So hey, it’s winter. I’m cold, and I have a cold, which is why I am spending my Friday evening writing book reviews instead of watching Jaws on the big screen to celebrate old Bruce’s 50th birthday.
That said, I am keeping to my read-five-write-five rule, so I suppose koff-koff evenings are good for something. Let’s roll.
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter).
My rating: four stars.
OK, so I’ve finally read the book that’s meant to be one of the key texts in the lit-bros-who-suck canon of High Brodernism. Which is, of course, a fucking terrible portmanteau, even if the there’s some decent points made about the insufferable kind of dudes who read books like this.
Books like this. What is a book like this? It’s the first Cărtărescu I’ve read, so I’m unsure how it compares to the rest of the author’s work. I’ve got a copy of Nostalgia on the shelf, but it is, helpfully, unread. What I know about Solenoid is that it was written in 2015, translated (as a lot of his work is not) in 2022, and has basically been a reading-on-hard-mode milestone ever since. What’s remarkable (if true) is that this book is a single, unrevised draft. I guess that translation forms a kind of second draft, albeit one by another human brain, but to have such a curious thing just spill out already formed is quite a feat.
I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.
The book takes the form of an unpublished manuscript, an extensive piece of autofiction created by a nameless Romanian teacher living in Bucharest in the 1980s (a job and home shared with the author). What’s included is the grinding life of a teacher under Ceaușescu’s privations: continually getting nits, being urged to whack kids by fed-up parents, occasionally shagging some workmates while studiously trying to avoid conversations with others.
But there’s… more, some of it real and some of it made up. Instructions on how to see a tesseract in your mind’s eye. A home that looks like a boat. A thanatologist who is into asphyxia (but only for the science). The Voynich manuscript. A factory where kids bunk off school which may lead to a hidden world. And giant titular solenoids that are sprinkled around the city with meanings unclear. (But which are good for nocturnal levitation, as it turns out.)
I don’t know how to best explain the book, and attempting to describe the story – beyond “a teacher experiences fuckery in Budapest” – is probably a fool’s errand. Borges and Kafka are thrown around in reference to the work but that’s too neat and suggests a little too much organisation; if anything, I think Cărtărescu is trying to show that even in places of organisation, human life is messy, the interior monologue always tripping back over itself in a quest to dig meaning, Proust-like, from the things that have gone before. There’s a feeling that the narrator is trying to make sense of the endless branching potential of each moment, each echoing path untaken as the world moves forward through time. It’s like Flatland with a cigarette.
We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable.
I freely admit that there’s lots about Solenoid that I didn’t (and probably won’t ever) understand. But that shouldn’t stop you: I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that so effectively communicated what it is like to be inside another’s head, to hear their thoughts in real time. As before: remarkable.
Conspiracy Nation by Ariel Bogle & Cam Wilson.
My rating: three stars.
Conspiracy theories are the sort of thing that people tend to laugh at because they are the preserve of nutters and cookers. Of people who aren’t them, who are fooled by some kind of huckster into believing bullshit.
Unfortunately, as the rise of sovereign citizen issues in Australia have shown – including the Wiembilla shootings (which this book covers) and the ongoing Porepunkah manhunt – the wormhole of alternate beliefs has real, negative impacts.
Bogle and Wilson have assembled an excellent overview of some of the most important conspiracies from Down Under, including Harold Holt’s Chinese aquatic Uber. The earliest conspiratorial thinking – around 1996’s Port Arthur mass shooting – is examined, with a grab bag of other topics investigated, including an eye-opening insider visit with disgraced conspiritualist chef Pete Evans.
Importantly, the book contains a section on the impact of conspiracies on Australia’s First Nations People. It’s a framing I’ve not seen a whole lot of, and it’s a viewpoint that’s crucial, as despite a lot of the sticking-it-to-the-man vibe, many sovcit behaviours are just colonisation: the return.
The issue is even more personal … when we discuss what happened in Wieambilla, Queensland, in 2022. ‘Two police officers [who] are going to an address looking out for the welfare of somebody get killed by those people, and the neighbour gets killed, and then, lo and behold, the three offenders get killed. ‘Six people are killed over something that just simply is not true. And that’s why I don’t laugh at them anymore.’
There’s a fair amount of levity in the book, but the serious effects conspiracies have on the friends and families of believers is a key concern. The authors don’t level the usual ridicule at believers, with the story of Robert Sudy (creator of the vital Freeman Delusion sovcit pseudolaw resource) revealing how a magistrate with a sense of understanding and a free afternoon turned him away from some ruinous beliefs.
Conspiracy Nation is a pretty quick read. It gives a good state of play on something that is becoming more and more important as distrust grows amongst people with fewer options than they’d like.
Big Time by Jordan Prosser.
My rating: four stars.
This one was a birthday present from the excellent Elizabeth. I’d added it to my wishlist based on the strength of the blurb (band tale, drugs, fascist future Australia? Sign me up!) and am so glad that a) I took the punt and b) she bought it because this debut novel slaps, as the kids potentially still say.
What Prosser has constructed here is dystopian kinda-SF tale about a pursuit of freedoms that the state (Australia is divided into the futuristic west and the Soviet-style east in the 2040s, and most of the action involves the gnomic east) dislikes most: those revealed by drugs and music.
The music is indie rock. The drug is F. The main character is a bassplayer called Julian, who tries F – a drug that allows you to see through time – though he’s not the narrator.
Whether or not Julian truly saw everything in that moment, as Trevor had promised he would, I can’t say. I myself don’t know what everything looks like so, no, I’m afraid I can’t say.
But Julian did see something. In fact, he saw a lot. And now, let me tell you: this is what he saw.
Julian’s band, the Acceptables, has been figuring out how to proceed without him. He’s been on hiatus overseas, and arrives back in Melbourne after a home-flight F trip courtesy of a friendly steward. What follows is the kind of people-in-their-20s, band dynamics story that is familiar but not, in Prosser’s hands, stale. We get the usual group dynamics you’d expect, but the setting is uncanny enough to ensure the reader doesn’t become too complacent. It’s Australia, but one where listening to The Drones might see you banged up. The Acceptables are straining to become something new – and increasingly marketable as befits the goals of their corporate, AI-advised overlords – and into the gap between the bandmates comes…
Drugs. (It’s always drugs.)
The ability F gives its takers to see through time unlocks what the novel seems to really be about: time, choice, destiny and whether any of us can do anything about it. Time becomes almost a character: poking it alerts it to our presence and… maybe that’s not a good thing? Certainly, doppelgänger events would indicate that there’s Something Afoot. And when Something’s Afoot, you know that the government wants to ensure they’ve got the whip hand.
Prosser’s prose is engaging and clever without falling into snark or smugness. I really enjoyed the way this felt like a music fan’s book without the onanistic focus that fandom implies. It’s a solidly written, clever story with an ending that I very much enjoyed.
I’ve spent my whole life berating myself for being a dilettante. Now I’d like to give myself permission to be an aficionado instead.’
I dug Big Time and I’m not even on drugs. (Other than cold and flu tabs.) It’s worth the trip.
(Elizabeth also sells writing implements and you should go buy them all because they’re rad.)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (narrated by Allison Hiroto).
My rating: two stars.
This novel had been sitting on my Kindle since its release. I remember there being a load of praise for this intergenerational epic, telling the story of the struggle of Zainichi Koreans to survive (and thrive, to a point) in Korea and Japan over a period running from the early 1900s to about 1990. Discrimination, fitting in, and overcoming the strictures of a system set against you? Sign me up.
On second thoughts, don’t. I listened to the audiobook version of Pachinko – all 18-ish hours of it – and I grew increasingly pissy as it went on. The novel begins with a fair amount of description, and Lee’s level of research in the topic and the time is clearly detailed. But the characters and the narrative are about as one-dimensional as they come. Hardscrabble peasants, rich arseholes, mysterious criminal lords, pious preachers, noble sons and troubled scions? Tick. They all do the things they’re meant to do, but there’s no emotional resonance – certainly not beyond the halfway point of the book, at least. It feels like these cut-outs are populating a stage that Lee has painstakingly constructed, and while the sets are great, the action sucks and the dialogue comprised of hackneyed platitudes.
I understand that eliding significant social or political events is a narrative choice, but in Pachinko the avoidance of the drivers in favour of the effects on characters feels more like a case of can’t-be-fucked. Characters crop up for narrative drives and then are taken offstage with a quick “oh yeah: they died!” offing that even a cast-of-thousands author like Dickens would consider beyond the pale. The last third of the book feels unmoored from place, and it feels as if even the author is sick of her characters by then.
(This is without mentioning how Lee writes about sex. Holy fuck, I have never read such variable, mark-missing tone in a novel. Even the prudishness of a Clavell is preferable. Will we get flights of angels tooting or bass-wah pornomusik in the next encounter? WHO KNOWS?)
I may be missing something. I don’t think I am. Good research and terrible writing? That’s Pachinko.
Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA by Tim Weiner.
My rating: four stars.
This is a phenomenal book. It’s the story of the CIA, which is largely the story of the agency’s creation and use as a blunt – if secret – weapon by practically every US President since it began. And there’s no blind quotes in this at all. Everything that Weiner reports is based on released documents or extensive reviews with people directly involved at the highest levels.
It’s difficult to overstate how horrifying the cost of the CIA’s acts, in monetary and human terms, is. We all know about the black ops, the dark holes that people can be dropped into. The assassination attempts and the misguided funding of convenient actors (Saddam Hussein, Afghan rebels and what would become Al-Qaeda) that would eventually wreak havoc on America and its allies. But it’s honestly gobsmacking to discover exactly how little the CIA knew. About everything.
The challenge of understanding the world as it is has overwhelmed three generations of CIA officers. Few among the new generation have mastered the intricacies of foreign lands, much less the political culture of Washington. In turn, almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.
The book covers the first sixty years of the CIA’s existence, and the essential narrative is that the agency has never fulfilled its mission – to provide reliable information – since its instigation from the ruins of the OSS. Covert operations became more and more important, control of funds and personnel became impossible, and the organisation that was built to ensure the surprise attack of Pearl Harbour could not be repeated… well, we all know how September 11 turned out.
(Badly. The answer is badly. It is mortifying to know how close the agency was to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred. The lack of action is one of the most egregious lapses of judgement in a history filled with what-the-fuck moments.)
Weiner presents this deeply grim tale with enough detail to inform but not enough to drown. He presents excellent portraits of the CIA’s directors and teases out their relationships with the presidents overseeing the agency, with no punches pulled. (Clinton comes in for a bollocking, fittingly.) The book removes the Hollywood romance from the organisation and shows it as a poorly run bureaucracy, unable to retain qualified officers. It’s the story of a body that, once the Cold War ended, had lost its bête noire, and lacked the ability to update itself – and consequently was white-anted by military oversight.
If you want the perfect example of managerial and institutional failure, the CIA is it.
At least David Brent lacked the ability to stage coups.
This evening I’ve just begun reading this book’s just-released sequel, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. Given recent interviews with the author I expect it to be merciless, particularly regarding the role the country’s leadership – well, leader – plays in the role and actions of the agency. It will certainly be a good update from the mid-2000s end of Legacy of Ashes.
I can’t wait.
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If you’d like to buy me some books to review, there’s a wishlist over here.
Yeah nah. 
[…] the post-9/11 follow-up to Weiner’s earlier work, Legacy of Ashes. (The review for that one is here, if you want a refresher.) Is it a cheerier […]