Only a Blockhead

Best of 2011: Books and People

Books and people; surprisingly, not music. 

This year, though I continue to enjoy my subscription to the Yomiuri Philharmonic, and though lots of delicious sounds have poured from my new stereo (Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues as I type, but since it's already 2012 they don't count) there's nothing that stands apart as a clear "best of."  True, that's probably because I haven't heard Tom Waits's new album yet, and because, though I have heard and enjoyed Los Lobos's new one, they're defintely a band one wants to catch live; I didn't get a chance to do that in 2011.

Teju Cole's Open City is, without any question, the novel, the book, of the year.  With the subtlety of Sebald and an intriguing range of references, Cole gives us a world, a city, a character we want to inhabit.  Here's what I wrote about soon after turning the last page:

Perhaps the best novel I've read this year, Teju Cole's Open City is the diary like account of a year or so (leavened with memories) in the life of a Nigerian psychiatric resident living in New York City.  It is a meditation on the lives of immigrants, but more importantly a meditation on pain, the pain those immigrants and others feel and have felt, and how a comfortable and bookish sort like our protagonist experiences and deals with (or doesn't deal with) that pain, and also with the pain he has caused.  Cole's intelligence, his cultural breadth, and his prose are breathtaking.

There were two non-fiction books that stood out.  The first is The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography by Donald S. Lopez.  Here's what I wrote about it in my Japan Times best of 2011 squib:

Donald S. Lopez's The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography is an elegantly written and surpassingly subtle account of how selections from a cycle of Tibetan texts found their way into Western consciousness through the offices of an interpreter more steeped in the bloviations of the theosophists than in Buddhism as it's actually practiced.

After reading Lopez's book, one will look afresh at the countless volumes of unmoored wisdom so many in the West have taken to heart.

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto caused me to reconsider several of my strongly held and weakly—Brand helped me to realize—analyzed positions with regard to the environment.  Whether or not one agrees with Brand's iconoclastic conclusions, the challenge he presents, as a green, to conventional green wisdom, is salutary.  Here's what I wrote upon finishing it:

All too often we read books that take positions we already agree with.  There's nothing wrong with that.  It's nice, sometimes, to hear one's convictions explained elegantly and eloquently, and perhaps to learn about new evidence in support of those positions.  Other times we read books about this or that field about which we have no position.  We just want to learn more, and that's okay, too.  Other times, however, we read a book about something we care passionately about—we all ought to care about Stewart Brand's concerns in Whole Earth Discipline, the health of the earth and the flourishing of humanity—and that book makes us radically reconsider all our positions.  I agreed with Brand going in about the desirability, from a green perspective among many others, of dense cities.  Given what we now know about climate change, I had been opening my mind to the necessity of nuclear power, and Brand convinced me, even in the aftermath of Fukushima, that the necessity is there, and also the possibility of doing it in ways that, if not entirely risk-free, are safer and more ecologically sound than, for example, the burning of coal, from which the world currently gets most of its energy.  I have done a full 180 on transgenic engineering and now agree with Brand that first-world Greens, in their opposition to GE foods, are responsible for many unnecessary deaths in the third world.  In short, Brand has shaken up my world view, and that's always good fun.  Now, to get on-line and see what some of his opponents have to say . . . .

Heroes, by definition, are exceptional.  Two came to public attention during 2011.

Ai Weiwei has stood up against the less savory aspects of his government even when they threatened him with (and followed through on their threats) detention and torture.  As I have written elsewhere, one hopes that in 2012 things will improve enough in China that he will be able to return to the obscurity avant-garde artists generally enjoy.  Given China's renewed committment to repression, there is almost no chance this will happen.

(Here's my review of Ai Weiwei's Blog.)

Bradley Manning is a Private in the United States Army.  He gave evidence of American war crimes (among lots of other stuff) to wikileaks, even though he was aware he might be executed for doing so.  He is currently being tried for this act by the United States government.  Support this brave young man in any way you can.

This is the first time my best-ofs have taken a political turn.  2011 being the year that it was, perhaps this is not surprising.

—David

Zero

Huang Fan, translator John Balcom informs us, is "a literary phenomenon" and "a bright star among Taiwan's so-called new generation of writers." He was, according to Balcom, "such a prolific author during the 1980s that the decade is often referred to as the Age of Huang Fan."

It goes without saying that a literary star whose light shines brightest in Taiwan will be all but unknown to Anglophone readers due both to the paucity of translations and to the general lack of interest in literary solar systems distant from our own. Thus Balcom's high estimation of Huang's place in the Taiwanese literary firmament will be, for many of us, the first sighting we have of this Taiwanese supernova.

That's from my review of Huang Fan's Zero and Other Fictions. 

The rest is here.

—David