The Best

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

A mix of fiction, history, and autobiography as a failed author and high school teacher navigates 80s Bucharest. Cărtărescu is a great stylist. Filled with surreal episodes in the liminal space between the droll ordinary life of late communist Romania and an incredible psychedelic fantasy world. People protest against death and have sex while levitating in the air, abandoned factories hide fantastical secrets. About writing, literature, art, humanity, dreams, death, life, love, bureaucracy. Nihilism and its defeat. Very wide array of influences, including H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, all the Latin American magical realists as well as Bulgakov, Bolano, Pynchon, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, even Cronenberg.


We search like idiots, we look in places where there is nothing to find, like spiders that weave webs in the corner of a bathroom where flies don’t come, where not even mosquitos can reach. We shrivel in our webs by the thousands, but what doesn’t die is our need for truth. 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, dozens and hundreds of times, 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. Such that, to the amazement of those still inside the four ink lines, the chosen one breaks out of his chrysalis, spreads his enormous wings, and rises gently, leaving his shadow below in his former world.

 

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Not quite as strong as Civilization & Capitalism, but it's a brilliant work, the result of decades of painstaking research. The Braudelian world-view is felt on every page, the interlocking systems of trade, production, geography, crops, animals and people. Mountains shape trade routes, climate patterns determine harvests, sea currents guide merchants - everything connects to everything else in Braudel's Mediterranean. Written in a Nazi POW camp, it brought a fresh perspective on how to think about history: not kings and battles, but the slow dance of geography and climate, the rhythms of peasant life, the endless circulation of ships and goods. Immensely ambitious and beautifully written.

But we cannot hope for precise measurements; at most we shall discover an order of magnitude. In this respect the Mediterranean was still broadly speaking the same size in the sixteenth century as it had been in Roman times, that is, over a thousand years earlier. Or to put it another way, the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the entire globe in 1939. It was vast, immeasurable, and its reputation as a 'human' area was earned only by contrast with those other monsters which sixteenth-century man was just beginning to tackle - the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention the Pacific. These were truly monsters, alongside which the Mediterranean was more like a domestic animal, but certainly not the 'lake' it has become in the twentieth century, the sunny resort of tourists and yachts where one can always reach land within a few hours and along whose length the traveller could be transported in the Orient Express. To understand what it was like in the sixteenth century, one must mentally magnify its area to a maximum and draw on remembered images from travellers' tales of the days when months, years, even a whole lifetime, could be spent on a voyage.

 

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Basically nothing happens in this book, and it is absolutely spectacular. Non-stop linguistic fireworks. A masterpiece. Outcasts, drifters, hobos, and various other miscreants in 1950s Knoxville. Among its many virtues: the best ever passage about someone fucking a watermelon. Funny and human, no Judges or cosmic pain here.

Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

 

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC

The book is split in two portions: first, a semi-fictionalized biography of von Neumann, with each chapter being told from the perspective of the people who knew him (his mother, brother, wife, scientific collaborators, etc). It doesn't focus strongly on the science, more on the person and his relations, and the recurring theme is one of petty resentment and inability to understand von Neumann because he was simply so far above and ahead of everyone else around him. The resentment often manifests as a kind of petty moralism, and Labatut basically makes everyone in von Neumann's life look rather pathetic. I don't know how factual that is, but it certainly works as a literary device.

The second part concerns Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. It's a bit drawn out, but it's an exciting story that's well-told. The point is essentially to underscore just how much von Neumann could see 60+ years ago, when everyone around him was essentially blind. AlphaGo is to the greatest humans as von Neumann is to normal ones -- we should expect the relations to play out in a similar way in both cases.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

 

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

Deceptively simple, philosophical, dark, ecstatic. Autistic at times. Incredibly dense. Loneliness, death, beauty, nature. I keep returning to her poems.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

 

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

A short story of an incredibly intense and mostly one-sided love affair. Raw, intimate, with complete lack of dignity, it felt like an invasion of her privacy. Living life novelistically. How lovers really only exist in our minds. I think the essential, unique part of the story is that there is no attempt at justification, explanation, etc. She accepts and presents the bare facts about herself, and almost nothing about her lover. In a way this is a portrayal of incredibly deep passion, on the other hand her approach also makes it feel really shallow: he's handsome, drives a fast car, career-minded. We have absolutely no clue what her passion is for exactly, but that's exactly the point, that the reason of the passion is irrelevant or unknowable or inexplicable or not worth explaining, what really matters is her own experience and what she takes from it ("I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it." and "Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence.") She considers herself luckier than him because she has the obsession and he does not, that really stood out as the cornerstone of the whole thing.

When he rang to arrange a meeting, his long-awaited call had no effect on me and I remained locked in the same state of anxiety as before. My condition was such that not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain. I longed to end the affair, so as not to be at the mercy of a phone call, so as not to suffer, realizing at once what this would entail, seconds after the separation: a series of days with nothing to wait for. I preferred to carry on at any cost—let him have another woman, or even several. (In other words, accepting a torment far greater than the one that made me want to leave him.) Compared to such emptiness, my present situation seemed enviable and my jealousy a sort of frail privilege which I would have been mad to want to end since one day it would end anyway, outside my control, when he would leave the country or would decide to stop seeing me.

 

Ctrlcreep, Fragnemt

A collection of tweets and very short stories from @ctrlcreep. "Why would I want to own a collection of tweets", you might think, but these are brilliantly etched little gems: dense, fantastical, inventive, awe-inspiring and terrifying.

The forest's immortal animals are weary of life. Stags rest in the shade for years, antlers growing, intertwining with ivy and brick

Tiny bots build nanoliths, defining sacred spaces on the underside of leaves, between scales of bark, in the grooves of your fingerprints

My brain is a temple, my body is the crowd of money-lenders and market stalls desecrating its courtyard

 

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Man being pulled apart between his civilized and the wild nature. Intellectual and spiritual crisis; despair; isolation in bourgeois society. Both the protagonist (Henry Haller) and the manic pixie dream girl Hermine are essentially Hesse self-inserts. Sex, drugs, jazz, liberation from the shackles of over-thinking, transcendence. Written in the 1920s, but parts of it feel straight out of 60s psychedelic culture (especially the hallucinatory magic theater section). A perennial favorite with intellectual misfits for a reason.

But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.

 

Camille Pagile, Sexual Personae

Paglia said this book "was intended to please no one and to offend everyone." It's not quite as offensive today, 35 years after its original publication, but it still manages to maintain a sharp edge. Paglia brings sex into art history in an incredibly entertaining style. Everything is rapid and extreme, grand pronouncements jump at you from every page, and Paglia's erudition will dazzle you. Sex, decadence, Apollo vs Dionysus. Bombastic and aphoristic. It's a bit too long, and the energy of the first few hundred pages isn't maintained to the end, but well worth experiencing. You'll never look at art the same way again.

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

 

Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog

Few people have led more interesting lives in the 20th century than Werner Herzog. The drive, the vision, the creative power, the collaborations, and the endless series of insane situations he put and found himself in make the whole thing feel fictional. Provocative thoughts on art, life, and everything in between. "Inspirational" is generally a dirty word when it comes to book reviews, but this is truly inspirational in the best way possible.

Months before, I had hired local Indians who had captured the hundreds of savage little monkeys, the ones who overrun the raft with Kinski. I paid only half the money for them because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organizing everything would run off with the cash. The monkeys had been sitting in Iquitos for weeks, but when it came to actually having to use them for the scene it turned out they had all been sold to an American businessman and were already on a plane waiting to go to the US. We ran to the airport and insisted we were veterinarians and that we had to see the vac- cination papers for the animals. We shouted so loudly that they admitted they had no papers, and they embarrassedly unloaded the animals from the plane. We just put them into our truck and left. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of a panic attack and bit me all over. I could not cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point.

 

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Kafka's best short work. In the Penal Colony starts as meticulous horror: a bureaucrat proudly explaining an elaborate torture device, and ends as transcendent horror with an almost religious ecstasy. Kafka pulls off a perspective shift that transforms everything that came before. The Officer's devotion to the old system, his obsession with procedure and machinery, and the Traveler's polite detachment capture the essence of instituional horror, yes, but the story evolves into something completely different.

Can you now appreciate the work of the harrow and the entire apparatus? Just look!” He bounded up the ladder, turned a wheel, called down, “Watch out, step aside!” and everything started moving. If the cog hadn’t screaked, it would have been wonderful.

 

Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography

Pessoa is one of my favorite writers and this biography is fantastic, very well-written, almost consistently captivating over nearly 1100 pages. Reveals a lot of hidden and surprising aspects of Pessoa's life, and made me want to be part of the Lisbon literary scene of the early 20th century...Astrology, magic, weird politics, a series of lost literary movements, and at the center of it all: a bizarre life. Would have been interesting to dedicate more space on his posthumous reception though, it ends kind of awkwardly in a place where he has only published a single book and is not well-known in Portugal and completely unknown in the rest of the world.

 

 

For Pessoa as for Campos, who in this case served as his creator’s faithful spokesman, the self’s true emotions cannot be intelligibly known, much less expressed, and the self is unreliable, its reality forever fluid, contingent on its changing relations with the surrounding environment. Self-knowledge, or individuality, is therefore a matter of attitude, of acting. The great artist, or great anything, is a great pretender. In the coming years, the editors of Presença would repeatedly invoke sincerity of expression and trueness to one’s self as hallmarks of superior art, while Pessoa would repeatedly question whether words such as sincerity and trueness can signify anything useful for a creative artist.

 

The Worst

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century

Utterly irredeemable garbage.

This was sold to me as a kind of sequel to Braudel's Civilization & Capitalism, one of my favorite books. I was really disappointed to find something completely different; Arrighi has none of Braudel's strengths, but is happy to copy his weaknesses. He displays none of the curiosity, none of the interest in data (while Braudel's work is filled with numbers, it would not surprise me if Arrighi was innumerate). But he does share Braudel's attitude towards growth (which is to say that he ignores it). To ignore productivity growth in a study of the 15-18th centuries is bad enough; to ignore it in a study of the "long twentieth century" is downright deranged. Not to mention ignoring demographics...

Arrighi writes about economic history but does not seem to have opened even a 101 econ book in his life. He frequently uses terms of art like "comparative advantage" incorrectly. Wild causal claims are made without any basis in data whatsoever.

While Braudel famously approached history in a highly quantitative manner, for Arrighi economics seem to be a kind of language game rather than something that can be measured and analyzed. It's all "as X has argued..", "as Y has suggested..."! Evidence? What's that? He likes to quote Robert Reich! His predictions about the US's decline have of course not been borne out. And it's terribly written on top of everything.

Indeed, to be the Venice of the nineteenth century was still the objective advocated for Britain by leading members of its business community at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And the same analogy was evoked again – albeit with negative connotations – when the nineteenth-century expansion of British wealth and power began reaching its limits.