By which of course I mean through the year.
(If I was referring to the grave then I’m more than halfway there, which is a sobering thought to open a post about books with. But you know, I’m a happy boy.)
Halfway through the year and we’re up to 42 books read. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep Douglas Adams-ian import could be made from that. Regardless, I’m both happy that I’ve read that many books (particularly given that there’s been so many four/five star reads in there) and annoyed that I haven’t read more.
There’s two books I’ve read (in the past two days) that haven’t made it into this review, but that’s only because I’m a) trying to get this one in before the month ends, b) keeping the books as close to multiples of five per review and (most of all) c) lazy.
(Though not too lazy to have started using a fucking book Gantt chart, it seems.)
Hey ho, let’s go.
Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton.
My rating: four stars.
This is otherwise known as the book Luke should’ve read instead of wading through Capital. (You know, the audiobook I reviewed last time.)
Nah, I tell a lie. I’m glad I got through Capital and The Communist Manifesto as it provided some helpful background to Marxism, and inspired me to find out more. I just wish I’d read this Eagleton work before I started, because it would’ve provided a pretty good summary of what it was all about, as well as a handy reframing of viewpoints that’re pretty common in the media and in discussion
Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror.
Eagleton’s work takes as its basis the concept that many of the common objections to Marxism or Marx himself are mistaken, or have the wrong end of the stick. I think there’s probably more people with at least passing knowledge of Marx these days (or maybe I’m just swimming in that end of the internet more) but the Greatest Hits Of Why Socialism Sucks that you’ve heard from a racist relative are all in here, and are ventilated in pretty amusing (and thought provoking) ways.
The political odds will always be on the system in power, if only because it has more tanks than you do.
This book is basically banger after pisstaking banger, which is likely the best way to get some people on side if clearly articulated reasoning isn’t enough to do it. Eagleton knows exactly how much of a punish leftist narratives (and meetings, oh god) can be, so it’s wonderful to read his framing of the whole endeavour’s flag-carriers:
Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire. It is more like being a medic. Medics are perverse, self-thwarting creatures who do themselves out of a job by curing patients who then no longer need them. The task of political radicals, similarly, is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished… If there are still Marxists or feminists around in twenty years’ time, it will be a sorry prospect. Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests the whole of their identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism.
I know that this ole blog isn’t really going to change anyone’s political stripes, but if you’re at all curious about Marxism, or if you have a reflexive “but it’s shit” view on the thing, give this one a whirl. You might find, when the half-truths and bad faith arguments are sifted, that the old bloke might’ve been onto something. I mean, even he was sick of fucken economics and just wanted to write about books:
Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called the ‘economic crap’ of Capital in order to write his big book on Balzac.
That’s a dude I’d hang out with.
They Will Claim That I Was Dead… by Florian Frerichs
My rating: three stars.
The sell for this book really was enough to make me insta-buy it. It described how a Berlin loser (Nico Pacinsky) becomes delusional following a car crash, to the point that he believes that he’s an actor (Klaus Kinski). He’s then contacted by a director (Werner Herzog… or is it?) who wants to make a film about Kinski’s life.
Then there’s a bunch of stuff about interdimensional German cultural investigation (which includes, uh, the soul of Leni Riefenstahl?) and Udo Kier as the first Rainbow Pope.
It’s basically Conclave but with more Vatican orgies and soul stealing. (Well, maybe not more but you get the idea.)
If this were a film, what would follow at this point is a really palatable montage in the style of the eighties with the appropriate background music to illustrate the progression of the temporal component and to show a development of the characters, the narration of which would otherwise have taken up too much space in the work.
This is a very strange book. There’s moments where its translation falters, and some of the writing comes across as the product of a writer who is very pleased with themselves. But the audacity kept me reading. They Will Claim That I Was Dead… is catnip for a particular sort of book nerd dickhead like me, because it weaves in all manner of media references, intertextuality and – eventually – recursive narration. It’s a big experiment that both hates and loves Berlin, features famous doppelgängers and is at once crass and subtle. It’s written with a lot of love/hate for the creative arts, with a full awareness of how masturbatory the process of creating is. It’s inherently silly, but there’s a lot of thought gone into making something that features as many arse jokes as this does.
I mean, we’re talking about a book where Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the voice of reason.
There’s a lot of expected knowledge of Kinski’s life in this book, and I think it would be less enjoyable if the reader didn’t know a bit of the actor’s backstory (particularly about his combative love-hate relationship with Herzog), or some of his works. Particularly important to the text is Jesus Christus Erlöser, a one-man show famous for a recording (above) in which ole Klaus loses his ever-lovin’ mind at the crowd and the line between heckler-baiting and performance becomes muddied, while the threat of violence hovers about the wings.
Actually, knowing a bit about ’70s theatre and film in general is good, as there’s whole sections that echo Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade (or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade if you’re a stickler for nomenclature), a fun piece about a production taking place in an insane asylum.
This write-up probably makes the book sound a lot more fragmented than it reads. It is a collection of bits and pieces, though they do (for the most part) hold together, and reward the attentive reader. I found the slapstick nature of some of the proceedings a bit on the nose, but I do wonder how much of that is a result of translation and social cues not making their way into my brain as well as they might? Regardless, the inventiveness that’s at work here meant that I was happy to see it through to the end the occasional eye roll notwithstanding.
You can buy the ebook from the publisher for eight bucks. If this seems even vaguely in your wheelhouse you should buy it, because the fact anyone is publishing such fuckery these days is a delight.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.
My rating: five stars.
I have a memory of reading something by Colson Whitehead before, but when I pursue that memory it leads nowhere. I’ve no idea if I’m getting confused or whether it’s a glitch in my recollection, but I can’t lay hands on what it is I’m supposed to have ingested. That makes The Intuitionist, I guess, the first of the author’s books I’ve consumed. Let’s assume it is, for the sake of moving this thing forward.
An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.
The Intuitionist is is a novel set in a city that appears to be an unnamed facsimile of New York. Looking deeper, it’s about race and upward social mobility, seen through the lens of a Black outlier of a technical discipline. It’s a story of North versus South, of hidden histories and of growing into a big city life following a small city upbringing. It’s also a noir tale that features philosophical rumination. And, most importantly, it’s a story of elevator sticklers versus elevator whisperers.
But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?
Yep. We’re in the realm of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, who are riven by division, because two schools of thought cannot agree. There’s the Empiricists (who believe the individual mechanical details of their charges reveal all) and the Intuitionists (who are derided as woo-woo merchants, but have a singular connection with their travelling boxes). The book’s focus, Lila Mae Watson, is the first Black elevator inspector, is a staunch Intuitionist, and has the highest accuracy rate in the department… until there’s a catastrophic failure, and she and her methods are brought under the microscope.
What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don’t know because we can’t see inside it, it’s something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels’ teeth. It’s a black box.
But why? Well, therein lies a convoluted tale, full of union election bluster, Mob intimidation, cross and double-cross. There’s a curiously withdrawn narration to the work, with some beautiful turns of phrase reading like observations from a gallery a little removed from the scene. It’s like a work of internal revelation written by someone using remote viewing.
I dig it. The Intuitionist is a remarkable work, with slippery depths beneath its accessible surface. I’m very keen to read more of Whitehead’s work, for sure.
(OK, so I finally remembered the book I’d read: The Colossus of New York, which is essentially a ramble set in the streets of NYC. It obviously left less of an impression than elevator psychics, but if I find it again I’ll give it another go in an effort to see whether it’s forgettable, or whether I am.)
The Star Diaries by Stanisław Lem.
My rating: four stars.
I’ve wanted to read more Lem largely because I’ve been trying to shrug off the snobbery of an Eng Lit degree and get more across the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. I’d previously read Solaris, the book the film(s) came from, and was expecting quite a dour time given how much of a beautiful downer that excursion proved.
The Star Diaries is a whole different take on space. It’s a collection of stories from 1954–1971, and while the stories are presented in numerical order (beginning with ‘The Seventh Voyage’ and ending with ‘The Twenty-Eighth Voyage’) they’re not chronological – so there’s early work next to later efforts, with a level of seriousness that fluctuates wildly. The stories involve a hapless space-dude, Ijon Tichy, who seems to attract intergalactic shenanigans.
‘Will you be lighting up during your stay on Enteropia?’
‘No, thanks.’
As you like. Here are your papers. You are a mammal, I believe?’
“That’s right.”
‘Well then, happy mammaling!”
What’s immediately apparent is that Lem is a fuckton funnier than Solaris might have you believe. There were multiple audible lols during my trip through Tichy’s travails. And while some of the humour is appealing in a ain’t-I-smart-to-have-understood-that-reference kind of way that you might experience while reading Flatland, there’s also just a lot of gut-buster stupidity-in-space moments that hit the perfect slapstick note.
Just as it is impossible to predict with complete accuracy the path of a single electron, so too you cannot know with certainty the future behavior of a single potato. Thus far observations show that man has mashed potatoes millions of times, but it is not inconceivable that one time in a billion the situation could reverse itself, that a potato could mash a man.
I didn’t give much thought to the translation of this work as it read in pretty easy English – but I am gobsmacked to read about Lem’s use of neologisms. To translate into English the work of someone who coined more than 1500 new phrases leveraging the peccadilloes of the Polish language is a titanic task. I mean, the guy once wrote an addendum to a book that translated some of his Polish coinings into Polish. So you know, it’s involved. But here, it looks effortless. Michael Kandel has done – ahem – a stellar job.
Yes, it’s comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard.
There’s a strong philosophical vein running through these stories, which often is in stark contrast to the I-mistook-an-alien-for-a-drink-dispenser, fish-out-of-water vibe that generally describes the proceedings. There’s lots of should we? thoughts in here, and consideration of man’s drive and recklessness. I was unsurprised to discover that Lem wrote a treatise – Summa Technologiae – on thorny future-tech-and-society issues, and I think it’d be a good read if the musings here are anything to go by.
To hunt a squamp one must have:
A) in the preliminary phase-base spread, mushroom sauce, chives, salt and pepper:
B) in the phase proper- a whisk broom, a time bomb
Concentrating on the theoretical rigour misses the main point, thought: these are funny, funny stories. This predates Douglas Adams’ version of the intergalactic everyman and does it a lot better. The silliness in here casts a long shadow, and reading these stories basically affirms that anyone doing funny-in-space has likely ripped off Lem at some point.
(I mean, on a planet of Middle English speaking robots there’s a character called Calculon, which I’m pretty sure Matt Groening would willingly admit is homage rather than wholesale lift.)
Go on, you know you want to. Not all spacelit needs to be hard SF, though I’ve yet to read a better – or funnier – example of someone stuck in a time loop.
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (reread).
My rating: four stars.
I read this book when I was just out of school. The copy was falling apart, the cover flaking away on my hands as I turned the pages. I remember the story of Zorba tagging along with the Narrator, making his way to Crete for lignite mining and the womanising bastardry to be found there. I remember it being an enthusiastic work, full of a desire for life and a vitality that impressed me. I’d always remained positively disposed towards the novel, and I figured that it might be nice to revisit and see if anything had changed in the intervening couple of decades.
The longer I live, the more I rebel. I’m not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!”
Firstly, I can see now that my memories of the novel were coloured by conflating it with the 1964 Michael Cacoyannis film adaptation, featuring an ebullient Anthony Quinn and the (unpaid?) people of Crete.
Secondly, I have to say that there’s a terrible darkness within the work that I’d either completely forgotten or hadn’t noticed. It’s a surprisingly nihilistic work, as the young narrator – sick of his bookish slant after a more active friend (or lover) leaves to militarily support Greeks being slammed by the Bolsheviks – decides he’s going to get close to the working man and live a more useful life.
You’ve got a devil inside you, as well, but you don’t know his name yet, and, since you don’t know that, you can’t breathe. Baptise him, boss, and you’ll feel better!
Though he’s free of his books, there’s always the sense that the Narrator is attempting to distil reality down to exact points. He’s working on teasing out the beliefs of Buddhism, but his task is confounded by the exigencies of life with a human whirlwind, the Greek Macedonian called Zorba who has infiltrated his life. Zorba – based on a real person – is a santouri-playing hard man, who has destroyed villages, murdered and raped during military action. But he has an enthusiastic zest for life that is at odds with the Narrator’s experiences of life.
All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them! D’you see?
There’s a lot more subtlety to the work than I remembered. I recall thinking that Zorba had an approach to life that was something wholeheartedly embraceable, but revisiting the tale I’m surprised to find that he can, in some lights, be seen as rootless and empty as the Narrator. There’s a sense of questing in him, wrestled into a sort of forced brio, as he tries to outrun the horrors and tragedies he’s weathered (and caused). He’s a loveable bastard, true, but he is one whose flaws seem almost unavoidable – and the Narrator’s pull to the man seems to say nothing good about how we are drawn, sometimes, to people we know are bad for us.
I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.
Kazantzakis’ turn of phrase is incredible. I spent a lot of my listening time lugging wheelbarrows of mulch from pile to bed, and a lot of times I was struck by the polished brilliance of a described moment or an inner observation. There’s a sense of refinement in how the story is written, and the pieces where the Narrator is working through his internal struggles of life are set in a living, breathing version of Crete. Beauty is ever-present, particularly when nature is discussed, though the interruption of ugliness and death is likewise close at hand. It’s a tough, beautiful world.
George Guidall’s narration of the audiobook is excellent. His Zorba borrows from Quinn’s rendition, and his narrator definitely has the clipped tones of Alan Bates. But the reading has a certain earthiness, almost a base nature that seems to fit the material well. There’s nothing that takes you out of the moment. Reading the words of characters – curiously, particularly those of Mme Hortense, the French showgirl adrift in Cretan old age – he is captivating yet subtle.
I did rewatch the film when I’d finished listening to this audiobook, and I enjoyed it though it did look pretty hokey in places. There’s a lot of darkness in there still, but obviously the interiority of the narrator can’t come across in the same way as it does in the text – and so the ebullient performance of Quinn becomes the focus.
My view of the book’s titular character is more rounded, now, but my love for the work itself is affirmed and deepened. I can see why some people dislike it – there’s a level of misogyny that’s undeniable, which the old “ah, but at that time” criticism doesn’t ameliorate – but I appreciated that it’s not as simplistic a tale as I’d remembered.
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