the gold mines, this was only what the Incas had done to other peoples before them. When the Spanish arrived, the Incas were consuming themselves in a bitter war of succession between Huascar and Atahualpa. Although Atahualpa succeeded in winning, and thus had the enjoyment of subjecting his rival Huascar to degradation and death, all of this only cleared the field for Pizarro to reduce the whole empire with ease.

Apart from all this history, one thing which struck me as strange was the practice in this book of giving distances in miles, feet, and yards, then (almost) always in parenthesis, the approximate equivalent in meters, kilometers, etc. It seems to me that it would have sufficed to have put a little table for converting these quaint, historical units into a more recognizable form at the beginning of the book, and then left it to the interested reader to do so. Surely, after hundreds of repetitions, we all know what a "mile" and a "yard" is! But I must admit that I had forgotten what a "league" is, and it was just at this point, where Davies was describing the initial conquests of Pachacutec, proceeding so many "leagues" from Cuzco, that I asked myself "What is a league?" He doesn't tell us! So for the information of any readers who are similarly ignorant of such matters, and who nevertheless would like to read this book, let me inform you that after consultation with my dictionary I have now (re)discovered the fact that a league is "a measure of distance varying for different times and countries from about 2.4 to 4.6 miles (3.9-7.4 kilometers)". (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary)

The Maya, by Norman Hammond

     So the Maya did have a written language. They, along with the other inhabitants of Latin America, were conquered by the Spanish who, of course, also had a written language. Unfortunately the Spanish were not particularly interested in the languages of the "heathen" peoples of the earth. They were more interested in acquiring as much gold as possible, but also they considered anything strange to be the work of the Devil, and thus worthy of being stamped out and burned. The most notorious inquisitor in the Maya realms was Bishop Diego de Landa, whose lust was not merely satisfied with the ceremonies of torturing his victims. Beyond that, he caused all Maya books to be collected and burned. His evil excesses were so great as to catch the attention of the main inquisitors back in Spain. So he was summoned for trial, but escaped the full fury of the Spanish Inquisition himself. In order to save his skin, he tried to write down all he had learned of Maya culture in order to prove its devilish nature. And so the sad fact is that these writings of Landa are practically the most important key to understanding that lost civilization.
    Starting from the rather primitive association of a few Maya hieroglyphs with Latin letters in Landa's scribblings, modern scholars have gradually been able to understand more and more of the texts. Only three books have - partly - survived. But there are many inscriptions on various stone monuments, and on tone pottery, which Landa was unable to destroy.
    This book describes the history of the Maya - as far as we can piece it together - by describing the history of modern scholars working in the field of Maya research, beginning with John Lloyd Stevens back in 1837. It makes an interesting story.
    Unfortunately I was again irritated by the continuous practice of expressing distances in inches, feet, yards, miles, etc., and then the (metric) equivalents in parenthesis. Is this standard practice for such books, or was it just an idea of the Folio Society when publishing these linked volumes? Obviously most of the distances mentioned are just approximate. For example, when describing a middle sort of distance, half the time in this book it is described as being about 100 yards (91.5 m), then the other half of the time it is 109 yards (100 m). Thus I was continuously wondering whether we are supposed to be thinking in terms of yards, or rather meters? What a ridiculous distraction! The worst example is at the bottom of page 140 of this Folio edition, where it is said that:

The single or grouped house platforms are often found in clusters, each group in the cluster being perhaps 328 feet (100 m) from the next, ... etc.

To take this sort of thinking to an extreme, one might for example say that towns in the mid-western states of the United States are perhaps spaced about 393696 inches (10 km) apart on average. Then a few paragraphs on, one could recall that thought by saying that the towns are spaced about 10 miles (1609344 cm) apart. And so forth. What nonsense!
    Anyway, it is known that the Maya were very interested in playing around with numbers, and also with astronomical observations. They imagined that Venus was the "wasp" star, which might sting the sun, causing untold catastrophes. Therefore they kept careful records of the movements of Venus - how many days it was the morning star, how many the evening star, and how many in the invisible periods when it was lined up with the sun. This leads to more and more refined cycles of numbers. The Dresden Codex - one of the three books which survived Landa's inquisition - deals with this. How sad it is that we have lost all of the other books on Maya mathematics.
    It is easy to draw parallels between the Maya and the ancient Egyptians. Their writing systems - as complicated as they were - are similar, in principle. Both cultures built pyramids. If the Spanish had not been so depraved by the evil of their religion then they would have been able to marvel at their new world, as if they were taking a step back a few thousand years into their own cultural heritage.
    Indeed, the present situation of the Maya people is worth thinking about. If, as it seems to me to be likely, the main problem with the world today is overpopulation, then it is important to think about how to reduce the size of humanity to a more sustainable level. (Despite the hand-wringing of present-day European politicians.) The Maya are an example of a people whose population during their "classical" phase (250-900 AD) was much higher than it is today. They grew a large variety of foods by digging canals and thus making self-sustaining fertile areas of raised land in what was once jungle. So they had a large, well-fed population on tropical rain-forest land, using advanced, aggressive techniques of land management. Yet at the end of the classical period, a time of chaos ensued, and the jungle reclaimed the land. Today, a small population of Maya exist using the "slash and burn" system of jungle planting. Their diet is very restricted. Hammond says that as much as 85 percent of their diet is corn (maize). So they have become a small people, only 150 cm tall or so, their growth being restricted by the limitations of their food. During the classical period they were physically bigger and stronger. Could this be the fate of the rest of humanity as well?

Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys

     This link has a picture of Jean Rhys as a young woman, and much biographical information. The title of the book reminds me of the film Dancer in the Dark, with Björk. There are similarities in the two stories. Young women facing a brutal world. But whereas Björk dies tragically at the end of the film, the heroine of this book, Anna, ends up having an abortion. It is also horrible. As the short resumé at the beginning of this hard-cover edition says, "No more brilliant account of the destruction - partly the self-destruction - of innocence has ever been written."
    I can't think of any other writer who can create such a dream-like feeling in tragedy. This novel is far more direct than her better known Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys said that she only wrote about her own life. Her first love affair was in London as a young woman before the First World War. She put down those experiences into a few notebooks. Then 20 years later, in 1934, she created this book out of those notes.
    As in the book, Jean Rhys grew up on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. She was sent to England, where she attended a school in Cambridge for a year, then began studying acting, but she ran out of money when her father died. So she joined a musical company, touring with them as a member of the chorus. She, or at least her character in the book, was taken up by a rich man who perhaps loved her fleetingly, but he certainly loved sleeping with her. And then he dropped her, but he offered to keep her going financially for a while. She was too proud for this. And so she drifts from one depressing "bed-sitter" to the next in London, thinking about cloths and always being short of money. She lives from the money her "boyfriends", or rather her man-friends, put in her handbag after spending the night. Jean Rhys herself - after this unpleasant phase - married, but it seems that none of her marriages were happy. She became the lover of Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged her in her literary ambitions. (Of course she is now recognized as a far greater writer than he was.)
     This book evokes the feeling of London in those days. She often travels through the "tube" from one place to another. Then she is taken on to other places by taxi. The houses are gray, dreary, all alike. The streets are like oily rivers. Dark, gray fog is everywhere. It rains. The people are cold, unfeeling, like walls. She dreams of the Caribbean, of the sun, of the smell of tropical trees and flowers and the sea. She wishes that she was of African ancestry since such people have true, honest feelings. Yet she realizes that the Africans were as much newcomers to the Caribbean as were the Europeans. (The original inhabitants, the Caribs, were nearly exterminated, and one of their last refuges was on the island of Dominica. There, they were not only able to resist Columbus, indeed, they were able to maintain their independence into the 18th century.)

Der Schwarm, by Frank Schätzing

    This book is a best seller in Germany. It was recommended to me, and so I thought I would see what it was like. Going into the University Bookshop, I asked if they had it, and so they pointed out a pile of copies of the book, topped by a poster, having a large picture, looking like the iris of a blue eye. Although it only costs 10 euros, it is a thick book with 987 pages! So it costs lots of time to read it.
    One of the main characters in the book is an Eskimo named Leon Anawak whose family had sunk into a degenerate state of degradation as a result of the oppressive influence of 1950s Canadian culture. So he became an orphan, and then later he became an established academic in the field of whale studies. Thus he adopted the hectic lifestyle of the white Canadians, including the concept of "wasting time", and he rejects his Eskimo background. Later, during the time of the book, Eskimo society had recovered somewhat. He visits his birthplace in the high north of Canada. It has become a kind of country in its own right, called Nunavut. (I hadn't heard of that before. There are interesting Internet links to Nunavut which you can find via google.) Anawak has the feeling that this visit is just costing him lots of time, but his uncle, who is a respected figure in Cape Dorset, then tells him that time costs nothing. It exists whether we like it or not. So I suppose the great amount of time it takes to read this book is a meditation on the meaning of time. It is the opposite of the precise, elegant style of Jean Rhys. Anyway, the story is the kind of science fiction which we associate with Michael Chrichton. But, if one is prepared to put up with the great length of the book, spending a week or two living in it, one finds that it's better than Chrichton. The science is plausible, the characters are more or less believable. Unfortunately though, at the end it does turn into a rather silly action adventure, in the style of Chrichton.
    The basic idea is that we are not the only intelligent creatures on the Earth. In fact, there is intelligent life in the depths of the oceans. This is not whales, or porpoises. Just now I was listening to a CD of the noises various kinds of whales make, and to be quite honest (and at the risk of offending people who would like to think that whales are just like people who are talking to one another) it seems to me that whale noises are no different than the barnyard squeaks and grunts of pigs or cows. That is to say, it seems to me that it makes no sense to imagine that such animals are "really" just people who are having difficulties speaking. That is nonsense! Their intelligence is of a different kind than ours. So the idea in this book is that there is another kind of intelligence in the oceans which is sufficiently similar to ours that we can understand it. In fact, it is far superior to our intelligence!
    Rather than being confined to the brain of some large animal, this intelligence is formed when huge numbers of single-celled amoeba come together and form a gigantic brain - with synapses and so on - rather like mushroom cells living under the earth coming together to make a mushroom. So this brain is ever-changing. It is also immortal and it is arbitrarily large since new cells can simply come in to replace the ones which have died off. Schätzing goes into much detail about how all of this could work. At the end of the book he thanks loads of different university professors, all of whom have helped him to think about such things in sensible ways.

The Aztecs, by Nigel Davies

Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë

The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë

Clear Light of Day, by Anita Desai

Trouble is my Business, by Raymond Chandler

The Master of Ballantrae, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Collapse, by Jared Diamond

Harold and Maude, by Colin Higgins

Mount Everest: Expeditionen zum Endpunkt, by Reinhold Messner

Memoirs of a Fighting Captain, by Admiral Lord Cochrane

The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters

Wake in Fright, by Kenneth Cook

The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes, by Timothy Hemion

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell