This year (2024)
Previous years: 2023; 2022;
2021; 2020;
2019; 2018;
2017; 2016;
2015; 2014;
2013; 2012;
2011; 2010;
2009; 2008;
2007; 2006;
2005
The English title is "The World of Yesterday".
I had thought that it would be concerned with the world of Vienna at the
turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, telling us about what life was
like. The elegance, the sophistication, music, arts, the scientific
advances which were being made, all destroyed by the First World War. The
first three chapters were indeed concerned with that lost world. But then
things became more and more autobiographical: the war, the catastrophic
1920s and 30s, and ending as the author is trying to find peace in a quiet
apartment in Bath in England in 1940. After finishing the book and writing
further things, he finally committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in
1942, depressed with everything that was happening to that world of
yesterday.
Stefan
Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 into a well-to-do Jewish family. He
tells us of the stability, the solidity of life in those days. People
looked up to older, experienced people. Who could imagine the modern-day
cult of youth? Young people were nothing, an embarrassment; what could be
worse than being a middle-aged, yet youthful looking person, always looked
down upon as being inexperienced, worth nothing. He tells us that a
hundred years before this time the Jewish people were down-trodden,
confined to their ghettos, but now - in the late 19th century - they have
equal rights with everybody else. And so many, including his family, have
become wealthy, establishing factories, contributing to the general
improvement of life for everybody. He tells us about school, about having
to learn various languages, but finding his school in Vienna, as with all
schools of the time, to be dreadful. The real learning was with his school
friends. They are a literary circle. Literature, poetry, music are
everything. The newspapers are concerned with the music of Mahler,
literature criticism. The feuilleton.
When the author was a young man of 20 or so he
published a book of poetry, obscurely he thought, but unexpectedly he
received a letter from Max Reger, proposing to compose songs to four of
the poems. Later he also collaborated with Richard Strauss. He sent some
writings to the Neue Freie Presse, the premier newspaper of Vienna,
and he immediately was invited to meet with the feuilleton editor, Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. Stefan Zweig
became close friends with Herzl and later published much in the newspaper.
Herzl comes across as a very pleasant man. He had originally advocated the
complete assimilation of the Jewish and Austrian people, but when covering
the Dreyfus affair for the paper he changed his mind. He wrote a novel, Altneuland,
(literally: Old-New-Land) which I downloaded and began reading. It is a
very readable style of writing, a utopian book, much like News from Nowhere, William Morris' book which
I read a few years ago. A vision of a future Palestine, a prospering
center of the world where the different religions and peoples live
together in perfect harmony. Unfortunately Herzl died soon after meeting
Stefan Zweig, and from the Wikipedia article we see that neither he nor
anybody else in his family lived to experience the reality of Israel.
The author soon became a very popular author. He was
the most translated author in the world. He tells us of his various trips
around Europe and the world and of his friendships with many of the famous
people of the early 1900s. He bought a house in the "village" of Saltzburg
in 1917, in the middle of World War I. As he describes it, we imagine a
small building, dilapidated, a leaking roof. But looking things up in the
internet we find that it is in fact a small castle, the Paschinger Schlössl. In the chaos and poverty after
the end of the war, the local orchestra organized an open-air concert in
order to raise some money. This quickly grew into the Saltzburger Festspiele. and all of the great
conductors and musicians of the time pilgrimed the hundred steps up the
Kapuzinerberg to visit and become friends with Stefan Zweig.
We are told about the catastrophe of the inflation,
first in Austria, and then very much worse in Germany. And then of Hitler.
How his books were publicly burned for no other reason than that he was
Jewish. Yet many of the Nazi inner circle were avid readers of his books.
He is overtaken with depression. It is a shame that he took his life. If
he had lived on another 10 or 20 years, would he have been accepted back
into the life of the post-war Vienna, and of Austria? Would he have found
it to be a life worth living?
A book written by a Japanese woman. This
translation into English renders it into simple, almost childish prose.
Does this reflect the style and feeling of the original Japanese? There
are five chapters telling us the stories of five different characters, all
of them everyday people with their everyday problems. They are unhappy in
their jobs. There is no time for doing what they would really like to do.
One is a man who has retired and found that life has become meaningless,
empty. He has discovered that all of the people he had thought of as his
friends were really just connected with his job, and they are no longer
friends. A woman has a small child, taking up all her time. A man with a
boring job would prefer to have a shop filled with antiques, knowing that
it would be impossible to make a living that way. Each of these people
happen to go to the local library where the librarian makes a list of
books which they might read. And in each of the stories they are led to
happy resolutions.
It is a pleasure to read of ordinary people and their
ordinary problems. A change from the usual stories of extraordinary people
which fill most of these books.
This is also a book of longish short stories,
or novellas. There are seven such stories, the first being Amok,
the title of the series. The characters in these stories are not ordinary;
they are hysterical, they are running Amok.
The title story is of a doctor in some Far Eastern
colonial backwater, perhaps the Malaya of those days. Stationed somewhere
out in the jungle, many miles from civilization. He tells us that he is
going mad while enjoying the sensual pleasures of life in the steamy bush.
Suddenly an arrogant Englishwoman turns up, her driver carefully staying
by the car. She avoids saying what she needs, but it is clear: an
abortion. The doctor avoids agreeing to the operation, perhaps even
hinting of a different kind of reward other than the many thousands of
pounds which are openly offered for his services. She drives off in huff.
He tries to follow on his bicycle, becoming hysterical. Her husband has
been away for many months so it is clear that the pregnancy is a scandal.
He follows her to the capital city. Is it Singapore? Does he love her, or
does he love the idea of her? She refuses to let him into her palatial
house. He tries to send her messages, but then she has gone to a Chinese
abortionist in a brothel, or opium den, somewhere in the seedier part of
town. She is bleeding to death; he is summoned, but he can do nothing. The
husband returns and then sets off in a ship back to England with the dead
body, to be buried far away. The doctor is secretly on the ship as well.
He must save the woman, or the memory of the woman, from defilement. And
in a dramatic scene at the end of the story he falls into the sea together
with the coffin, drowning, both of them lost forever.
Another story is about a man taking his summer holiday
on a Swiss Alp. The weather is hot and dry. There are distant
thunderstorms, but they do not reach the valley of his hotel. Everything
is dry. It is hot. Even the nights are hot. The man is becoming
hysterical. It is so dry. When will it rain? Water, where is water? In his
delirium he notices that a girl, or young woman, who is also a guest at
the hotel with her parents, has the similar look of hot, dry delirium as
himself. All of this culminates in an erotic encounter on the hotel bed
which, being published over a hundred years ago, albeit in the German
language in Austria, avoids titillating details, and which, suggestively,
ends with a great downpour of rain and a startling awakening of the young
woman. I don't know if this would be a story to satisfy the imaginations
of all of those Global Warming enthusiasts, or even of Greta Thunberg, but
it is a good thing that the hero of the story was not in Australia, where
a good, long, hot drought is usual, and he would have had to wait months,
if not years, for the explosive, watery resolution of his hysteria.
And then there is the story Brief einer Unbekannten.
The English translation is Letter from an Unknown Woman. A writer moves into an
apartment in Vienna opposite that of a very ordinary family: the parents
with a daughter of perhaps 12 or 13 years old. She observes the writer
coming and going through the peephole of the door of the apartment. She
secretly falls in love with him, or at least with the idea of him. She
observes that various women accompany him into his rooms late at night. He
seems to have a very active sexual life. We are reminded of Arthur Schnitzler. Did Stefan Zweig imagine himself
in the character of this story? On the other hand he told us in Die
Welt von Gestern that people in those days had great fears of
contracting syphilis. The treatment consisted of massive and continuous
dosages of mercury, whose consequences might have been even more horrible
than the disease. Anyway, the family moves to Innsbruck and the girl pines
after her secret love, the writer. She grows up, leaves home, and returns
to the big city. There she hangs about the old apartment, becoming
noticed, but not recognized by the writer as the girl of yesterday, and is
taken into his bed sufficiently often to generate a pregnancy. She does
not want to embarrass him; indeed, she recognizes that he would refuse to
have anything to do with her, and he would accuse her of falsely claiming
that the child was his. She has the baby in a sordid teaching hospital,
barely surviving. The child, a son, is now 10 years old. A perfect child,
as beautiful as his father. But he dies. And the mother is also dying. She
has recently encountered the writer, in his bed, but again he has not
recognized her. After all, how can he place her face among all the
hundreds of faces of the women he has slept with over the past 10 years?
She writes a letter to the writer, saying that he will receive it only if
she has already died. She still loves him and is totally devoted to him.
I finished reading this story late one evening and
found it to be so dreadful that I couldn't get to sleep. What a sad,
unpleasant vision of women this story tells us. Could it be that Stefan
Zweig was such a misogynist? I hope not.
I started reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot,
but gave up about a third of the way into it. The characters are so
unpleasant. Everything is obsessed with money. I stopped reading soon
after the scene where Nastasya throws a packet of bank notes wrapped in
newspaper into the fireplace, expecting one or another of the other
characters to grovel in the flames. The packet contains 100,000 rubles. In
those days, the ruble was a silver coin, as was the American silver
dollar, the English crown, the French franc, and so forth. All of these
coins contained similar amounts of silver, and thus they were
approximately equal in value. The internet inflation calculator for
American money only goes back to 1913, the year the Federal Reserve System
was created, initiating this modern phenomenon of inflation. We learn that
the value of a dollar today has been reduced to only about 3% of its value
in 1913. Thus we can think of Nastasya's packet as if it contained about
three million of today's dollars. Perhaps those Russian, Ukrainian, and
indeed American oligarchs of today would similarly enjoy throwing such a
packet into the fire at a party in order to observe the spectacle of
people burning their hands, producing a few laughs for the spectators. It
might be that the book emerges from all of these unpleasant scenes
somewhere in the remaining two thirds which I did not read. Perhaps
Dostoevsky's prose in the Russian language gives the story a sense of
meaning, especially in the character of Myshkin. But this translation into
English which I downloaded from Gutenberg.org, while being clearly and
simply formulated, lacks all character.
And so, looking for something more stylish, I read The
Sea, by John Banville. It won the Booker Prize in 2005. Despite
that, it was an enjoyable, coherent read. And Banville's prose is so
wonderfully stylish. It is a simple story. The narrator is an old man
whose wife has died. It is Banville's Ireland. He remembers a summer
holiday he had with his parents 50 or more years ago when he was a young
teenager. He befriended a family which had rented a large house for the
summer; his parents could only afford a tiny cottage. He secretly falls in
love with the mother of the family, and then with the daughter. The
transition happens as he is swimming "between two of the green-slimed
concrete groynes that long ago had been thrown out into the sea in a
vain attempt to halt the creeping erosion of the beach."
What is a groyne? The Wikipedia can tell us. Without knowing what they are
called, I have spent large parts of my life walking, or running, or even
swimming between groynes. If you had asked me before reading this book
what these things are called, I might have struggled to call them jetties,
or perhaps breakwaters, or something. But what an image Banville's
sentence gives us for the adolescent imagination. We think of groins.
Green-slimed! and the fascinating Chloe.
Groyne is not the only word I didn't know when reading
this book. There were 20 or 30 words, or perhaps much more I had to look
up. Many were not in the dictionary of this Kindle. Those that were were
often obscurely associated with French or Latin words. Questions for those
of us lacking a classical education.
It was a wonderfully nostalgic book, especially for old
people with memories of the sea, with a surprising, enigmatic ending.
The author is a Nigerian who moved to London at 14 for school and university. Her first book, The Spider King's Daughter was published when she was only 21. But I read her latest book, Sankofa, first.
The narrator of Sankofa is Anna, a mixed-race
woman of perhaps 45 years old who has lived all her life in London. Her
mother was a woman of Welsh descent, very white, and her father was a West
African, very black. But she has never met her father, in fact she knows
practically nothing at all about him. Her mother has died about six months
ago, and now Anna is going through her things, finding a dusty trunk in
the attic. It contains a notebook, or diary, which was written by her
father, Frances Aggrey, during the 1960s when he was a student in London.
He is a native of "Bamana" in West Africa. Don't try to look up such a
land in Google Maps. A reviewer at amazon.com tells us that he/she is
familiar with the various geographic details of those regions, and that
the imaginary Bamana is, in fact, modeled on Ghana, a country which does
exist. In the diary Anna is told about the racism of the English in the
1960s. He is a quiet young man, but he is befriended by other African
students who meet and speak about independence, communism. He writes about
how he meets the sister of Anna's mother, and then he falls in love with
her mother. He must quickly return to Bamana; was it that someone in his
family had died? He promises to write, but there the diary ends.
Gradually Anna learns more and more about her father.
How he had fought in the jungle for the independence of his country, how
he became a politician and was the President of Bamana for many years. He
had assumed a different name, the two middle names of his full name, and
he is now a famous and respected elder figure in Africa. She travels to
Bamana, accompanied by a professor from Edinburgh, a Scott who was also
involved as a student in those communist circles back then in London, and
who maintains contact with his old friend, the President. They travel to
one of the palaces, or presidential villas, and after passing numbers of
guards they have a pleasant lunch on the veranda with the great man,
looking out on the peaceful garden. He asks Anna what she is doing in
Bamana, and after she tells him he immediately stands up, practically
shouting for them to get out. He is insulted that his friend has brought
this imposter with such an invented story. But a week later she is
summoned from the hotel and ushered into another palace where he tells her
that he accepts that she is his daughter. He has read the diary, and he
has had the glass she had been drinking from tested for DNA, proving his
paternity.
She would like to return to London, to her daughter and
her more or less separated husband, on the flight she had booked. But
there is a problem at the airport. She is suddenly thrown into prison. It
has become a nightmare. And then she is let out. It was a terrible
misunderstanding. But it wasn't. Her father did not want his daughter to
simply go away, as if Bamana, her homeland, was nothing.
Is she trapped? Her father takes her on a road trip
around the country, showing her what he has done, what his country has
become. The people worship him, although he has sometimes exercised
cruelty. Some call him the Crocodile. After all, how could a president
otherwise stay in power for 30 years in a country whose borders were fixed
by ignorant European colonial powers, cutting across the boundaries of
ancient empires.
The book ends with dream-like scenes, Anna
understanding and accepting her father and her role as his daughter in
Bamana along with his other children, each of whom travel the world in
various roles. And so she returns to London, a different person and an
important citizen of Bamana.
It was a very enjoyable book to read, but I'm afraid
the basis of the story is sadly implausible. We think of similar African
visionaries: Patrice
Lumumba, or Muammar Gaddafi. Here is a list of African leaders who
were assassinated. It is a long list, and many were the victims of
the CIA or the similar secret agencies of the French and the British. The
President and father of the story does well to be surrounded by armed
guards and fortress-like residences. But the influence of the U.S. and the
European powers seems to be decreasing rapidly in the world, so we can
hope that the countries of Africa and the other areas which have been
dominated by these powers will begin to develop a true independence in the
future.
The Spider King's Daughter is a less pleasant
book to read. It has to do with the "rich kids" of Lagos. Abike Johnson is
17, she lives in a huge mansion and is driven to and from school in a
chauffeured SUV. When the car stops at traffic lights, or slows down in
traffic, "hawkers" approach, knocking on the windows, wanting to sell
various forms of junk. Abike is fascinated with one of these hawkers,
whose street name is "Runner G". He speaks with a refined British accent,
just as she does, although he speaks the language of the street with the
other hawkers. She wants to have him. He is invited into the mansion of
her family, past the countless guards, into the expansive property. It
turns out that he was also a rich kid, but his father died in a traffic
accident, leaving the family with debts, throwing them into poverty. What
does all this have to do with Abike's evil, corrupt father? Things end in
a cathartic explosion.
This one is about the English spy, Anthony Blunt, and more generally the Cambridge spy ring, of which he was a member. They
were together in the 1930s, in the inner sanctums: the Apostles, and all
that. The book cannot really be considered to be an historical novel about
Blunt since some of the attributes of the narrator, Victor Maskell do not
match that of the spy. For example Maskell marries and has two children
before discovering his homosexuality. The real Blunt went straight in,
presumably experiencing the furtive, random excitement of public toilets,
reeking of urine, and the casual, quick sexual gratification which I can
hardly imagine but which fills large parts of the present book. Looking at
the photo of Blunt in the Wikipedia, he looks weak, slope-shouldered, with
a face which has been dragged down by the gravity of his life. Although
his role as double-agent, spying for the Soviet Union, was discovered
certainly in 1963, but perhaps already 10 years before, shortly after the
defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, he was never prosecuted, and his
past was only made public by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Such are the
advantages of being an insider, a member of the "Deep State", confidant of
the Queen and lover of high placed and established homosexuals.
On the other hand, as with the real Blunt, Maskell
began studying mathematics at Cambridge but found it to be too difficult,
changing his studies to the History of Art. Well, I am sure that I would
also have failed the traditional English tripos regimen; I hate exams. But what a contrast.
The book is filled with waffling about art, undoubtedly true to the
character of Anthony Blunt. In particular about the French renaissance
painter Nicolas
Poussin. The real Anthony Blunt actually wrote numbers of books on
the subject of Poussin. I suspect that the author, John Banville, is
himself a Francophile, and the existence of Poussin, while having a name
which allows numbers of suggestive word-plays which the author playfully
enjoys, also proves that there did exist a school of renaissance painting
in France.
The characters in the book are continuously drunk,
hungover, lungs filled with tobacco fumes. What tedious people they must
have been. And Banville's elegant prose and humor only occasionally
lighten the narrative. In one scene in the book, the Blunt character is
conversing with his secret Soviet contact, casually naming a British spy
embedded high in the hierarchy of the politburo. He is told about the
consequences of this revelation. The spy will be arrested and slowly
tortured to death. Does he have misgivings about this? But the Blunt
character, ever the egoist in his pampered life, says it is the fate which
a spy can expect and deserve.
I briefly tried to associate the fictional characters
of the novel with the real-life members of the Cambridge spy ring.
According to the Wikipedia, even such people as Baron Rothschild may have been in it, and in the
book one of Maskell's close friends is Leo Rothenstein, an immensely rich
Jewish character. In the book he lends Maskell £100 in order to buy the
imaginary painting "Death of Seneca" by Poussin. In real life the real
Nathaniel Rothschild lent Blunt £100 in order to buy the real painting Eliezer
and Rebecca, a copy after Poussin, which Blunt kept for the rest of
his life. It is said to be worth £100,000, which, according to the
inflation calculator, would exceed by ten times the amount Rothschild gave
him in the 1930s. The original painting by Poussin is in the Louvre, and
is therefore, of course, priceless.
While all of this comes across as being unpleasantly
sleazy, I imagine that the present day people in the CIA, MI6, and all of
those other ugly agencies are even incomparably more cruel and sleazy than
this.
John Banville clearly had lots of fun writing
this one. It is a Philip Marlowe story written in the style of Raymond
Chandler. A tough "private dick" in the L.A. of the 1950s. It is wonderful
how he can change his style from one book to the next. What could be a
greater contrast between this one and The Untouchable, which I
just read before? It is more convincing than William Boyd's Solo,
which was a James Bond novel, meant to be written in the style of Ian
Fleming.
But Banville does depart in various ways from the
original. Chandler's slang of the 1940s includes various derogatory words
which refer to women, such as "broad", "babe", "looker", and so forth. In
the age of "MeToo", the modern author would use such words only at his own
peril. On the other hand, Banville describes Marlowe climbing into bed,
and indeed having sex with his female client, something which Chandler
certainly avoided at his peril back then. But of course both then
and now it has been acceptable to describe horrible acts of violence, even
torture, in a cynical, matter of fact way.
I suppose the actual plot of the novel is secondary to
the atmosphere. But as with some of his Quirke books, Banville leaves a
few threads of the plot unresolved to the imagination of the reader.
This one is about adultery, hardly a shocking
subject in the modern world. Many people say that adultery is normal; that
it is abnormal to remain faithfully together in a marriage, particularly
when the married couple are continually in conflict, no longer having
loving feelings for one another, even replaced by feelings of hate. If the
married couple has children then there is more to the marriage than just
the two spouses. Adultery, divorce has serious consequences.
In the present story we have two childless, middle aged
married couples. Everything is related from the point of view of Oliver,
one of the husbands. He is a painter who has achieved a sufficient success
that somebody has actually written a monograph on his work. But now the
muse has left him. He no longer paints. Life has become meaningless. His
best friend is Marcus, who repairs wristwatches, peering at them through
magnifying glasses using tiny watchmakers tools. Marcus' wife is Polly who
has secretly longed for the heroic, artistic Oliver to replace her boring
husband. We read little about Oliver's wife Gloria until the end of the
story, where she makes her dramatic revelation. At the beginning, and
through the story, both couples are childless.
All of this is the perfect setting for Banville's
elegant, witty prose. Oliver is at first reluctant to give in to Polly's
urgent advances. And when he does he is overcome with guilt. Marcus visits
him in his disused artist's studio, telling Oliver, his best friend, that
he suspects that Polly has become unfaithful. What can he do? Who can it
be? They drown his sorrow and Oliver's secret guilt in a bottle of whiskey
and further alcohol at the local pub. The story continues to the end with
more characters and twists of the plot, giving an enjoyable read and many
more opportunities for the author to confuse us with obscure Latin words.
A change of pace. No obscure Latin or French;
not one unfamiliar word in the whole book, just simple Anglo-Saxon
language of the American variety. The book was mentioned in one of the
blogs of "Simplicius", an anonymous internet entity whose writings I often
enjoy clicking into and reading. He (I assume that it is a he) was writing
about the degeneration of modern writing, citing the author of this book
as someone who has had the courage to risk offending her readers.
The story of the book involves a married couple, Amy
and Nick. Amy's parents are rich, having written a series of books in the
series "Amazing Amy". They describe a wonderful character, Amy, who is a
child in the first few novels of the sequence, and who gradually grows up,
novel for novel. These books are in all the school libraries of the United
States, and many people follow them, being amazed at everything Amy does.
Therefore the real-life Amy lives a kind of distorted life, living up to
all these amazing things. Is she so amazing?
Nick is also pretty amazing, given the difficulty of
being married to such an amazing woman. He loves her completely. But then
Adversity strikes. The latest novel in the Amazing Amy sequence is a flop.
Her parents have made some bad investments so that they are now bankrupt.
They borrow much of what remains of Amy's trust fund, leaving her with
just a few tens of thousands of dollars. Nick and Amy can no longer afford
to live their lives in New York, the sophisticated Big Apple, the Big
Smoke where Amy has been admired by all the Beautiful People. Instead they
move to Nick's old home town in the middle of fly-over country, on the
Mississippi in Missouri. Nick and his sister borrow the remaining money of
Amy's trust fund in order to open a bar in the run-down town. The name of
the bar is The Bar. It seems to be doing well. All those Midwestern hicks
come in to drink their beers and have a loud, wild time while Amy sits
alone in the old family home, thinking bad things about Nick and
everything else. Since Nick was a writer in New York, fired, since nobody
wants to read all the rubbish in the legacy media any more, he has been
given a part-time job at the local community college, giving lectures on
how to write. One of his students is a young woman who throws herself into
his welcoming arms.
And so one day Nick returns home in the middle of his
fulfilled life to find the house apparently ransacked, blood on the floor,
and Amy missing. Has she been kidnapped? Has she been murdered? Where is
she? Her devastated parents fly in to the fly-over local airport to join
Nick. The police are everywhere. Is Nick a suspect? The story is front
page news in the legacy newspapers and it is the subject of emotionally
charged woke and not so woke talk shows on American network television.
The story takes us through twists and turns of the plot. I read on and on,
hardly putting it down, wanting to know how things turn out. But the final
twist of the story seems to me to be extremely implausible.
During his youth, Nick had loved his mother and hated
his father, who hated all women, loudly shouting obscenities at them.
During the drama of the story, Nick's father is a demented, embittered old
man. I imagine that after the final twist of the plot Nick now understands
his father, and perhaps he will similarly turn into a bitter hater of
woman.
On the surface it is a simple story. A famous
elderly person, Adam Godley, is lying in bed, paralyzed with a stroke,
dying. It is a country house. His son, Adam Jr., comes, together with wife
Helen. There is the elderly wife of the patriarch, Ursula, who drowns her
sorrows, even those she had when Adam was still coherent, in drink. The
daughter, Petra, is somewhat insane. She enjoys cutting her arms with a
razor. And then a young dandy arrives who wishes to write a biography of
the great Godley, together with another strange character who was
apparently some sort of a colleague in earlier times. These people
interact with one another in predictable, shallow ways. It is certainly
not a book which encourages the reader to read onward from page to page,
eager to find out what happens next. I wondered why I continued to read on
to the end.
The deeper story - only vaguely hinted at in a very few
passages - was that Adam Godley was a physicist, making some sort of
breakthrough in the world of knowledge. To be frank I seem to have missed
some of these passing snippets, only realizing what they were when reading
the Guardian review of the book which I have linked to above. Owing to the
fact that modern physics is formulated in terms of differential equations
on manifolds which do not have closed solutions, physicists say that the
solutions have "infinities". They were dealt with 70 or 80 years ago using
"renormalization" theory. Similarly, in those days something called the
"many worlds" theory was proposed. A misunderstanding of the role of
probability in physics. This seems to be a favorite with authors of
literary books who would like to spice them up with seemingly esoterical
words and ideas from the world of science. Thus Adam Godley imagines that
at each instant, the Universe splits apart into an infinity of possible
alternative worlds.
The world of this book has split apart from our real
world in various ways. Cold fusion, that dream which seems to have been
thoroughly debunked, exists in this world. Cars simply fill up with
seawater and drive about in the direction of infinity for nothing. Sweden
is war-like rather than pacifist and neutral (in fact, to the dismay of
many, at the time I write this, in our real, existing world, Sweden has
recently decided to discard its tradition and instead go on the warpath,
joining NATO). In this alternative universe the theory of the evolution of
species, and also the theory of relativity are false. I missed these
points when reading the book, otherwise I would have stopped before going
on to the end. And so we can thank the sharp-eyed Guardian reviewer for
bringing these things to our attention.
The story is partially told through the narration of
Hermes, the ancient Greek god. He is accompanied by his father, Zeus who,
we are told, as with all the gods is unable to interact directly with
humanity, yet still he lusts after the beautiful Helen, Adam Jr.'s wife,
giving her erotic dreams and motivating the dandified biographer to kiss
Helen while sitting on a bench in the woods, after which, Helen
administers a severe slap to the biographer's face, leading him to leave
this whole deathbed scene in a huff.
All of these elements give Banville the opportunity to
fill his pages with elegant and obscure literary prose, but for me he was
taking it all a bit too far in this book.
When reading this book I had the feeling of
intruding on something which was not meant for me; could my intrusion
cause offense? But still, the world remains sufficiently free for me to be
able to download the book and to read it, and write whatever flippant
thoughts might pass through my mind at this moment. There are hardly any
men in this book. Just a few violent abusers of women as well as some
further unpleasant male characters. Otherwise it is about women struggling
against the difficulties of life and of the world; even the children and
babies in the story are girls. No boys.
The protagonist is Natsuko, who is living in Tokyo. She
tells us about her difficult, impoverished childhood. The father did
nothing except to lie about in their tiny, squalid apartment, drunk,
abusing her mother. The mother with children secretly escape to some other
suburb of Osaka where she works nights at a bar, entertaining the rude,
primitive male clientele. Natsuko and her sister help earning a few
pennies by washing the dishes. But all of that is in the distant past.
Both the mother and the grandmother have long since passed away.
The book consists of two parts. In the first, shorter
part, Natsuko is perhaps 30 years old. She is making a modest living as a
writer of short pieces for newspapers and magazines. She is working on a
novel, but is making no progress on it. Her sister, who continues the
tradition of working as a barmaid in Osaka, comes to visit Natsuko,
together with her daughter. The sister is in her late 30s. She is obsessed
with the idea of having breast enlargement surgery. The purpose of the
visit to Tokyo is to either have it done, or at least to visit some
clinics where it could be done. The daughter, who is just entering
puberty, finds the idea disgusting. She also finds the idea that she must
soon start having periods every month, ovulating, producing blood and
eggs, to be equally disgusting. And so we have long meditations on all the
different methods of breast enlargement and, as far as the daughter is
concerned, the properties of human eggs; the fact that mammalian eggs, in
comparison to birds eggs, are so tiny that they cannot be easily found.
She tells us about various ways of looking for them with a magnifying
glass or a microscope. All of this gory detail is certainly something that
I had not encountered before in a novel. An embarrassment. Hardly a
pleasant subject. More a subject for a medical treatise.
Well, O.K. But why do some women want to have their
breasts enlarged? The idea seems to me to be horrible and disgusting. Can
they really believe that by doing so they become more attractive? Am I
alone in finding the idea repulsive? Fashion models, who are considered to
be the ideal of attractiveness, are thin, with small breasts. Women
athletes, active, fit, healthy people, generally have small breasts, just
as they have no excess fat in the rest of their bodies. And active,
healthy men also have little fat, unlike, for example the "man boobs"
exhibited by such a person as William Henry "Bill" Gates III.
Part One ends with the sister and the daughter
screaming at each other in an hysterical fit, smashing all the
considerable number of (hen, not human) eggs from Natsuko's refrigerator
on each others heads, after which, the next morning, they depart on the
train back to Osaka. It is unclear whether the sister has, in fact, had
her breasts enlarged or not. We hope not. And so begins Part Two.
It is now 7 or 8 years later. Natsuko is herself in her
late 30s. She has published a novel with moderate success. She had had a
boyfriend many years ago, perhaps back in Osaka, but she had found the
sexual act to be so unpleasant as to exclude it, as well as the boyfriend,
from her further life. She wonders how she will be able to live on into
the future, alone. A fellow novelist - of course without husband or (male)
partner - has a baby girl, and Natsuko thinks it is wonderful to hold it,
to play with it, smell its intoxicating aroma. She wants a baby of her
own. How can she get one?
We learn that in Japan, donor sperm is not officially
allowed for single women. Natsuko becomes obsessed with the idea of
artificial insemination. There are online things you can click into; send
them some money and they send you an anonymous packet of human sperm.
There are men who advertise themselves in the internet, offering to
impregnate you either using artificial insemination or else the natural
method. Natsuko has a rendezvous in a café and it turns out to be a little
fat man with a large hairy wart on his face. He tells her at length about
the properties of his semen; how it has been tested, how vigorous it is,
and he tells her about how wonderful his penis is. He seems to be grasping
under the table to show it to her. She has been paralyzed with horror and
fear throughout the meeting, but now she jumps up and flees, distracted,
only stopping when she is far away.
And then there are people who are the products of
anonymous sperm donors. They grow up believing somebody else was their
father and are shocked and devastated to learn that it was all a lie. They
spend the rest of their lives endlessly and hopelessly seeking their true
fathers. In Japan all records of donors are destroyed. As I understand it,
in Germany, according to recent law, such children have the right to learn
their true parentage. Male donors, perhaps medical students who had long
ago donated sperm, must live in the fear that apparent strangers will
start coming out of the woodwork, demanding hundreds of thousands of euros
for failing to pay maintenance costs of their lost childhoods. Will the
often arbitrary, politically correct German legal system support such
claims? As a result, donors are drying up and childless couples are
perhaps turning to the internet, or to the chaos of Eastern Europe.
Natsuko meets and has long, intimate talks with Aizawa,
a man who has been the result of such a donation and whose life is devoted
to trying to find his biological father. Aizawa seems to be overcoming his
obsession, falling in love with Natsuko. He writes many messages to her
which she ignores. But then they do come - chastely - together for a
day in Natsuko's old hometown of Osaka. And he asks her if she will bear
his child.
The story skips a year or two and Natsuko tells us how
horrible the birth was, yet she loves her baby girl. Aizawa is, of course,
out of the picture. He is off somewhere else looking after his sick mother
with presumably no visiting rights, and Natsuko is thankful that she has
nothing more to do with him. (As far as I know, this would not be possible
in German law.) But at least in the future her little girl will be able to
learn who her biological father was. What an unpleasant, hopeless vision
of life this is, and what an egotistical, self-centered woman.
This is certainly a contrast with the previous
book. Here we have wild passions, not the cold selfishness of the more
modern story. Things are narrated from the point of view of Sonoko, a
young married woman. She becomes infatuated with Mitsuko, another young
woman who along with Sonoko is studying art, the practice of painting.
Here in Tanizaki's novel everything takes place in comfortable,
established society. Sonoko's family is wealthy, as is that of Mitsuko.
Sonoko's husband is a lawyer, but he has hardly any clients. It is more of
a hobby to give him something to do while being supported by his wife's
family. And so she takes great liberties with him. Mitsuko spends the days
in Sonoko's bedroom being painted in the nude and loved by Sonoko.
But then suddenly we learn that Mitsuko has a
completely different life when she is not in Sonoko's bedroom. She has a
male lover who she meets regularly in various public houses. He is
desperate to marry Mitsuko, but he is infertile, a condition which would
seem to exclude marriage in Japanese society. It is said that this was
caused by having had mumps when he was a child. Indeed, looking it up, I
see that mumps
can indeed lead to infertility. In fact I've read that something like one
in seven married couples are infertile for one reason or another So the
problems dealt with in the previous book are very real for a great many
people.
Both Sonoko and this other man are passionately in love
with Mitsuko who enjoys the game of having these two lovers, and to spice
things up she falls in love with Sonoko's husband as well, leading to
tragedy.
A previous book about the climate of the past
which I read a couple of years ago imagined that the entire history of the
Earth be compared to a single day. Then each hour of our imagined Earth
day would be a bit less than 200 million years. There are hardly any rocks
to be looked at by geologists which are older than 600 million years.
Multi-cellular life started not much before that so that the direct
evidence of past climate, which can be obtained by studying fossils and
the properties of rocks, peters out beyond that time. That is to say, in
our Earth's day, we only have direct evidence of past climate for the
three hours from about 9 p.m. to midnight. A million years lasts just
about 18 seconds in this Earth's day. It is only in the last 3 million
years or so that the Earth has become so cold as to be in the present
ice-age epoch. That is to say, the present, very unusual state of climate,
where the world is generally half frozen with water locked in massive ice
shields, has only lasted for about the last minute before midnight in this
Earth's day, only relieved by fleeting warm events lasting a fraction of a
second, a blinking of the eye. We are in the middle of such a blink, an
inter-glacial period, which is - on human time scales - gradually coming
to an end. Nevertheless, the present book is exclusively devoted to the
problems of describing and understanding the climate situation which the
Earth happens to be in during this very unusual and non-typical last
minute of the long Earth's day.
For most of the last 600 million years - perhaps 70% or
more of that time - the Earth's climate was much more stable and warm than
it is now. The temperature at the equator was only a degree or two on
average greater than the situation today; the temperate zones around the
latitudes of Europe or North America which now have cold, freezing
winters, had continuous, balmy summer weather all year round; the poles,
while having six months of night and six months of day, nevertheless were
no colder than this cold, rainy, unpleasant April day which I am
experiencing at the moment. Since the temperature gradients were much
less, there were fewer storms. The Earth was full of teeming life. It
seems that the reason the climate was so much better in those past times
was that the ocean waters could circulate freely from the tropics to the
poles, efficiently distributing the warmth of the sun. The problem with
today's climate is that the South Pole has a continent sitting on it
covered with ice, blocking the ocean water from transporting warmth to the
south. Instead the currents in the southern ocean go uselessly around
Antarctica, remaining cold. The North Pole has the Arctic Ocean, but it is
stuck there, blocked by the shallow Bering Straight which during most of
the present ice-age epoch is a land bridge. It is connected to the
Atlantic Ocean in the passage between Greenland and Norway, but that is
the only connection, allowing little circulation, so that the cold
stagnates in the Arctic.
The Earth is dangerously cold. There is a positive
feedback: the colder it gets, the more ice there is, which being white
reflects more light and warmth out into space, making things still colder.
Thankfully, very gradually, over hundreds of millions, billions of years,
the sun is getting hotter. Eventually it will expand, enveloping and
consuming the Earth before its final explosion as a nova. But it is now
sufficiently hot that even with the continents arranged as badly as they
are, there's still enough heat for the Earth to escape a descent into a
"Snowball Earth" scenario where almost all life, and certainly all human
life would perish. And thankfully, as Vinós shows, the average temperature
seems to have leveled off about 600 thousand years ago, not descending
further.
The Earth orbits the Sun in a nearly circular ellipse
and the axis of rotation of the Earth is tilted about 23° to the plane of
the ellipse. So the Earth is like a giant gyroscope, perturbed by the
gravity of the other planets and of course the Sun and the Moon. The
ellipse wobbles about, becoming more or less circular, and its axis
rotates slowly around the Sun. The gyroscopic Earth experiences precession
with a period of about 23 thousand years as well as nutation, a kind of nodding up and down. This is
dealt with when working out the Milankovitch cycles. When all of these things
occasionally happen to line up in a favorable position then it is just
enough to allow the Earth to briefly break out of the ice into an
inter-glacial phase. People have thought that things like the average
energy from the Sun reaching the Earth at the latitude 65° north during
the northern summer having an unusual peak may be the mechanism allowing
the start of an inter-glacial period. But Vinós shows convincingly that
the true mechanism is the variation of the Earth's obliquity, or axial tilt. It varies between about 22° and 24.5°,
cycling back and forth with a period of about 41 thousand years. The
greater obliquity allows the Earth to melt its ice. At the present time
the obliquity is 23.44° and it is decreasing. A million years ago every
phase of high obliquity produced an inter-glacial period, but now, with
the Earth still colder, only about half of these obliquity maxima are
sufficient to melt the ice.
Vinós devotes also a chapter or two to the Dansgaard-Oeschger events and also the Heinrich events, and so on, showing that they are
probably not caused by some catastrophic collapse of the Atlantic
currents. Rather they occur when the sea level is between 30 and 100
meters below today's level and warm water gradually builds up under the
extensive ice sheets floating on the North Atlantic. Then during extreme
tides the warm water might break through, causing the temperature to
suddenly warm the atmosphere a number of degrees in just a few years. Thus
they are irrelevant to the climate of today. As the book progresses it
deals with shorter and shorter time frames, getting down to the end of the
Little Ice Age 150 years ago and even the cooling between the 1930s and
the 1970s, with subsequent warming and all the the human hysteria about
all of this.
The book is long and often difficult to read, with very
many charts and diagrams from the published literature; every third or
fourth sentence of the text seems to reference one or another academic
paper and its authors, with extensive discussion of the assertions and
results. It is a shame that no politician or personality in the legacy
media has the time or interest to devote to studying this book. On the
contrary, their interests rest on an ignorance of the facts. They are all
invested in the money and corruption of the CO2 narrative. And so we lurch
from one unnecessary crisis to the next.
Years ago I read a book about the ice ages by the
controversial astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. His theory was that
they were caused by the impact of large comets into the ocean, releasing
huge amounts of initially cold water into the atmosphere which then fell
as snow, leading to a runaway cooling caused by the positive feedback
mentioned above. That theory is hardly compatible with the facts presented
in this book. Still, Hoyle's suggestion was to power the Earth by means of
the endless renewable energy which could be obtained by pumping the deep
cold water of the tropical oceans to the surface and using the perhaps 25°
difference in temperature to the surface waters to power some sort of heat
engine. Of course with such a low temperature difference the efficiency
would be low. Still, the net effect would be to warm the deep oceans and
thus, following his theory, prevent future catastrophic glaciation events.
But it would take an immeasurable amount of time, even if all the
electrical power of humanity were to be thus produced, to warm the oceans
just a little bit. And even if it might contribute somewhat to the warming
of the polar zones it would hardly be enough, and fast enough, to prevent
the onset of the next glacial cycle.