This year (2025)
Previous years: 2024; 2023;
2022; 2021;
2020; 2019;
2018; 2017;
2016; 2015;
2014; 2013;
2012; 2011;
2010; 2009;
2008; 2007;
2006; 2005
Rachel Kushner:
Creation
Lake
Liz Moore:
The
God of the Woods
Futaro Yamada:
The
Meiji Guillotine Murders
Yael Van Der Wouden:
The
Safe Keep
Manolo Palomares:
Mestizo
Charlotte Wood:
Stone
Yard Devotional
Peter Janney:
Mary's
Mosaic
Jason Rekulak:
Hidden
Pictures
Elif Shafak:
There
are Rivers in the Sky
Rita Bullwinkel:
Headshot
Barbara Davis:
The
Echo of Old Books
Gareth Brown:
The
Book of Doors
Hisham Matar:
The
Return
Sophie Elmhirst:
Maurice
and Maralyn
Jenny Jackson:
Pineapple
Street
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Dream
Count
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani:
I
Do Not Come to You by Chance
Tammy Borden:
Waltraud
William Boyd:
Gabriel's
Moon
The heroine, or shall we say protagonist of this
book is an agent provocateur. Her job is to ingratiate herself into
environmental protection groups which the Powers That Be would like to
eliminate, provoking them to do something illegal, providing the evidence,
and then seeing that they are thrown into jail to serve long sentences,
safely put away from normal society. For the purpose of this novel she has
assumed the name Sadie Smith. She is middle 30s, fit, still beautiful, and
so she uses sex. Her present assignment is in the south of France. Water is
to be diverted from its natural courses and into a large artificial
reservoir in order to irrigate the endless fields of corn (or maize) which
is to replace traditional agriculture. Thus it is part of all the pollution
caused by modern Green politics. The traditional farmers of the area are
protesting. According to the narrative of the legacy media, they are thus
part of the "extreme right". There is also a commune of hippy-like people;
perhaps they should be referred to as elements of the "extreme left", led by
a guru whose name is Pascal, and they join in with the protests. They have
given up on the idea of revolution, instead withdrawing into
self-sufficiency by subsistence farming, aided by the occasional addition of
funds by the wealthy parents of one or another member. They also produce
reams of philosophical literature. The annual agricultural fair is soon to
take place and an obscure politician named Plato is to make an appearance.
Sadie's mission is to infiltrate the commune and get them to assassinate
Plato.
The story unfolds gradually; Sadie tells us lots of
things about herself. It is an enjoyable read from one character to the next
with excursions into one thing and another. Rachel Kushner writes well, much
irony and fun. In particular Sadie is constantly reading the emails of Bruno
Lacombe. He is an old man who has progressed from living in a farmhouse with
family, to living alone in the barn, to living in an ancient stone hut, to
finally living in a limestone cave, an entrance to which is on his property.
We have long meditations about the Neanderthals. Cave
men. Two or three percent of non-African human genomes are attributed to
Neanderthals while Africans have only a one percent or less contribution. It
used to be thought that Neanderthals were ape-like brutes with their thick,
muscular chests and short limbs. Too stupid to understand bows and arrows or
thrown spears, they lunged at large animals with their primitive wooden
lances, grappling, killing them with bare hands. The bones of Neanderthals
are said to exhibit at least as many breakages as with modern-day rodeo
cowboys. And yet the Neanderthals had huge brains: an average of 1640 cubic
centimeters for males and 1460 for females. This compares with 1362 and 1201
for the average modern European brain. And so people imagine a different
picture of the Neanderthal. Were they gentle, caring, unimaginably
intelligent people, living in perfect harmony with nature? Like Pascal's
commune, but infinitely sustainable. A mythical, perfect human existence,
brought to a tragic end by the invasion of cruel, evil modern man. Bruno
tells us of such things in his emails and tells us how the enduring echos of
those lost times of 50 or 100 thousand years ago can be felt in the darkness
of his cave. Perhaps he imagines himself to be a kind of spiritual
Neanderthal.
Indeed, all of this is very interesting. When reading the
book I decided to look up a "comparison of neanderthal and human brains"
using duckduckgo.com. (Not Google. Heaven forbid!) This led me to a recent paper on the subject. There it is said that
modern humans have a mutation to the TKTL1 gene, changing just a single pair
on the sequence. All other hominoids lack this mutation. It has the effect
of dramatically increasing the number of neurons with all their connections,
especially in the frontal lobe. Therefore the fact that our brains are
smaller than those of the Neanderthals does not mean that we are more stupid
than they were. On the contrary, we return to the picture of Neanderthals as
stupid, grunting brutes, perhaps with IQs in the sub-50s or less, fighting
with their primitive neurons to survive in harsh Ice Age Europe. The
examples of birds with high intelligence: parrots, kookaburras and the like,
with their small brains, show that brain volume is not necessarily the
decisive factor. There is some evidence that our genomes contain almost no
Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, seeming to imply that almost all sexual
encounters between a Neanderthal and a human involved a male Neanderthal and
a female human. That is to imagine that the women were raped.
Despite enjoying the story of the book, it seemed to me
to be strangely naīve. It is placed in modern times with emails, mobile
telephones and all the rest. Sadie tells us about her first case in which
she framed a young man who was protesting the cruelty of animal experiments
in some horrible laboratory. She induced him to buy tons of nitrogen based
fertilizer which could be used to make a bomb. And so he was sentenced to
years in prison. He is now free, having a lawyer investigating the exact
circumstances of his case. Yet Sadie has disappeared into thin air and has
gone on to successfully frame numbers of further such people. This might
have been possible, say, in the 1970s, but in our real world of today
everybody is constantly taking pictures, selfies, videos with their mobile
telephones. The world is filled with surveillance cameras, recording things.
There are countless images stored away in the vastness of both government
and private "cloud" memories. Emails, certainly those of Bruno, are
generally not encrypted, and people accessing other people's emails can be
identified. So I imagine that such an agent provocateur would have only one
chance, after which she would be useless, having to hide, perhaps in some
cave in the south of France, for the rest of her life.
And then of course we have the circumstance which I
cannot understand, that the Green political movement has mutated from being
representative of the kinds of people Sadie is ruining, people with just
environmental causes, to being the shrillest voices for war, mass murder and
all the rest. For some reason these people embrace electricity almost as a
kind of fetish. Everything is to be based on electricity. Laws have been
passed, specifying that in the future only electrical battery cars will be
allowed. Houses will only be allowed to be heated with electricity. Huge
windmills are being built everywhere for generating intermittent
electricity, polluting vast swathes of natural forest, decimating the birds
and the bats, relying on obscure minerals for their functioning which are
mined at the expense of extreme, deadly pollution, sometimes using
child labor, in countries out of sight of Green voters. For the last year
teams of construction workers have been going through the streets here,
digging up the sidewalks and laying cables. But these are glass fiber
cables, not new, robust electrical cables. How will the old cables which
were laid down under the streets, up to 100 years ago, cope in the middle of
a cold, windless winter night with every single house drawing perhaps 10 or
15 kilowatts or more of electricity, continuously, for heating and car
charging? Where will all this electricity come from, given that the system
is now almost at its limit, despite the fact that only few houses are heated
with electricity and few battery cars are on the roads?
But this was not really part of the story of the book,
except that we imagine that Sadie's unknown employer might very reasonably
have been an obscure Green-funded NGO. After all, the farmers were
protesting all of this infrastructure for transforming their land into a
corn mono-culture for the production of ethanol to be burned in the engines
of cars (which are to be banned in the future).
A rich banking family have a mansion on a hill in
the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. There is a lake down below and
a summer camp for the children of rich parents. Everything is surrounded by
dense woodlands. In the spring there is an invasion of irritating black
flies, but they disappear in mid-summer, and to celebrate this event the
banking family invites a select group of people to their mansion for a party
which lasts for a week. Meanwhile down at the lake, the summer camp of
children - most of whom are not children of parents taking part in the
celebrations up at the mansion - goes on in a highly organized, almost
military style. The party for the grownups consists of a few old friends of
the family, and then possible future customers of the bank together with
their spouses, and finally a collection of young and attractive men and
women from Hollywood or whatever to make things look more attractive and
perhaps to provide sexual diversions for one or another of the guests. As
with the summer camp for children, the party for the grownups is highly
organized with competitive games and sporting events, points being awarded
and added up to determine the winners and losers at the end of the week.
All of this seems to me to be extremely unpleasant, and I
find it difficult to believe that a potential customer of the family bank
would afterwards want to have anything more to do with such a family. But
what do I know about the lives of the rich?
In the book, all of the rich people are portrayed as
being dreadful, and all of the non-rich people - the workers at the summer
camp for children, the ordinary people in the small town nearby - are
wonderful. The one exception is the simple-minded wife of the present head
of the family bank who drowns her feelings in alcohol and pills prescribed
by the family doctor. Her depression was particularly due to the mysterious
disappearance of her beloved young son into the depths of the wood, never to
return. Was he murdered, abducted, the victim of an accident? Despite
extensive searches lasting days, weeks, by everybody in the surrounding
villages, the police and everybody else, his body has never been found. And
now, at the time of the present story, the young daughter has also
disappeared. Again, everybody is searching without success. Where is she?
Was she murdered or abducted or something?
We read eagerly on. The good people are falsely accused
while those arrogant rich people make halfhearted attempts to continue their
party, on to the end of the week. My theory was that the family lawyer whose
degenerate son was set to take over the bank was the perpetrator. After all,
he had a motive in both cases. For anybody who might happen to click in here
(and I expect that there is nobody except me who would do that) I will not
spoil the story by revealing how things are resolved at the end. At least
the New York Times took the book seriously enough to give it a review.
This is also a crime story, but of a completely
different character to the last book. The author was of an earlier generation and he based
his story on the situation in Japan in 1869, during the time of the Boshin War. In 1854, the United States Navy Commodore
Perry sailed his fleet of Black Ships into Tokyo Harbor to open up trade
between Japan and the outside world. Earlier, during the 1630s, the rulers
of Japan decided to isolate the country from divisive outside influences,
particularly those of the Portuguese and Spanish which had reached Japan in
the years before that. Japan refused to allow itself to be colonized, either
by force or else by the subversive influence of the Catholic missionaries
with their Christian religion. Yet at the end of this "Sakoku" period, the isolation was ended. Such events
are bound to lead to conflicts, with those people who were dominant in the
old system - the Samurai class - losing out.
The book begins with chapters describing lots of blatant
corruption in the chaos of the time. Roaming bands of police extract money
from everybody they can see. They come from the old ronin class of wandering, itinerant samurai of bygone
days. We are overwhelmed with all the complicated Japanese names of so many
different characters, most of whom seem to play no particular role in the
story. Perhaps the internet might tell us that they are actually famous
historical figures from that period. The narration seems to be going
nowhere, but gradually we do converge upon two characters with similar
appearing names who are both somewhat higher up in this newly established
police department. And then finally, a chapter does appear with a murder
mystery.
Somebody - was he also with the police, or was he a
politician? - was killed with the sword of another character who was also
either police or politician despite the fact that the apparent killer was up
in a tower with windows all around and observed constantly by various other
policemen. And there can have been no other assassin at the scene. What a
mystery! The mystery is solved by a young French woman who is the girlfriend
of one of the two main characters. She is described as being indescribably
beautiful and clothed in indescribably beautiful clothes. She enters a state
of trance and communes with the deceased in a seance who, speaking through
the French woman, explains what happened. It is a rather far-fetched
explanation. The other policeman, or perhaps somebody else, is constantly
saying that the French woman should be deported along with all other
foreigners.
Then the next chapter is another short story explaining
another murder mystery. It has snowed and there are the tracks of a rickshaw
leading down to a canal where the victim drowned, yet no footprints in the
snow of the coolie who must have been pulling the rickshaw. Again the French
woman makes an appearance and in a seance explains what happened. There are
a number of further chapters seemingly written in the same style, but I gave
up.
The text is interspersed with the occasional obscure
Japanese word which the translator has conveniently placed in italic type,
but which is nowhere explained in the book. I certainly do not have a
Japanese-English dictionary. We do have GoogleTranslate, but I couldn't be
bothered. Undoubtedly the Japanese readers of the original which appeared in
1979 could make more sense out of all this than I could.
Before beginning this book we know that it is
concerned with a young woman living alone in a rural house in Holland in
1960. She is extremely uptight, an unpleasant, brittle person insisting that
everything should be kept in its place. Both her parents have passed away.
Her uncle owns the house and gives her an allowance, but when he dies the
house is to go to the older brother. The book was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize of 2024 and it is the debut novel of the author. This is the information we gather from the
blurb, and so I started reading.
We soon learn that Isabel, or Isa for short also has a
younger brother, Hendrik, who is homosexual and lives with his exotic
partner somewhere else, far enough away - was it Amsterdam, or Den Haag -
I've forgotten which. Isa's house is in the east of the country near Zwolle.
The elder brother, Louis, is already about 30 years old and has one
girlfriend after another. The present one is named Eva. They all have a
get-together at a restaurant and Isa is very rude to Eve who seems not to
notice. A bit later Isa receives an unpleasant telephone call from Louis to
tell her that he is to go over to England on business for a month, and Eva
should stay at the house with Isa for the time.
And so Eve comes to stay, bringing disruption, disorder.
What is more, Louis has put her in their mother's bedroom which, for Isa is
a kind of shrine; she was alone with the mother for her last breaths into
death. Isa shouts at Eva. She is rude; she counts the days till the month is
finally finished so that Louis will take her away. But then, at the climax
of these towering emotions, Eva moves closer, holds Isa, kisses her. And
suddenly the novel becomes a celebration of female homosexuality, explained
in page after page of vivid, graphic, trembling detail. If, as is sometimes
said, Queen Victoria could not imagine what female homosexuals could
possibly be doing, then she would certainly have found this book to be
instructive. I have not read any homo-erotic novels; Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar was unpleasant enough without
reaching such levels of detail, and anyway, the female is a more pleasant
subject than the male.
But then the whole story takes on a whole new twist.
According the Guardian review of the book, in order not to spoil it for
their readers they refrained from revealing what it was. But since
practically nobody reads what I am writing here, I can just write whatever I
want.
It is a Holocaust story. All that lesbian stuff was just
more of the eternal suffering of the poor Jewish Eva. The house had belonged
to her family. Her father was sent to a concentration camp and was killed.
Therefore the mortgage on the house was not paid, and so the surviving
family was evicted. Isa's uncle later bought the house. Meanwhile, unlike
Anna Frank who hid together with her family in Amsterdam, the young Eva was
sent by her mother to various farms in Holland, paying the people to hide
her in attics or barns, sleeping alone, cold, on rough straw, kicked out
when the money didn't come.
Is this really the picture we have? Those cold-hearted,
money-grubbing Dutch people, seeing the opportunity of making a few gulden
out of the suffering of the Jews, throwing out the poor little Anna Franks
of the world as soon as the money runs out. Well, undoubtedly there are
unpleasant people in Holland. The Dutch East India Company was just as cruel
as the English in their colonies. The Belgians in the Congo were perhaps
even worse. I can only say that the Dutch people I have known over the years
are so different from all of this as to render it absurd. And anyway, even
if there was such a horrible farmer, would it have been worth a few gulden
to hide a young Jewish girl? If there was a market for such things then such
farmers would be known in wider circles, and soon the GESTAPO would come and
take them away. And if such a farmer were to evict such a young girl for
want of money then the parents might anonymously let it be known to the
GESTAPO. So the danger would not be worth the money at all. In fact it would
be the money itself which would produce such an impossible level of danger
for such an imaginary farmer. This part of the story is clearly
nonsense, absurd.
And then we have Eva living homeless, destitute in the
Amsterdam of 1960, wanting her old house back. Why is she destitute? This
wasn't explained in the story. Surely there was much sensible employment to
be had in the Holland of those days. We can understand the lazy Isa sitting
around doing nothing, stewing in her own juice, but this doesn't apply to
Eva. Of course it would be nice to live in the old family home, but such is
the tragedy of many, many people. All of the countless wars in the world. Is
it improper to think of the many Palestinian families who lost their homes
in the Nakba of so many years ago and who, we are told, still treasure the
keys to those long-lost houses?
Mestizo, by Manolo Palomares
After a cursory search of the internet I couldn't
find any sensible reviews of this book. It is concerned with Martin Cortez, the first born son of Hernan Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico. Of course we
should say that Cortez, the Conquistador was evil, marching through
the innocent, pure, sustainable civilization of original America, unsullied
by the corruption of Europe, killing and then enslaving the native peoples
for the glory of Spain. But on the contrary, this book treats Martin, and by
reflection his father, Hernan, as heroes. And thus no self-respecting
newspaper or internet reviewer will touch it.
The author has also written another historical novel
about the father, but I won't bother to read it. Nevertheless, it is surely
fair to treat Cortez more honestly. The situation in Mexico in 1519 was that
the Aztec nation was dominating various other nations, enslaving their
peoples, ritually killing them as sacrifices to their gods. And thus Cortez
with a force of only 500 men inspired these oppressed peoples to rise up
against the Aztec. His very essential partner in this endeavor was La Malinche, a native woman who acted as his
translator and advisor and who was the mother of Martin, the hero of this
book. Certainly the Spanish in "New Spain" enslaved many of the natives, but
many of them, and many of the mixed-race people, became respected citizens
and even ascended to the aristocracy. The book agrees with the narratives of
these people as they are described in the Wikipedia, so I assume that it is
all historically accurate.
The story is that Cortez senior did not marry La
Malinche, but rather upon returning to Spain with riches and fortune he
married a Spanish aristocrat, thus raising himself into that class. With his
official wife he had two sons, yet using bribery he had the Pope declare his
first-born, Martin, a legitimate child. Nevertheless, in his testament he
declared the son of the aristocratic wife to be the main beneficiary,
inheriting his title and most of his riches. Since that son was evil while
Martin, the Mestizo was devoted and pure, all of this led to horrible
consequences. The father's testament went on for many pages, trying to
impose his will onto the world after his death. A terrible idea. Testaments
should be short and simple. The moral of the story is that you should die
peacefully; the future is no longer of concern to you.
This one was short-listed for the Booker Prize, so
it is well written. And I wanted to read it since it is concerned with the
Monaro country of southern New South Wales in Australia, around the town of
Cooma. During the time I was studying at the Australian National University
in Canberra I often drove through Cooma, either down to my parents place on
the coast or up to the Snowy Mountains. And I remember a party once where a
young woman told us that she had been an art teacher in the school at Cooma.
She had slept with one of the 16 year old students in her class, which she
said with a smile was wonderful, but as a result she had lost her job. I
suppose these days she would be accused of rape and thrown into jail.
The book is concerned with a Catholic monastery somewhere
out on the Monaro plains. I can hardly imagine such a thing. A woman,
perhaps in her 50s or 60s, comes to visit and stay in a guest house on the
property of the monastery. She stays for a week. She does this often, and
then one time she decides not to return to the real world. The narration
follows the quiet happenings in the monastery while the horrible "COVID"
nonsense passes through the world. Policemen, particularly in Victoria, go
berserk, beating up innocent people. In the north of the country a
concentration camp is constructed for imprisoning people who do not toe the
line. But serenity reigns in the confines of this little world. Nobody is
hiding behind masks. Eventually the outside world seems to return to normal.
One nun and another dies. And the story is particularly concerned with a nun
who had in former times rejected the order and traveled to the slums of
Manila (was it?), serving the poor there, where she was murdered by a
Catholic priest. Her bones have been discovered and they are to be returned
to the monastery through all of the hysteria of COVID.
How times have changed since the idyllic 1960s and 70s,
at least as Australia then was.
This book is concerned with the murder of Mary
Pinchot Meyer in October 1964. Of all the countless sexual partners of
President Kennedy, including the wife Jackie, Mary Meyer is perhaps the only
one he may have loved, if indeed that was an emotion which was possible for
such a man. Mary's murder has been the subject of countless "conspiracy
theory" books and internet sites, yet this one especially deserves our
attention since the
author was intimately connected with the Meyer family and with many of
the suspects in the whole affair.
The book begins with a very detailed account of the
circumstances of the murder on a tow path along a canal in Washington DC,
and how the "patsy", a small, sensitive African-American, Ray Crump, was set
up to be blamed. He was freed from this miscarriage of justice by the one
real hero of the book, Dovey Roundtree, the African-American woman who
defended him in court.
The book then goes on to describe the Kennedy family, the
Pinchot family and also the Meyer family, back in the 1939s, living in their
mansions and mock castles. The exclusive private schools where they mix
together, the young Jack Kennedy already having a reputation for his
unbridled sexual adventures. We are told that the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy,
instructed his sons that "a day without laying a woman is a day lost". But
during these high school days, the formal dances and fancy costumes,
preparing the way for a later life of luxury in the upper classes of
American life, Mary rejected Jack and preferred the young Cord Meyer. We are
told that he was a sensitive character. During the Second World War he was
sent to the Pacific, and after landing on Iwo Jima a grenade exploded next
to him, blinding one eye. After the war he became a pacifist. He
participated in the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco,
accompanied by Mary who was then his wife. They both dreamed that the United
Nations would form a One World Government which would ensure that such wars
would never again take place. It was a beautiful, utopian dream. But utopian
dreams are often dangerous. Cord Meyer, with all his connections, expected
to become a professor in an Ivy League college: Yale or Harvard or
something. It was not to be. Instead Allen Dulles convinced him to join the
newly-founded CIA. He joined such people as James Jesus Angleton and Wistar Janney, the father of the author, in this
founding generation of the CIA.
These days we associate the CIA with torture,
assassination, regime change, and all sorts of other horrible things. So why
did the sensitive, pacifist Cord Meyer join such an organization? Surely the
answer is obvious. He, as well as Dulles, Angleton and all the rest saw that
the only practical path to a One World Government, a force which would
control the world and prevent another world war, would be the United States.
The United States, as world hegemon would be the true United Nations; in all
its benevolence it should control the world. Only by understanding this do
we understand the crisis which the United States and the rest of the world
is now experiencing. The United States is losing its control. China has
become the center of world commerce, Russia has successfully resisted the
efforts of the Hegemon to destroy it both militarily and economically. This
is an existential crisis for the CIA and the United States, and it has led
to those strange, seemingly absurd characters who have recently become
Presidents: Biden and Trump. But the book is dealing with an earlier era, at
the beginning of the 1960s when the dream was closer to reality.
Cord Meyer withdrew into himself as the reality of his
actions distorted his character, and he separated from his wife Mary. She
delved in art, painting, but also she had many friends in this circle of CIA
people and their wives. She got to know Timothy Leary, who was then a professor at Harvard,
experimenting with the mind-opening properties of LSD. Little did she know
that the CIA had long been using LSD in its MKUltra program under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, carrying on the mind control and
torture experiments begun in the NAZI death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.
Timothy Leary and the beginning Hippy generation of the 1960s had a
different idea. By opening people's minds with LSD trips, the world would
gradually embrace love, and not war. Mary accepted the advances of Jack
Kennedy who had now become President, and she introduced him to LSD. It
seems to have worked. He suddenly began issuing real peace initiatives,
ordering the complete withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam, negotiating
seriously with the Soviet Union. Mary also motivated other CIA wives to open
the minds of their husbands through LSD. Well, we can all see what happened
to Kennedy. Mary was not someone to keep her mouth shut, and she found out
much from all of her friends in high places, so she also had to be gotten
rid of.
The author has been on a quest for over 30 years to
discover everything about the murder of Mary Meyer. As a small child in the
1950s his best friend was one of Mary's sons, and so he spent much time with
their family. He admired Mary. He went on outings together with his father
and James Jesus Angleton, for example telling us how he and his best friend
were fishing while the father and Angleton looked on, reclining on the river
bank, laughing together. Mary, Mrs. Angleton and his mother, Mrs. Janney,
were very close friends.
In the end he discovers that not only Angleton, but also
his father, was very directly concerned with Mary's murder, its planing and
its execution. And finally, over 50 years after the deed, he is able to
discover the man who, if not the actual murderer, was at least the person at
the scene who directed the narrative and who was the prime false witness at
the trial of Ray Crump. He confronts him, is threatened, legal processes
take place, but of course this confrontation of two old men after all these
years leads nowhere.
A ghost story. We have a young woman from the slums
of Philadelphia, a recovering drug addict, being offered the job of live-in
babysitting, or to use a more old fashioned expression, to be the nanny for
a small boy of exceptional intelligence whose picture-book parents live in a
wonderful house in a beautiful suburb in southern New Jersey. But then we
learn that all of this is not what it seems. The young woman was an athlete
who was injured and was given too many drugs by those evil medical doctors.
The small boy is maybe not a boy; or is it a girl? or something else? Are
the parents really the parents? Are they really living in the house? Are
they horrible criminals?
All of these elements are sufficient to create a
complicated story, lurching from one idea to the next. As if that was not
enough, the author has found it necessary to have the little boy/girl, or
something, occasionally entering a trance and being possessed by the spirit,
or ghost, of someone who has died. While thus possessed he/it draws
elaborate pictures, seemingly narrating some sort of crime. Despite all of
this nonsense I did read on to the end, even enjoying the story. A welcome
change from more depressing "serious" books I've been reading lately.
I'm not really a fan of ghost stories, and I can hardly
remember reading any. There was one by Henry James which was equally
absurd. The best was a movie a few years ago: The Sixth Sense.
A good ghost story should be based in a very normal situation where,
inexplicably, things seem to go wrong in strange ways, not confusing the
mystery with irrelevant nonsense.
In contrast to the previous book, this one
maintains the pretense of being serious. It is concerned with lots of
different things, sadness accumulating from one theme to the next: ancient
Mesopotamia; Gilgamesh,
the oldest recorded story in the world; a distorted fictional account of George
Smith, the person who discovered the Flood tablet; the Yazidis; the building of dams, flooding river basins;
hidden rivers flowing beneath the streets of big cities; a bit of climate
change; the harvesting of human organs from helpless people in order to
insert them into the bodies of rich people, and so on and so forth.
Where to begin? Years ago when we were still receiving
the local newspaper, before all that COVID and Ukraine business, when at
least the reporting of local happenings in the town here seemed to be
factual and not particularly intended to distort things to support one or
another given agenda, there appeared a tragic story. As I remember it, a
family consisting of four children, the youngest a girl still at school,
together with the parents, murdered the schoolgirl. Of the three older
children, the oldest was a woman in her late 20s. She was a respected civil
servant in the town administration. Along with her two younger brothers she
took part in the murder. The father, who was said to have ordered the
killing, could not be brought to justice since he was being protected by the
surviving children. The family belonged to the Yazidi religion, or people.
This was the first time I had heard of it. It was said that the Yazidis are
forbidden to marry or to have close relations outside of their group. The
crime of the younger sister was that she had a boyfriend who was not a
Yazidi. We learned that there is a Yazidi community here, people who are
refugees. Then a few years later we read in the paper that hoards of young
Muslim hooligans were traveling to Syria, cutting people's throats,
destroying ancient monuments, and in particular overrunning the Yazidi
people, murdering all the men and taking the women and children to satisfy
their depraved sexual desires. At least this was the narration in the
newspaper, and it seemed to me to be believable, if unimaginably horrible.
It is a basic and unfortunate property of life - call it
the selfish gene - that it is an advantage for closed groups to form
within a larger population of organisms, interbreeding within themselves and
working for their advantage over the rest of the population as a whole. And
so within human society we have these groups becoming the eternal victims,
filling the pages of novels with their sufferings. I sympathize with them
and I wish that biology - game theory- would be different from this. Perhaps
the young woman murderer and her two brothers are still in prison, or
perhaps they have already been released on the basis of good behavior. After
all they were model citizens in this New Germany. If so then I wonder if
they have returned to the principles of Yazidiism.
According to the book, the Yazidis are the true
descendants and preservers of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations and the
Zoroastrian religion. According to the Wikipedia, this is questionable, and
anyway, I thought it was the Parsees in India, and of Freddie Mercury fame,
although of course that was Persia.
There is a lot in the book about the cuneiform system of
writing on clay tablets, and we are motivated to look up what we can find
about such things. It is amazing that people were able to understand this
complicated system of writing and to reconstruct those lost languages. The
Victorian character named Arthur Smyth in the book bears only a superficial
resemblance to the real George Smith, who was a much more admirable person.
The book dwells on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and this led me to download a pdf
version which you can find here. It is only 51 pages long. You can skip over lots
of passages which are repetitive, and anyway, many lines are missing,
breaking up the story to become often hardly comprehensible. This is
understandable when we look at pictures of the broken fragments of the
tablets.
It is said that Rilke was quite carried away with the
whole thing. I find that hard to understand. It is also said that he might
have just been posturing. Perhaps it will be possible to reconstruct more by
using computers and some sort of machine-learning algorithms to fit together
lots of obscure fragments in various museums.
At least the first tablet seems to be relatively
complete. To begin with we are told how wonderful, strong and cruel
Gilgamesh is. Then we have Enkidu, a gigantic wild man coming down from a
mountain. This is a bit like the beginning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. But
unlike him, Enkidu is tamed by the harlot Shamhat with whom he has wild,
continuous sex for a week or more, after which he is drained and civilized.
He then sets off to do battle with Gilgamesh. Unfortunately many lines are
missing here, but they emerge as friends, and even brothers. Then the
fragmentary parts in the middle describe various battles with different
monsters. Finally the eleventh tablet gives a kind of flood story. I found
it to be confusing. It was more a matter of Gilgamesh traveling by raft,
poling himself along, somewhere to the land of death or something. This
caused much controversy in the 19th century since it predates, yet has many
parallels with the equivalent biblical story. The Wikipedia mentions a
twelfth tablet. That is not included in the pdf version which I read, and
anyway it is said to contradict much of the rest. For example Enkidu dies in
tablet seven, yet he is suddenly alive in tablet twelve. But what do I know
about such things? They can be left to the countless Ph.D. students, writing
their theses on the role of Gilgamesh in relation to one thing or another.
Interestingly, it is said that Saddam Hussein was also fascinated with
Gilgamesh, and in his novel, Zabibah and the King, which I, of course, have not
read, he apparently portrays himself as a kind of Gilgamesh in the First
Gulf War.
Anyway, to summarize the present book, it has many
episodes, all of which are sad, and many of which are tragic.
Headshot,
by Rita Bullwinkel
Women's youth boxing. Girls under 18. This story is
concerned with an imaginary tournament which is the endpoint, the end round
to see who is the best fighter of all the girls in the US. It is in a dusty
gym in Reno, Nevada. There are eight girls, and therefore this is the
quarter-finals, to be followed next day by the semi-finals, and then later
in the day the final fight. We are not told which weight class this is, or
if women's youth boxing just throws them all together regardless of weight.
An unusual idea for a book. Something amusing, and so now I have read it.
Is there really such a thing as competitive boxing for
young girls? I can imagine frustrated housewives, or harried business women,
joining some sort of boutique fitness studio, putting on boxing attire and
tapping each other carefully under the supervision of a handsome young,
athletic trainer. But girls really trying to slug each other senseless? In
fact a quick internet search finds lots of contributions to this genera.
There are a few angelic faces with tiny raised fists, but most look much
more serious. Many Youtube videos. They really are hitting each other as
hard as they can. There is nothing attractive in the spectacle. Are they
hitting so hard as to induce gradual, permanent brain injury as is the case
with men's boxing?
In the book each of the matches is described not as a
round by round commentary, but rather the author imagines that the
individual girls are dreaming about their lives. And so the narration
describes these dreams, what each of these girls are like. All of them have
the killer instinct. They want to win at all costs. Their dreams are often
angry dreams. But realistically, would a person in the middle of a violent
fight be thinking like this? Surely it's just mindlessly punching away,
fighting exhaustion.
Each of the girls is portrayed as being totally dedicated
to winning. I sometimes wonder if most people are like this. Is winning
really so important? For example as a student I occasionally played tennis,
but I just liked hitting the ball back and forth across the net, enjoying
the feeling of the movement. How unpleasant it was when the other person
insisted on keeping score. In fact I hate competitive games. On the other
hand the beauty of music is that people get together to try and create
something; something which would be spoiled if the musicians began overtly
competing with one another.
In the book, some of the girls reflect on the
meaninglessness of the whole business. One of them thinks about her trophy
cabinet, filled with all her trophies, her wins. And yet the trophies are
plastic figures, cups, or whatever, painted with gold paint. Even in her
young life she has accumulated many trophies for many victories. But the
gold paint is flaking off the trophies, covering the bottom of the cabinet.
And even this trophy for the best girl boxer in America has already
developed a crack in the plastic of its little head in the heat of the
desert of Nevada.
When people die, leaving houses filled with old
things, the people who are left to clear things up put them in boxes to be
disposed of. Some of the boxes might be filled with old books, and those,
especially the ones containing books which are properly bound, might end up
in an antiquarian book shop to be sold on to new customers. In this
book, Ashlyn is a young woman who has taken over an antiquarian book shop
from her grandfather, or uncle, or something. She is blessed with the
esoteric ability to feel the emotions of books as she handles them. And so
she is struck with the emotions of a particular book in such a box.
Examining it more closely she finds that no author is mentioned, no
publisher, there are no attributions at all despite the fact that the book
is not at all new. It must have been privately published at great expense.
(These days you can just send a pdf off to some place in the internet, and a
few days later you receive one copy, or a thousand copies or more of your
text, bound, even with sewn bindings and hard covers if you want, costing
scarcely more than the cost of the paper which has been used.) But in those
days such a manuscript would have to be set, letter for letter by hand, then
printed page for page on some sort of printing press, and bound, all by hand
by somebody working away for a month or more. An indulgence which only
wealthy people could afford.
Ashlyn begins reading the book. It is a description by a
man of how he falls in love with a woman in the year 1941. On the front page
is a handwritten note, written in 1953 by the author, accusing the woman in
the story of violating his love. The woman is referred to as "Belle". In
fact the title of the book is "Regretting Belle". Her family apparently
swims in money. We are reminded of Mary Pinchot, the young randy Kennedys,
and all the rest of the children of the American rich living it up in the
1930s. The author of this book is not rich. He is a journalist, an
Englishman who has come over to America in this beginning war year,
apparently to report on the scandals of the rich for some sort of newspaper
which specializes in such things. But Ashlyn is fascinated with the love
story.
She gets in touch with Ethan, the person who had
delivered the box of books, and soon finds that there is another such
expensively, privately produced old book, this time with the title "Forever,
and Other Lies". It was written by the Belle of the other book and is
addressed to Hemi, the author of that book. It describes the love story from
her perspective and the fact that she feels that Hemi is the guilty party.
Ashlyn and Ethan gradually read through both books. They
read a chapter or so, and then days or weeks go by before they read the next
chapter. During this intervening time they try to find out who Belle and
Hemi really were, together with the various other characters mentioned in
the chapter they have just read. This device of gradually reading the two
books of the developing love, chapter for chapter, inter-spaced with the
developing love of Ashlyn and Ethan, makes a nice novel, but since both of
the books are only 50 or 100 pages long, and since particularly Ashlyn is so
excited about it, then, realistically, she would have simply read through
them in an hour or two, all the way to the end, right at the beginning.
The real story is about discovering the identities of
Belle and Hemi, their relation to Ethan and his inherited wealth, and
bringing everything to a happy end. It is a sentimental love story; in fact
two sentimental love stories. I found it difficult to put the book down. A
wonderfully emotional story.
I've been reading so many stories written by women
that this time I thought I would try something written by a man. It was
highly rated on Amazon. Things start off (again!) with a young woman working
in a bookshop. She is friendly with an old man who spends much time sitting
in an easy chair in the shop reading the books. Once again I wonder how this
is supposed to work. Do bookshops really tolerate people sitting day after
day in the chairs they provide, reading the books on offer and I then
returning them to the shelves, thus transforming them from being expensive
and new to being cheap and used? Libraries work this way, but do bookshops?
Continuing with the story, it is getting towards evening
and the shop is gradually closing. When she returns to the old man in the
chair the young woman finds that he has quietly died. On the table beside
him is the book he had been reading, together with a mysterious book called
the "Book of Doors", The man had written on the first page that it is a gift
for the young woman. It turns out that it is a magic book. When she, or
whoever it is who owns it, opens a door while imagining some other door,
then magically she steps through this other imagined door into the world
behind that door. For her first such adventure that evening she is in her
cold, unpleasant apartment in New York, and she imagines how it was when she
was traveling in Europe some years ago. She had been staying in a pension in
Venice, and it was wonderful to open the door in the morning and go out and
smell the freshly baked bread in the bakery across the narrow street. And
so, holding the Book of Doors, she opens her dull New York door and is
suddenly in sunny Venice. She experiments with interesting jumps through
space and even time as well. Imagining a door she has seen in the past
transfers her to that time and place in the past. We are in a time and space
travel adventure.
The idea seems popular these days, even among
professional theoretical physicists. If the world consists of a differential
manifold of some possible indeterminately high dimension and various complex
topological properties then all this business of "jumping through wormholes"
- or as in the present case, jumping through doors - becomes reality,
justified with reams of incomprehensible mathematical formulae. Of course it
is nonsense, but part of the enjoyment of reading is a certain suspension of
reality, allowing us to float into a world of fantasy and dreams.
As the story develops we learn that there are lots of
other magic books. For example there are the books of memory, of material,
of pain, of safety, and so on. There are hundreds of these books, all of
them having different properties. They are ancient. Maybe they were created
by a magician in those days of lore. A Merlin, traveling backwards in time
to Camelot. But then in this unpleasant world of today there are people who
will do anything to own such books. We learn that the Book of Doors is the
most prized book of all. Thus this present book by the male author, Gareth
Brown, degenerates into a kind of computer game with the various characters
having their particular fighting attributes, given by the various magic
books they hold. They kill, maim, torture one another in an orgy of
senseless nonsense. Is this a typical male fantasy? Is it why boys and men
become addicted to these computer games? I wasted too much time on this book
despite giving up well before the end.
The author is a Libyan who lives in England and who
also has English citizenship. After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 he traveled to Libya to search
for his father who had been kidnapped in 1990 while living in exile in
Cairo, and who was then thrown into a prison in Libya. The family had at
first received smuggled letters, but for ten years or more they had heard
nothing. Could it be that the father was still surviving, or was he killed
in the terrible Abu Salim Prison Massacre of 1996? The author tells us
about the long-lost relatives he meets who survived the dictatorship. It is
a travelog, but also a recording of the abuses of the Gaddafi regime and of
the personal stories of his cousins and uncles, those who had been
imprisoned and also those who had been fighting for a free Libya. How
dreadful it is to read of the endless suffering in those prisons which
resembled concentration camps.
In the ancient world as described by Herodotus, the name Libya simply refers
to all of Africa. Two hundred years ago, the North African coast was full of
pirates. The Barbary
Coast. They were barbarians. Skipping over lots of history, we arrive
at the year 1911 when Italy decided to capture that middle bit from the
Turks. The eastern part around Benghazi was the colony of Cyrenacia. The
Italians massacred about a quarter of the total population of Cyrenacia. The
western part containing Tripoli was the colony of Tripolitania. The Italians
also went berserk in Ethiopia, killing lots of people there as well, but
that's another story. In 1934 the Italian fascists decided to resurrect the
ancient name "Libya" from the mists of time, perhaps imagining that they
were emulating the ancient Romans, when they combined the two north African
colonies into one entity. They were defeated by 1943 and Libya became a
monarchy under King Idris. He was overthrown in a military coup by Gaddafi
in 1969 and he was in turn overthrown by the "Arab Spring" in 2011. Since
then the place has descended into a lawless chaos reminiscent of past times.
All of this can be read about in the Wikipedia entry for Libya.
Given this short sketch of history, we contemplate the
overwhelming sense of patriotism and love of country which runs through the
present book. Hisham Matar tells us again and again of the history of his
family, fighting the Italians and then later, Gaddafi. He tells us of the
beauty of the country around Banghazi, the sea, the air, the desert sands.
His grandfather was a famous warrior in the fight against Italy. It was a
wealthy, established family. His father at first was a high official in the
Gaddafi government. In fact the author was born in New York when his father
was a part of the delegation to the United Nations. The author was sent to
exclusive schools and universities in England. Other brothers were in
Switzerland, the US, if I remember all of this correctly. But the father
turned against the dictator, encouraging and financing groups to rise up
against the Libyan government. The obvious consequence was that he was
hunted down and imprisoned. What else could he expect?
We are constantly told that we are everywhere supposed to
be fighting for "Democracy". A recent example of this is the country of
Romania where one candidate for the presidency had overwhelming popular
support and was about to be elected in a landslide. In order to prevent this
and preserve "Democracy", the European Union canceled the election at the
last minute and it has subsequently forbidden the people from voting for
that candidate in future "elections". The leaders of the EU are also not
elected. They are appointed in secret back-room deals and rubber-stamped by
a European parliament with few powers and which is legitimized in a
meaningless election in which hardly anybody bothers to go to the trouble of
voting. This is only natural. After all, how could a true democracy work in
a region consisting of a multitude of incompatible countries, speaking
incompatible languages with different traditions and histories? In a direct
vote, the French would vote for a French person, the Spaniards would vote
for a Spaniard, the Germans for a German, and so forth. The winner would
simply be somebody from the country and language group which had the
greatest population. All the losers in the smaller countries and languages
would rebel. Perhaps the only example of a real democracy in a diverse
country is Switzerland, a place which is small enough, and beautiful enough,
to remain civilized, despite democracy.
Libya has different tribes, ethnic groups, but at least
(as far as I understand it) it does have the common language of Arabic.
Given its history, perhaps the monarchy was the best solution. But that
didn't have a chance to succeed. Was Gaddafi a monster, as described in this
book? He did much to improve the lives of the ordinary people, carrying out
many popular reforms. In 1975 he purged the army and the government of
people who he perceived must be gotten rid of. And if we read Machiavelli,
we realize that it is vitally important for The Prince to maintain order in
this way. This must have been the reason for the rebellion of Hisham Matar's
father, and his fate. The fate of Gaddafi was sealed by his resistance to
many of the policies of "The West" under the hegemony of the United States.
In particular it is said that the final straw was his ambition to establish
a gold-backed currency to be used in the oil trade, thus undermining the
ability of the hegemon to live high by importing things and in return simply
exporting pieces of paper - US dollars. The Obama administration saw to it
that he was truly eliminated.
Maurice and Maralyn were an English married couple
who set off in the year 1972 in their 31 foot sailboat to sail to New
Zealand. Again this is a true story, not a novel. They got through the
Panama Canal and were on the way to the Galapagos Islands when suddenly, in
the middle of a calm, empty sea, a sperm whale rammed the boat from beneath,
breaking it apart and then thrashing about, filling the sea with its blood.
They remembered some time before seeing a whaling boat which they suspected
had harpooned the whale, and maybe the whale was taking its revenge on their
boat. It gradually disappeared into the depths. And within a half hour their
sailboat sank as well.
They had two tiny inflatable life rafts and they tried to
fill them with whatever they might need as quickly as possible. And then
they were left floating alone under the hot sun of the tropical Pacific
Ocean. The moral of the story is that if you intend to sail across oceans in
a small sailboat then, first of all you should have a good stock of fresh
and well-functioning flare rockets, and second a satellite telephone to call
for help. Perhaps satellite telephones were not available in 1972, but they
certainly are these days.
Over the weeks and months ahead, Maurice and Maralyn
encountered numbers of ships. Some of them even passed within just a few
hundred meters. Yet these ships ignored all efforts to grab their attention.
They had a few hand-held flares, but all of them but one turned out to be
duds. And before setting out, Maurice in particular had said that they would
have no radio or any other of those newfangled things. After all, the great
sailors of the past were able to navigate the globe with just a chronometer
and a sextant. He was able to save these from the sinking boat, but they
were of little use on the life rafts, apart from determining the course of
their helpless drifting. At the end of 117 days they were spotted by a South
Korean fishing boat and were saved.
We learn about the endless difficulties they faced.
Eating raw the turtles and the fish they caught. The gradually increasing
hissing leaks of the inflatable rubber rafts. Sitting constantly in puddles
of seawater. Afterwards they were strict vegetarians. They later wrote a
book: 117 Days Adrift, describing everything. It
really was an ordeal. At the end Maurice was drifting in and out of
consciousness, halfway into death. He was only kept alive by the strength of
Maralyn. If the Koreans had not by chance found them at this point of most
extreme endurance, they would have simply disappeared. Their story would
have died with them to join the countless stories of all the unknown people
who have vanished into the ocean through the ages, never to be seen again.
Who wants to think about the endless suffering, the disappointed hopes all
those people had before finally dying? But Maurice and Maralyn did live to
tell us about it. This is not the longest anyone has survived like this at
sea. José
Salvador Alvarenga survived for 14 months, drifting half way
across the Pacific. But he was on a boat, not a tiny inflatable raft.
We are told what Maurice and Maralyn were like. How they
met each other and fell in love. And we are told that after their ordeal
they decided to get a new, somewhat bigger boat in which they set sail for
Patagonia in 1975. They survived that voyage and indeed continued sailing
around the Mediterranean in later years. But it seems that the Patagonian
cruise was an unfortunate experience. They invited another married couple to
accompany them, together with another friend. Maurice declared himself to be
the captain of the boat, and he ordered the others about, often bringing
them to tears. The tyranny of a weak willed, insecure person.
Pineapple Street is in Brooklyn Heights, just
across the East River from Manhattan. Traveling along Pineapple Street via
Google SteetView from one end to the other it seems to be lined with rather
crowded, mostly anonymous apartment blocks, some towering 10 or 15 stories
into the sky, but there are a couple of semi-detached, or even detached
buildings which might be the residences of single families. This is the
story of one such family. They are rich. Real-estate speculators going back
three generations. There are two daughters and a son, whose name is Cord,
reminding us of Mary Meyer's husband Cord of a few books back. We are told
that only very rich people name their sons Cord. He has married Sasha, a
"normal" wife from a non-rich family, and the book is concerned with the
little dramas which arise from this situation. I enjoyed the story. It
reminded me of some of Trollop's stories about the trials and tribulations
of the rich in Victorian England. An amusing other world.
The younger sister has an emotional crisis leading her to
declare that she will give away all of the money in her trust fund to
charity. We thus learn that her trust fund contains 37 million dollars.
Extrapolating this to the rest of the family and imagining that its entire
wealth is not just wrapped up in trust funds, we arrive at the idea that the
family must possess a few hundred million dollars. This seems a lot,
certainly much more than Trollop's characters had, even accounting for
inflation, but such is the degenerate state of today's corrupt society of
"The West" which seems, thankfully, to be nearing a state of collapse.
The internet tells us that there are 735 billionaires in
the United States. A substantial number of those, including the top of the
heap - Musk - are now in the inner circles, directly controlling the
government of the country. It has become a plutocracy. Thinking about the
particular example of real estate speculation, the vast amounts of money to
be gained are extracted from normal people in the form of ever increasing
rents or mortgage payments relative to their incomes. How strange it is that
the losers in this system, the "MAGA" people, have chosen a flamboyant and
chaotic real estate mogul to be their leader.
The family of the story seems not to be in the
billionaire category, but at least the internet also tells us that 99.97%
have less than 200 million, which would roughly mean that 0.03% do; that is
to say that there are something on the order of 100,000 families with this
sort of net worth. They would fill the largest football stadiums in the
world to overflowing. Thus it is nothing special.
We "normal" people who do not belong in the rich category
imagine what life must be like for people with so much money. The book gives
us some insights. For example before Cord married Sasha she was suddenly
approached by a lawyer, claiming to be representing Cord's family. He gave
her a thick envelope containing the "prenup". That is to say a marriage
contract regulating the financial conditions of the marriage, and in
particular those involving the divorce. Sasha was at first shocked, but Cord
told her to just get over it and sign the thing; it was a normal part of the
contractual agreement represented by marriage. We learn also that the older
sister who was already married had, through a mistaken sense of pride,
refused to have her husband sign a prenup. One element of the drama of the
book was that her husband suddenly lost his highly paid job and so their
family was left with no income. It was said that if no prenup is signed then
the married couple is denied the trust fund; it passes to the children of
the next generation when they reach maturity. Such is the brutal reality of
the rich.
Somehow Trollop's characters, with their paltry incomes
of just £10,000 or so per year - or say a million a year of today's devalued
money - seemed to live in a world of very much greater wealth and luxury as
compared to these 100,000 people in the United States with their
$200,000,000 or more of net worth as described in the book.
Dream
Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What a pleasure it is to read Adichie's elegant and
stylish prose. There are four characters in the novel, all women, all from
Nigeria except one who is from Guinea. Chiamaka, or Chia for short, begins
by telling us that she is locked-down by COVID and to escape she will tell
us about the world of her dreams and memories. She is in her forties, has
never been married and is childless. She is a member of the Igbo people, as are the other two Nigerians and as is
indeed the author herself.
We are told that for the Igbo it is important to marry
someone who is also Igbo, in fact ideally someone in the extended family: a
more or less distant cousin. But Chia's family is rich and she has traveled
the world. One of the family houses is in a neighborhood of Washington D.C.,
and Chia is living there right now. She is an aspiring travel writer,
writing amusing stories of her travels, especially with the different
boyfriends she has had over the years. For example she was together with a
Dutchman, a white person, for a number of years, and she went with him to
visit his family in Holland. Afterwards they stayed briefly in the Black
Forest where the elderly German tourists stared at her, the only African,
and so she proposed to write a story about being "Black in the Black
Forest". Another boyfriend was an African-American professor of politics.
She tells us of his arrogance, his rudeness not only to her but to
everybody. He says that the riches of her family stem from their dealings in
the slave trade; did her Igbo ancestors capture his ancestors and sell them
on to eventually be bought by the cruel slave owners of the Deep South? But
Chia tells him that even if her ancestors were formerly rich, all of that
was lost in the Biafran War. She dislikes the United States. The food is
tasteless. The food in France is also tasteless. Kadiatou, the woman from
Guinea, cooks tasty African food for her as well as keeping the house clean.
We imagine that the author, Chimamanda, could easily be
called "Chia" by her friends. Is she loosely describing her own life? Chia
is often told by friends or even by perfect strangers that she is beautiful.
And photos of Chimamanda Adichie are still beautiful even now when she is in
her late 40s. The Dream Count is the number of inadequate men who have
passed through Chia's life.
Chia's best friend is Zikora, who is a wealthy lawyer.
She is in the same position as Chia, in her 40s with time running out for
having any children. Her family, relatives, are also trying to arrange
something. It has gotten to the stage that she is thinking about adopting a
child, or perhaps just having a baby without marrying the father, or even
having her remaining, rapidly aging eggs frozen. Both she and Chia have lots
of boyfriends and lots of sex, but apparently they continue to take their
birth control pills. Finally, with the last boyfriend, Zikora has decided to
marry him and she has stopped taking the pills. She becomes pregnant. When
she tells the boyfriend he immediately walks out, never to be heard of
again. And so Zikora's chapter of the book is concerned with all this:
Zikora's reconciliation with her mother who comes to look after the baby,
the advice of other relatives that the father, as a good Igbo man, will
eventually came back to her.
Then we have a chapter about Omelogor, a cousin of Chia,
also rich, single, childless, in her 40s. She is based in Nigeria and worked
in a local bank, but now she is an independent financial advisor. She has
observed how everybody steals a part of whatever passes through their hands,
and she has become a master of this art. Also, when still working at the
bank she overheard a conversation about some financial transaction and so
took all the money from all the accounts she had access to, put it into this
transaction - that is to say, insider trading - and made a huge fortune. Now
she lives in the luxury of a gated compound with many servants and guards.
Chia does not really approve of all this, but Omelogor is her cousin and she
comes and visits Chia in her house in Virginia.
The chapter about Kadiatou tells us about the poverty of
her childhood in Guinea and how she ends up in the United States as a single
mother with a daughter who is becoming a well-adjusted teenager in America.
Kadiatou has a job as a maid in a hotel in Washington, earning $25 an hour,
cleaning the rooms. Of course she also works for Chia, not only cleaning
things but also cooking good African food. It is her ambition to save enough
to not only put her daughter through college but also she would like to be
able to establish an African restaurant in Washington. One of the dangers of
being a maid in a luxury hotel is the possibility of being raped by some
rich, powerful guest. In
the novel, Kadiatou is told that a suite on the top floor of the hotel
is empty and she should go in and clean it. But when doing so, she is
suddenly attacked by a Frenchman who attempts to rape her, but who then
forces her to have oral sex with him. He then leaves, she spits out the
horrible stuff, wretches, and her supervisor comes to help. She wishes
the whole thing would just go away, but she is interviewed by the
police, gives statements, and the consequent legal mess disrupts her
life.
In an Afterword to the book, Chimamanda Adichie tells
us that she was motivated by the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who
allegedly raped Nafissatou Diallo in the Sofitel
New York Hotel. The news was full of this case back in 2011, and I also
found it to be shocking. A sex obsessed French politician, even worse than
Kennedy, since it was rape. But then, learning more about the case, we
wonder what the true story really was. Why didn't Strauss-Kahn simply hire a
prostitute, as he undoubtedly usually did? Why did it all take place at the
moment when he was leaving for France, the airplane being boarded by police
just before takeoff, taking Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs to be thrown into the
notorious Rikers Island Prison for a few days where he would experience the
worst degradations of prison life? He was the President of the International
Monetary Fund and was a favorite to become the next President of France. We
learn that he was proposing a new monetary system to replace the American
dollar as the world's reserve currency. As noted a few books ago, people
have been murdered for the crime of bringing this very essential element of
American hegemony into question. And it is said that Diallo was given
millions. So what are we to believe? It seems to me that Adichie would have
made a more powerful statement if she had not based things on this specific
Strauss-Kahn business but instead described the helplessness of hotel maids
in such a situation.
The author is again of the Igbo tribe of Nigeria
and her photos are beautiful, but her prose lacks the elegance of Chimamanda
Adichie. The book is concerned with the Nigerian scammers. Years ago I used to find amusing
emails in my account in the Faculty. A paragraph or so of text saying that
Chief Mumbo Jumbo had funds of 500 millions but he was being held in prison
and the writer of the letter, his nephew, was trying to find a way to save
the money from the corrupt Nigerian government. If I would agree to use my
bank account to receive the 500 million then, as a compensation for my
troubles, I will be given 50 millions. And so forth. For some reason I only
received such emails at the University, none in my two other, more private
accounts. Presumably the people writing such emails believed that university
people were more likely to fall for such scams than the average, more
practical people in the world.
We follow Kingston, a young man who has obtained a degree
in chemical engineering from a Nigerian university. He applies for jobs in
the oil industry of the country, but to no avail. His family is almost
destitute despite the fact that both his parents are highly educated. On the
other hand his uncle Boniface, the brother of his mother, known to all as
"Cash Daddy", is full of cash. Gated mansions, fleets of extravagant cars,
bodyguards and servants everywhere, women of all kinds. When Kingston's
father falls ill, he goes to Cash Daddy against the best advice of his
parents to beg for money. And eventually he joins the enterprise. With
all his education he is assigned to the "CIA", Cash Daddy's central
intelligence agency where the scam emails are composed and sent out into the
world. Maybe only one in ten thousand elicits a response. I remember reading
an article in the Guardian newspaper where a reporter answered such an
email, resulting in a long and amusing exchange. It seems that the real-life
Kingstons of Nigeria had infinite patience in this email writing business.
After all, they had nothing else to do. In the book the scams extend well
beyond this Mumbo Jumbo email business. Contracts for major, but imaginary
projects are awarded to naive individuals or companies. For example a
project to build an international airport somewhere in Nigeria. Kingston,
together with a delegation of Cash Daddy's people, actually travels to
Amsterdam to meet with the sponsor of the project, with Cash Daddy making an
appearance, pretending to be the finance minister of Nigeria.
All of this has an element of slapstick humor. Yet it is
unrelenting. Towards the end, one of the colleagues of Kingston in the CIA
is stringing along a scam with some people in Iran. He travels there to
speak with the people personally and is never heard of again. We are told
that those Iranians, being intelligent Muslims, are not to be fooled around
with as is the case with all the stupid people with too much money in the
US, France, England, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and a further long
list of countries inhabited by "white" people. Is this the statement
Nwaubani would like to make?
maids in such a situation.
Waltraud,
by Tammy Borden
The Waltraud of the title is the mother of the
author, and the book is about the experiences of her mother as a young
teenage girl in the Nazi Germany of World War II. It is called a novel
because it is related as a story with feelings and dialogue which the author
has made up, but the events, the towns, the people with their real names,
are true to life as described by her mother. It is written in the simple
style of a children's story.
Unusually, it is not a holocaust story. Waltraud
did have some unpleasant experiences; the great tragedy for her was that her
father was drafted into the Wehrmacht, certainly against his will, and died
in Russia. When she turned 14 it was compulsory to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel where she was required to spend a
year serving on a farm under a family who were strict Nazis. Any slackness
or lack of discipline was punished with a stick and she was required to
address the family with "Heil Hitler" and the Nazi raised arm salute.
Thankfully she became sick, dangerously so, and was returned to her family.
The other unpleasantness was when her BDM troop was ordered to help clean up
the mess after a devastating bombing of the nearby town of Braunschweig
where they were required to shovel dirt over a ditch filled with hundreds of
stinking, decomposing corpses.
We are told that she secretly hated Hitler and the Nazis.
It would certainly have been fatal to have said that openly while the Nazis
were in power. And today it is beyond the realms of normal behavior to say
anything different. But it is interesting to contemplate what a book of the
memoirs of that Nazi family would have been. Obviously it would never be
published, certainly not in Germany where such a thing would be very
strictly illegal. In fact displaying, even owning any Nazi symbols or other
paraphernalia is strictly illegal in Germany. This is not the case in the
Ukraine where, for example, the Azov Brigade openly displays the Nazi symbols of World
War II and espouses its ideology. This is relevant to the story of the book
owing to the fact that towards the end of the war, Waltraut became good
friends with a family which had fled what was then the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The name of the family is
different from the Ukrainian names we are familiar with in the news these
days so perhaps they were ethnic Germans. In any case, Waltraud's mother,
the grandmother of the author, was - for some reason not explained in the
book - dead against the family. Waltraud married the son of the family. Her
mother refused to go to the wedding despite the fact that it was held in the
small village where they lived, and despite the fact that the newly wedded
couple lived just a few houses away from the grandmother, they refused to
speak with one another for years. What secrets are we missing? Were they
Jewish? That hardly seems likely since it would have been fatal to flee into
Nazi Germany. Were they Banderites,
fleeing the vengeance of the advancing Soviet army? If they were simply
ethnic Germans then why the hatred of the grandmother? Or were they ethnic
Poles fleeing the Banderites, despite Hitler's hatred of Slavs? Who knows?
Eventually the family found refuge in the US where the author grew up as an
American.
The father of the author, the young Ukrainian man
Waltraud married, spoke numbers of different languages and acted as an
interpreter for the occupying powers. It seems to me that the book would
have been much more interesting if Tammy Borden had written about the life
of her father rather than that of her mother. But I suppose these days, in
the "western world", men's lives are considered to be inferior to those of
women.
It is 1960. Gabriel is a travel writer, traveling
about the world, writing books describing his experiences. He is in
Léopoldville in the Congo when he receives an invitation to interview Patrice Lumumba. He is asked to bring a tape recorder so
that the report he will send to a newspaper will be accurate. During the
interview, Lumumba mentions the names of three people who he believes are
plotting to kill him. Later, back in London, writing up the story, he learns
of Lumumba's assassination. The assassination had been personally authorized
by President Eisenhower in the dying days of his presidency. All of this
leads us into a complicated spy story.
I couldn't put the book down. We are drawn on from one
episode to the next, revealing unexpected things. These spy stories are
William Boyd's forte. On the cover of the book it says that it is, "From the
acclaimed author of Restless and Any Human Heart". This one
was almost as good as Restless, but much better than Any Human
Heart.
Towards the end things seemed to me to become just a bit
too complicated. We have the idea of a spy, and then that of a double agent.
That is a person who appears to be spying on country B for country A while
actually being a spy for country B. This is a concept I can easily
understand and it seems to be a standard practice in the world of spies. But
then the story of this book involves a triple agent. The Wikipedia has no
explanation of the concept, just an article about some obscure movie which
was made some time ago. A triple agent must be someone who appears to be
spying for country B, but then appears to be really spying for country A,
while really being a spy for country B. All of this is getting beyond me. I
began to ask myself, what is a quadruple agent? Or a quintuple agent?
Eventually, when all of this is taken to the n-th degree of complexity then
surely both country A as well as country B will simply decide to have
nothing more to do with this nonsense and either arrest the person or have
him eliminated in some more permanent way.
