Anna Funder: All That I Am
This is an excellent historical novel which grew out of author Anna Funder's friendship, many years after the events her book describes, with one of the principals, Ruth Blatt. Blatt was a German leftist who was part of a circle of activists that included Ernst Toller and Dora Fabian and whose members went into exile at around the time Hitler came to power.
The prose is clean and never fusty in the way that historical novelese—especially when dealing with more distant epochs—often is; Funder's insights into the difficult lives and times of her subjects are acute. The book is well-researched and convincing throughout (even the parts Funder has imagined). All That I Am demonstrates that even a fictionalized account can be a good introduction to history—in this case, a slice of history overshadowed by the horrors that were to follow.
Rudyard Kipling: Kim
In Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express he writes about how he hoped to have an audience with Borges when he was in Buenos Aires. He made the appropriate overtures, and was told that Sr. Borges was reading Theroux's piece about Kipling, recently published in the NYT Book Review, the implication being that Borges would not waste his time with someone inadequately appreciative of a favorite author. This is, of course, another example of the sort of the sort of theater that Borges always employed in his self-presentation, but it is endearing nonetheless.
Borges did grant Theroux an audience, but I'm afraid he may not have wanted to meet me. Having finished Kim, the first substantial bit of Kipling I've read since the Just So Stories as a child left me underwhelmed. It's pleasant enough, colorful enough, but in the end mostly interesting as a document of its time (the late 1800s) and a place (the empire).
David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years [Hardcover]
Economists have often worked from models: they imagine societies, and how things like barter, cash, and other aspects of economic life might have come into being and been practiced. David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 years, is an anthropologist. His discpline insists that he study actual societies rather than imaginary ones. One thing his and his colleagues' research has shown him is that the economists' stories about how economic life happens are not, in most cases, the way things actually happen. My background in economics is weak, to say the least, but this book is packed with intriguing facts and convincing arguments—particular about the reification of "the market." I didn't, in all cases, feel I was knowledgeable enough to evaluate Graeber's arguments with adequate rigor, but I am stimulated me to want to learn more.
Derek Raymond: The Crust on Its Uppers (A Five Star Title)
The milieu—the English underworld of the early '60s—is interesting, especially when it bumps up against Chelsea Bohemia, and Raymond's deviators (to use his word for what Americans would call grifters), are engaging, but what pulls one into this novel is the language, the argot of the morries, slags, and boilers, who populate the book (this American was very grateful for the glossary, and suspects most English not from this place or time would be too). Dialect writing can be painfully bad—think, for example, of Willa Cather's "Whatsa Matta You!" Chico Marx sound-alikes—but Raymond makes the language sing. Readers who know Raymond only from his "black novels" may be surprised that this is a comedy, and often laugh-out-loud funny. The wikipedia article about the author gives an interesting account of his colorful life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Raymond
Fuminori Nakamura: The Thief
Fuminori Nakamura has done it: given us a thriller that has more than thrills, that keeps us turning pages not only to find out what happens next, but also what the author—through the medium of his characters—will think next. The model for Nakamura's account of a pickpocket cut off from the rest of humanity might be Crime and Punishment: a crime novel that raises questions more compelling than "who done it?"
Shuichi Yoshida (Translated by Philip Gabriel): Villain
[Raw and compassionate] I thoroughly enjoyed this crime mystery, which took me into a working class provincial Japan I barely knew. It’s rich in detail of both character and the aimlessness, loneliness, and constraints of ordinary life. Then there’s the lousy influence of the mass media, which has to grind indeterminate reality into a black and white morality play, and which changes the way we think as a result. Fascinating and educational both. And an excellent translation into English. Thanks to Blockhead’s Chris for recommending this. (*****)
Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
[average] This was my first Julian Barnes. It’s the story of coming of age and retirement, and includes a mystery. The schooldays that begin the book are compelling but I found the mystery underwhelming, with too much odd behavior necessary to further the plot. (If characters had behaved in a more usual way, there’d be no mystery). Verdict: I didn’t mind reading it. (**)
Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
[History to savor] Pinker makes a cast-iron, statistical case for the counter-intuitive idea that worldwide violence has gradually declined from prehistory to the present day. This takes nearly 500 pages: I wished it had been much shorter as I took his word for the veracity of the research and interpretation of same, but I know it is all necessary to make the cast-iron case, and at least it is written clearly and often with humor. The next 200 pages pull as much cause as possible from the correlations between lessening violence and changes in human nature and society, to discover and posit reasons for the decline. This section is equally thorough, and is the heart of the book.
This study is state-of-the-art. At the same time as hoping for brevity, I wish every author were as thorough and wide-ranging as this. The subject and conclusions are important, and the teaching of history will surely be changed by it.
We are nowhere near eliminating physical violence, and perhaps never will, but it’s amazing how far we’ve come. As Pinker says at the end, “For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”
(*****)
