Paging All Bookworms! discussion

Thanks to having retired on May 1, I went over all my goals for last year (2021): 155 books (goal was 132); 37 not in English (goal was 24), and 37,309 pages (goal was 35,000). For 2022, I will increase my goals to 150 books, 48 not in English, and 38,000 pages.

Jan. 15

1. Celia Correas Zapata, Isabel Allende: Vida y espíritus [1998] 255 pages [in Spanish]

Called a "literary biography" of the author Isabel Allende, this is not in any way a critical work, but a series of interviews with the author by a close personal friend, with some linking text. It is very disorganized, and much is repeated in the two autobiographical works I have read, but there are some interesting insights into her early novels.

Jan. 16

2. Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts [2002] 406 pages [YA, Eng. tr.]

I am currently reading a number of Allende's novels; I hadn't intended to read any of the Young Adult books, but the description of them in her autobiography La suma de las dias seemed interesting so when I found this translation for ten cents at a used book store I decided to pick it up. Despite the length it only took a few hours to read. According to her autobiography it was written in collaboration with her three grandchildren, Alejandro, Andrea and Nicole; the hero is named Alexander and there are references to the other two. There are two sequels, I'm not sure if they all feature Alexander or if there is one for each grandchild.

The blurb calls it "magical realism" but it struck me more as an actual fantasy novel, though with some realistic description. It is set in the Upper Orinoco-Amazon region on the border of Venezuela and Brazil. The plot concerns an attempt by a millionaire with the support of corrupt military officials to exterminate a native population to exploit the resources of their land -- not unfortunately an unrealistic premise. There is much spiritualism as one would expect from Allende. Fifteen-year-old Alexander and his thirteen-year-old friend Nadia, together with a supporting cast of an eccentric grandmother, a guide (Nadia's father), a shaman, an Indian tribe and an anthropologist for comic relief, save the native population, as well as a population of yeti-like creatures. Not great literature, but an entertaining read for younger readers -- I might consider it more for middle-grades than Young Adult; there is no real romance between the two main characters.

Jan. 21

3. Isabel Allende, La isla bajo el mar [2009] 511 pages [in Spanish]

A historical novel set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this book tells the story of a slave named Zarité from childhood up until she is forty. The first half of the novel is set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, against the background of the slave revolts which led to the founding of the Republic of Haiti; the second half moves to Louisiana and is less interesting and less believable. Zarité is a domestic slave and concubine of the master -- like most slave novels, the field slaves are never in the foreground. There are some other clichés of slave novels, like the weak but well-intentioned master and the cruel overseer. Not the best novel I have read on the subject, but it isn't the worst either and the history of Haiti was worth the read.

Jan. 24

4. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art [rev. ed., 1999] 325 pages

A guide to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, which goes through them book by book and story by story, explaining the references and putting the stories in the context of his life and events. It gave me a better appreciation of some of the stories I hadn't enjoyed so much, particularly all the gaucho stories. Although the revised edition was written after Borges' death and claims to be based on all his works, there is no mention of his last collection, La memoria de Shakespeare.

Jan. 31

5. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion [2005] 262 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

The first book I have read by this year's Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar but moved to England at age 18. All his fiction is set in East Africa and he is described as a Tanzanian author. Although his first language is Swahili, he writes in English. Desertion is a study of the personal relationships between the British and the African population, as exemplified in three interconnected stories of "desertion", set against the history of colonialism, independence and revolution. (The title could also refer to the British abandonment of the colony, or to a few other things as well.) I would recommend this book and I am looking forward to reading some of his other books as they come in on hold (I was between twenty and thirty in the queue for most of them.) Note: it is impossible to summarize this book without SPOILERS.
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The first part of the novel begins in a small Moslem village south of Mombasa in what would later become Kenya, in 1899 when it was still a British colony. A British "orientalist", Martin Pearce, abandoned and robbed by his guides, has managed to reach the village and is rescued by Hasanili, a shopkeeper. Pearce falls in love with Hasanili's sister, Rehana, and they live together for a while in Mombasa, and have a daughter named Asmah. Pearce then deserts her and returns to England.

In the second part of the novel, we are in an island off the African coast, presumably Zanzibar, in the mid-1950's, just before independence. We are introduced to a family of five, the parents who are both teachers, a daughter Farida, and two sons, Amin and Rahid. The main story here turns on the relationship between Amin and a woman named Jamila, who turns out to be Asmah's daughter. Amin in obedience to his parents breaks off his relationship, the second "desertion" of the novel.

The third part takes place in England, where Rahid (like Gurnah) has gone to study and remains as a professor. He marries an English woman named Grace, who later leaves him. In the final pages, he meets a granddaughter of Martin Pearce by his English wife and we learn more of the details of the first part.

Feb. 1

6. Isabel Allende, El Cuaderno de Maya [2011] 442 pages [in Spanish]

This first-person novel begins with a nineteen-year-old American girl, Maya Vidal, on her way to Chile with a backpack and a blank notebook, which becomes this book. She tells us that she is hiding from unspecified but powerful "enemies". This is the major mystery of the novel, and we do not find out who the enemies are or why they are persuing her until near the end of the book. The notebook entries alternate between her current experiences on an island in Chilote at the "end of the world" and her memories of her life up to the beginning of the book. At the beginning, both are somewhat normal, although not boring, but as time goes on they both become more complicated and intense. While this is at the simplest level a "crime thriller", not a genre I usually read, the descriptions of drug addiction and the criminal underworld in Las Vegas, and a mystery centered in the history of Chile, give it a more serious literary feel. Despite the intensity of some of the descriptions in Las Vegas -- it would be hard to read if we didn't know that she survives her experiences, since she is writing the story in Chilote -- and of the experiences of the Chilean characters during the Pinochet years, there is also much humor (an eccentric abuela who resembles Isabel Allende) and hope. Definitely a good read.

Feb. 3

7. Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Last Gift [2014] 279 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]

Only the second novel I've read by Gurnah, but this is one of his most recent. It opens with the illness of Abbas, an immigrant in Exeter, England, a former sailor who now works as an electrical engineer in a factory. We then meet his wife, Maryam, a foundling who lived with various foster families before running away with Abbas and works as custodial staff in a hospital. They are an older couple who have been married for decades and have two adult children, Hanna (also called Anna) and Jamal. We find out at the beginning that Abbas has "secrets", that he has never told Maryam or the children where exactly he came from (other than a vague "East Africa") or anything about his life before they met.

The novel is in the third person, but from the internal perspectives of the characters; the psychology is described very well and we see how all the characters interpret their lives very differently and misunderstand each other. In the course of the novel we meet other characters who exemplify nearly every imaginable situation of immigration, but it is all done very naturally and never has the feel of a contrived or didactic book like some others I have read about immigrants.

At the end, the dying Abbas reveals the secrets of his life in Africa and as a sailor and many of the "loose ends" are cleared up. There is no question that Gurnah, unlike some other recent choices, deserved the Nobel Prize.

Feb. 7

8. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo [1949] 121 pages [in Spanish]

Carpentier's second novel (I had originally said his first, but there was an earlier one from 1933 which he essentially rejected later as a "failure"; in any case, this began his serious "canon"), El reino de este mundo was the origin of the style he described as "real-maravilloso", the real marvelous, which was the precursor of the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and much of later Latin American and other literature. It is also (not by design) the second novel I have read this year about the revolution which created the nation of Haiti.

The protagonist is a slave named Ti Noel, who at the beginning of the novel is accompanying his master on a trip to buy horses. He becomes friends with another slave, Makandal -- a historic figure who is described at second hand in the other novel I mentioned, Isabel Allende's La isla baja el mar. (Allende's novel is probably influenced by Carpentier's; both are set in the country around Ciudad del Cabo and have the same structure of a slave who is taken to Santiago de Cuba at the beginning of the Revolution, although they differ entirely in the later parts, where Carpentier's protagonist returns to Haiti and Allende's goes on to Louisiana. Carpentier's novel is much more serious as literature, and is both more magical and more realistic, while Allende is probably the more entertaining storyteller.) Makandal, with his supernatural powers derived from African religion, is the center of the marvelous in the novel and occupies several chapters. His (literal) flight at the time of his execution became the basis of legend in Haiti.

The novel then skips ahead to the insurrection lead by Boukman. Carpentier, while obviously sympathetic to the rebellion, does not idealize it in the way Allende does; he also breaks off the description before the rise of Toussaint. Ti Noel is taken to Cuba. After a considerable time, he manages to return to Haiti under the reign of King Henri Christophe.

The novel also contains episodes concerning Pauline Bonaparte and the family of Henri Christophe. The book is very concentrated and has an elliptical style. This is one of the most important works for an understanding of contemporary Latin American literature.

Feb 16

9. Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos [1953] 148 pages

This is Carpentier's second or third novel, depending on whether one counts the early novel from 1933 which he essentially rejected as a "failure". This is a very symbolic book; the "marvelous" here is in the entire feeling of strangeness, rather than in any particular instances of unreal events. The book is in the first person; the narrator-protagonist, never named, originally from Latin America, is a musician, and music plays a large role in the symbolism. (Carpentier, in addition to being a novelist and journalist, and after 1959 occupying many cultural and diplomatic posts for the revolutionary Cuban government, was also a prominent musicologist; his best-known nonfiction book was Music in Cuba.) As the book opens, in New York City (although that isn't actually obvious until near the end of the novel, and all we are explicitly told is that it is a modern city whose language is not Spanish) we learn that his wife, Ruth, has been trapped for more than four years in a too-successful play which somewhat resembles Gone With the Wind, and that the protagonist himself is in a dead-end job misusing his musical talents on advertising-film music, the first two examples of "pasos perdidos" or "lost steps". We learn also that the couple are essentially separated although living in the same apartment because they have opposite schedules (time maladjustments will be one of the themes of the novel), and there is a passing mention of another woman he is seeing. Having just finished a film project, the protagonist now has three or four weeks of vacation, but finds that Ruth is unexpectedly leaving for a tour with the play.

He wanders around the city, undecided about how to spend his vacation. There are various memory-flashbacks, some giving us background about his life, and the longest of which, a visit to a museum in which he travels back in time from modern art through nineteenth-century, Renaissance, mediaeval and classical art and ultimately to the Stone Age, foreshadows the trajectory of the novel as a whole. He goes into a concert hall where an orchestra is preparing to play, but leaves as soon as he realizes that they are performing the Ninth Symphony, a work he particularly detests. (We find out why later.) On coming out of the concert hall, he meets someone he has not seen for many years, the curator of a museum of musical instruments, who has been looking for him to give him something. The curator questions him about his research on the origins of music; at first he lies, but then confesses that he has abandoned research and wasted his life. The curator then asks him to take a trip, at the expense of the University which owns the museum, to South America to look for certain primitive musical instruments. Uninterested, he slips out. We next find him at the apartment of his girlfriend, Mouche, who is apparently an intellectual, very influenced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century French avant-garde writers, but who earns her living from astrology. When he tells her about the offer, she becomes excited and begins packing, suggesting that he can fake the instruments or pretend he couldn't find them and they can have a free vacation at the beaches in Venezuela. Somewhat reluctantly, he returns to the curator and accepts the assignment, and the next chapter finds them on the airplane on their way. The remainder of the book is about his travels in South America. I'm not sure that in a novel this symbolic there is a problem with SPOILERS but if there is a concern you should stop reading here; in any case I won't give away the ending.

On arriving in "the city", presumably Caracas (where Carpentier was living when he wrote the book) though this is not named, they attend a nineteenth-century opera which in its staging and the whole feel of the theater seems to him as if he has returned to the nineteenth century. Mouche, on the other hand, dislikes it because it is the sort of thing criticized by her avant-garde writers, and insists on leaving. He becomes increasingly annoyed with her and realizes (although he had already suspected) that her intellectual pose is only superficial. They become caught up in an insurrection which is of unclear meaning and he is nearly killed. Eventually, they begin travelling toward the jungle; in a reversal of their original roles, he becomes progressively more enthusiastic about the journey while she complains and wants to return to the city. With every new place they arrive, the technology and society seems to retrogress, in stages he refers to as the Land of the Horse, the Land of the Dog, and eventually the Land of the Bird. At some point Mouche becomes ill with malaria and returns without him, and he takes up with Rosario, a part Indian woman who seems to him to be more authentic. At this point, I began to be very ambivalent about the book, because it seemed to be an example of the fifties literary cliché that the uneducated and primitive are more "authentic" than the more educated, which I have always disliked; in fact at the end, however, he takes a different turn. What Carpentier is really saying is that these communities are not "primitive" but very sophisticated adaptations to the environments in which they live, and I would agree with that; and the truth is that, between Stalinism and the "witch-hunts" in the West, the academic and "intellectual" currents in the fifties were often (and to some extent still are) rather superficial and trivialized, disconnected from the lives and concerns of the majority of the population. He is essentially criticizing the bourgeois way of life and its alienation, the lack of real freedom for most people to "choose their own steps."

I won't reveal how the book ends, but it certainly provides food for thought and is another book which makes clear the influence Carpentier had on later Latin American literature.

Feb. 19

10. Alejo Carpentier, El acoso [1956] 119 pages [in Spanish]

One of Carpentier's less well-known novels, and I can understand why: in addition to being (according to the Prologue of this edition) his only book not to have any "marvelous" aspect, it is simply very difficult to understand; what follows is my best guess as to what is happening. The novel is in stream-of-consciousness and is structured like a sonata. The setting is Havana in the late forties. It begins with the consciousness of a poor music student who is working as the cashier in a concert hall, and reading a biography of Beethoven which is quoted from time to time as he reads it, and we see from the outside the person who will be essentially the main character, a former architecture student and political activist, who is the one being "pursued" (the title is Spanish for "chase" or "pursuit"). These are the theme and countertheme. The action of this chapter takes place in the concert hall, during intermission, where a performance is about to be given of the Eroica as the second half of the program. The "pursued" rushes in and throws a large bill on the counter, grabs a ticket and hurries in without waiting for change, followed by two other men who run in without paying. The cashier cashes out, keeping the large bill -- the Eroica is the end of the night -- and rushes off to a local prostitute, Estrella, who refuses the bill as probably counterfeit and throws him out. He returns to the hall and offers to close up. We then without any notice get stream-of-consciousness of the main character -- it takes a while to realize that the person has changed, and we assume incorrectly that it follows the first section in time -- who is hiding in the tower of a house next door to the music student, from which he can hear the music student practicing and playing the Eroica on a cheap gramophone.

The second chapter, which takes up most of the book, is the "development" section, almost entirely in the consciousness of the main character, and goes back to the previous one or two days, although it takes a while to realize this, with flashbacks to the past several months, explaining in bits and pieces out of order how he got to the point at which he enters the concert hall. The chronology is so confused that at the beginning I had no idea what was going on, but by the end of the chapter I had it largely figured out, having had to occasionally go back and re-read former parts in the light of the later events, which were in some cases prior in time. We find out that the main character had been a member of an ultrleft terrorist group which degenerated into a criminal band. He is now on the run from both the police and his former comrades. He has also gotten religion very heavily, although largely expressed in formula prayers and quotations from the Mass.

A short third chapter is the "recapitulation" which repeats the events of the first chapter now largely through the consciousness of the major character. He rushes into the theater to hide. We then get the final event.

In addition to the difficulty of the structure, the language is also difficult: because of the main character's architecture background, he describes everything around him constantly in technical architectural terms which I didn't know even after looking up the English equivalents, and in other respects the vocabulary is very lush and "baroque" and the syntax is very complex (which was true of the two previous novels as well).

Despite being disguised as an adventure novel, the book deals with some very serious questions, as always with Carpentier: questions of guilt and repentance, as well as politics and music. I usually like books with a challenging style but in this case, while others may find that the theme resonates with them, for me it was not really worth the effort of decipherment.

Feb. 26

11. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography [1929, tr. 1930] 602 pages

I may have read this some fifty years ago, when I was studying politics and the Russian Revolution and before I began keeping track accurately of my reading, but if so I didn't remember much of what I would have expected to have remembered. Of course, the earlier chapters about his childhood and pre-revolutionary adolescence are only of biographical interest, but from then on there is much of political and historical importance. The chapters on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions are naturally less clear than his books on those subjects, and there are occasional differences of detail, given that this book was written largely from memory under less than ideal research conditions during his exile in Turkey. Given the time and place it was written, there is a feeling throughout the book of its being essentially a defense against the charges of the Stalinists.

The most interesting chapters are on the disputes within the Social-Democratic parties between the two revolutions and the attitudes towards the First World War; the period of the Civil War (I hadn't fully realized how close the revolution came to being defeated on several occasions); and the period of Lenin's last illness and death, when the Stalinist conspiracy took power in the party and the state. While there is much that is inspiring in the book, at the end it was definitely depressing, despite Trotsky's attempt to remain optimistic about the temporary nature of the setback. Reading it in hindsight, after all of Stalin's betrayals, Trotsky's assassination, the Second World War, the failure of the parties of the Fourth International to ever gain major influence, let alone accomplish a revolution either in Russia or the West, and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism, it is obvious that the Stalinist Thermidor has been a long-lived catastrophe for the entire world. I finished this as the tanks of Putin's capitalist Russia were entering Kyiv (Kiev), to the hypocritical and basically empty condemnation of the Western imperialists.

This was the Pathfinder Press edition with an introduction by Joseph Hansen about the exile in Mexico and Trotsky's assassination, and a brief chronology of Trotsky's life after 1929.

Feb. 28

12. Isabel Allende, El amante japonés [2015] 347 pages [in Spanish]

A combination of a romance and a historical novel, the book opens in the present day with Irina Bazili, a young immigrant from Moldavia, getting a job at Lark House, a home for older people in the San Francisco area. After a couple chapters on Irina and her work with the inhabitants of Lark House, she meets one of the more independent residents, Alma Belasco, in her eighties, from a locally prominent (i.e. rich) family of successful lawyers, and her grandson Seth. Alma hires Irina as a part-time personal assistant to help sort out her papers and photographs, for a book Seth intends to write on the history of the Belasco family. (Irina continues to work at Lark House, but gives up one of her other part-time jobs.) Seth soon becomes romantically interested in Irina, who is more equivocal about the relationship. It gradually becomes obvious, however, that the novel is not about Irina and Seth but about Alma, and the relationship they suspect she is having with a Japanese man, Ichimei Fukuda. We expect that the book will become a kind of detective novel with the relationship of Alma and Ichimei gradually discovered by Seth and Irina, but in fact we are plunged into a series of flashbacks to Alma's past, while Seth and Irina, and the frame story, make infrequent appearances, and their discoveries usually come after we have already learned the truth from the chapters set in the past.

In the first flashback chapter, we learn that the seven-year-old Polish-Jewish girl Alma Mendel has been sent to San Francisco to live with her aunt, Lillian Belasco, and her husband Isaac, the head of the Belasco family, to escape the growing threat of invasion from the Nazis (it is mentioned in passing later that her parents have died in the Treblinka death camp). At first Alma is naturally very upset and homesick, until she meets Ichimei, a boy her own age whose father Takao is the Belasco's gardener, and they become best friends. A few months later, however, Ichimei and his family are also sent to a concentration camp, Topaz, near Delta, Utah. The chapters set in Topaz and the Fukuda family's life in the aftermath of the concentration camp are the most interesting part of the novel. There follow a few chapters about Alma, who has lost contact with Ichimei, as she grows up and goes to college in Boston. On her return to San Francisco, she unexpectedly meets Ichimei again and they begin a secret love affair, which they know would be unacceptable to both their families. There is also another forbidden love between Ichimei's sister Megudi and an American who met her while a guard at Topaz.

So far the book is a very good historical novel with much information about the racism against Japanese Americans, with antisemitism as an occasional comparison point. However, about three-fifths of the way through it completely changes. In place of the theme of racism, we get a potpourri of other social issues, from third-world sex-trafficking and internet pornography to illegal abortions, euthanasia and AIDS. If this had been a novel about a political activist and had demonstrated how these issues are connected and stem from the same roots, I would have been fine with it, but it isn't; the various issues are inserted into the romance story in liberal fashion as completely separate questions. At the same time, the writing style degenerates; we get a long didactic passage of pop psychology which reads as if Allende has taken a chapter from a self-help book by someone like Brené Brown and pasted it in as a monologue by a minor character, a long, repetitive and boring description of Alma's character which should have been shown in action earlier, not narrated near the end, and much sentimentalism.

I won't reveal the endings of the various threads, but suffice it to say that what began as a four-star historical novel about Japanese Americans becomes a barely three-star romance novel; not a completely bad novel, actually, but not one that I would be likely to recommend.

Mar. 1

13. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights [1977, tr. 1984] 121 pages

I thought I was done with Borges for the time being but then I found this in my garage while looking for something else.

This short book is a translation of seven lectures given by Borges in the summer of 1977; they were printed as a book in Spanish in 1980 and in translation in 1984. The seven lectures are on Dante's Divine Comedy, Nightmares, The Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, Poetry, the Kabbalah, and Blindness. All are interesting, although perhaps more for what they tell as about Borges than for the subject matter.

Mar. 6

14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [1955, tr. 1973] 425 pages

Tristes Tropiques is the second book I have read by Lévi-Strauss, after his earlier Les structures élémentaires de la parenté; if that book established his reputation among academics, this popular book established it among the general public. I really don't understand why, because I was totally unimpressed by it. The first book was somewhat poorly organized, but it is a model of organization compared to this one. Essentially, this book is an account of his travels, as a framework for random "profound" observations on history and anthropology, confirming my general prejudice that the more profound the writing, the less meaning it has. It reminded me of another book I read recently, Wade Davis' Magdalena, and I suspect it was an influence on Davis' style, which I also disliked.

Lévi-Strauss begins with a first chapter, "Setting Out", basically saying that travel books about adventures in exotic places are trivial, deceitful and worthless; a great introduction to a travel book about adventures in exotic places. The chapter ends with a banquet in 1934 where he is about to "set out" for Brazil and his anthropological work. The second chapter, "On Board", finds him on a ship to the New World. The trip to Brazil? No, this is a 1941 trip to escape Vichy France and take a job at the New School in New York, via the French colony of Martinique. The third chapter is a description of his experiences in Martinique. The fourth chapter apparently begins in Brazil, but is largely composed of generalities, again discussing travel books, and ends with a short description of Lahore, in northern India (now Pakistan). This is Part One.

Part Two begins with a short chapter which is mostly a biography of the minor French intellectual Victor Margueritte. The next chapter, "The Making of an Anthropologist", is about his college days. Then we get a chapter called "Sunset", which is a lengthy description of a sunset seen from a ship. Part Three has three chapters about his shipboard adventures (now the trip to Brazil) and a long chapter describing the city of São Paulo as it was in 1934. Part Four is ostensibly a description of the cities and countryside of Brazil, but has long digressions to India-Pakistan.

Finally, well over a third of the way through the book, we get to his anthropological work, although still largely organized around his travels. Part Five is on the Caduveo, a tribe which has been largely influenced by the colonial or as he terms it "neo-Brazilian" culture; Part Six is on the Bororo; Part Seven on the Nambikwara, which is the most interesting section of the book; and Part Eight on the Tupi-Kawahib.

Part Nine, "The Return", consists of a chapter describing a play about Roman history which he began but never finished, and expressing his doubts about the nature and worth of anthropology, followed by a chapter which shifts without warning back to India-Pakistan, and ends with a final chapter outlining a superficial and entirely wrong theory about the relations between religions, in which he claims that the rise of "reactionary" Islam deprived the Christian West of the opportunity to merge with Buddhist India. (Of course in reality, early Mediaeval Christendom was reactionary and backward, India, despite Asoka, was Hindu and not Buddhist, and the advanced Islamic world, far from being a barrier, was a transmission belt for Indian science to the West.)

This was a very gloomy book, as one could guess from the title, meaning approximately "tropical sorrows"; partly of course because the cultures he describes were in the process of becoming extinct, but also because it was written in the mid-fifties when most thinking people in Europe and the US were gloomy, as opposed to the unthinking majority who were euphoric about post-war economic prosperity. The edition I read was the 1973 complete translation; there is apparently an older abridged translation which eliminates most of the digressions about India-Pakistan. I hope that his more academic books about anthropology are better, or I will abandon the project of reading him.

Mar. 10

15. Alejo Carpentier, Guerra del tiempo y otros relatos [2001] 214 pages [in Spanish]

This collection of stories, apart from the Prologue and Epilogue by Gonzalo Celerio, is divided into three parts. The first part consists of three early stories, of which the first two were published for the first time in this collection; they were written in France under the influence of André Breton and the surrealist movement. "El estudiante" (1927) is an unfinished fragment, which is the most surrealistic of the three, and is impossible to describe except as a nightmare. "El milagro del ascensor" (1929) is about a monk who works as an elevator boy in a skyscraper, and also resembles a dream or nightmare. The third story, "Historia de lunas", is transitional between surrealism and his later style; it is a fantasy about a paranormal creature called "el escurradizo" -- literally the slippery or elusive one, according to the dictionary -- which is a sort of were-satyr.

The second part consists of the three stories which were originally published as Guerra del tiempo in 1958. All three are concerned with different distortions of normal time. "Viaje a la semilla" is about a life lived backwards in time; "El camino de Santiago" has a time which circles back and meets itself at the same point; "Semejante a la noche" has similar events repeating themselves, and is a reflection on the romantic view of war. All three are excellent stories.

The third part is the "otros relatos", four later stories. "Oficio de Tinieblas" is about a city where suddenly for no apparent reason people become gloomy, and there follow various natural calamities, then again for no reason they suddenly become happy and prosperous again. This was probably my least favorite of the stories. "Los fugitivos" is about a fugitive slave and a runaway dog who become companions; it is told from the consciousness of the dog. "Los advertidos" is a fresh take on the legend of the deluge. "El derecho de asilo" is a story about a politician who finds political asylum in a foreign embassy following a military coup, and is told with much humor.

All these stories are told in Carpentier's usual style, with complex sentences and unusual vocabulary. I was beginning to get paranoid about my ability to read Spanish, because I have to look up so many words and so many of them aren't even in my dictionary, but according to Celerio's Epilogue Carpentier's use of rare and obsolete words make his writing difficult even for Latin American readers. He is worth the effort.

Mar. 11

16. Alejo Carpentier, Concierto Barroco [1974] 130 pages [in Spanish]

In this 1974 novella, Carpentier combines his two roles of author and musicologist. The book begins with a description of the mansion of a wealthy Mexican of Indian descent, called el Amo (the Master), in Veracruz, and his preparations for a voyage. In the next chapter he is in Cuba and acquires a Black servant, Felipe, whose ironic comments provide much of the comedy in the book. The two then voyage to Europe, and ultimately end up in Venice, where the Indian inadvertantly gives Antonio Vivaldi the idea for his opera Moctezuma, a description of which is the central part of the book. A quarter of this 130 page book is taken up with the Prologue by Gonzalo Celorio, and there is an appendix with a facsimile of the first pages of the opera; the book is also printed in large print, so it is really quite short, but there is a lot going on in it -- reflections on the nature of fantasy and its relation to history and so forth. It also has many comic anachronisms; my favorite scene was when Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti and Handel are having a picnic in a cemetery and begin a discussion of the works of Igor Stravinsky. Vivaldi says Stravinsky was "a good musician but rather old-fashioned." The writing style is also deliberately baroque; Carpentier was part of a group of Cuban writers who are described as "neo-baroque".

Mar. 13

17. The Chautauquan: The Magazine of Systematic Reading (Sept. 1909) 162 pages
18. The Chautauquan: The Magazine of Systematic Reading (Oct. 1909) 142 pages
19. The Chautauquan: The Magazine of Systematic Reading (Dec. 1909) 162 pages

My sister-in-law and my niece run an antique shop, Suzanna's Antiques, in Rolesville, NC. This past January I went out to visit my brother and found these three issues of The Chautauquan at their shop. I hadn't known anything about Chautauqua except vaguely that it was (and still is) a school in western New York State, but looking it up on Wikipedia and on its own website, I found that it began in 1874 as a summer camp for training Sunday School teachers, and became a movement for promoting adult education from a non-denominational Christian perspective, particularly among rural housewives. The magazine, published between 1880 and 1914, was actually the organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, which was part of the overall Chautauqua movement and functioned as a kind of free correspondence school. September began a new "school year", and in 1909-1910 the focus was on antiquity, which was what drew my attention (together with the subtitle; I'm a real fan of systematic reading, as anyone who reads my reviews will realize) when I saw these in the shop.

Each issue begins with a selection of article/editorials on domestic and world politics, which in retrospect are so wrong in their predictions they are rather funny. They seem to be from the perspective of the "Progressive" Republicans -- for those who are not from the U.S. or are too young to recall, the Republicans from the Civil War and Reconstruction to about the 1912 election represented themselves as the "liberal" party, and the Democrats were the "conservatives"; this changed about this time, except with regards to white supremacy where the Democrats were the racist party down to about 1960 (and the Dixiecrats like Joe Biden -- does that name ring any bells? -- were the leaders of the anti-desegregation forces until well into the 1970's.)

There are three books which are serialized (since I am lacking November, I read chapters 1, 2, and 4.) These are the "required reading" for the course. The first book was George Willis Cooke, Woman in the Progress of Civilization; chapter one was on the matrilineal/matrilocal "totemist" societies (somewhat obsolete anthropology and very oversimplified even for the time), the second on the rise of patriarchy, particularly among the Greeks, the missing 3rd was on Rome, and the fourth was on (rich) women in the Middle Ages (a very contradictory account, which ignored the majority of the population). The second book was James Henry Breasted, A Reading Journey Through Egypt; having read his important and scholarly History of Egypt, also published in 1909, I was disappointed that this was just a superficial travelogue which referred to the ancient monuments geographically rather than chronologically. The third was Lewis Frederick Pilcher, Historic Types of Architecture; chapters 1 and 2 were on Egypt, the missing chapter 3 was on Mesopotamia, and chapter 4 was on Persia. I actually learned a bit from this one.

There are also miscellaneous articles and selections from ancient works, which gave the magazine a sort of Readers' Digest feeling, and at the end there were study questions and exam questions on all the books. Also, as in any magazine this old, the ads were a real "hoot".

Mar. 15

20. Kevin Jackson and Jonathan Stamp, Building the Great Pyramid [2003] 191 pages

This is a popular book about the pyramid of Khufu, its construction and subsequent history, with a sketch of the development of Egyptology and a bit too much about the crank theories. It is very highly illustrated with simple text; it was designed to accompany a BBC television program on pyramids. The authors are a freelance writer and the producer of the show, neither of whom are professional Egyptologists. It lists a handful of books for further reading, but has no real bibliography or footnotes; as Wikipedia would say, Needs sources.

Mar. 19

21. Alejo Carpentier, El recurso del método [1974] 289 pages [in Spanish] [1974]

A satirical novel about an unnamed dictator of a fictional Latin American country, with traits taken from Porfirio Diaz, Gerardo Machado, Anastasio Somoza, Rafael Trujillo, and various others of their ilk. The book is written from the consciousness of the dictator, referred to as "El Primer Magistrado", "El Presidente" or "El Mandatorio", mostly in "free indirect discourse" although it occasionally drops into first person or even stream-of consciousness, and occasionally it seems that someone else takes up the narration in the first person for a paragraph or two, signaled only by the fact that the dictator is referred to as another person, e.g. "he said to me". Despite this, it is actually the simplest book by Carpentier I have read in terms of style.

The novel begins with the dictator on a prolonged visit to Paris, in about 1909, where he prefers living to his palace in "Nueva Córdoba", the capital of his own country. He is recalled home by the uprising of a general, which he suppresses with the aid of a loyal colonel whom he promotes to general. At the same time, he represses the more democratic opposition in the capital, especially the university students, in a massacre which is photographed and publicized throughout the world. Somewhat later on, he again visits Paris and the previously loyal general from the previous war in turn begins an uprising which he also suppresses. The story outlines the history of his country, which is typical of all the countries of Latin America, through World War I and the prosperity that results during the war, the recession and virtual bankruptcy of the country after the Peace, the revolutionary movements of the 1920's, another massacre in the capital, his abandonment by his gringo masters and overthrow, and his final exile back in Paris sometime in the 1920's.

Apart from the dictator, the main characters are his "zamba" servant and sometime mistress La Mayorala Elmira; his daughter Ofelia, a self-centered "princess" who is superficially enthusiastic for everything "modern" and avant-garde, and who reminded me of Mouche from Los pasos perdidos; his personal secretary Doctor Peralta; his ambassador to France, Chulo Mendoza; and his main opponent, the revolutionary known only as "El Estudiante", the Student. His sons are mentioned but play no essential role in the novel.

The satire is very subtle; most of the time, the novel just seems like a more-or-less realistic description of how a dictator of that time and place would actually think and behave, but from time to time things are exaggerated to make symbolic points, as in the finding of the mummies in the cave or the building of the new Capitol. The protagonist thinks of himself as a very cultured person, and throughout the book there are literary and cultural allusions -- many of them incorrect, which was rather disconcerting until I realized it was deliberate on the part of Carpentier. There is no "maravillosa".

The prologue by Ambrosio Fornet points out that there were three major novels published in 1974-1975 on the same theme, this book, Roa Bastos' Yo el Supremo, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' El otoño del patriarca (the next book on my reading list), which caused critics to make a distinction between "novels about dictators" like these three and "novels about dictatorships" such as El Señor Presidente (on my list for late April or May) by Miguel de Asturias -- incidentally one of Carpentier's best friends in their student days in Paris.

Mar. 24

22. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, El otoño del patriarca [1975] 301 pages [in Spanish, Kindle, Open Library]

Like the last book I read, Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del método, published the previous year, El otoño del patriarca is a satirical novel about an unnamed dictator of a fictional Latin American country. Also like that book, but even more so, it is written in a difficult experimental style; if Carpentier's narrative has no divisions into paragraphs, this book isn't even divided into real sentences, but continuous prose held together with commas goes on for pages before ending with an arbitrary period and beginning again. The novel opens with the presidential palace being broken into by carrion-eating birds and the finding of the corpse of "the general", who has apparently ruled the country for over a hundred years, covered with parasites "from the depths of the sea", amid a deserted and ruined mansion full of wandering cows and domestic fowl (there is an element of "magical realism" similar to his previous novel Cien años de soledad). The stream-of-consciousness of one of the discovers of the corpse merges into an impersonal narrative in the same style (can you have stream-of-consciousness of an impersonal narrator?) which merges into the stream-of-consciousness of the general (and later other characters) in a series of flashbacks in no apparent chronological order (although ultimately the narrative moves forward to the present in a back-and-forth way.) Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a kind of free association. Each chapter begins with the finding of the corpse and moves back along a different path.

Leaving aside the style, the content is also similar in its more objective side: revolts of generals, massacres, growing debts, control by the European powers and ultimately the United States. There is more exaggeration, and the examples of his policies are unreal and "magical", as when he sells the sea to the yankees and they actually suck up all the water and leave a huge dry plain (obviously a reference to the actual sale of rights of exploitation of territorial waters, taken literally.) This novel, however, puts much more emphasis on the subjective side. As the title indicates, it is about the "autumn" of the dictator; his absolute power has become more symbolic than real, as his ministers increasingly deceive him about reality, and at the end he is deaf, visually impaired, and probably senile. We find out very early in the narration that he has already died once before; his body was found in the same position, clothed the same way, etc. This is explained as being the death of his "double", but perhaps it also indicates, together with the impossible length of his rule, that the dictator as such, if not the individual, is immortal; and throughout the novel, he is described as immortal, as having godlike powers over both the human and natural world, and so forth. (Possibly in addition to the political satire there is a metaphysical suggestion that he IS God, who is no longer able to rule the world.) Gradually, the question arises whether he has ever actually been the absolute ruler that he and everyone else considered him, whether the real power wasn't always somewhere hidden and beyond his control -- as of course it is.

Mar. 26

23. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada [betw. 1961-1972, bk. pub. 1972] 156 pages [in Spanish, Kindle, Open Library]

The book I am reviewing contained the title novella, La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972), about a teenage girl forced into prostitution by her grandmother, and six shorter stories, all but one written between Cien años de soledad (1967) and El otoño del patriarca (1975). In style, they resemble those novels, with improbable, magical realist plots and in one case the same lack of sentence division as the later novel. In content, however, they seem to have much less point, although probably with enough ingenuity one could find allegorical meanings.

The stories included were "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes" (1968), which is just what it says, a story about a very old man with enormous wings who is knocked down to Earth by a storm and found by a poor couple outside their hut; "El mar del tiempo perdido" (1961), about a village by the shore of a strange, malevolent sea, which has something surprising underneath; "El ahogado más hermoso del mundo" (1968), about a drowned man who is washed up on shore and all the women fall in love with him; "Muerte constante más allá del amor" (1970), a more realistic story about a dying senator who becomes infatuated with the daughter of a criminal; "El último viaje del buque fantasma" (1968) about a boy who sees a ghost ship; and "Blacamán el bueno, vendedor de milagros" (1968), about a pair of con artists -- or maybe not. I had already read four of the six stories in translation a decade ago.

To be honest, after reading the two novels mentioned above, I was rather disappointed in the shorter fiction here; probably not his best work, although granted that is a subjective opinion.

Mar. 28

24. Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada [1981] 141 pages [in Spanish, Kindle, Open Library]

The narrator, who is ostensibly the author himself, returns to his native town to try to make sense of his memories of an "honor" killing which occurred many years before. The novel was inspired by an actual murder and has the form of a mystery novel; although we know from the beginning who killed Santiago Naser, the question is rather how it happened when everyone in the town knew that the killers were waiting for him except him. The novel is told from the perspectives of many different people (including relatives of García Márquez) who all give differing versions of the events. Nearly everyone has an excuse why they didn't warn him. While the style is difficult and experimental, it seems almost traditional compared to his previous novels and stories; there is almost no magical realism, apart from the many strange coincidences which keep him from being saved. We never learn the most important fact. The novel is among other things an ironic critique of the traditional macho code of behavior.

Mar. 30

25. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memory of Departure [1987] 159 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

After reading two of Gurnah's most recent novels, I went back to what I believe is his first. Memory of Departure is set in Tanzania in the first years after Independence. The book opens on the eve of Independence, on the protagonist's fifteenth birthday, the age of majority in that culture. Nothing really happens in the first chapter but we get his memories of his childhood and learn about his family and the impoverished conditions they live in. The novel then moves forward three years, to his graduation from high school. He takes the final examination, but the government does not release the scores, fearing that those who have done well will leave the country and remain abroad. After much trouble, he manages to get a passport and travel to his rich uncle's home in Nairobi, hoping that his uncle will give him the inheritance he has withheld from his sister, the protagonist's mother. (We learn for the first time that the protagonist's name is Hasan Omar.) The remainder of the novel is about his vacation in Nairobi, his return to the coast, and his ultimate departure. While not as good as the two later books I read, Memory of Departure is very good for a first book.

Mar. 30

26. Naguib Mahfouz, The Final Hour [1982, tr. 2010] 169 pages

The Final Hour is a novel about three generations of a family in Helwan, near Cairo. The grandfather, Hamid Burhan, is the official head of the family until his death, but the real head is his wife, Saniya al-Mahdi. They have three children, Kawthar, Muhammad, and Muniya, and eventually five grandchildren, who become adults near the end of the book. The novel opens near the present time of the book, about the mid-1970s, with Saniya looking at a family portrait taken in 1934. We immediately learn about the house in which she is living with the older daughter, and which serves as a focus of the book and of Saniya's thoughts, as well as a flashback to her wedding and basic descriptions of the husband and three children. The novel then proceeds more or less chronologically, with various episodes and much dialogue, to the present.

The book is very historical and political, covering most of the major events in the country's life. Hamid, a lifelong supporter of the Wafd (the liberal pro-independence party), recalls the one political act of his life in the demonstrations against British colonialism. Saniya and Kawthar, and Muniya's son Ali, are relatively apolitical, or at least skeptical of all the tendencies; Kawthar's son Rashad could be called a moderate, probably not much different from his grandfather; Muhammad (and ultimately his son Shafiq) support the Muslim Brotherhood, Muniya and her son Amin support the Nasserite revolution, and Muhammad's daughter Siham becomes a communist. One can imagine the arguments which make up most of the text. This is not to say that we don't get personal events and conflicts as well, many of which illustrate the development of social mores, especially in the treatment of the women characters. The basic idea of the book, presenting all the tendencies of Egyptian politics through a family history, of course immediately suggests Mahfouz' great realist novel published in the 1950's as The Cairo Trilogy but set after the period of that novel. The style however is much different, less detailed and more schematic; if we divide the number of pages by the years covered, the trilogy comes to an average of sixty pages per year and this short book to about four pages per year. Perhaps a closer analogy is to Miramar but with younger characters.

As with all his writings, Mahfouz is a great writer and a perceptive critic of historical events, although it is not always obvious what his own opinions are.

Apr. 2

27. Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief [1973, tr. 2010] 177 pages

This book contains "Journal of an Ordinary Grief" and eight other "essays". I put "essays" in quotation marks because they are written in a poetic style, full of images and imaginary dialogues, similar to his poetry. Taken together, they cover the history of Palestine, and Darwish's own life, from the Nakba to the time the book was published. The book is a powerful description of the Palestinian reality within Israel after 1948, and would probably be a good introduction to his work, making clearer some of the allusions and images in his actual poetry.

Apr. 7

28. Boubacar Boris Diop, Kaveena [2006] 300 pages [in French, Kindle]

Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese author who won this year's Neustadt Prize. Kaveena is one of his most recent novels, and the first I have read by him; like all but one (or perhaps now two) it is written in French.

Like Carpentier's El recurso del método and Garcia Marquez's El otoño del patriarca, both of which I read last month, this is a novel about a dictator of a fictional (but typical) country, in this case in Africa rather than Latin America. Also like the latter novel it begins with the narrator finding a cadaver, which he soon reveals is that of N'Zo Nikiema, the recently deposed president, and the book is largely the history of the dictator's life; and just as in that book we ultimately learn that the dictator was never really in control of the country, so here we learn that Nikiema has never been the real power, but a puppet of the man who ultimately deposes him (for a new and even more docile puppet), the French capitalist Pierre Cardenas. The narrator is obviously from the first few pages an ex-policeman, and in fact he soon reveals that he is the former head of Nikiema's secret police, Colonel Asante Kroma. Himself fearing Cardenas, he decides to utilize Nikiema's hideout and spend his time in hiding studying the letters and documents of Nikiema to try to understand his former boss better. Excerpts from these letters and documents supplement the first person narrative by Kroma.

The main thread of the novel is the relationship between Nikiema and Cardenas, which goes back before Cardenas puts Nikiema in power at the time of independence from France. Throughout the book, however, there are references to a major scandal, the rape and ritual murder of a six-year-old girl named Kaveena. At first it seems the book may be a mystery novel about the case, but very early on we learn that Kroma knows who is responsible, and that in fact it was Pierre Cardenas himself. The case of Kaveena does influence the ending of the novel, which I won't reveal. The novel is an interesting psychological study of Nikiema, Cardenas, Kroma himself, and one or two other characters, but the real point is undoubtedly to illustrate the dynamics of Africa after independence and its continuing dependence on the former colonial powers.

Apr. 9

29. Jean Bottero, ed., Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia [1992, tr. 2001] 277 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

This is a collection of fifteen articles about ancient Mesopotamia which were originally published in the French popular history magazine L'Histoire, probably during the 1980's. Nine are written by Jean Bottero, who also edited the collection, three by George Roux, two by Bertrand Lafont and one by André Finet. The title is totally inaccurate, as only four or five articles could be considered as being about everyday life.

The first article by Roux deals with the theories about the origins of the Sumerians, whose language seems to be unrelated to any other known language living or extinct, whether they came from Anatolia or from Bahrain or elsewhere in the Gulf or from somewhere in Central Asia, whether by land or by sea, or even from somewhere now under the water of the Gulf (which was much lower at an earlier date, although perhaps too much earlier). His own opinion is that they arrived in the late Paleolithic or early Neolithic and the migrations of that early date are impossible to determine. The second article, also by Roux, deals with the enigma of the so-called "Royal Cemetery" at Ur, which has evidence of mass suicides to accompany the main burial; he explains there is actually no evidence that any kings were buried there, and the few graves which can be tenuously attributed to individuals (by the presence of cylinder seals, which may or may not belong to the main burial) are mostly to persons called nin, which can mean either "queen" or "priestess". He reviews all the theories and concludes that there is no real evidence for any of them.

Then there are the articles that could actually be considered as about daily life: one by Bottero on cuisine (although it is obviously about the cuisine of the ruling elite, not the everyday food of the majority of the population), one on banquets (ditto), one on wine by Finet, one on "Love and Sex" and one on the legal position of women in Mesopotamian society (probably better under the Sumerians than the later Semites, but not great in either case) both by Bottero.

There is then an article by Lafont on the Palace Women at Mari, one by Roux on the legend of Queen Semiramis (his opinion is that it originated in Persia and conflates the two historical queens Sammuramat and Naqia/Zakutu and the goddess Inanna), two more by Bottero on "Magic and Medicine" and "The Birth of Astrology", and one by Lafont on trials by ordeal.

The last three articles, all by Bottero, are on the myth of the Flood (the Book of Atrahasis), the Epic of Gilgamesh, and "How Sin was Born", the last a rather annoying article by Bottero which quickly moves from Mesopotamia to "Israel" and interprets Hebrew religion through the rise of modern Judaism on the basis of the Old Testament used totally uncritically (the religion was imposed as a whole entity by a historical individual named Moses, the Hebrew tribes were united from the beginning by the exclusive worship of Yahweh, there was a united monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon (all just taken for granted), and above all the Hebrew concept of "sin" was radically different from that of the other Semitic cultures, etc.) To be honest, all of Bottero's articles were somewhat annoying in their overgeneralizations and personal opinions presented as fact; the articles by the other contributors were better, especially those by George Roux.

Apr. 12

30. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way [1988] 495 pages

A popular history of astronomy, and particularly cosmology, with some physics and a little geology and biology, this is apparently considered a classic of popular science writing, although I'm not quite sure why. It's a low-level popularization (not intended as derogatory; I mean it's a simple account with no mathematics, intended for readers with no previous knowledge) and while there were as always a few anecdotes I didn't know, I'm now a bit beyond that level.

It wasn't a bad book by any means, but just not in the league of Weinberg's The First Three Minutes or the books by Marcia Bartusiak, Kip Thorne, Brian Greene, Lee Smolin and others I have read in the last three or four years on similar themes. It's also of course after 35 years a bit dated when it gets to the "present" (dark matter is barely mentioned, as it is still a new idea; dark energy and the accelerated expansion weren't known yet; string theory was just getting started, there were no exoplanets known, and so forth-- it's amazing how much more is known after three and half decades), although as history its fine, just not very detailed. There is a very long bibliography, which makes it disappointing that not much has made it into the text.

Apr. 20

31. Gabriel García Márquez, El amor en los tiempos del cólera [1985] 461 pages [in Spanish]

Although not really a mystery writer, Gabriel García Márquez tends to begin his novels and stories with the discovery of a corpse. This novel begins with Dr. Juvenal Urbino called to sign the death certificate of a photographer (and personal friend) Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who has just committed suicide. There is a little information about Jeremiah, and his origins are presented as something mysterious, which we expect may be the subject of the book. However, this is just one of García Márquez' frequent misdirections; Jeremiah completely drops out of the novel after a few pages. The remainder of the first chapter is about the life of Dr. Urbino, who dies accidentally that same afternoon, and his wife Fermina Daza. Again we think the novel may be about Dr. Urbino, and again this is largely another misdirection, though he does continue to play a secondary role. It is only in the last few pages of the chapter, 71 pages into the book, that we meet the real protagonist, Florentino Ariz, identified as the president of the Compañía Fluvial del Caribe, which controls most of the riverboats on the Rio Magdalena.

The next chapter goes back some fifty years--actually fifty years, nine months and four days, as we are told later. The novel is full of such seemingly precise indications of time durations, but there are no indications of absolute dates to anchor them. All we really know is that the events of the second chapter take place some few years before 1900, so the present of the novel would probably fall in the 1940s. There are no references to world events, although a Columbian reader might be able to date some of the local events, or perhaps the two cholera epidemics which are in the background but play no real role -- the title may be another misdirection. The whole of the novel, with the exception of a few voyages, takes place in the city of Barranquilla at the mouth of the Magdalena, although I don't recall that it is ever actually named. In this second chapter, Florentino, a young (twenty-two)and not especially wealthy assistant in the telegraph office, delivers a telegram to Lorenzo Daza and notices his beautiful daughter Fermina (eighteen). He immediately falls in love with her and begins trying to contact her in secret. Initially reluctant, she eventually agrees to a clandestine correspondence; the pair never actually speak together for more than a minute or two. Nevertheless her father discovers the correspondence and completely disapproves, since he wants her to marry someone rich and important. He sends her on a voyage to visit relatives in the country, hoping she will forget Florentino, but the two remain in contact thanks to a network of telegraph operators. They consider themselves to be engaged.

On her return, Florentino manages to see her for a few minutes in the market, and she suddenly decides to break off with him; we realize that for her their relation had been largely an adventure and an act of rebellion against her father. She later gives in to her father's ideas and marries the prominent doctor and civic figure Dr. Urbino, against the wishes of his snobbish family, and their relationship after returning from a Paris honeymoon is at first very shaky; their marriage was less one of love than of social convention. She assumes that Florentino must resent her and puts him out of her mind.

Florentino, on the other hand, remains in love with her to the point of obsession. He tries unsuccessfully to forget her, and attempts to replace her with other women, becoming a Don Juan: the narrative tells us that he has 622 love affairs in the fifty years, many of which are described in the novel in some detail. The book alternates between the stories of Florentino and Fermina, but without actually counting pages I had the impression that the sections about Florentino are very much dominant; even the sections about Fermina are often from his perspective. Despite his many loves, he never overcomes his one real passion for Fermina; his formula is "unfaithful but not disloyal". He never gives up hope, and dedicates himself to becoming successful so that he can marry her when her husband dies, which he simply assumes will occur before he or Fermina dies. In fact he rises through the ranks of the CFC to become not only the president but the acknowledged heir to the owner, his cousin Leon XII.

The novel is essentially a study of love in all its many forms and stages, from adolescent infatuation to conjugal life (and adultery) to the many lonely older and younger widows, from intense passion to purely sexual relationships to simple friendship, and in all socio-economic classes. The style is in many ways very unlike García Márquez' earlier novels; apart from one or two appearances of ghosts, which may be imaginary in any case, there is nothing suggestive of "magical realism", and apart from the scrambled chronology there is nothing at all modernist. The book is actually written in a Romantic/realist style which reminded me more of Balzac than of his earlier books. Nevertheless, it does have some of his earlier themes, in particular the idea of "solitude". In passing we learn about the ecological destruction of the Magdalena basin, which becomes a kind of symbol of the deterioration of old age.

Apr. 22

32. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Pilgrims Way [1988] 270 pages [Kindle]

An early novel by Gurnah, Pilgrims Way, like his later book The Last Gift, is about a man from Zanzibar living in England with a hidden tragic past in his home country. Daud came as a student, but was unsuccessful and now is working as an orderly in a hospital; as he describes it, as a cleaner. The writing at the beginning seems a bit awkward, but is better after the first chapter. The novel opens with him in a pub thinking about the racist ways he has been treated since his arrival, and this is a major theme throughout the book; the tone is a bit angrier than in the later novel, but the most extreme expressions are on the part of his friend Karta who despises everything about England and the English. After a while the plot becomes mostly about Daud's relationship with his English girlfriend Catherine, a nurse at the hospital where he works.

Apr. 26

33. Nawal el-Saadawi, Zeina [2009, tr. 2011] 251 pages [Kindle, Open Library]

As far as I can tell, this was the last novel written by Nawal el-Saadawi; in any case it is the last I will be reading unless some of the earlier ones I skipped become available in Open Library or elsewhere. The novel opens with a brief description of a nine-year-old girl, Zeina bint Zeinat, by a younger girl in her class, Mageeda Zakariah al-Khartiti. Zeina is an orphan who grew up on the streets of Cairo before being taken in by a poor serving woman, Zeinat, who works for Mageeda's parents; Mageeda is from a wealthy academic family. The novel then turns to a description of Mageeda and her family, and quickly focuses on her mother, Bodour. After a while (there is no division into chapters) we realize that, although from time to time there are episodes from the lives of Zeina and Mageeda, and various minor characters, this is essentially a novel about Bodour.

Like all of her novels, this is a strongly feminist work about the treatment of women in Egypt, in this case in the period from the collapse of Nasserism to the present day, in which Islamic fundamentalism has increased in influence along with unregulated capitalism and American domination. El-Saadawi is definitely emphasizing the negative aspects of Egyptian society to make her points, but there is no reason to suppose the portrayal is not basically accurate. The novel is less experimental than many of her earlier books, although the style is generally similar. Having read her earlier novels, I found it somewhat disconcerting that many of the most important episodes seem to be taken very directly from her earlier work. I suppose that there is a tendency in a last novel to try to synthesize a lifetime of work -- as for instance Shakespeare does in Cymbeline; there is also much discussion of writing as such, both of which aspects reminded me of Adorno's concept of "late style". By any standards, an excellent novel.

Aprl 30

34. Gabriel García Márquez, El general en su laberinto [1989] 286 pages

El general en su laberinto was chosen by "The World's Literature" group on Goodreads as the reading for Ecuador. I'm not sure why, because it is by a Colombian author and apart from a few mentions of the past (mainly Venezuela and Peru) it takes place entirely in Colombia. It is a historical novel (no "magical realism") about the last months of the life of el Libertador, Simon Bolívar, after he is removed from power in the spring of 1830. He leaves Bogotá with a small group of followers on May 8, goes by horseback to the Rio Magdalena and travels up the river, intending to leave for Europe from Cartagena. He is very ill and by midway through the book it is obvious that he is dying, as we already know from history. This is actually the least well-documented time of his adult life, so García Márquez is free to imagine events as he wishes. The various memories and people he meets along the way provide the opportunity to give a sketch of his life and a discussion of the motives and principles of his political activity.

The view García Márquez gives is a tragic one; after liberating all of Spanish America from Spain, and trying to found a powerful independent and united country, he sees it dismembered by sectionalist separatists and torn apart by civil wars. He struggles against this until eventually his enemies drive him out of power. I admit I know very little about the early history of South America and the wars for independence; all I know about people like Santander, Paez, Urdaneta, and for the most part Bolívar himself, is what I learned from this book itself. So as far as the novel is concerned, I had to "suspend disbelief" and assume that García Márquez gets it right.

Two things however are certainly true: first, that Bolívar was correct, that the only way South America could have been truly independent was for it to have remained united; and secondly, that there was essentially no chance of that happening. If we compare the situation to our own war of independence, the differences are obvious: the thirteen colonies were colonized by England, a country which had already had its social revolution under Cromwell and was a bourgeois state, with strong representative institutions, and which implanted those institutions in North America; the colonial population was entirely English (the Indians lived separately and could be ignored) and apart from the slaves and slaveowners in the South was composed mainly of small independent farmers and merchants, with a similar culture and society all down the coastline, and a tradition of commerce and cooperation among the colonies. The Continental Congress existed from the beginning, based on the legislatures of the colonies, and the generals from Washington on down were appointed by and under the control of the Congress. The Spanish colonies on the other hand were founded by a still largely mediaeval, feudalist Spain, which implanted those institutions; the colonies were ruled directly by Spanish viceroys, supported by a small layer of criollos who ruled in feudal fashion over a large disenfranchised population of indios and mestizos. The various parts of the empire had no tradition of cooperation; their relations were with Spain rather than each other. The generals were independent powers, who founded the congresses under their control rather than the other way around; and at best the representative institutions represented a small layer of the population. This is the background of the novel; it tells us for example that the criollo elites opposed integration in a single country because it would threaten the local power of the feudal families.

Bolívar himself belonged to that criollo elite; and despite his liberal views, and his commitment to the integration of the colonies in a single state, he was fighting for the independence of the criollos and not the people. The novel shows this in his execution of General Piar, who tried to organize the Black, Indian and mixed soldiers against the elite.

He says that the colonies are not mature enough for federalism, and at one point in the novel that they are living their middle ages; in a sense his task was less that of a Washington than of a Henry VIII, trying to forge a central state out of feudal elites. But he also recognized that the time for kings had passed, and opposed the monarchism of General Paez. The third possible model was Napoleon, that is a centralism based on a common military power, and this may have been what he was trying to accomplish; but unlike Napoleon he did not have a unified army or a loyal staff of generals; some of course supported him but others were his most determined opponents. If North American unity was threatened at times by the differences between the Northern capitalists and the Southern slaveowners, until a (single) civil war ended them, South American unity began to disintegrate even while they were still fighting Spain; the coup d'état of Urdaneta is described as the first coup in Latin American history, and the first civil war, and the subsequent history of the continent down to the date the novel was written has been a history of continuous coups and civil wars.

The novel however focuses mostly on Bolívar as a person, his tragedy as a heroic but defeated figure struggling with his own physical degeneration as well as his political despair. The book ends with his death at Santa Marta in December of 1830. It is well-written and definitely a novel worth reading.

May 2

35. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise [1994] 247 pages

A classic coming-of-age story set in East Africa against the background of European penetration, Paradise tells the story of Yusuf, from the age of twelve when he is taken by the seyyid (master), "Uncle" Aziz, a merchant, as a rehani or hostage for his father's debts, until the age of seventeen. He works in the merchant's store, and later participates in a catastrophic trading voyage to the interior. At the beginning, the Europeans (Germans) are a far off, somewhat legendary threat; by the end, they are firmly in control of the country, but preparing for a war with the English. Definitely an interesting read.

May 6

36. Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia [1998] 346 pages

Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat's Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia is a volume in the Daily Life series. It covers nearly every aspect of Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian culture to a reasonable nonspecialist depth (like the Everyday Life book I read last month, it doesn't seem to be entirely about what I would call daily life, but perhaps what both books intended by the title was that it was not a chronological history of kings and wars, which is summarized in a few pages at the beginning.) There are chapters on writing, education and literature, on private life, marriage and the family, on medicine and astrology, on religion, on government, law and warfare, on crafts and trade and so forth. The book is illustrated with many black and white illustrations. I learned some very interesting things I didn't already know from the book.

There were problems with it however. Although it is grammatical and has very few typos -- no longer things I take for granted -- the writing is at times very awkward. There are apparent mistakes and contradictions; some may be just due to the awkwardness of the writing, but others left me very confused. She says for example that Sennecherib enlarged the city of Nineveh to "more than 700" hectares, making it the largest city that ever existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Two paragraphs later, she tells us that Babylon was approximately 1000 hectares. Three pages later, she says that Sennecherib enlarged Nineveh from 72 to 400 hectares. So was it 400 or more than 700? and how is either one more than the 1000 she attributes to Babylon? There are too many things like this for me to trust her apparent exactness.

She also presents everything she says as certain and factual, when I know from other books (and as a matter of general principle) that much about the period is uncertain or disputed among scholars. For example, she says that "early man" believed in impersonal numina, which were living beings (a confusion of pre-animism and animism) but in Sumer in the fourth millennium they began identifying them as personal gods. This is only one among many speculative hypotheses about the origin of religion, which there is no evidence for, and if it happened that way it was obviously long before the fourth millennium (some of the Sumerian temples existed continuously from the sixth or seventh millennium and there is no reason to believe they weren't dedicated to the same gods from the beginning.) There is no indication anywhere in the book that anything is controversial.

I admit that the further I read the more frustrated I got. This is a book that would be most useful as a supplement to other books, and maybe mostly to younger readers, but for someone who is only planning to read one or two books on the subject I would still recommend the slightly older books by Oppenheim and Roux that I read last year.

May 7

37. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids [1951] 191 pages

This 1951 science-fiction classic was one of the earliest (and one of the best) examples of the subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction (apart from Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells, obviously). Set in the near-future (the first actual satellite was launched in 1957, and the setting of the book is a decade or so later) the technology is basically 1950's. There are three disasters: the triffids are a species of intelligent carnivorous and mobile plants, supposedly created artificially in Russia (the Wikipedia article on the novel says that one version -- not the one I read -- actually mentions Lysenko), which spread widely but are kept under control until the second disaster, a shower of bright green "meteors" which cause most of the world to go blind (an explanation for this is proposed near the end of the book); the third disaster is a plague of an unknown disease. The substance of the book is the reactions of different groups to the disasters. There are more ideas than in the formula zombie novels of the recent period; this was written when science fiction was actually about ideas.

May 13

38. Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale [1957] 454 pages [in French, Kindle, Open Library]

Anthropologie structurale is not a treatise but a collection of seventeen articles, originally published in the decade following World War II, organized into five sections. Many of the articles are translated from English, as he was teaching in the United States during part of this period. He has updated them all, at least with notes, mainly responding to criticisms.

The first article, "Introduction: Histoire et ethnologie" and the four articles grouped under the heading "Langage et parenté", together with the three articles in the last section, "Problèmes de méthode et d'enseignement", attempt to define the subject of anthropology and in particular the concept of (unconscious) "structure" which underlies his project of "structural anthropology". These are the most important articles for understanding his method and theories, and how they were influenced by the rise of structural linguistics. The other sections are on "Organisation sociale", three rather technical articles mainly concerned with kinship structures, which elaborate on and modify somewhat the ideas presented in Structures élémentaires de la parenté, the first of his books which I read last year; "Magie et religion", four articles trying to find underlying structures of myths and rituals; and "Art", two articles on specific styles/themes in "primitive" art.

This book is important for understanding the aims and methods of the structuralist school in anthropology. I was interested to read in his reply to criticisms by Maxime Rodinson that he considered his theoretical work to be within the Marxist tradition. These articles are all much better than Tristes tropiques which I was not impressed by.

May 16.

39. Honoré de Balzac, La recherche de l'absolu [1834] 324 pages [in French]

Written in Balzac's more Romantic style, and placed (after some vacillation) in the section of Etudes philosophiques, this novel deals with the character of the genius who in pursuit of knowledge neglects family and social bonds and devotes all his time and resources to his intellectual quest, to the extent of complete financial ruin.

Balthazar Claes is described as a "chemist" who is devoted to science above all else; actually he is more of an alchemist, pursuing a mystical "absolute" which will give him power to transmute elements; in a scene that seemed more like comic relief than a serious part of the novel, he actually produces a diamond -- by accident. The particular quest, however, is really not the important point; it might just as well have been religious, artistic, literary or any other pursuit which becomes so much of an obsession that it takes over the life of the genius. Compare the artist in Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence; both novels are essentially exaggerated caricatures.

The other side of the novel is the genius' wife and daughter, Josephine and Marguerite, who are described as "angelic", and sacrifice everything for the sake of their husband and father, until they have to rebel in order to save the younger children from ruin. Part of the tragedy is that Josephine cannot understand or share her husband's research, and his growing alienation from her is partly because his "work" is completely separate from their relationship. While it is true that she makes an effort to learn chemistry to share in that part of his life, when he actually tries to explain what he is searching for, she reacts in horror and begins talking about God and Satan. I was reminded of Travelling to Infinity, the book Stephen Hawking's ex-wife wrote about their relationship; like Josephine, she was religious and had no sympathy for what he was devoting his life to, explaining the origin of the Universe without divine creation. Unlike Josephine, she didn't make the effort to learn anything about physics.

To be honest, I think the novel was too exaggerated to be convincing; not one of Balzac's best.

May 18

40. Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child [1923, tr. 1926] 251 pages

The Language and Thought of the Child is a translation of Piaget's first important work from 1923, which was the first of a two-part study of "child logic" (I'm now following up with the second part), based on investigations Piaget and his fellow-teachers carried out at the Institut Jean-Jaques Rousseau, a teacher-training institute in Geneva with an attached school (the "Maison des Petits") for children under nine years of age. The school was international and the students came from various parts of Europe and had somewhat different upbringings, although I'm not sure how diverse they actually were. Piaget himself admits that his studies were based on a very small number of children and would need to be tested against a larger sample before arriving at any certain conclusions; he is merely trying to arrive at some hypotheses for further research.

The book investigates the thought of the child as expressed in language. It begins in the first study/chapter by classifying the actual functional uses of language on the basis of the spontaneous speech of two six-year-old boys, Pie and Lev. He classifies the functions as Repetition or "Echolalia" (i.e. repeating sounds and words, the way a baby does when learning language -- only 1-3% by the age of the two boys), Monologue (talking to oneself, without addressing it to others), and Collective Monologue (a child talking about himself and what he is doing, ostensibly addressed to others but not really expecting anyone to be listening or to respond), the three types which Piaget refers to collectively as "ego-centric" uses of language; and Adaptive Information which is addressed to specific others, either not about themselves or in collaboration, and intended to be understood and provoke a response, that is actually communication, which he refers to as "socialized" use of language. He calculates a measure he calls the Coefficient of Ego-centricity, which is the ratio of the sentences of the first three types to the total number of sentences; the coefficients for the two boys are .43 and .47, or in other words almost half their speech is not really communication. He also points out that nearly all the Adapted Information consists of purely factual statements. His hypothesis based on this study is that language begins entirely at the ego-centric stage and only begins to become socialized gradually between about the ages of four through six, becoming predominantly socialized during the seventh year. He also suggests that ego-centric language represents a stage of ego-centric thought in which the child reasons to himself without communicating his thought to others, and in a non-discursive or "syncretistic" way based on entire gestalts and dreamlike symbolism rather than analysis of particular details. (He also refers to this as "autistic" thought, which is confusing since it has nothing to do with the modern use of the word "autistic".)

The second study/chapter was carried out in one classroom recording the speech of children from about 3 1/2 to seven; it checked the classifications from the first chapter, and went a bit beyond. In this study, which deals with spontaneous conversations rather than individual sentences, he ignores the first two types and begins with Collective Monologues, which he calls Stage I; he then divides the Adapted Information into Stage II, non-abstract discussions and primitive arguments (itself subdivided into IIA and IIB first type and IIA and IIB second type) and Stage III with abstract discussions and genuine arguments. Study/chapter three studies conversations among children between six and eight from the opposite viewpoint not of expression but of understanding; it is based on experiments with having children explain stories and mechanical devices to each other and then having the recipients in turn explain them to the experimenter. Chapter/study four was another experiment about understanding of proverbs. These three chapters give rise to more detailed hypotheses about ego-centric thought; among the observations is that children before seven have no concept of chance but assume that everything can be explained (in a kind of animist fashion where everything is explained by motives and purposes), and that adults know everything and can explain everything.

One point which Piaget makes in these discussions is that children talking to each other almost never ask questions beginning with "Why?". At first sight, this seems to be very odd, because we all know that children of that age drive people crazy with their constant Why this and Why that, but apparently they only ask Why questions of adults or much older children, never of each other. The last and longest chapter studies one boy, Del, over a few months from six and a half to just over seven years old and records and classifies all the Why questions he asked one teacher (over 1500 questions). Piaget shows that at the beginning the assumption was that everything could be explained in what he calls Precausality, that is an undifferentiated mode of explanation starting from animist psychological explanations with explanations of causality and justification not clearly divided out, while by the end Precausality has largely disappeared and causal and justificatory explanations are clearly separated. He has also begun to be skeptical of grown-up omniscience. One of the most interesting things in the book was when the investigator asked the just-over-seven-year-old Del the same questions Del himself had asked six months earlier (Del didn't know they were his questions) and he thought they were silly and didn't understand some of them, but those he answered he answered just the way an adult would.

The over-all conclusion is that after slow and gradual progress from four through six, the ego-centric child-logic is rapidly replaced by adult logic between the ages of seven and eight. Of course, as Piaget recognizes, the interest is in the stages and their explanations and relative order, and not in the ages which are only statistical averages based on a small sample with much individual variability (for example Lev, who is examined at six and again at seven, was apparently six months to a year ahead of the average.) A very interesting book; many of the same subjects touched upon here are dealt with at length in his later books (to judge by the titles), and I'm left wondering how much of this has stood the test of time after about a hundred years.

May 21

41. Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child [1924, tr. 1928] 260 pages

The sequel to The Language and Thought of the Child, which it continues and refers back to continually, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child begins with a study of the use of the word "because" ("parce que"), the corollary to the study of "why" which ended the first book, and various words equivalent to "although". Piaget says that children under 7-8 use "because" correctly when it is a question of motivation (e.g. "because my Daddy won't let me" -- his example) but misuse it when it is a question of causal explanation or logical justification; "donc" (therefore) appears only about 11-12, because it involves formal logical thought; and the words meaning "although" are also first correctly understood at that age because they implicitly involve general propositions.

The second and third chapters deal with formal reasoning and relations, and argue that children in the ego-centric stage before 7-8 have difficulty understanding relations (his experiments were on "brother" and "sister", "left" and "right", and relations of part and whole) because they involve looking at them from the perspective of the other as well as the self, and because they require synthesizing details rather than juxtaposing them. Piaget also argues that while children begin to use deductive reasoning from 7-8, they can only reason from premises that they actually believe; it is only from 11-12 that they become able to reason from purely hypothetical or arbitrary premises, and thus that is the age where they are capable of formal reasoning.

The fourth chapter continues the argument by considering what he calls "logical addition" and "logical multiplication", or what English speakers call "union" and "intersection" of sets. (Throughout the book French technical terms seem to be translated literally rather than by the corresponding English technical terms. There are also many cases where a sentence seems to say the opposite of what the context calls for, as if a "not" has been added or left out, which occurs too consistently to be typos and probably is a problem with the translation.)

The last chapter is a summary of both books, which was very welcome given how complex his arguments are.

May 25

42. Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City [2001] 360 pages

Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City is a history of ancient Mesopotamia organized around ten cities, Eridu, Uruk, Shupparak, Akkad, Ur, Nippur, Sippar, Ashur, Nineveh and Babylon. These are discussed in the chronological order of their periods of greatest influence, but leaving aside Ur and Babylon, and the yet unlocated Akkad, they are also in geographical order from South to North. Each chapter begins with the modern re-discovery and excavation history (except of course for Akkad) and a physical description of the remains, then summarizes the history, and explains what is typical or unique in each city, usually ending with the city god or goddess or the role of the city in literature and myth.

The best book I have read on ancient Mesopotamia is Hans Nissen's The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 BC, but this is a close second; Leick uses Nissen as a source in the first five chapters and tends to accept his view as to the role of climate change in the region as an explanation of the history. She is a professor of anthropology as well as an Assyriologist, which gives the book a somewhat different perspective than other things I have read. Where the last book I read on the subject, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat's Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, treated everything as definitely known with no indication of controversy, Leick's book is almost as much about what we don't know as about what we do know (and frequently criticizes what we formerly thought we knew), which gave it a real interest.

May 31

43. Miguel Angel Asturias, El señor Presidente [1933, first pub. 1946] 296 pages [in Spanish]

The most famous work of the Guatemalan author and 1967 Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, this is the July reading for the World Literature group on Goodreads which is doing Hispanic America this year. (I got confused as to the months, because I wasn't really interested in reading the June book and didn't add it to my six-month TBR list.) Unlike the novels I read recently by Carpentier and Garcia Marquez, and despite the title, this is not a novel about a dictator but about a dictatorship; although el señor Presidente is present in the background throughout, we don't actually see him very much until chapter 34, almost three-quarters of the way through the book. The novel is written in a modernist style with long passages of seemingly random images, which the blurb on the back describe as "poetic", and frequent dream (nightmare) passages which often comment on or foreshadow the actual events. Nevertheless it is also brutally realistic in its descriptions of prisons and torture; it is the most violent book I have read since Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo which it in many respects resembles.

The novel is set in the capital of an unnamed semi-fictional Latin American country, which is probably based on Guatemala. The action of the first two parts takes place in a single week, from April 21 to April 27 of 1916. The third part covers a longer period. The first chapter begins with a group of beggars sleeping in the plaza near the cathedral. A colonel shows up (by chance?) and for no reason we ever learn begins taunting "the idiot", a beggar with obvious mental health issues. "The idiot" jumps up and strangles him to death, then flees. For some reason which is never explained, the police decide to use the opportunity to frame up a general, Eusebio Canales, and a lawyer, el licenciado Carvajal, for the murder. This sets in motion the whole plot of the novel. Meanwhile, the fleeing "Idiot", in a passage where dream and reality are rather difficult to separate, meets the main character, Miguel Cara de Angel, whom we learn is a close confident of el señor Presidente. It will soon appear that being a friend of the dictator has its own dangers. Other important characters are Camila, the daughter of General Canales; a secret police agent named Lucio Vásquez, his friend Genaro Rodes and Genaro's wife Fedina; and the main villain of the novel after the dictator, the Assessor of War.

A powerful novel and a modern classic, this is definitely a novel worth reading.

June 2

44. Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness and Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World [2018, tr. 2020]

I have enjoyed reading some of Carlo Rovelli's popular physics books, such as Reality is Not What It Seems and The Order of Time, so when I saw this on the new book display at the library I decided to check it out. It is a collection of forty-six short essays, originally written for Italian newspapers between 2010 and 2018 (with one last essay on the pandemic from 2020 added in this printing), some on physics, some on the history or philosophy of science, a few on political or personal subjects. Many take off from some recently published book, so they may have originally been conceived as reviews. They are not sorted by date, newspaper, or subject but seem to be random. Naturally there is some unevenness and with an average length of five or six pages per essay everything is a bit superficial, but many of them are worth reading, particularly the ones on the history and philosophy of science; the ones that take up social science and politics are somewhat less successful.

Highlights for me included the first essay, a defense of "Aristotle as Scientist", with criticism of postmodernist cultural relativism in the history of science and pointing out that those who have read Aristotle usually have no knowledge of physics and those who do physics generally have no knowledge of Aristotle, which reminded me of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures, first published the year Rovelli was born; and on the same theme, a group of essays about literary figures who were also scientists or at least were literate in the science of their time, starting with Nabokov's discoveries in entomology, two essays focusing on Lucretius, one on Leopardi who wrote a history of astronomy when he was fifteen, and a very interesting argument that Dante's Paradiso was based on the idea of a three-sphere.

June 5

45. Boubacar Boris Diop, Le temps de Tamango, suivi de Thiaroye terre rouge [1981] 203 pages [in French]

After having earlier this year read one of Boubacar Boris Diop's more recent (2006) novels, Kaveena, I went back a quarter of a century to his first novel, Le temps de Tamango. This is a complex, many-layered postmodernist novel, influenced by Garcia Marquez, and one of the first really experimental novels of that type by an African author. It is not an easy book to understand. It takes place in an unidentified (within the novel) African country; clearly it is meant to be Sénégal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, but while it is definitely that I think Diop is also intending it to be much more broadly applicable, about neocolonialism in all the formerly French colonies. It opens with a scene where the president is addressing his cabinet, and my first reaction was, "Oh no, not another dictator novel!" I'm getting tired of starting every review with "A dictator of an unnamed country. . ." but it wasn't that sort of book after all; it is about a group of revolutionaries and in particular one character, N'Dongo Thiam.

The premise of the book as far as I can follow it is that an unnamed Narrator (although we might suspect who he is near the end) some time in the 1980s, that is not much later than when the (real) novel was written, had begun to research and write a historical novel about N'Dongo and his activities in the two decades of neocolonial rule since Independence from France, but never finished it. Sometime in the 1990s (that is a decade after the date that Diop's novel was written) there is a "socialist" revolution which is obviously very Stalinist, the documents of the preceding time have been suppressed and an ideological and largely mythical official history has made the revolutionaries of the 1970s into precursors of "our glorious communist party". At the same time, another very different history has been written by reactionary supporters of the ousted neocolonialist regime in exile. Both histories are of course totally unreliable, and Diop's caricature of their language is quite humorous. At some point before his death about 2060, the Narrator has produced notes related to the book, whether for completing it or to explain it. In 2063, in what is now a free socialist country (at least to the extent that history can be written without external constraint) the unfinished novel (which may be called Le temps de Tamango) and the "historical" notes for writing it have been rediscovered and a group of historians is publishing it as a rare document from the past, with notes which try to use it to reconstruct what actually happened in the 1970s. That is supposedly the present book. At least, this is what I think is going on, but except for the two endpoints, the events in the late 60s and 70s and the final book in 2063, the timeline is unclear and various secondary articles online seem to assume different dates, some of which might perhaps be derived from the author's explanations.

If we leave aside the notes, the fragments of the "novel" itself are fairly understandable. There is a strike of bank employees which becomes a general strike by the Central Union Federation, accompanied by large-scale demonstrations, which are crushed by the government. There is a French sergeant named Navarro who is sent to the country as an advisor and who claims to be a general, whose actual role is unclear and disputed by the "historians". A group of possibly anarchist militants called by the acronym M.A.R.S. and led by Kaba Dialo and N'Dongo tries to forge ties with part of the union leadership but the meeting is raided by the police. N'Dongo escapes but Kaba is arrested and killed in prison. N'Dongo under the party-name Tamango (supposedly the name of an escaped slave who led a rebellion in the eighteenth century) gets a job as a domestic servant in the home of General Navarro with the assignment of executing him for the murder of Kaba. General Navarro is ultimately killed by someone else, who may be the lover of his wife (but the notes call this into question). N'Dongo appears to become insane, perhaps because of torture by the General although this is not shown in the "novel" but only suggested in the notes.

From there, it gets complicated. The "novel" leaves much unexplained, and ends in a very strange way. It is obviously fiction, and we have no idea how much of it is "true" and how much made up. The Narrator presents himself as a friend of N'Dongo but at times seems to know no more about him than we do. Near the end, the N'Dongo of the novel comments negatively on the Narrator and his biography of him (the book he is a character in), saying that the the title Le temps de Tamango is meaningless and the Narrator is no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "notes" of the Narrator also seem to become very strange, when he begins talking about Tamango as a historical figure, with obvious anachronisms. (The only references to Tamango I could locate on the internet are to the nineteenth-century novel by Prosper Merimée (which I now need to add to my unending TBR list) and the 1958 film based on it (not allowed by the censorship to be shown in the French colonies or the United States) which differ somewhat from the version in the "notes".) Perhaps the story of Tamango, since it provides the title of the novel, also serves as a mythological or allegorical summary of the entire novel; the slaves have revolted and taken control of the ship (of state) but are drifting, not knowing how to reach their goal of actual independence. . .

Through all of this, Diop manages to give a psychological account of the after-effects of colonialism on various layers of the population. In focusing on trying to sort out the events, I have perhaps left out what is of more importance, the many allusions and discussions of politics and literature. I generally thought it was a good novel, although I think he made the same points more clearly and effectively in Kaveena.

At one point in the "novel", one of the characters proposes making a film of a play by N'Dongo called Thiaroye. An actual play of that name was written by Diop himself, and is published here along with the novel. (In other words, the play is related to the novel in the same way that Peter Pan is related to The Little White Bird.) It was also proposed to make the real play into a film, but the project fell through; shortly afterward, Sembène Ousmane, the best-known Sénégalese author from the generation before Diop, did in fact make a film based on the massacre.

Unlike the events of the novel, the massacre at Thiaroye is a historical fact. The French recruited Black soldiers to fight in World War II; many of them were taken prisoner when France fell to Hitler. They were known as the "Tirailleurs Sénégaleses" ("Sénégalese Sharpshooters") although they actually came from all the French colonies in Africa. After the war, they were sent back to Africa, many to a camp called Thiaroye in Sénégal, to be demobilized. They refused to demobilize until the French gave them their back pay and pensions; the regular French army then machine-gunned them. According to the French accounts, 35 (or 70) were killed; according to the Sénégalese, over 300. Diop's play imagines the conversations of the fighters and exposes the irony of their situation.

June 8

46. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report [1997]

An example of bad timing, this book was written nine years after Ferris' Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which I read two months ago, yet in some respects it seems much more dated. Partly this is because the earlier book was largely a historical survey of astronomy and related science up to 1988, while this one is more a survey of what was currently believed in 1997 with history mainly confined to the first chapter. Compared to the earlier book, there is somewhat more about dark matter, and there were already a handful of exoplanets known. This book was written in the heyday of string theory, which plays more of a role in his discussions, although it is not actually about physics.

The biggest problem is that the main theme of the book is that Omega=1, that is that the Universe is essentially "flat", with the total of mass and energy close to the "critical density". Of course, this is probably true and has been confirmed by recent observations, but it is discussed here on the assumption that the expansion of the Universe is slowing down due to this gravitational attraction, which it is not. Actually, the first evidence that the expansion is actually accelerating came a year after the book was published, so it became outdated almost immediately. This is undoubtedly why it is not as much of a "classic" as the older book.

This is somewhat unfortunate, as it is very well-written at a much higher level of popularization and would have been a good simple summary of cosmology at the time. The writing is very clear and parts of the book are still worth reading, such as his discussion of the large-scale structures in the Universe. His discussion of Bohm's views on quantum theory is interesting, and I hadn't realized that Feynman's methods were connected with Everett. One annoyance, however, is the last chapter, which is devoted to a wishy-washy discussion of religion in relation to cosmology, which concludes that religion and cosmology should be kept separate -- which is a good reason why he shouldn't have written about religion in a cosmology book to begin with.

June 10

47. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism [1962, tr. 1963] 116 pages

This short book was written at the same time as his La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind) -- the two books cite each other -- which is next up in my anthropology reading project. By 1962, totemism was basically a discredited theory, after having dominated the anthropology of religion for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lévi-Strauss compares it in the introduction to the theory of "hysteria" before Freud, and suggests that they were essentially (but not necessarily consciously) attempts to exaggerate the otherness of mental patients and "primitives". But he also asks what the real explanations were for the phenomena which were lumped together under the heading of "totemism". He gives a brief history of the decline of totemism and the theories that were advanced to explain totemistic phenomena without the general theory of totemism, considering and critiquing the views of Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, his usual bête-noir Malinowski, Firth and Forte among others. At the end, he considers Henri Bergson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to argue that the overall structure was based on a dialectical unity of opposites.

June 15

48. Pablo Neruda, Crepusculario [1923] 86 pages [in Spanish] [Kindle, Open Library]

This year I am reading extensively in Latin American literature for a Goodreads group, and it was recommended to me by the group moderator, Betty, that I should read Pablo Neruda (not one of the group readings); he was on my TBR in any case, but rather far down, so I decided to move him up and begin reading some of his works chronologically over the next few months (mainly what I already own or what is available from Open Library -- I have the Antología General which will fill in the gaps with selections from all the collections I don't read separately).

Crepusculario is Neruda's first published collection of (forty eight) poems; probably not a fair introduction since it was published when he was nineteen and contains poems from as early as seventeen. It isn't all bad poetry -- some poems I thought were fairly good, actually -- but it is very uneven.

Even leaving aside the last section which contains poems about Pelleas and Melisanda, it is obvious that he is imitating the turn-of-the-century French symbolist writers; nearly every poem uses words like "triste", "tristeza", "dolor", "llanto", "sollozos", "angustia" and other allusions to a kind of generalized existential melancholy. This theme is of course also connected to the title; there are constant references to twilight and sunset, the sea, the moon, etc. Despite his claims that it is written with his blood, it all too often seems like a Romantic pose. Technically, it is very accomplished; many of the poems are metric and use rhyme or assonance, and unlike many modern poets who attempt older forms it almost never seems to be forced or twisted to fit the form.


49. Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [1924] 118 pages [in Spanish]

Published in the year after Crepusculario, this collection of twenty one love poems is a real step forward, although according to the introductory matter in the Antología General it is still not his "mature" work. The book apparently was a public success and remained popular reading for young lovers for decades. The poems are more "material" than "ideal", about real human desire rather than some ethereal Platonic conception of love. They are loosely organized into a chronology of a relationship; the most famous poem was number 20, set after the "break-up", as was the Canción desesperada. There is still a bit of melancholy and a few references to his (unmotivated) sorrows, but that aspect is less central here; the nature references also become a little more specific and original than in the previous collection.

June 18

50. Boubacar Boris Diop, Les tambours de la mémoire [1990] 237 pages [in French]

Another of Diop's earlier novels, in French (he now writes mainly in Wolof, his native language), Les tambours de la mémoire is about a young man from a rich and powerful Sénégalese family, Fadel Madické, who becomes obsessed by the stories of Queen Johanna Simentho, a semi-mythical leader of anti-colonial resistance in the Kingdom of Wissombo (based on a historical figure who led resistance to France in the Sénégalese province of Cassamance in the 1940's; the name "Johanna" is apparently a reference to Joan of Arc.) The narrative is complexly structured and often deliberately ambiguous, although not as confusing as his first novel Le temps de Tamango.

The novel begins with Fadel's friend Ismaila and Ismaila's wife Ndella (formerly Fadel's girlfriend). Ismaila has just learned that Fadel has been brought, dead, to a hospital in Dakar, supposedly a victim of a hit-and-run accident. The official line is that he was mentally disturbed. Part one of the book is mainly about Ismaila and Ndella and their reaction to the news. They suspect he has actually been assassinated by agents of the dictator Major Adelezo. (There is no historical Sénégalese dictator by that name, and I haven't been able to learn which of the historical presidents or prime ministers is hidden under the name.) This first part ends with the funeral of Fadel. In the course of this part we learn something about Fadel's father, a rich and corrupt businessman and former politician, El-Hadj Madické, and Fadel's brother, Badou, a doctrinaire but ineffective "pseudo-revolutionary" who writes pamphlets against the government, some of which mention Queen Johanna, as well as about the relationship of Ismail and Ndella.

Part two of the novel is largely in flashbacks, giving us more background on Fadel, his growing obsession with Queen Johanna and his mania for proving that she really existed and might still be alive, as well as raising questions about his actual mental state, which despite the claims of Ismaila and Ndella remains ambiguous to the reader. He comes to insist that Johanna was actually a young domestic in his family when he was five or six years old, although no one in his family will "admit" to remembering her and the chronology is inconsistent with the known facts about Johanna (who would have been at least in her sixties when Fadel was born); and there is a thirteen-day period which appears to be a mental breakdown of some sort. In the "present" of the novel, Isamaila receives a mysterious packet which turns out to be the notebooks of Fadel, and he and Ndella decide to organize them and prepare them for publication at some point; these writings are the basis of Part three. The second part ends with Fadel's decision to travel to Wissombo to find out the reality of Queen Johanna.

Part three, which makes up more than half the novel, deals with Fadel's life in Wissombo (although there are also flashbacks to his life in Dakar.) It is ostensibly based on his papers which have been organized by Ismaila and Ndella, although the dénouement of the novel which "resolves" all the questions takes place in the last hours of his life and could not have been in his papers, so presumably is based on the imagination of the two friends, leaving everything completely ambiguous. The people of Wissombo apparently "remember" Queen Johanna, and expect her to "return" in some fashion to achieve justice and prosperity for not only Wissombo or Sénégal but all of Africa or the world. They commemorate her with plays, and it is during one of these plays that the final events of the novel begin. There are clear resemblances between the memory of Johanna and the Christian legend of Christ, although the religious world of Wissombo is definitely pagan (and the characters in Dakar are at least nominally Moslems.)

Like the legend of Tamango in the first novel, the legend of Queen Johanna is essentially a symbol for the struggle for the real liberation of Africa, in contrast to the false independence of the historical neo-colonialist regimes. Clearly, both books also deal with questions of memory and the relations of literature to history. While I had never heard of Diop before he won this year's Neustadt Prize, it seems there is a large amount of critical writing about his work and he is considered an important literary figure; I may attempt to read some secondary works after I have read his more recent books.

June 20

51. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Dottie [1990] 397 pages [Kindle]

I think this is Gurnah's third novel, after Memories of Departure and Pilgrims Way. While both of those early novels, although worth reading, are a bit awkward at times, Dottie is definitely a mature work. It tells the story of Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour, a Black factory worker in London, still considered a "foreigner" despite being third generation English, and her two younger siblings, the somewhat retarded Sophie and the wild Hudson.

The book opens with Sophie telling Dottie that she has decided to name her newborn son Hudson after their brother, who has recently died at the age of eighteen after a troubled adolescence. The book then returns to their life from the death of their mother, young Dottie's struggle to reunite the family, the resentment of Hudson, and their problems with poverty and xenophobia. The novel catches up to the beginning about halfway through, and we see the further life of the two sisters and their relationships to each other and to various other characters, including the men they become involved with. At the end, there is a certain ambiguous hope, at least for Dottie (who may have finally learned to stand up for herself and reject the role of self-sacrificing caretaker.)

June 21

52. John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes [1953] 240 pages

A kraken, as I know from watching a Dr. Who episode, is a mythical giant octopus. There is no kraken in this science-fiction novel by Wyndham; the title is taken from a line of a poem by Tennyson. The book is an apocalyptic story of an invasion of Earth by unknown creatures who come to dwell in the deepest parts of the ocean, possibly, as one character maintains, from Jupiter -- they are obviously adapted to very high pressure environments. The central characters are a husband-and-wife team of British radio journalists, Mike and Phyllis Watson, who observe the fall of the strange red vessels while on a honeymoon cruise and come to be considered as specialists in strange events.

[Possible spoilers]
As in his earlier novel, The Day of the Triffids, there is a good deal of satire on human stupidity, as governments and people alternate between denial and panic. Some are certain that the following events (beginning with sinking of ships at sea, later invasions of islands and ultimately coastal area by "seatanks") are somehow a Russian plot (the novel was published in 1953), while the Soviet Union of course attributes them to capitalist warmongers and refuses to cooperate in dealing with them. The Western governments refuse to act in time because they are afraid to jeopardize world trade. Unlike the earlier novel, which becomes "post-apocalyptic" from the very beginning, this book deals with the unsuccessful attempts to fight the invaders, until they unleash their ultimate weapon: warming the polar regions to raise the sea-level, thereby flooding much of the land and finally causing the end of human civilization and bringing about the post-apocalyptic ending. I'm sure Wyndham would have appreciated the fact that we are doing this to ourselves now, with the same combination of denial and panic.

Like all of Wyndham's novels, and most good science fiction, this is a fast-paced, exciting tale with some thought-provoking extras.

June 23

53. Honoré de Balzac, Adieu [1830] 59 pages [in French]

An early short story by Balzac, originally placed in the Scènes de la vie privée but later moved to the Études philosophiques, Adieu is a rather sentimental story of a colonel in Napoleon's army, Phillipe de Sucy, who returns from three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia to find his lover, Stéphanie, from whom he became separated in the retreat from Russia, has become insane from the sufferings of that time.

After he recognizes her in 1819, the story flashes back to the crossing of the Beresina River in 1812. This is the most interesting part of the story; Balzac, as a monarchist with no great respect for Napoleon, does not romanticize the horrors of the events at Beresina, and gives a good feel for what must have happened at the time, although the story of Philippe and Stéphanie is of course treated in Romantic fashion.

The story then returns to the present as Philippe tries to break through her madness.

This was definitely a good story although not as serious as other parts of the Comédie humaine.