This year (2025)
Previous years: 2025; 2024;
2023; 2022;
2021; 2020;
2019; 2018;
2017; 2016;
2015; 2014;
2013; 2012;
2011; 2010;
2009; 2008;
2007; 2006;
2005
Kiran Desai:
The
Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny
Lisa Feldman Barrett:
How
Emotions are Made
Viviane Serfaty:
Flesh
and Blood
Ben Markovits:
The
Rest of our Lives
Amity Gaige:
Heart
Wood
Mark Macrossan:
The
Volcanologist
Solvej Balle:
On
the Calculation of Volume
Anita Desai:
In
Custody
John Banville:
Venetian
Vespers
Edith Wharton:
The
Custom of the Country
Abdulrazak Gurnah:
Theft
This was a Christmas present, a real book about 1 1/2
inches thick. But I secretly downloaded the ebook version from amazon since
that is so much easier to read. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and
I had been vaguely thinking of reading it for the last few months. Kiran Desai is not someone who publishes copious
numbers of books. It is almost 20 years between The Inheritance of Loss and the present book.
Again it is very much concerned with India, but at the beginning both Sonia
and Sonny are living in the United States. She is a student of literature in
a New England college, feeling lonely, by chance meeting an older man who is
privately rich, an artist, having a name suggesting degenerate European
sophistication: Illan de Toorjen Foss. She immediately climbs into bed with
him in his country house amid the winter snow. He seems to us to be an
unpleasant old man, leaving the toilet dirty, not bothering to brush his
teeth, expecting Sonia to clean things up between all the sex. He refuses to
show her his paintings, but at least he introduces her to a woman who runs
art galleries in New York, and who gives her temporary employment at a newly
opened gallery, thus perhaps opening the way for her to obtain a coveted
"green card" and the dream of American citizenship. She had thought that
Illan might marry her, but suddenly his wife turns up to boot her out, to
free the air for the next nubile, young sex companion to replace Sonia. She
must quickly clear her things away, but in the process she forgets to take
the magic amulet of the Himalayas - named Badal Baba - which was given to
her grandfather, a German who escaped to live in the mountains of India all
those years ago. And so she returns to India and her family, chastised, at
loose ends.
Sonny is living in New York, unaware of Sonia, working
the night shift for the AP - the Associated Press - receiving stories that
are coming in, editing them and passing them along to all the newspapers
which subscribe to the AP. Sunny's girlfriend is Ulla, a very American girl,
full of sex and self confidence. A letter arrives advising Sonny that he
might like to meet Sonia, whose grandfather is a friend of the grandfather
of Sonny, proposing to relieve her solitude and, in a traditional Indian
fashion, arranging their possible marriage. Sonny and Ulla laugh about it,
discarding the old-fashioned letter. Yet an old friend of Sonny who is
studying medicine in some obscure American university, feeling lonely, has
asked his parents back in India to find a bride for him. So Sonny
accompanies him on a trip back to India in order to help the friend choose
from the various possibilities his parents have found. Certainly neither
Sonia nor Sonny have told their families about their love lives in far-off
America.
They get to know one another and then they travel
separately to Goa where Sonny's friend and new wife are having their
honeymoon. And so Sonia and Sonny come together and also have a beautiful
honeymoon. They aren't married; Sonny must return to New York and his job
and his dream of a green card; Sonia is refused a visa to the U.S. They
agree to meet for a weekend in Venice. Lots of traveling with little money.
The desperation of love. When reading something like this, becoming one with
the characters, I had to put the book down from time to time to gain a
little distance from all the emotions. By chance they go to an obscure art
gallery and it has an exhibition of the art of Illan de Toorjen Foss. There
are erotic paintings of Sonia and esoteric elements connected with Badal
Baba, the magic amulet which she had mistakenly left with Illan and his
wife. Sonny returns angrily to New York. Sonia to her family in India.
The story continuous on, becoming ever stranger. The
amulet has given Illan success but its absence brings Sonia and her family,
and that of Sonny as well, only disappointments, disasters. Sonny sets off
on a quest to regain the amulet, and Sonia is writing a book about a
beautiful young Indian woman who falls in love with a strange artist. At the
very end of the book, in the Acknowledgements, after thanking a few people
(and especially her mother, Anita Desai - What does she think about this
book of her daughter? - ) and acknowledging various institutions which have
supported her, she finishes with the sentence: "And to maestro Francesco
Clemente for the precious gift of Badal Baba"...
- Has she been writing about herself? -
Naturally I quickly looked up the Wikipedia page of Francesco Clemente. A portrait photograph of the
artist made in 2011 when he was only 59 shows an aging man, not in the best
of health. There is an ugly picture of a fat naked woman fingering herself
which he painted in 1981, followed by a photograph of himself in 1991, where
he appears to be a normal, healthy person. Looking for images associated
with the artist we find lots of surrealist art, tending to the primitive. I
see that Kiran Desai has coauthored a book about the artist. But we are left
to speculate about the meaning of his "precious gift of Badal Baba" to the
author.
I would have said that this was a totally wonderful book
if it had ended one or two hundred pages before it did. It would have been
much better than Flesh, which did actually win the prize. What is it
to be a young Indian, sent at great expense to the United States to
university with the expectation of becoming a successful person, a holder of
a green card and perhaps a naturalized American? Clicking about the internet
I have often found essays written by Americans who revile the Indians.
Dreadful things are written about the wife of the Vice President. Whatever
one might say about him, his wife is surely a very admirable person, and I
won't even think of comparing her to the wife of the President.
Interestingly, a day or two ago there was a statistic of
the median incomes of the various nationalities living in Germany. That is
to say normal people doing proper work, not people with inherited riches or
the oligarchs of the arms industries and that sort of thing. The Indians in
Germany doing honest work have the highest median incomes of all
nationalities, followed close behind by U.S. Americans, Austrians, UK and
Irish, Chinese, Swiss, and down the list with the median incomes of Germans
well below, but well above most other nationalities. (Australians were not
on the list.) Of course these Indians are mainly in the MINT professions.
Unlike Sonia and Sonny, their success was achieved without the aid of
magical Himalayan amulets. Also not on the list were the members of those
Arabian clans of Berlin whose only apparent income is the unemployment
support of the government, despite the expensive, top model cars they drive
and the comfortable houses they occupy, leading to a state of perplexity in
the rest of the population. Perhaps their successes could be attributed to
amulets distributed by some modern-day Aladdin with a magic lamp.
It was only after I had finished reading this book
that I realized that I had read another
book by the same author a couple of years ago, and thus there is much
overlap between the two. As the title tells us, this one is more concerned
with her theories of emotions. To begin she tells us that as a graduate
student she had been unable to replicate a well-known experiment. The
hypothesis was that, on the one hand (a) people feel depressed when
they fail to live up to their own standards, and on the other hand (b) they
feel anxious when they fail to live up to the standards of other
people. Many psychologists had confirmed this hypothesis using their
"experiments", while her attempts to confirm the hypothesis using her
"experiments" had failed.
What is an "experiment" in psychology? I suppose the
simplest example would be a multiple-choice test which random people are
asked to fill out. More elaborate examples would involve random people
coming into an official looking "laboratory" in an established, very
official university, and being subjected to some sort of strange or awkward
situation. In the case at hand, the responses of the participants would be
estimated by deciding whether the word "depression" or instead the word
"anxiety" best described the result. But how can that be decided? For
example, how can you tell if a person is "angry"? The book contains a
picture of just the face of a woman who seems to be shouting or screaming,
perhaps in pain, or terror. What unspeakably horrible things are being done
to her? Then we are asked to turn to the appendix C of the book where the
whole picture in its real context is shown. It is Venus Williams at the
moment she has beaten her sister at the finals of the 2008 U.S. Open tennis
tournament, screaming in joyful celebration.
This leads to a discussion of the fact that different
people, in different situations, exhibit different symptoms when feeling the
same emotion. For example with "fear" some people might distort their faces,
some may try to run away, some may stoically confront their fear in silence,
some may shout. There is no common, measurable symptom. The blood pressure
might rise or fall; facial expression might change; using fMRI, we find no specific area of the brain uniquely
associated with "fear", or with any other given emotion. And therefore, in
the end, the experimental psychologist must resort to simply asking the test
subject what their emotion is. In the case at hand, whether or not he or she
feels "depressed" or "anxious", or perhaps both of these emotions
simultaneously, or neither of them. And then maybe some people will ask what
is meant in this particular experimental situation by the words "depressed"
or "anxious"? How are they to be defined in this particular laboratory
situation in this impressive university?
The word "emotion" is defined as being something other
than the basic functions and responses of the body. Hunger is not an
emotion. Nor is the sort of acute pain caused by some physical injury. When
a newborn baby cries or smiles, according to Barrett's definition, this is
not the expression of emotion. Instead emotions are learned phenomena. The
baby, the child, accumulates a collection of situations it has observed, and
it creates groups of possible situations for which such emotions as "anger",
"jealousy", "depression", "anxiety", and so on might apply. These ideas are
supported by experiments she has performed in her laboratory. She also finds
that having words to express these groups of feelings aids in the creation
of emotion concepts - the development of "emotional intelligence". But then
later on in a chapter concerned with the question of whether or not animals
have emotions, she reduces things to the question of whether or not specific
kinds of animals recognize words. Perhaps some of the great apes can
recognize a few words, and therefore she grants them some sorts of primitive
emotions. Of course anybody - except Lisa Feldman Barrett - who has had
anything to do with dogs knows that they are the most emotional creatures of
all, far exceeding the emotions of humans. Yet Barrett seems to assert that
since they have no words, it follows that they have no emotions!
There is a chapter or two repeating what had been in the
previous book about the functioning of the brain. We are told that it is
constantly trying to predict what is happening, not only in the outside
world but within the body as well. It is constantly making models of the
world, and then comparing them to the inputs coming into the brain, trying
to optimize the conditions for life, adjusting the levels of hormones, the
rate of heartbeat and all that, but also optimizing social interactions as
best it can.
A chapter is concerned with Emotion and the Law. She
explains how false it is to say that a criminal act was committed in a
moment of emotional madness - the "reptilian brain" - before the reasoning,
higher brain was able to take over and bring things under control. Yet much
of criminal justice is based on this disproven theory of the mind. And then
the severity of sentencing is determined by judgements on the emotions of a
prisoner. Has he or she showed remorse? guilt? But as we have seen, there is
no way to determine these things objectively. How much is true, how much is
play acting? And on a deeper level, what is remorse, really? Instances are
given of how unfairly women are dealt with in court in comparison with men,
or men in comparison with women. Do people exhibit the emotions society
expects of them in given situations?
And finally she repeats the sensible advice she had
explained in the previous book. To have a healthy mind and healthy emotions
you can start by having enough good sleep, exercise out in the open air, and
good food - not all that processed sugary junk.
The author
is an Associate Professor at Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée, doing
research about the internet. It seems that she writes these Thomas Sturm
books for enjoyment. A bit of lightweight fun. A year or two ago I read her
first two Thomas Sturm books, and now I see that she has written another.
Captain Thomas Sturm is a policeman in the town of Garches, a prosperous suburb west of Paris. A
policewoman, her husband and her son, as well as the dog, are blown up in a
violent explosion in a parking lot in a forest near Garches. It was a car
bomb. And so we follow the investigation, taking Sturm to the instep of the
boot of Italy and the notorious 'Ndrangheta. He even got Inspector
Laura Tonacci onto the case, the beautiful, young Italian
policewoman with whom he had spent a wonderful night of erotic explorations
in his hotel room during his previous investigation. But this time he didn't
even bother to meet her in person. Also his relationship with his colleague
Lieutenant Helen Sennevieres, with whom he had had a torrid hour on the back
seat of her Volvo station wagon during a previous investigation, remained
chaste in the present affair. Indeed, at least for the present story, he has
been true to his real love, Alice Delisle. So that's nice, isn't it?
This one was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize,
and again it was much better than the winner - which just goes to show that
we should not place too much importance on those committees which choose the
winners of prizes, especially those of the Nobel variety. It is concerned
with a not-so-perfect American family. Tom comes from a lower middle class
Catholic family while Amy's family is relatively wealthy and Jewish. The son
Michael is a teenager and the daughter Miri is just 6. Tom had been studying
literature at university but changed to law in order to have a profession
which gives financial security. Amy has assumed the role of housewife. She
is a beautiful woman and is much involved with the synagogue where she
commences an affair with one of its more active members. This becomes known
and she confesses everything, but Tom secretly resolves to leave the family
when Miri begins university, 12 years in the future.
It is now 12 years later. Tom is professor of law at one
of those prestigious New England universities. He is 55. Michael is in Los
Angeles while Miri is about to be driven to a college in Pennsylvania where
she is to begin studying. Amy is still a very attractive woman, still very
much in love with Tom. She doesn't really get along well with her daughter
who is very casual, unconcerned with her appearance. And so, in the end, Tom
heads off alone with Miri, taking a day to drive there and help Miri get
settled, then, supposedly, to come back the next day. But instead of doing
that he heads off, westward. The story becomes a road trip. He stays with
his brother for a day or two in the Midwest; then with the old girlfriend he
had been with for a couple of years, years ago in college, at her house in
Las Vegas; finally with Michael in Southern California, on the coast of the
Pacific. But the book is really concerned with more than just this little
family drama.
A road story, or road movie, is concerned with the
country you are going through. The people, the scenes. What is it like? Some
sort of statement about the essential reality of the place. To begin with
Tom has been told by the Dean of the Faculty that he should take a semester
off from teaching. He has fallen into disfavor. His crime was to neglect, or
even refuse to use the currently acceptable pronouns when addressing the
students. He is a tall man, and in his youth had played basketball even
semi-professionally. (The author played professional basketball in Germany,
such as it is here.) Through his contacts with old friends in professional
basketball he has signed his name to a legal opinion defending someone who
said something or other which was not in line with the accepted level of
political correctness. And then a friend asks him to legally represent an
active professional basketball player, a person of predominantly European
ancestry - a "white" person - who would like to pursue class action
litigation against the National Basketball Association for discriminating
against white people in favor of "black" people - those with predominantly
African ancestry. He says that of the top college players looking to be
recruited into the NBA, 80% are white while in the NBA only 20% of the
players are white, and those are predominantly European players, not
Americans.
I have no idea if these numbers are correct. ChatGTP
tells me that in the 2022-23 season, 70.4% of NBA players were black and
17.5% were white, with the remainder being Latino, Asian, Multiracial/Other,
whatever that means. We are further told that only around 20-27% of NCAA
Division 1 male basketball players - that is, the top college players - are
white, while 50-60% or more are black. Therefore this contradicts the
premise of the proposed class action law suit. Thankfully, Tom refuses to
represent the player. Nevertheless, one way or another, Tom has very
sensibly decided to quit his professorship and be done with it, perhaps
driving across America and writing a book about the various pick-up
basketball scenes he encounters.
#####
We contrast the system of professional sports in America
with that in other countries. The system in the United States is that there
are a fixed number of professional teams in the various cities around the
country. Each team is a purely commercial operation, and the owners do not
want to lose their money. Therefore there is no question that they might
lose, in the sense of dropping down to lower leagues or falling out of the
professional circus entirely. In fact, finishing at the bottom of the league
is an advantage in that the worst teams have the first picks of the best
players coming out of college. The champions are left with what is left
after all the other teams have had their choices. I find it difficult to
understand that, given this system, the fans keep following their teams, and
that the teams have much of a motivation for success. It is just show
business. The show must go on and the fans must be kept entertained and
spending money. In fact all of the players earn millions, I suspect far more
than almost all Hollywood actors, just excepting the very few at the top.
Contrast this with the situation in real football, which is called soccer in
the United States. The bottom two or three clubs in each league drop down,
and in the case of continuing failure they disappear into amateur obscurity.
The top two or three advance up to the next higher league. There is
certainly no question that the losers get good players. The top clubs: Real
Madrid, Paris St. Germain, and so on, spend hundreds of millions - getting
towards billions - on transfers - for the top stars. The question of whether
or not they come from Africa or Europe or Asia or even the United States
plays no role at all. The only question is whether the team is winning. A
few lost games and the trainer is out and the search for the next big player
and the hundreds of millions needed to get him under contract begins. At
least in Germany, almost all of the top clubs are true clubs with the many
thousands of members paying their dues and buying their season tickets.
#####
Returning to the story... it has a similarity to Richard
Ford's Be Mine, but Tom
has a much more pleasant character than the dreadful Frank Bascombe. Not to
mention the rude, primitive blowhard who believes he is presently running
the country.
The Appalachian trail. The northern part up in Maine. A
woman has gone missing. Is she lost, murdered, kidnapped? Beverly Miller -
Lt. Bev - is the forest ranger responsible for the search. She is proud of
being one of the first women rangers, and as the story progresses she tells
us about her life. Eventually the breakthrough comes from an old woman
confined to a wheelchair in a luxurious old people's home, chatting with
somebody on her mobile telephone. This is one of those books in which
everybody is very nice, and even the ones we had at first suspected to not
be very nice turn out to be so. Of course even a woman writing a book like
this filled with loving concern and goodness does allow a sliver of darkness
to enter the picture. We are told that the woman went missing near Sugarloaf Mountain, with the nearby SERE facility of the US military. The view in google
maps is here, and by zooming out a little you can see where
the Appalachian trail passes close by. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape. The idea is that if an American soldier, in the
process of terrorizing people in some distant part of the world, becomes
captured and imprisoned, then he or she is supposed to execute the four
functions represented by the letters SERE in order to be able to return to
apple pie America. Could it be that one of the SERE participants or
instructors had anything to do with the disappearance of the woman? Oh well.
It was an amusing story.
A couple of years ago the brother of a good friend of
ours had a go at the Appalachian trail, together with his partner who he
had, unfortunately, not married. They began in early spring at the starting
point in Georgia and progressed northwards, sending messages with pictures,
keeping track of things. They sent a view from the top of a mountain and
then in the valley decided to treat themselves to a comfortable night
sleeping in a bed in a hotel, or motel. He did not wake up. Not being
married, his partner was excluded from the inheritance. I don't know how
much of a problem this was for her. Somehow this little tragedy of a man,
still in middle age, and his partner seems to me to be much deeper than the
imagined tragedies, even if they were real, in this book.
The author is an Australian who has been a barrister, an
actor, and certainly a widely traveled person before becoming a writer. This
is a short book telling a fast-moving story, a downfall, or perhaps an
enlightenment. John Penne, certainly not his real name, is a British
intelligence officer. He is at the Geneva railway station, tasked with
observing if Dala Gasnier, also not her real name, a young woman presumably
with French intelligence, will board a high speed train to Paris. If so, he
is to discretely follow her, informing his superiors who are to arrest her.
She was involved in the violent death of another agent in the French Alps.
She eludes him. He follows, to Paris, Bangkok, and eventually New Caledonia
and Vanuatu where he makes contact, not arresting or betraying her, but
falling in love. And so the story continues. I couldn't put the book down,
finishing within a day.
Tara Selter lives with her husband, Thomas, in a
small town in the north of France. They have an internet business selling
antiquarian books, sending things through the mail to their customers. Tara
occasionally travels to auctions and to other book shops in order to acquire
the books. She has just been in the south of France and is now returning,
spending a day or two in Paris, staying in a hotel, visiting friends who
have a real antiquarian bookshop and one or two titles she has been seeking.
She arrives late on the evening of the 17th of November, stays overnight
into the 18th and goes about her business for the day, returning to the
hotel, planning to journey on home the next day, the 19th. But upon waking
up she finds that it is not the 19th. She is in some sort of time-warp. The
18th has come again and although she has gone on to the next day, the world
and everybody in it are back in the 18th. And the next day is the same. For
Tara it is as if it November the 18th repeats itself endlessly, while for
the rest of the world time apparently goes on as ever, on into the 19th and
beyond, leaving Tara behind.
After struggling with this strange situation, spending a
couple of days in a Paris which keeps recycling back to the 18th, Tara
decides to return home, arriving late in the evening. Thomas is astonished
that she has come a day earlier, as it was planned that she would return on
the 19th. She explains all about the situation; they go to bed and the next
morning they wake up. Thomas is shocked to find that she is next to him in
bed despite the fact that it is only the morning of the 18th. She must again
explain the whole story. That evening they again go to bed and the next
morning they wake up and Thomas is again astonished to find that Tara his
here although it is only the morning of the 18th. And so on. Eventually she
tires of explaining the whole thing every morning again and again. She
decides to live in the spare room which, luckily, Thomas never enters on the
18th. The whole thing has interesting consequences. For example she can
spend all the money she wants, since the next day - for her - is always
reset for the rest of the world, including the balance in her bank account,
to what it was at the beginning of the 18th of November. She decides to move
in to a house in the neighborhood whose inhabitants are away, on vacation.
She can do whatever she wants with the house since it will always be again
reset to its state at the beginning of the 18th. And so on.
The novelty of this device soon wore off and the book
came to an end without any particular resolution. Will Tara break out of
this time-warp, or whatever it is? Will she go mad? I am astonished that the
book has received such overwhelming praise. It seems that the author has
gone on to write a whole series of these books, as if they themselves are in
a time-warp. The next book is apparently concerned with the idea that Tara
finds it depressing to always be in the 18th of November in a rainy day in
the north of France. Thus as a year - for her - goes on, she travels to the
south for what for her should be summer and experiences warm, sunny days.
After all, in the southern hemisphere the 18th of November is the beginning
of summer. Then she might travel to northern Sweden in order to experience
the feeling of winter as is was on that particular 18th of November. But we
needn't bother with all those further books in the series.
Maybe the story could be thought of as an allegory on
living alone, as so many people do these days. Each day is practically the
same. Life for the lonely becomes a meaningless sequence of similar days.
And then, in some ways the condition of anterograde amnesia is the opposite of this.
A sad, depressing story. In an interview the author tells us that this is a story of what men are
like, or at least it is a story of the doings of men. Deven is a meek,
somewhat simple-minded teacher of the Hindi language in a college in a town
a few hours north of Delhi. He hardly earns enough to feed his family: his
wife who despises him for his poverty and his small son. But Deven is really
an Urdu speaker. We are told that Urdu is a useless language which nobody
speaks anymore. The college does have a department of Urdu, but there is
just one teacher and practically zero students.
Of course I know almost nothing about the languages of
the Indian subcontinent. The Wikipedia tells us that Hindi is the lingua franca for most of
northern India. But we also learn that Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, and it is
widely spoken in southern India. In fact Urdu is the 10th most widely spoken
language in the world. Thus this attitude of Deven's college can perhaps be
understood in terms of the conflict between Hinduism and Mohammedanism. As I
understand it, the former basically speaks Hindi while the later Urdu. And
after the dreadfully violent partition of India and Pakistan, the hatred of
the one group for the other remains. Thus Deven is a Moslem in the
predominantly Hindu regions around Delhi. It seems that Hindi and Urdu are
closely related in the same way as Ukrainian and Russian are closely related
languages. But it is not necessarily true that having closely related
languages leads invariably to hatred and bloody conflict. For example German
and Dutch are also closely related. And also German, Bavarian, and Swiss
German, while sharing the same vocabulary and being essentially identical in
written form, are mutually incomprehensible as spoken.
But to return to the story... An unpleasant friend of
Deven arrives, and we learn that he publishes a journal of Urdu in Delhi. He
proposes that Deven, who imagines himself to be a minor poet, interview Nur,
the famous Urdu poet who lives in Delhi, and who is Deven's hero, the one
figure who makes life worth living, in all its squalor and poverty. With
great trepidation he makes his way to the house of Nur. It is in a part of
the city of ill repute. Nur, that great figure of literary renown, is a
degenerate, fat old man, hardly capable of movement, spending his time
eating and drinking - rum - together with a hoard of hangers-on who are
themselves just there for the food and drink. Somehow Deven makes himself
known to the guru amid all the loud laughter and coarse shouting, and it
seems that this project of an interview and the recitation of earlier works
of the great Nur might be possible.
It is suggested that Deven should acquire a tape recorder
and tape a session with Nur. Of course in all his poverty he cannot buy such
a thing himself. His friend, the teacher of Urdu, convinces the college to
devote the entirety of its annual library funds to the project, giving Deven
barely enough to purchase a second hand recorder and the promise that a
nephew of the electrical store owner will act as technician and operate the
machine. Owing to the hatred of Nur's wives for each other it is necessary
to do the recordings in a neighboring house, a brothel. The sessions turn
out to be loud, chaotic orgies of food, drink and foul language, only very
occasionally interspersed with a few words from Nur, and over a week of this
there are one or two gems in which Nur recites a few lost poems. But the
"technician" nephew spends the time bored, sleeping, perhaps also partaking
in the general revelry and drink, so that all of that is lost - the tapes
are simply full of meaningless noise, chaos.
Deven returns to his village with its college where a few
students who are studying science - not useless languages - try to extract a
few useful snippets out of the chaos. For this they demand that Deven give
them top marks in the end of year exams. But even these snippets are
useless. And then the brothel which had been renting out the room and
providing the endless food and drink presents Deven with a huge bill and the
threat that if it is not immediately paid then those violent underworld
figures of Delhi will come and extract unimaginable retribution. The book
ends with Deven walking about hopelessly through the night.
I know that these Indian poets and philosophers imagine
themselves to float above the world in their dreams of perfect harmony. But
is it really such a great problem to push the buttons yourself on a tape
recorder? Since I am now an old man, I still remember those tape recorders.
They had three or four buttons. Play. Stop. Rewind. Perhaps also Fast
Forward and Fast Rewind. To record you pushed the red button, together with
the Play button. Is this totally beyond the capabilities of a sensitive
Indian literary intellectual? But I cannot imagine that Anita Desai
considered Deven to be a typical example of the Indian man. After all, her
husband had a software company, and so I am sure that he was capable of
operating a tape recorder despite the fact that he published Between Eternities, a book dealing with the mystical
realities of life, the universe and everything else.
It is the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries,
the end of the Victorian era. The protagonist, Evelyn Dolman (a man), is an
obscure writer for the periodicals of London. He has recently married Laura
Rensselaer, the younger daughter of one of the richest men in America, a
billionaire who also has extensive properties and lands in England.
Understandably, Evelyn was careful of his valuable bride, demurely
respecting her chastity before the engagement. Yet on the evening of the
engagement they come passionately together to the bewilderment of Evelyn,
demonstrating that Laura was far from being the inexperienced virgin he had
taken her to be. After that, and on into the first weeks of marriage, Laura
coolly dismissed each of Evelyn's attempts to again become intimate. And
then for some reason Laura had become detached from her wealthy family. Was
there some sort of a scandal? Soon after the marriage, when out riding alone
with her father on one of their estates, there was a fatal accident, the
father falling from his horse. In the aftermath it was found that Laura had
been disinherited, all the immense millions going instead to her unmarried
and unpleasant older sister. In this situation, soon after the funeral,
Evelyn accompanies Laura to a winter honeymoon in a rundown ancient palace
on the Grand Canal in Venice.
We think of Venice as being elegant, refined, an
exclusive playground for the rich, full of deep history, art, dreams of a
perfect holiday. But is Venice really such a desirable place? A city
floating in the miasma of a swamp with polluted canals, mosquitoes. A place
of scandal, of rotting stones, a history filled with pain and destruction.
What has Evelyn got himself into in this story of coldly calculated
deception? There are no pleasant characters here to enjoy the warmth of
Banville's elegant prose.
This book was first published in 1913: the Gilded
Age, reflecting our even more extreme gilded age as it is being revealed and
covered up in the ongoing revelations of the Epstein files. Rather than dwelling too much on such
things, let us instead refer to the Wikipedia article for a description of
the plot of the book.
Undine Spragg is a young woman who wants and expects
everything. And that everything is concerned with her beauty. Everybody is
overwhelmed with her beauty. She spends all her time on fashionable dresses,
jewelry, going to the most expensive places in New York, Paris, to have
these things. Seeking out the most exclusive, fashionable people. Each of
the men she successively marries loves her above everything else, even going
into bankruptcy for her. Such a beautiful woman.
I did enjoy reading the book and Edith Wharton's writing.
But really, what is beauty? Is it something absolute? It is said that
clothes make the man - or the woman. Certainly exquisite clothing can
produce a dramatic effect, especially if coupled with a youthful, perfect,
symmetrical face and figure. For example, perhaps you could say that the
most beautiful young woman in the world - as an objective measure - is she
who has been chosen to be "Miss World", whoever she is. Looking at the pictures
of the recent winners of that contest, some seem to me to have very pleasant
faces, some are more ordinary. I imagine what the personality behind the
face might be. And the personality of Undine Spragg is dreadful. Selfish in
the extreme. Thoughtless. Perhaps some of those billionaires, these men of
our modern gilded age, would gladly marry one of these faces, not out of
love but in order to display it as an exquisite acquired article to be
admired by the rest of the world. But how, in particular, can Ralph, her
second husband, keep on loving Undine despite the ugliness of her person?
This made no sense to me.
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Again, a beautifully written book by Gurnah. In
chapter after chapter, each of which at first seems to have little to do
with the anothers, the various characters are introduced. Only gradually do
we understand the connections, the more or less distant branches of family
relationships. It takes place in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, with a short
and unpleasant beginning on Pemba Island. After we are well into the book
there is an abrupt change when a young boy, Badar, is driven away from his
home by what we take to be his father, to be deposited in a strange house
where he is to be the lowly servant. Only the old father of this house is
dreadful, frowning in silence with hate-filled eyes. The others try to be as
nice to him as possible. We discover that Badar is related to them; his real
father had cheated the father of the house, stealing all the money, and so
the hatred of the father of the house for Badar's father is transfered to
him.
Badar had been taken from school at an early age. He is
left with little education. The others become professionals in the
corruption of the new state of Tanzania, while Badar, in the end, emerges in
harmony with life. It is what we imagine to be a calm, honest description of
post-colonial Zanzibar. Tourists, NGOs. Flaneuring about the old city in
shorts and t-shirts, complaining of the smells, ignorant of the traditions
they are flaunting. A beautiful young English woman, perhaps 21, arrives for
a stay of three months, vaguely associated with some sort of NGO. She is
looking for a sexual adventure with the natives, leading to disruption in
the family.
