2023 Books: June to December

 2023 Books: June to December

      Here, the editing/consolidation process was again demonstrating that this process results in more traffic to this blog (of whatever kind)- when I started consolidating I was combining posts that were nearly a decade old and sometimes had under 20 page views, now I'm removing posts with at least 100 page views, sometimes 200, 300 or 400- these were the first posts I was making after I started the editing process.  Many of the books I read in this period were from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- I was absolutely crushing New England.

Published 7/7/23

Rewriting the Soul: 

Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995)

by Ian Hacking

  I actually source a decent number of books from the New York Times weekend obituary section.  One example is this book, by recently deceased Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.   Here's the obit from last month.  Hacking takes what you might call a Foucauldian approach, excavating historical sources and showing the contingent nature of mental health diagnoses through time. 

  I found it revelatory, twenty five plus years later- the way he uses the Foucauldian method of demonstrating the social construction of allegedly "objective" ideologies- here he traces the development of "multiple personality disorder" from the 19th century through it's post-WWII rise in the USA as a companion of the child molestation hysteria of the 70's and 80's.  It was a pretty curageous position to take, and Hacking bends over backwards not to be unnecessarily cruel, up to and including a conclusion that argues that for the people suffering from "Multiple Personality Disorder" the truth of an allegation of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member may be beside the point so long as the client derives relief from its "discovery." 

  That is a diplomatic way to put it. Another way to put it is that the conjunction of the popularity of multiple personality disorder and flamboyant stories about recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse destroyed at least hundreds, if not easily thousands of lives as families were forced to take sides as shocking allegations were made decades after the events in question.

   My personal connection to this world is through my work as a criminal defense attorney.  Much earlier in my career I handled a case of sex abuse by a father of his children and at the time I struggled with how a child could make something like that up- not that it was the case for my client- just the idea of it, like, how could someone ever make something like that up?  This book provides that answer.

    

American cover art for the English translation of Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min.

Published 7/7/23

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022)

by Dolki Min

Translated by Victoria Caudle

   I picked this title out of the Sunday New York Times book review- it's translated from the Korean, it's a literary fiction/science fiction/body horror/lgbtq themed book about a horrific alien who has crash landed on planet Earth and is forced to subsist... on humans.  Specifically, eating humans that they(yes, this is a book about gender issue) find on dating apps, both men and women.  The creature/narrator can assume human form, though it is a real effort- it sounds like having to hold some kind of weight lifting pose for hours on end and the book is just a couple days in the life of this creature as it goes about its extremely nasty business, which is described in clear prose a la American Psycho.

  At 144 pages Walking Practice: A Novel is a quick read.  There are some typographical shenanigans that have to do with the translation and the idea of an alien narrator, but it wasn't that difficult to follow.  There also line drawings of the creature in its hideous, natural form, sprinkled throughout the text as full, additional pages.

Published 7/8/23

City of Night (1963)

John Rechy

   This groundbreaking novel about the life of a gay hustler during the pre-Summer of Love 1960's recently got a fifty-year anniversary edition, which was the first I'd heard of it- something I'm embarrassed to admit.  It is hard to believe that in 30 plus years of assiduous reading of transgressive fiction, City of Night never came up.   Rechy chronicled the LGBTQ underworld (Mostly the G/T letters of the formula) at a time and place where those kinds of choices were actively persecuted by the authorities.  In a way, this pre-Stonewall, pre-Summer of Love, pre-AIDS world borders on the quaint, as distant from our modern world of killer drugs, killer diseases and the open embrace of LGBTQ lives as a book about people living on a frontier farm in the mid 19th century.

   The lack of concern with societal approbation and open embrace of the gay hustler lifestyle is still refreshing in 2023.  His portrayal of the different hustling "scenes" of the era are memorable, NYC, LA, the SF Bay Area and New Orleans in particular.  LA/Hollywood, in particular is vividly drawn, almost a book within a book, including his portrayal of thinly veiled closeted Hollywood bigwigs.  This fiftieth anniversary edition makes the case for a canon-level placement for City of Night, perhaps replacing one of the cis-white male beats who are commonly included from this time period.   You could replace On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac and miss very little.

Published 7/8/23

Ask the Dust (1938)

by John Fante

   Ask the Dust, the great depression era proto-beat novel by John Fante, was another embarrassing omission from my reading list.   Like City of Night, I'd literally never heard of Ask the Dust before it came across my radar.  When I mentioned it to my girlfriend she laughed at me and told me it was one of the books "everyone" read when they moved to Los Angeles.   Fante's portrayal of Depression era Los Angeles, with a heavy emphasis on the area surrounding the now destroyed Bunker Hill neighborhood, is an iconic description of depression era Los Angeles.

   Fante's protagonist, Arturo Bandini (this is book three of the four book Bandini sequence) would be a common type after the mid 1960's, a would-be romantic writer, seeking his muse in the lower echelons of the big city.  He finds it in the figure of a latina waitress.  Their antagonist courtship has not aged well:  He insults her race frequently and generally behaves in a way that would get him arrested and served with a restraining order in the present day.   The story ends with his unrequited love running up the wall of a marijuana addiction induced bout of psychosis in the object of his affection- talk about not aging well- as the last fifty pages turns into a "reefer madness" type scenario.

  But man, in terms of the description of depression era Los Angeles Ask the Dust holds up.  How did I make it this far without ever hearing about it or Fante himself?  This is another canon level contender- Fante could sub in for one of Henry Miller's tropics- Cancer or Capricorn.  The west coast is basically unrepresented in the 30's American lit canon beyond Of Mice and Men which is set in the farm country of California, not the city.

Published 7/8/23

Is Mother Dead (2022)

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

This was a 2023 longlist title for the International Booker Prize. In the time it took me to get off the Libby waitlist for the Audiobook version, I went back and read her 2016 book about the impact of a recovered memory of child sex abuse has on a Norwegian family- Will and Testament.  I thought Will and Testament was very well written and completely disturbing in the way it treated recovered memory and its impact on child sex abuse, written from the point of view of the child victim as an adult.  I gather from online reviews and the anger of Hjorth's own family that Will and Testament was autofiction, and I'm assuming that this book is in the same category.

 It features a narrator/protagonist who seems like the same person as the narrator in Will and Testament: A woman who has purposefully estranged herself from the family.  Here, the narrator abandons legal studies and a boring lawyer husband in Norway for an American who teaches her how to paint.  It turns into a succesful career as a painter, but she never makes good with the family she left behind in Norway.  They split is compounded by the narrator's work, paintings that dwell on the painful relationship between family members.

  She returns to Norway for an upcoming career retrospective exhibit and begins to stalk her estranged mother- not sure how else you could put it.  Her obsession with reconciliation is the central and only theme in the book and you have to marvel at the fortitude of a novelist who could paint herself, essentially, in such a negative light.

Published 7/9/23

This is Not Miami (2023)

by Fernanda Melchor

Translated by Sophie Hughes

  I'm a fan of Mexican author Fernanda Melchor since I read the English translation of her 2017 novel, Hurricane Season, a searing and brutal book.  I'm generally in favor of ANY author whose work can be accurately described as "searing and brutal."  The fact that Melchor scores so high on the diversity index is merely a bonus in her case.   

   It's hard to put This is Not Miami in a literary category- it is not a novel.  It could be considered a book of short stories centered on the Mexican city of Veracruz.  In her foreword Melchor describes the book as being based on journalistic reportage.  Like many authors who are translated into English, This is Not Miami is not her most recent writing.  It was published in the original Spanish in 2013, with Hurricane Season coming out in 2017 and Paradais in 2021 with an English translation last year.   Like her later books, This is Not Miami is searing and brutal with highlights including the title story, about a bunch of Caribbean immigrants who find themselves marooned in Veracruz under difficult circumstances. 

  Another memorable story is the tale of local beauty queen who ends up on trial for the murder of two young children.  Reading This is Not Miami does help the reader obtain a better understanding of Fernanda Melchor and her fans, but for novices it doesn't displace Hurricane Season as the best entry point.

Published 7/9/23

The Memory of Animals (2023)

by Claire Fuller

   English author Claire Fuller has five novels under her belt and the kind of international recognition that is one step below the top tier (She won the 2021 Costa for best novel (RIP Costa Book Awards), and she won some even more obscure contests in 2015 for her debut, Our Endless Numbered Days, which sounds pretty interesting.  I think I read the Guardian review of The Memory of Animals and picked it up because of the theme (post-apocalyptic), the literary pedigree of the author and because it was available to check out immediately in the Libby library app for the Los Angeles Public Library.  

   The set up is dystopia 101:  Neffy, the protagonist/narrator, a somewhat feckless youngish woman who is banging her step brother and has recently had a spot of trouble with her job as an octopus handler at a London area aquarium, volunteers to be a test subject for what appears to be a post-COVID type virus that has just emerged.  After receiving the vaccine and the virus she falls unconscious and when she wakes up... you guessed it! Society has collapsed!

  Beyond that it's pretty clear that Fuller is more interested in the inner turmoil of Neffy than the implications of the collapse of society.   While Neffy and her cohorts remain barricaded inside the hospital there are a series of chapter length flashbacks that fill you in on Neffy and her issues.  When they finally get out into the world, it's essentially a coda to the (un)resolved personal issues of Neffy. 

Published 7/15/23

Audiobook Review

Death By Water (2015)
by Kenzaburo Oe

Translation by Deborah Boehm

   Nobel Prize in Literature 1994 winner Kenzaburo Oe died in March of this year which spurred me to take a look for any Audiobooks that might be available on the Libby app.  I found an Audiobook version of Death by Water, which was originally published in 2009 in Japanese and published in English translation in 2015.  In many ways, Oe is the prototypical Nobel Prize winner:  A writer who does not write in English, who is politically engaged in a controversial way with his home territory and who writes serious books with both heavy political and personal themes.  In addition to be a controversial pacificist/leftist who authored many books that challenged the militaristic Japan of his childhood, Oe was also a pathbreaker in terms of his depiction of disability via the reoccurring character of his son, who was disabled and frequently appears in fictionalized form in many of his novels.

    Death by Water is a "late work"- a term used within the novel itself by Oe, the fifth in his series of novels about the life of Kogito Choko, who is widely considered a stand in for the author himself.  In that sense, Oe should also be considered an early adopter of auto-fiction, particularly in the treatment of the character of his disabled son.  Death by Water is very much the work of an author who can do whatever he wants.  The book is 450 pages and much of the plot involves the attempts by a group of "underground" theater performers to adapt Choko's books into works of radical theater.   As the plot slowly develops, issues with Choko's disabled son and his own attempts to write a novel about the traumatic death of his father, a right-wing militarist who drowned in the aftermath of World War II after an ill conceived plan to fly a kamikaze plane into the Emperor's palace fails, rise and fall within the context of the main plotline. 

   The action is slow indeed to get started but Oe does provide an action packed finale, hard as that may seem to anyone (like me) who struggled through 13 hours of Audiobook conversations about the vagaries of radical Japanese theater in the early 2000's to get to 2 hours of excitement.  

Published 7/23/23

Audiobook Review

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2021)

by Quentin Tarantino

  I'm not Tarantino-stan, and I fully acknowledge how annoying his fandom can act, but I wanted to say that I checked out the Audiobook of this loose novelization of Tarantino's most recent movie, narrated by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and I found it very interesting and worthwhile, but only for fans of the film.  If you haven't seen the film this book functions as a full-on spoiler.  However if you've seen the film and loved it, you simply must check out the book version because Tarantino includes all kind of backstory and scenes that must have been cut from the screen play or never were in the screen play.  He doesn't just put in the scenes from the film- those all happen "off camera" as it were, so the overall impact is pleasant.  Worth looking for in you Libby library app!

Published 7/29/23

Audiobook Review

In Ascension (2023)

by Martin MacInnes

   The Guardian review of In Ascension, the third novel by Scottish author Martin MacInnes because it was a clear example of the literary fiction x science fiction genre-crossover that I enjoy.  MacInnes doesn't have a high profile in the US and I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK- In Ascension is not what you would call a hit- it's too different, but it was very interesting, and I really enjoyed the Audiobook, narrated by Freya Miller.    Miller speaks in the voice of narrator and protagonist Leigh Hasenbock, a Dutch biologist specializing in ancient forms of life like Arcahea.  Arcahea branch off from bacteria and they play a huge and little understood part of microscopic existence.   I actually read The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (2018) by David Quammen back in 2019, and he provides much of the background you would need to understand Hasenbock's scientic specialization.

  Not that In Ascension is "hard sci fi."  Quite the opposite.  MacInnes presents the book in five separate parts- part one is about the physical and psychological abuse Hasenbock suffered as a child at the hands of her father, a frustrated architect in charge of administering Dutch polders.    We pick up in the present day with Hasenbock on a boat in the middle of nowhere Pacific ocean, a junior member of a vessel exploring a hole in the ocean which is many times deeper than the Marianas trench.  This part reads like reportage with an ominous frisson of sci fi anxiety- they can't measure the depth of the hole in the ocean! People who swim around inside the ocean near the hole feel funny when they get out of the ocean!

  Fast forward, and Hasenbock is recruited to work on a highly secretive project which seemingly has something to do with an announcement that there has been a scientific breakthrough which will shortly lead to interstellar travel.  It's part Kubrick, part Tarkovsky and part Booker nominee level literary fiction.  

  I did want to mention that the Guardian review I read seemed to indicate that there wasn't a proper resolution but the edition I listened to very much did provide an ending- so not sure what happened there.   The Audiobook was great- loved Freya Miller and her voice. MacInnes deserves a higher profile in America and def will check out his other two books.

 

British-Pakistani author Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Published 7/29/23

The Centre (2023)

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

    The Centre is a very interesting debut novel by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.  It's part sci-fi, partly about the experience of being a British-Pakastani woman in the early 21st century.  There are themes of class, race, colonialism and even LGBTQ issues.  In short, The Centre is an ambitious, commercially-savvy debut, and it bodes well for Siddiqi and her future in the literary marketplace.   The Centre is very much in the category of books where extensive discussion of the plot can operate like a spoiler- even if there are no spoilers involved in the review, but the basic idea is that Anissa- the narrator- is a young, independent British-Pakistani woman living in London, eking out a living as a translator of Bollywood film subtitles into English,  Fortunately she is a woman of independent means, descended from one of the wealthy Indian-Muslim families who managed to relocate from India to Pakistan after the partition.

   Anissa shares this background with author Salman Rushdie, who's Indian Muslim family relocated when Rushdie was a teenager.  While taking classes at a local university she meets a young white guy who can fluently speak a dozen languages. She becomes intrigued, and eventually he introduces her to The Centre, where a select few can pay twenty thousand a pop to fluently learn a language in 10 days.  Members are sworn to secrecy, and Anissa is skeptical from the start, even as she gets deeply involved.

  I listened to the Audiobook, narrated by actress Balvinder Sopal- she was great, listening to her was a real pleasure.  I also very much enjoyed Siddiqi's authorial voice which reminded me of different writers from America (Moshfegh) and South America (Melchor, Enriquez).

Published 8/3/23

Not Even the Dead (2023)

by Juan Gomez Barcena

   I checked Not Even the Dead out from the library (digital version) because of this lede from the New York Times book review:

             We’ll never know what the late Cormac McCarthy might have thought of Juan Gómez Bárcena’s “Not Even the Dead,” but I wager that the novel would have appealed to him, and also to Roberto Bolaño and Joseph Conrad, if for no reason other than their egos. Each of them would have seen strong evidence of their influence on Bárcena, whose previous work — a story collection and a prizewinning novel, “The Sky Over Lima” — has already established him as a leading writer in Spain. His latest book, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore, only adds to his standing, thanks to its successful blend of ambitious literary dynamism with contemporary social and political commentary.  (New York Times)

   I'm not sure any human on earth could read Not Even the Dead and not have McCarthy and Bolaño at the top of their mind.  Conrad, yeah, sure, but def McCarthy and Bolano.  The McCarthy comparison is interesting because I've yet to come across a Spanish language writer who was anything but ornate and verbos.  Right now I'm thinking of Bolano, of course, but also Javier Marias- who wrote spy novels that read like Proust.   

  There is lots going on in Not Even the Dead, that same New York Times review calls it a "transhistorical" epic- which I didn't even notice at the time, but now realize is important to understanding the book.   I was hoping, I suppose, for less Bolano and more McCarthy, but the book moves in the opposite direction- the first 100 pages are McCarthy plus, and the last two hundred are Bolano minus- that's just my opinion.  Still worth reading if you are a reader of the McCarthy/Bolano/Conrad school of adventure literature.

Published 8/7/23

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023)

by Agustina Bazterrica

  I loved, loved, loved Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica's 2017(2020 in translation) novel, Tender is the Flesh, a parable about cannibalism and capitalism that really tore into both themes with wit and verve.  This year we get Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, a compilation of her short fiction- some pieces short enough to qualify as "flash fiction."  

   It's hard to get excited about the 19 stories in Nineteen Claws- there are some moments, some pages, some turns of phrase, but many of the works here are little more than literary sketches, which is fine, I understand the process by which authors who have a mid-career breakthrough in translation then get to back and publish their older/minor stuff in translation as well, and I'm here for it, but I didn't find Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird particularly satisfying.  I am looking forward to her next novel, though.  There's Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2023) by Agustina Bazterrica

Published 8/8/23

Crook Manifesto (2023)

by Colson Whitehead

   I listened to the Audiobook, narrated by the excellent Dion Graham- one of the most, maybe the most enjoyable Audiobook of the year.  Crook Manifesto is Book 2 of Whitehead's "Harlem Trilogy."  Book one was 2021's The Harlem Shuffle.  Presumably Whitehead is at the point in his career where he doesn't have to do anything in particular- I mean he's probably not set for life, but I'm guessing his publisher doesn't tell him what to do, especially since what he wants to do is a crowd-pleasing trilogy of historical fictions set in mid 20th century Harlem. 

   Back for book two is the same cast of main characters: Raymond Carney, second generation crook and furniture store owner, Pepper, his sometime partner in crime and Elizabeth, his loving wife.  Also back are some of the secondary players: Chink Montague, Bumpy Johnson, Lucinda Cole and crooked police detective William Munson.   Time has moved forward into the 1970's and Crook Manifesto is filled with fond memories of "bad ole New York," with several elements of that era:  the Black Power movement, the Blaxploitation film era and uptown redevelopment all playing a part in the story.

 

  Despite subject matter that would seem to necessitate an "R" rating, Whitehead keeps everything PG-13 the characters don't even swear.  It's a talent Whitehead has for writing adult fiction that doesn't necessarily eliminate the potential of a children reading and enjoying adult fiction.  That's certainly part of the reason he's won the Pulitzer Prize more than once- he is beloved by all. 

   Now that the cat is out of the back about the Harlem Trilogy, Crook Manifesto doesn't exactly thrill as much as it does please.  There is a deep aesthetic pleasure to almost every aspect of Whitehead's prose, whether it be Carney's musings over the home furniture market of the 1970's or Pepper's soliloquy that gives the book its name.  On the other hand, every reader knows from page one that Carney is going to make it to book three- or rather, one suspects that Whitehead isn't going to let go of such a compelling protagonist after two of three books.  The structure of the book is episodic, with tidy resolutions to difficult situations arriving every seventy pages.   Kind of a Quentin Tarantino vibe, you might say.

 

Author Chetna Maroo

Published 8/18/23

Western Lane (2022)

by Chetna Maroo

   Western Lane is a 2023 Booker longlist title by debut author Chetna Maroo.  It is a tidy little debut about a young Jain girl coping with the loss of her mother through her love for the game of squash.  It's a small, vividly drawn novel that handles the distinct religion of the Jain with a light touch.  In fact, I believe there is only one direct mention of their religious situation, with most of the specific references to religion/ethnicity coming via the Gujarati language school Gopi and her sisters attend after school.

    The Audiobook, narrated by Maya Soroya was great because- there is no way I can do the accents in this book in my head.  Maroo doesn't try to do too much- there is no backstory besides the recent death of Gopi's mom and its impact on the immediate family.  We know that Gopi's dad is an independent electrician and that they are a part of some sort of Gujarati expatriate community but it remained unclear whether these were jain co-religionists or just people from the same part of India.

  There is also A LOT of squash, so be ready to learn about the game if you tackle Western Lane.  

 

Published 8/18/23

Counterweight (2023)

by Djuna

 Counterweight is a very interesting Korean export written by a pseudonymous author, Djuna.  It reads like an update of early William Gibson, taking place mostly on an island off the coast of Indonesia where a Korean mega corporation is building a first-of-its-kind space elevator to facilitate interstellar exploration (and mining nearby asteroids for metals).   The narrator is a security operative for LK corporation and the story involves the memories of the recently deceased corporation president and their implantation in the mind of a low-level LK employee.  Many people want those memories, and once the word gets out it is violent mayhem.   Like Walking Practice by Dolki Min, another work of Korean sci-fi, Counterweight emerges as a fresh take on the genre with literary aspirations that come from being a work in translation. It's worth a read for fans of the genre and fans of translated Korean lit.  I listened to the Audiobook, which wasn't amazing, but it is a good title for listening to as an Audiobook because of the rhythms of the prose in translation and the fact that the whole book is narrated in the first person.

Published 8/20/23

Venomous Lumpsucker (2022)

by Ned Beauman

   There are a couple ways I keep track of what books I want to read- the first tier is the New York Times book section, the reviews that appear in the Guardian and the publications I have in my feedly- Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, etc.  Second tier is the nominees and winners for a host of literary prizes- The Booker Prize is my number one, then the National Book Award then the secondary awards- usually just the winners.  The Arthur C. Clarke award, which was established in 1987 for the "best science fiction" book published first in the UK in the preceding year.   If you look at the past winners you've got a pretty good guide to the important stopping points in the continuing intersection of science fiction/genre and literary fiction.  Previous winners include trailblazers like Margaret Atwood- The Handmaidens Tale was the original winner in 1987, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Emily St. John Mandel, Colson Whitehead and Namwali Serpell- all authors who are widely read by the general reading audience for literary fiction.

   Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman was the Arthur C. Clarke prize winner this year.  I checked it out from the library in an e-book when I read the announcement, only to learn that I'd checked it out when it was originally released and didn't actually read it. Beauman is another science fiction/literary fiction cross-over author.  His 2011 book, The Teleportation Accident made the then Man Booker Prize longlist. 

    Like many succesful works of cross-over literary/science fiction, Venomous Lumpsucker dwells in a future that is close enough to be described with the vocabulary of the present, but different enough to evoke interest.  The world of Venomous Lumpsucker is recognizably a variation on "the not so distant future," global warming/climate change continues unabated, but the United Nations has somehow managed to set up a binding system of extinction credits to manage the competing needs of economic growth and environmental protection but you probably don't need me to tell you how that is going at the beginning of the book.

   The two major characters are Karen Resaint, a hired gun who helps companies manage the extinction process and Mark Halyard, the employee of an Indian mining conglomerate charged with their end of what Resaint calls, "the extinction industry."  The plot is set in motion by a surprise attack on a "bio-bank" used by governments and corporations to store the genetic data of now extinct species.  The bio bank is wiped out.  The value of extinction credits goes up by a factor of 10 (50,000 to 500,000) over-night, which leads to complications for Halyard, who is now caught in a semi-illicit act of arbitrage which centers on the work done by Resaint.  My feeling is that the sophistication of the set-up- which involves an university level of contemporary economics- should be enough to intrigue a potential reader if the pedigree of the Arthur C. Clarke.

  The action that follows the set up isn't particularly inventive, but the reader is carried along by the richness of the world Beauman described- down to his coy use of the term The Hermit Kingdom to describe what has happened in the United Kingdom- a transition that mostly remains off stage until the exciting conclusion of the book. 

Published 8/30/23

Audiobook Review

Zone One (2011)

by Colson Whitehead

  I think if you had to look at the top two authors to combine genre writing with literary fiction it would be 1) Kazuo Ishiguro because he won the Nobel Prize- not known for their embrace of genre-fiction embracing literary fiction and 2) Colson Whitehead- because he won the National Book Award AND the Pulitzer for Underground Railroad- a bold take on the alternate-history genre of science fiction.  His success with Underground Railroad was presaged by The Intuitionist, his debut novel and this book Zone One, his 2011 foray into Zombie-bit.  

  I read Zone One when it came out- bought the hardback first edition- but never wrote about it for this blog.  After listening to his latest book on Libby, I saw the Audiobook for Zone One and thought, "Hey, that looks fun!"  And it is, intermittently- the key difference between this book and his award winners is that this book is less concerned with telling an actual story and reads more like a work of literary fiction/experimental fiction set in a genre world than an actual attempt to fuse the two things- which his books after this point have accomplished as witnessed by their price winning status and universal acclaim. 

  What the reader gets in Zone One is basically a series of flashbacks where the protagonist muses about the lost world, spelled with episodes set in a post-zombie reconstruction lower Manhattan, where civilian-military personnel are mopping up, building by building after the Marines accomplished the heavy lifting.  Mark Spitz, the narrator, wasn't much in the world before, in the world after, he like, everybody else, is a survivor par excellence. If you take out the flashbacks, the story can be summarized in a sentence, but that also functions as a spoiler, so.  

 Published 9/11/23

Audiobook Review

Christendom (2022)

by Peter Heather

  British historian Peter Heather is the leading popular voice in the area of the history of late antiquity (Europe).  I've been enjoying his books for years. Heather is part of a generation of historians- he's actually part of the second generation of scholars in this area- who have rewritten the history of Rome by applying advances in historiography which have occurred since the late 19th century, when Edward Gibbons published his monumentally influential The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbons was a fan of the idea that the Roman Empire was felled via the decadence of its own people- many of our received cultural ideas about the insanity of late Rome can be traced directly to people who read The History of the  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the century and a half when it was the only such history. 

  Anyway- times have changed, as Heather has repeatedly noted over the past two decades.  In Christendoom he hones in on the changes that occurred after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  The conventional wisdom- largely put forward by the Catholic church in the early Middle Ages to justify the outsize role they wished to play in Europe- was that the Roman conversion was thorough and involved the vast majority of Roman citizens converting with a generation or so.   This explanation was largely accepted by secular historians in the modern period, and only recently have scholars begun to question this received wisdom.

   As it turns out, the conversion of the Roman country-side to Christianity was nothing like a thorough-going conversion of the entire countryside, rather it resembled an adoption by local elites of a new "Cult of the Emperor" that was very much in their self interest as citizens of the Roman Empire. Those who had less interest in the empire as a whole had almost no reason to convert for centuries.

   Another strand of Heather's analysis concerns the idea that Roman Catholicism and its medieval power structure was somehow present in the time after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  Heather points to non-controversial scholarship that firmly demonstrates the absurdity of this idea.  Rome was originally only one of four patriarchs and there was no idea of a supreme Rome (outside of Rome) until after the Islamic conquest decimated the patriarchates of the Near East. 

    After a shaky section on the Islamic world made difficult by the lack of medieval Islamic scholars in pre-Islamic local history or early Islamic history (this being a controversial subject inside Islam), Heather gets to the real heart of the book, a tour of recent scholarship on the conversion experience in Northern Europe from Ireland through the Baltics.  This has been a fertile area for scholarship and Heather has absorbed it all and regurgitated it in easily consumable form.

  I listened to the Audiobook- 24 hours in length- because I've got his other hits in hardback and didn't want another on the shelf.  I didn't find it as difficult as the New York Times reviewer- but perhaps listening to it rather than reading it saved me some problems in reading comprehension.

Published 9/11/23

Sparrow (2023)

by James Hynes

 I practically spit out my coffee when I read the write-up of Sparrow by James Hynes in the Sunday New York Times Book Review last month:  A novel set in post-Christian Rome written from the POV of a slave in a whore-house?  Sign me up!  Serious works of fiction set in this period are few and far between, so kudos to Hynes who includes an afterword showing he was up to date on the scholarship surrounding the delicate issues of sexuality in Rome, a slave-holding society.  Those interested in this place and time will find much to like in Sparrow- though the sexual content is at times cringe inducing- just like- horrible stuff about the experiences of sex workers in the Roman Empire, but Hynes doesn't sensationalize the abuse and I enjoyed the rest of the book.

Published 9/18/23

Ascension (2023)

by Nicholas Binge

  I checked out the Audiobook of Ascension by Nicholas Binge after reading the the New York Times book review.  The mere fact of a work of speculative fiction getting a full length book review in the Times is unusual.  Ascension is also a take on the genre known as "cosmic horror"- pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft and his ilk.  I was intrigued.   As it turned out, Ascension was almost too faithful to the conventions of the genre.  Start with a clunky format- letters discovered by the relatives of a scientist who has gone mad after an expedition to a mysterious mountain that has just "appeared" in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.   Add a healthy dose of the "nameless horror" situation as the crack team of soldiers and academics makes their way up said mountain.  Conclude with a prototypical white male narrator who spends most of the book regretting his emotional unavailability which caused him to split up with his ex-wife (who of course, is also on this same expedition).   It made, quite frankly, for a tedious Audiobook and I think the print version would have been a better experience. 

   On the positive side, Ascension does deliver a fun adventure yarn with a suitably mind-blowing conclusion-none if it makes a lick of sense, but that is cosmic horror for you.

Published 9/18/22

The Bee Sting (2022)

by Paul Murray

  The Booker Prize shortlist announcement is this week (9/21).  I got a tip from an acquaintance who served as a judge on the Costa Prize until it ended that The Bee Sting, by Irish author Paul Murray was a hot pick over in the UK so I prioritized getting my hands on the eBook and then reading that eBook (I have a pretty high percentage of NOT completing the eBooks I check out from the library).  This is the fifth book from the longlist I've tackled (Western Lane, In Ascension, This Other Eden and Old God's Time).  Of those five I'd say that this book and Old God's Time are both likely shortlist candidates, followed by Western Lane and that In Ascension (genre) and This Other Eden (white male American author) are both unlikely to make the cut.

  In fact, The Bee Sting could very much be the winner this year since it combines elements that Booker juries have prioritized in recent years: First and foremost, it's a good read- a book with interesting, sympathetic characters, a definite story to tell and a plot that rewards reading the whole book.  That's the main thing I've noticed from the last several years of Booker nominees- the shortlisters and winners tend to actually be entertaining books that reward the reader.  Like many books in this category, the description "An Irish family tries to deal with the fall-out from the 2008 recession," doesn't do the book justice.  It's also true that this is one of those books where an in depth review is likely to compromise the reading experience.   Indeed though, this book has the feel of a winner (as does Old God's Time).

Published 9/18/23

Audiobook Review

Prophet (2023)

by Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald

  I never read H is for Hawk, the 2014 falconry memoir turned surprise best-seller, but I darn sure saw it nearly everywhere- and still do, for that matter.  H is for Hawk is still in print, and its still selling.  As far as I'm aware (not very) all of her books have been non-fiction type stuff about birds.  So when I read- in the Guardian I think- that MacDonald's newest book was a techno-sci-fi-lgbt-thriller- I was intrigued.  Who had that on their 2023 bingo card:  Helen MacDonald sci-fi techo thriller?

   Not really a cross-over you expect to see at the highest level of literary fiction or literary fiction genre cross-over.  I have to say- the genre elements are quite strong here- if you look at the cover art, for example.  I listened to the Audiobook, and it sounds like a straight-forward, albeit bizarre, techno-sci-fi-thriller written by a top-flight author of non-fiction works about birds that have found a huge mainstream audience.    The essence of the book is the relationship between Sunil Rao- a self-destructive London born "human lie detector"- he is able to determine the truth value of any statement and Rubenstein- a steely Jewish-American jack of all trades for the CIA.

   The story begins in the fields of rural England, where a 50's style American diner has appeared in the middle of an English pasture on a US military installation located in the English countryside.  Rao, lately of HMS prison, is summoned by the American military to assist in the investigation.  There he is tasked a handler- Rubenstein- they've worked before. Rao has just, an incredible amount of LGBT back story- like it feels like half the book is Rao explaining himself and his backstory. 

  The thing they've invented for the novel- a drug (or is it a drug?) called Prophet- is a very interesting proposition and what starts out as a crazy drug turns into a substance that may cross dimensions and contain some kind of sentience.  There were plot elements that left me scratching my head, but in light of the obvious literary fiction pedigree any reader has to give the authors vast artistic license to diverge from genre bound expectations regarding plot development in the context of a sci-fi thriller type book.

   Maybe a Hugo Prize Winner?

Published 9/19/23

Cosmic Scholar:

 The Life and Times of Harry Smith (2023)

by John Szwed

  It may be hard to imagine, but once upon a time, being cool took work.  As it turned out, I was one of the last people to grow up without access to the internet- I remember seeing the internet work for the first time in my freshman college dorm room.  I finished college and law school without possessing a lap top computer (I had a desktop computer in law school).  Back when I was a lad, discovering the counter-culture required physically travelling to bookshops- I went to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and later, City Lights Book Store in San Francisco.  Learning about new music meant going to Amoeba and Rasputin Records in Berkeley.  These days, it's almost impossible to imagine the lengths I had to go to in order to learn about non-mainstream culture.

   How timely then that author John Szwed had written this biography of Harry Smith, best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, generally credited with inspiring Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and literally the entire 60's music explosion.   Smith was known as an icon of the downtown New York art scene though it was unclear what, exactly, he was up to at any given moment.   The Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 and it was created from Smith's amazing collection of 78 records, which he had begun collecting in the 1940's in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Smith's biography is more interesting than any fiction, reading Cosmic Scholar is more interesting than reading a dozen works of contemporary literary fiction.

   Each chapter is a different adventure: Smith starts in the Pacific Northwest, making field recordings of Native American songs before he had graduated high school.  Next he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became a trailblazer in the world of be-bop jazz and experimental cinema.  Following San Francisco he relocated to NYC where he was an inspirational figure to the entire downtown art world through the 1960's and 1970's.   During this period he was mostly focused on elaborately insane art films, a chapter which reaches its apogee with his attempt to make an "animated" version of the Wizard of Oz (never completed). 

   He started doing drugs in the Bay Area- where he was smoking marijuana and taking amphetamines in the 1940's.  In New York he graduated to the hard stuff- by the 70's and 80's he became a regular user of cocaine and methamphetamine.  As Szwed points out repeatedly (you could call it the story of Smith's life) he was his own worst enemy and managed to burn through friends and patrons via a mixture of extremely uncouth behavior (frequent tantrums) and constant need for people to give him money (he never, ever had a job).  Szwed and others mention again and again that one of the marvels of Harry Smith's life is how he managed to even exist for decades in New York- making art and scenes, while never having a visible means of support.

   Frankly, he sounds like a trust funder, but Szwed provides enough information(like the fact that he never had a bank account) to rule this out as a possibility.   As an avowed experimental artist, much of what Szwed was trying to accomplish, artistically speaking, sounds ridiculous but his inspiration status can't be questioned.  How else to explain that his primary supporters at the end of his life were Allen Ginsburg and Jerry Garcia and that his papers were purchased by the Bob Dylan archive? 

  

Published 9/22/23

Remote Sympathy (2022)

by Catherine Chidgey

     The Guardian called this is an example of the newish genre of "Holocaust Literature."  I am a fan of the genre- unabashed, in the only the way a solo reader could be- hard to imagine plugging into a community of similar interested readers.  By my making, the foundational text of this genre- which are works of fiction written from the perspective of Nazi's, rather than works of fiction written about the Nazi's where the characters are either victims or onlookers- is The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littrell, published in French in 2006 and reviewed in its English translation by the New York Times in 2009.   The next major work in the genre is HHhH by French prankster Laurent Binet- that book got an English translation in 2010.  Since then there have been more- as witness the 2022 Guardian review of this book, which references it as a genre. 

    Remote Sympathy is itself an impressive achievement in the genre.  Chidgey takes a polyphonic approach- rotating perspectives- the Camp Commandant, who is being interviewed from prison in the 1950's, his cancer-stricken wife, whose voice is conveyed by her "imaginary diary" and Leonard Weber, an eighth-Jewish doctor with unconventional ideas about treating cancer with electricity (which is the source of the title).  Hahn, the camp commandant at Buchenwald, which was the concentration camp the Nazi's put in Weimar, reads about Weber's abandoned research, and has him transferred from the Eastern front to Buchenwald in order that he may treat Hahn's wife. 

   Chidgey stops well short of Littrell's relentless lack of humanity and is no where near as funny/clever as Binet (who is?) but I did find Remote Sympathy a compelling entry on the Holocaust Literature shelf.  Be warned- it clocks in at over 500 pages so it is not a light read. 

Published 9/22/23

The Fraud (2023)

by Zadie Smith

    I haven't read much Zadie Smith- just On Beauty which was one of the last books from the original 1001 Books list.  The Fraud is her sixth novel, and I was intrigued by previews that indicated it was a work of historical fiction partially set in the mid 19th century milieu of literary London, with characters including Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank and a starring role for now-forgotten English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who actually out-sold Charles Dickens at certain points in his lengthy career but is now forgotten.  I knew from On Beauty that I could expect The Fraud to be well researched and clever, and I was not disappointed.    The narrator is Eilza Touchet, the cousin and sometimes lover of Ainsworth.

  Touchet is a classic Zadie Smith protagonist, multi-faceted and complex, determined to live her own life after the untimely, early death of her husband.  Much of the plot concerns Touchet's interest in the Tichborne Case, a cause celebre in 1860's and 70's London.  The Tichborne case involved a man who returned from Australia to claim that he was the long lost and previously thought deceased claimant to an English title.  Smith also develops the character of Andrew Bogle, the Jamaican born servant of one of the Tichborne's and a supporter of the Tichborne claimant. The relationship between Touchet and Bogle is well developed but to little impact- there is a hint of the possibility of any interracial relationship but it doesn't go anywhere.

   I gather the reviews have only been so-so, but if you actually are a fan of the literature of mid 19th century England- Dickens et al, then you can hardly afford to skip reading The Fraud.  Also worth noting- I checked out the Audiobook from the library and Zadie Smith herself narrates, which is a very mid 19th century author type of thing to do- Dickens loved giving public readings and doing the voices of his characters. 

Published 9/27/23

Beyond the Door of No Return (2023)

by David Diop

  I really enjoyed French novelist David Diop's first book, At Night All Blood is Black.  It won the Students Prix Goncourt in France, the 2020 LA Times Fiction Book Prize and the 2021 International Booker Prize.  Also, I genuinely enjoyed it- a novel about the experience of an African volunteer in the French army during World War I.   His new book, about the experience of a French naturalist in early 19th century Senegal- then a quasi-French territory but a weak one with many local rulers- was nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature (they need to work shop the name of that award!) and I'm sure it will be nominated for the International Booker next year. 

  Diop's 19th century Franco-phone Africa is a nuanced portrayal- we are a century past Conrad and his Heart of Darkness, and Diop's Senegal reflects the more nuanced view of the colonial experience that has percolated through academia in recent decades.  This early in the 19th century, the slave trade was still going full tilt- the first French ban on slavery (within France) didn't come till 1818, and slavery was abolished in French territories in 1845.

  I sensed that the narrator- the French naturalist, isn't really the focus of the book, which consists of a kind of post-mortem revelation of his past to his daughter, years after the experiences described; rather it is Senegal and the rich historical tapestry of the early 19th century at the center of Beyond the Door of No Return.  Presumably, the title of the book refers to the actual Door of No Return in Benin, which is a monument to the experience of the enslaved as they leave Africa for the last time.

  I tore through the book- I just so enjoyed turning each page (figuratively speaking because I read the eBook copy from the Los Angeles Public Library), that I didn't want it to end. I wish it was 500 pages long!

Published 9/29/23

The Devil of the Provinces (2023)

by Juan Cardenas

Translated by Lizzie Davis

   The Devil of the Provinces by Colombian author Juan Cardenas is the fourth book from the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature I've read.  It's also the second book by Juan Cardenas I've tackled- the first was Ornamental (2020).  This book was produced by the same publishes, Coffee House Press, and the same interpreter, Lizzie Davis and generally speaking covers the same literary territory as Ornamental, about a medical researcher who returns from abroad and is recruited to work on a shadowy pharmaceutical project sponsored by either the government, a private corporation or a drug cartel- the lack of clarity is kind of the central thing going on in Ornamental.

  Here, the returning narrator is a biologist, not a chemist, but the plot follows a broadly similar path- the narrator is approached by an ex-girlfriend to work on a problem with the palm fields- which he knows are a highly destructive crop in terms of their environmental impact on their surroundings.  The question becomes, will he take the job or won't he.  Like Ornamental(175 pages), The Devil of the Provinces is brief.  The audiobook version I heard was a little over three hours long. 

   It doesn't seem to me like The Devil of the Provinces is a potential National Book Award winner.  Maybe a finalist?  It seems unlikely.   Once again, I was delighted to see that there was in Audiobook version- too often Translated Literature is book format only, when the delights of a translated Audiobook come in hearing the characters speak with the English language accents of their translated languages.  It doesn't make any sense, if you stop and think about it- characters speaking in translation would have the voice of the translator, not the voice of the original characters. kind of the reverse of the way subtitles vs dubbed audio works in films. 

   The Devil of the Provinces is also a reminder that a character who might be totally insufferable if he was an American can be an interesting fellow in another country.  Impossible to imagine the same plot happening in the USA or Western Europe, let alone what this character WOULD be getting up to in USA/Western Europe that anyone would want to read about.

Published 10/5/23
The Vaster Wilds (2023)

by Lauren Groff

     I'm a big fan of American author Lauren Groff.  The first book I read by her was her short story collection, Florida (2018)-  I thought it was very interesting, particularly the texture she gave to the environment of Florida itself- which- you don't see portrayed much in literary fiction.  Most of the Florida books I've read have been detective fiction- namely Elmore Leonard's Florida era.  After Florida I went back and read Fates and Furies (2015)- which was nominated for the National Book Award.  I didn't love Fates and Furies, but it is impossible to argue with a National Book Award nomination.  I read Matrix- her very cool novel about life in a medieval Nunnery in England when it was released in 2021 and loved it.   I actually bought the hardback edition.  For The Vaster Wilds I checked out the Audiobook because the description, "girl escapes foundering American colony in the New World to fend for herself in pre-lapsarian North America"; sounded like a good Audiobook listen.

    Readers, I am here to say that The Vaster Wilds is a bit of a dud. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the listening experience, but Groff's minimalist attention to plot left me wanting more and less at the same time.  One of the issues here is that if you strand a pubescent, uneducated 17th century servant girl in the wilderness she isn't going to have many memories to reflect upon over the course of the book.  Groff keeps her isolated from the Native Americans, which cuts off another plausible path for narrative development.

   The narrator's flashbacks (she is unnamed in the book) to life in England don't feel revelatory or even particularly nuanced- life for a foundling servant child in 17th century London wasn't fun, we all know that and aside from the odd rape she seemed to have emerged from that portion of her experience with fewer scars than many other characters from the era.  We glimpse some true horror when the flashbacks take her through her life in the Virginia colony before her escape at the beginning of the books- some of the details there reminded me of the some of the grimmest moments of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  Overall, her survival narrative is almost frighteningly dull- she escapes the colony, travels far enough to evade capture and then settles down for a decade.  Basically Groff gets her settled then presses fast forward to the end. 

  It make for an excellent Audiobook since it's a single voice adventure story- I enjoyed the experience, just didn't think it was Lauren Groff's best work.  Certainly a let down after the subtly nuanced Nuns of Matrix. 

Author Maya Binyam

 

Published 10/5/23

Hangman (2023)

by Maya Binyam

  I checked the Audiobook version out of the library after seeing a couple of reviews of this book by Ethiopian-American author Maya Binyam- it's a debut novel, written by a woman and- surprise- it isn't about being a mom, not being a mom, being single, not being single etc.  That is pretty much an automatic read for me- a book written by a woman that isn't about motherhood or the travails of being an educated, upper-class white woman who lives in a city in NYC, LA, SF or London.  I'm looking for a breath of fresh air, in other words, and Hangman, an intriguing tale about an expatriate who returns to his unnamed country of origin because he believes his brother is dying, is precisely that, a book, written by a young, American author that isn't just about a stand in for the author complaining about her life for three hundred pages.

    Hangman was great- even though the country is unnamed I noticed similarities to Africa and Ethiopia.  The narrator of the Audiobook had such a distinct African accent that it seemed like a tacit admission that the book is set in Africa.  At times the writing reminded me of Kafka, Naipaul and Coetzee- a book filled with lower case p politics but also with intriguing narrative development and memorable supporting characters and locations.  Hangman has much to recommend it, and I recommend it highly!

Published 10/18/23

Abyss (2023)

by Pilar Quintana

translation by Lisa Dillman

  Strong year for the finalists in the National Book Award for Translated Literature.  You've got the second novel by David Diop, a disturbing book of short stories by Bora Chung (Korean lit is so hot rn!)  Abyss, by Colombian author Pilar Quintana, who was nominated in 2020 in the same category for The Bitch, is another strong contender on the theory that multiple nominations for major literary awards increase the author's chance of winning each time.  Abyss is a familiar tale, told from a newish perspective, about the impact a parent's lives have on the inner life of their daughter, eight and a half, narrated by that daughter. This is an example of a child narrator for a work of adult fiction- nothing about Abyss is YA or children's lit. 

   The struggles of Claudia's parents, particularly her mother, who spends her days in bed reading celebrity gossip magazines, is hardly novel, but the location, Cali Colombia.  The time isn't specified but the gossip references in Claudia's mothers magazines: The death of Karen Carpenter, in particular, happens during the course of the novel.  The real star of Abyss, is Cali Colombia itself, which seems a quasi-idyllic place in the eyes of eight year old Claudia.  1983 was before the rise of the Cali cartel, and Abyss includes a distinct locations- a modernist vacation home built onto the side of the cliff.  This location proves significant in the development of the plot and gives the book its name. 

  Abyss doesn't feel like a prize winner to me- there isn't anything here that wasn't in What Maisie Knew in 1897, but the place and time of the book made it an interesting read, and I do like Quintana and her general style.  I'd like to see a bigger book from her, but I know that shorter pieces are all the rage these days, so I'm pretty sure she doesn't care about going big. Still, Cali...Colombia...historical fiction... lotta material there to mine.

 

American author C. Pam Zhang

Published 10/19/23

Audiobook Review

Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

by C. Pam Zhang

      I didn't love C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, but I certainly admired it.  Any American author who makes their debut novel something OTHER than a coming-of-age book about their particular experience/milieu or a book about how difficult relationships, dating and marriage are is interesting to me.  That debut didn't go unnoticed- it got longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey was published by Penguin Random House main, where her first book was published by Riverhead, the prestige literary fiction imprint wholly owned and operated Penguin, now Penguin Random House.  That's a promotion! 

   I mention it because so much of the contemporary scene for literary fiction is decided by who gets published in the first place, and whether they get a second book, a third book, etc, at the same level.  Readers have almost nothing to do with that process, and yet breaking free of its orbit in any significant way is essentially impossible.  When you write about contemporary literary fiction you are writing about the mainstream publishing behemoths and their market-driven choices.   

  I knew Land of Milk and Honey would be a priority read after reading a one line description that promised a near-future dystopia and a food-driven plot.  How, I thought to myself, could that go wrong?  I found the New York Times book review, written by Alexandra Kleeman, to be polite but not an overwhelming recommendation.  She also claims to respect Zhang's resistance to the short-attention span of modern readers, but it was hard for me to see how Land of Milk and Honey would be taxing to the average reader of literary fiction.  It is, after all, part genre- nothing complicated about a climate-based near-future dystopia because we already live in one, and part conventional American literary fiction about a character with a complicated relationship to capitalism, western values and her immigrant parents.   

   I checked out the Audiobook from the library- narrated by Eunice Wong (Julliard graduate actress) who voices the Southern Californian Chinese-American chef (nameless by design) at the center of the book.   It was a great Audiobook- Wong captures the voice of the chef, no doubt.   The story at the center of the book- a remote Italian mountain top where a billionaire and his prodigy daughter are preparing to survive the end of the world- has its moments, but the most memorable portions concerned the chef looking back on her relationship with her doctor-in-china-cleaning-lady-in-america single mother and her struggles growing up in southern california.

    Published 10/31/23

Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (2023)

  by Matthew Dallek

 I hadn't thought about the John Birch society in a while before I saw the NYT review of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.  Before reading I was broadly familiar with the outlines of the Birch Society- a group of staunch anti-communists who pioneered many of the tactics embraced by the far-right today, but I didn't know the details.  For example, that the founder of the Birch Society was a Massachussets based candy-maker.   Like many pioneers who were ahead of their time, the Birchers faced challenges and ridicule in their then near quixotic attempts to steer the American Public (and the Republican party) to the far-right.

     They were mocked by the media (all the media were mainstream media in the 1950's) and countered their influence by becoming dedicated early on to making their own propaganda materials.  Like the far right Republicans of today, they were more likely to actively target members of their own party- their leader called Eisenhower a Communist during his Presidency- then members of the opposition.  Again, like the far right of today, they had little to say to their actual opponents, who they basically saw as Satan-affiliated, and became obsessed with the perceived inauthenticity of their own representatives. 

  Richard Nixon, in particular, was a target- really THE target, for his flexible centrist policies.  Nixon, for this part, hated the Birchers, despite the fact that they represented an important part of the Republican coalition.  Eventually they would be co-opted by Barry Goldwater, starting with his landslide defeat to LBJ after Kennedy was assassinated.  Reagan would finish the job of bringing the Birchers fully onboard- he figured out the same thing that Trump figured out:  If you talk the talk what you actually DO is less important.    Another take-away from Birchers is that like today's far right, they weren't particularly interested in questions of morality- their are brief mentions about anti-Abortion, but that is essentially a different book.

   It's also interesting that while the particular policy concern of the Birchers:  The communist conspiracy for world-domination, has fallen by the way side, their style has found a home on the internet.  The paranoid style in American politics has never been more popular and Donald Trump is quite easily the most Bircher-esque President in American history.  Unlike Reagan, who was a mainstream pol who co-opted radicals with his savvy communication style, Trump seems to actually be a descendant of the Birchers.

Published 10/31/23

A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960 (2023)

 by Nikhil Krishnan

  I knew I had to read this book based on the title- how often does one see a personality driven book about the rise of analytic philosophy at Oxford during the early and mid 20th century?  Not often, I'll tell you. Broadly speaking, Oxford was the home of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy in the Anglo-American world.  The "linguistic turn" basically describes a philosophical movement that started in Europe and then migrated into the English speaking world.  The idea was to abandon the philosophical obsession with the unknowable, broadly called "metaphysics" and to replace it with an approach that focused on the relation between, "language, language users and the world." 

  Krishnan tells a modestly entertaining tale about this world.  Prominent figures include J.L. Austin, author of How to Do Things With Words, A.J. Ayer and philosopher turned novelist Iris Murdoch.  Austin assumes an almost heroic stature, both in terms of his achievements in the field and his war-time service, where he played a huge and important role in organizing the D-Day invasion.   It's pretty incredible that he could be both a pragmatic and theoretical thinker, echoing the contribution of scientists like Oppenheimer and Einstein, who most certainly could not have organized the D-Day invasion. 

  As a lawyer, I've always been partial to words and their meaning. It's an irony that the impact of this philosophical movement within the law has been largely conservative- it's hard to imagine the textual approach of the current Supreme Court without the influence of analytic philosophy.

Published 11/7/23

The MANIAC (2023)

by Benjamin Labatut

    There is no doubt that Latin American literature, comprised of writers from South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, comprise one of the most vibrant canons in world literature.  I'm talking 20th century, here.  Within that world Chile isn't exactly a backwater- with two Nobel Prize winning poets (Mistral and Neruda) and contemporary author Isabelle Allende broadly known to a world audience, but the fiction scene has taken off- alongside Argentina- in terms of international attention.  Labatut.  His last book- When We Cease to Understand the World- was published in 2021 to international acclaim- it was shortlisted both for the International Booker where it lost to David Diop- which is like, fair enough, and the National Book Award for Translated Literature where it lost to Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Dusapin- which I never read.  

  When We Cease to Understand the World was distinctive both in terms of the technique- which featured heavy doses of scientific theory alongside more conventional novelistic concerns like the price of genius.  It was... a heady mix... and if it wasn't quite a la mode in terms of the subject matter, personally, I loved it. I'm pointing that out because The MANIAC- the capitalization reflects the fact that Maniac is an acronym for an early computer- is a similar blend of heavy scientific fact with a novelists grasp of personality and the international audience for literary fiction. 

     Specifically, The MANIAC picks up at the dawn of the computer age, in the aftermath of the tremendous power required to run the equations to invent the atomic bomb. The MANIAC is a real computer- built at the Los Alamos laboratory and weighing in excess of 1000 pounds, it was the first device that allowed the idea of artificial intelligence to be expressed.  

     It is pretty esoteric stuff, obviously, but I was struck when one of the characters actually said that the The MANIAC used 5 kilobytes of RAM, which is like... a jpeg today. This was the first computer to beat a human in a game of any kind- not chess.   Like When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut glides through time- which- I might add, is an incredibly savvy story telling technique because the shift in focus prevents character burn-out with the reader.  You get all these chapters of the lives of these brilliant wierdos, but they come in and then exit the frame.  I think that is the element of Labatut's writing that puts him on the edge of actually winning one of these major in translation awards.

   His tour de force is his last chapter about the attempts (succesful) to make an AI that could beat a top world player at the game of GO which is known in a diminutive (and I now realize nearly comical) form in America as Othello- we are such BARBARIANS how they must laugh at us for that.  The point is that GO is fantastically complicated- makes Chess look like a kids book is the idea.  Labatut tells this story- which has a similar shape and feel to a lengthy Harper's or New Yorker piece- but there is such a pay off at the end it made me feel like I was reading a work of great literature- something really profound.  No spoilers on the revelation contained, but wow.

Published 11/9/23

Audiobook Review

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) 

by Shehan Karunatilaka

   I missed this 2022 Booker Prize winner during my long COVID era- which lasted roughly one year from when I got COVID to when I was back to something close to like what I was before in terms of reading capacity.  Long COVID is no joke- though I count myself lucky that I didn't have any PHYSICAL long COVID symptoms, continued to do my job etc.  At the time I thought if that was the worst COVID impact- well it could have been much worse.

  For me, the Booker Prize is the primary way I keep track of literary fiction from South Asia:  India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lank included.  The level of interest inside the US is basically nil, and promoting authors from all corners of the Commonwealth is at the center of the Booker Prize mission.  Most of the works of literary fiction written by South Asian authors inside the US tends to be immigrant coming-of-age stories or a variation on the multi-generational family history book.  Shehan Karunatilaka is from Sri Lanka, which is a particularly interesting place for literary fiction right now being both an English speaking place, a place of tremendous diversity- human and otherwise and a site of recent generational trauma (the long civil war against the Taiml separatists), and present uncertainty  (Chinese influenced debt crisis.)  In this regard, Sri Lankan literature sometimes feels like it belongs in Latin America since the Sri Lankan experience roughly mirrors the history of Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

  One might reasonably expect a burst of creativity out of the cultural conditions outlined above, and thus, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which combines a very specific Sri Lankan narrative with plot devices and themes that are in common with those in other cutting edge works of literary fiction in the west, was a worthy Booker Prize winner.  I checked out the Audiobook, because I figured the narration would be a real accent fest- what is a Sri Lankan accent, anyway? I was not disappointed- I loved the Audiobook.

  I also loved the book itself which combines the supernatural, civil war and LGBTQ issues with humor to create an intoxicating stew of a novel.  It's no wonder it won the Booker Prize. 

Published 11/17/23

Cursed Bunny (2022)

by Bora Chung

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

   Cursed Bunny was a 2022 Booker International Nominee.  It was translated from the Korean by Anton Hur- who also translated Counterweight by Djuna.  Chung graduated from Yale and a PhD in Slavic Literature at Indiana University and she teaches Russian in Korea as her day job, which means she is fluent at a professional/artistic/specialist level in at least three different languages.  You would think she could have either composed Cursed Bunny in English or provided her own translation but Korean appears to be a complicated language to translate because they have their brand of experientialism that has to do with the placement of the written figures of Korean on the page. 

   

  I'm not sure if that was in play here, but I often feel with Korean literature that something is lost in the translation or at least that a deeper knowledge of Korean culture is required to really appreciate the fiction.  Cursed Bunny is a collection of ten short stories that combine the supernatural, body horror and 'magical realism' in different shapes and sizes.  

     To give an example drawn from the title story, a family is in the business of making fetish curses. They create one for the head of a corporation who has wronged a victim who hires the family to make him a curse.  Instead of taking the cursed fetish (a rabbit lamp) home, he puts it into storage.  Chaos ensues.  It's not the only story about a curse, and roughly half have some kind of supernatural element.  Like many Korean books that get translated, I found myself wondering about the motivations of the characters in a way that rarely happens when I read books from the west. 

Published 11/20/23

Audiobook Review

Tremor (2023)

by Teju Cole

  I'm a big Teju Cole fan- I like the way he mixes up fiction, art criticism and biographical detail in a way that reminds me of W.G. Sebald- one of my favorites.  The New York Times reviewer agreed:

He has written admiringly about, and frequently been compared to, the German writer W.G. Sebald; they share among other things a capacity to tunnel back from a single image or artifact to scenes of historical barbarism. (I almost wrote that Cole seems like a postcolonial version of Sebald — but Sebald is already the postcolonial Sebald.)

  

  There are quite a few Sebaldian takes in Tremor, notably the initial chapter where Tunde, a Nigerian-American professor who serves as the Teju Cole figure, and his Japanese wife, go antiquing in Southern Maine and come across a poorly maintained African artifact.  Later there is a chapter length "lecture" on the JMW Turner painting, "Slave Ship," which depicts a historical episode where the captain of a slave ship through his human cargo overboard in an attempt to save his vessel during a storm.

   There are also some non-Sebaldian features in Tremors, like the part in the middle where he voices 24 different people who live in Lagos, Nigeria. All of it is very entertaining to readers interested in the kind of art criticism/fiction pioneered by Sebald, but perhaps less so to those unfamiliar with that world.

Author Tania James

 

Published 11/20/23

Loot (2023)

by Tania James

  Loot was a National Book Book longlist title this year and the description caught my eye, I'm just cut and pasting from Penguin Random House promo copy here,  "A spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century: a hero’s quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist adventure that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years."

   The story starts in pre-British rule India (James is an American author of Indian decent) and makes its way to late 18th century England and France.  Abbas, who starts Loot as a child in the Sultanate/Kingdom of Mysore, is the main character- he has a .talent for carving that leads him to apprentice to Lucien de Leze, a French clockmaker who is in favor at the court of Sultan Tipu.  Anyway, if you look at James' publishing history you can see a familiar trajectory- a first novel that is a multi-generational family saga from the perspective of an immigrant to America (or their children), which is well received critically but doesn't land with a mainstream audience (58 amazon reviews), a follow-up book of short stories.  A second novel (written from the perspective of a rampaging Elephant) which is interesting but again, not a huge seller (239 amazon reviews).   And now Loot, which seems designed to contain both adventure, sophisticated cultural commentary on 18th century colonialism and a love story!

 I'm here for it- looking forward to the film or tv version.  Would certainly read another by Tania James but unlikely to go backwards and check out the catalog titles.

    

Published 11/27/23

Audiobook Review

White Holes (2023)

by Carlos Rovelli

   I snatched the Audiobook of this short treatise on the theory of "white holes" (physics) from the library because I love a good general interest books about the nature of time and space.  In particular, I find the treatment of time in physics to be very interesting.   I was a terrible math and science student in school, and never seriously pursued any subject tied to either after I left high school, but as I get older I realized that physics, and specifically its description of time, space and "space-time" are very interesting indeed.

   This book is about the theory of White Holes.  White Holes are what lay on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole.   It is, of course, just a theory, since obtaining proof of white holes would seem to lie beyond human capacity (since nothing, not even light, ever escapes from a black hole).   I will confess that I didn't understand much, if any, of the theoretical underpinnings of the white hole theory.  Rovelli does make the claim that time runs backwards after you emerge from a white hole, which is a pretty interesting theory about time- that it can, in fact, run backwards.  One of the points Rovelli makes repeatedly is that physics is time agnostic, i.e. that time can run backwards and forwards in the standard model of physics and much of the book is devoted to explaining the subjective experience of time vs. its actual role in the universe.

Published 11/28/23

Audiobook Revie

The Glutton (2023)

by AK Blakemore

   I'm quite sure I never would have heard of The Glutton, by English author-poet AK Blakemore, were it not for the New York Times book review published on October 29th of this year.  It is Blakemore's second novel after publishing some poetry- original and in translation (Chinese!) Her first novel was published by Granta Books but this book is published by Scribner- a hallowed name in American publishing, so someone at that conglomerate has faith in her!  I checked out the Audiobook without even reading the NYT review- all I had to see was that it was a work of 18th century French historical fiction with a body horror/freakshow twist- sold. 

   It makes for a fun Audiobook- the story is recounted by the Glutton himself on his deathbed.  It's a story that is based on a true event- a French Revolution era peasant who could and did eat everything in sight.  This book makes him seem like a 1/1 but any reader knows that American sideshows frequently featured a "geek" who would bite the head off of live chickens and eat all sort of disgusting filth.  Here, of course, Blakemore is free to weave her poetic spell.   While the grotesque eating does provide some extremely memorable moments, they aren't matched by the adventures which give rise to them.  Tarare is a genuine son-of-a-whore who eeks out a hardscrabble existence with his mom in a small french village until his step-father tries to murder him.  It is the resulting injury which transforms Tarare from a common village half-wit to Tarare the Great.  

   I can see where Blakemore- and Scribner- was going with this idea- The Glutton reminded me of much of the interesting fiction emerging out of Latin America and South Korea- typically written by women though often not about women.  It is the weaving of body horror, historical fiction, science fiction/horror/gothic genre literature and writerly technique.   Interested to see Blakemore's next work of fiction to be sure, though I'd stop short of calling this one of my favorite books of the year.

Published 11/30/23

Audiobook Review

Blackouts (2023)

by Justin Torres

    Congratulations to Blackouts and author Justin Torres, who won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction last week.  I just happened to finish the Audiobook right after it won the NBA Fiction.   Torres blends fact and fiction, history and the present in a way that very much reminded me of W.G. Sebald.   The plot is straight forward and elusive at the same time: An unnamed narrator comes to visit Juan Gay, an elderly Puerto Rican member of the LGBTQ community who is dying in a flop house in an unnamed city.   Gay has used his copy of Sex Variants- a 1941 book that purported to be an objective "study" of homosexuality to create black-out poetry- where the creator takes an existing book and blacks out large amounts of text to create a poem with what remains. 

   As Juan and Nene (the narrator) sit/lie waiting for Juan to die, he recounts the history of the 1941 book, specifically the roll played by Jan Gay- a real-life trailblazer in the LGBTQ community who contributed her own descriptions to the 1941 book, only to see them used in uncredited fashion.   No need to proclaim how good Blackouts is- it just won the National Book Award!

Published 10/5/23

Audiobook Review

The Wolves of Eternity (2023)

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

    I'm a fan of Karl Ove Knausgaard- I listened to most of his six volume series My Struggle, on Audiobook- which was a great experience and something I highly recommend given the sheer volume of the reading experience AND the fact that all six books are narrated by the same person recounting their life and experiences- an ideal format for the Audiobook.   In many ways, I think My Struggle, with its combination of the excruciating banality of everyday life and lenghty philosophical diatribes, makes a better Audiobook than book. 

  Back in 2020 I bought the hardback (not sure if it made it to paperback!) of the first volume in this projected three volume series, The Morning Star.  I read it almost two years ago this month and after reading it I wrote:

So I am very excited about The Morning Star, the first volume in what seems to be a multi-volume series modeled after, and I know this sounds strange, the works of Stephen King.  There's no reason that Knausgaard would be naive about the potential international sales appeal of his books and The Morning Star, which combines Knausgaard's characteristic grousing about the minutiae of day-to-day existence in contemporary Norway and Sweden with the possibility of the imminent arrival of some kind of supernatural demon, does indeed accomplish its goal:  Expand the international audience for Karl Ove Knausgaard.   Ironically, it seems like more of a critical success than a popular one. 

  Maybe the second volume, which seems to promise the kind of well described literary bloody mayhem you might associate with American Psycho, will generate the sparks necessary to elevate the popular profile of both books, but I, like other readers, was struck by just how little actually happened in The Morning Star.  I mean I did love every page, but still.

    Reader, I am here to tell you that The Wolves of Eternity does not deliver on the bloody mayhem I had hoped for.  I can advise you that after The Wolves of Eternity, which tracks back in time before moving forward to the "present" of the first book (1980's I think- right before Chernobyl), it appears that the plot involves the dead coming back to life as a result of the appearance of the Morning Star from the first book.   Another exciting development in The Wolves of Eternity is a female narrator- which I want to say is a first for Knausgaard.  

   At the same time I would be at an absolute loss to recommend this book to a non-Knausgaard devotee- unless you have the time to read the 800 page hardback or 23 hour Audiobook.  It took me a couple months and multiple check-outs of the Audiobook to complete it.  Lengthy portions of the book describing the Russian obsession with bringing the dead back to life seem to situate Knausgaard's authorial intent- it's hard to ignore the appearance of Tolstoy in the pages of The Wolves of Eternity.  At the same time, once again, in an 800 page book, not much happens.   The most action packed portions of the book are a train ride by one character and a plane flight by another. 

 Published 12/7/25

Saint Sebastian's Abyss (2022)

by Mark Haber

   I'm not sure how I missed Saint Sebastian's Abyss when it was published last year, but likely the explanation comes down to 2022 being a lost year for me reading because of the lingering effects of COVID AND because the New York Times book review didn't mention the obvious, glaring influence of the writing of Thomas Bernhard over every aspect of this book.  If the reviewer had done so I would have immediately ran out (or gone online)  and bought a copy.  As it happened, I didn't know about Saint Sebastian's Abyss until last month when I ran one of my periodic Google searches on Thomas Bernhard and reviewed the returns.   Haber was mentioned in a June 27th Los Angeles Times feature about the influence of Bernhard on contemporary fiction- another article I missed because I was travelling that week and because I literally don't know anyone else who reads the LA Times and knows about Thomas Bernhard.

 

  In fact, as I sit here writing this, I've still never met another human being- in person or on-line, who has even heard of Bernhard, let alone read him.  I only heard about him/read him through the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die project- where I rank Bernhard and Sebald as my top two literary discoveries from that period.  As I periodically mention here, despite being an attorney with a partner who works in the culture industries and many friends who qualify as intellectuals or culture professionals or both, my reading life is conducted in isolation. 

  I think about Bernhard frequently, in the sense that I think about writing a piece of fiction- a short story, of course.   What I think about is the need to write a short story that another person would want to read, vs just writing something "I have to write" which is a line you often hear from writers and people writing about fiction.  Baloney, is what I say.  Of course, every author is drawing upon their own experience but the idea that a given work of fiction simply emerges into the world and then attracts readers of its own accord is patently absurd.  

    At the very least a first-time writer of fiction needs to find someone who wants to publish it, and if they can't do that they need to find their own readers without the benefit of a sponsoring publisher.  Anyway- the question I ask myself is that if you were to ride a story/novella/novel that blatantly imitated an author like Thomas Bernhard- would it bother people?  The answer is no- probably because not enough people know about Bernhard to incite conversation- Los Angeles Times articles aside. 

  As the LA Times said last year, Saint Sebastian's Abyss is about as close to straight-forward homage to Thomas Bernhard as you can get- and  I loved every second.  This is very much the sort of fiction I would want to write if I wrote fiction (I don't and have no plans to) and it's nice to see that Haber found a publisher (who subsequently hired him to work as their marketing supervisor).

Published 12/18/23

 Audiobook Review

 Blood Meridian Or The Evening Sun in the West (1985)

by Cormac McCarthy

   The NYT announced with fanfare last month that they would be formally reviewing Audiobooks as separate works from the underlying print/ebook.  That's a huge shift since their prior recognition of the form was a semi-regular "AUDIOBOOKS" round up in their weekly book review.  If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that I've been a fan of Audiobooks for years because of all the driving I do back and forth between San Diego and Los Angeles.  I also rarely miss a chance to shill for the Libby library app, which allows you to check out Audiobooks for free from your local library- as valuable an app as I possess considering the price of an individual audiobook or Audible subscription. 

    Cormac McCarthy died earlier this year, which is a traditional trigger for evaluating an artistic career.  Not that McCarthy has much to worry about in that department.  Besides never winning the Nobel Prize, there wasn't much he didn't accomplish, and he did it all without prostituting himself to the cultural-industrial complex.  Whether you like his writing or not, like Bob Dylan, you have to respect his ability to do exactly what he wanted without caring about an audience, critical or popular. 

Here's a list of the McCarthy books I've read and written about- I've already done an Audiobook specific review of The Road.  I'm missing his first two books and his last two to make the set:

Child of God  (1973)

Suttree (1979)

Blood Meridian or the Evening Sun in the West (1985)

 All the Pretty Horses  (1992)

The Crossing (1994)

Cities of the Plain (1998)

The Road (2006) 

No Country for Old Men (2005)

  There can be no doubt that Blood Meridian was his breakout commercial AND critical hit.   My sense is that before Blood Meridian was released, McCarthy was four novels into his career, and he'd convinced his publisher that something was there worth supporting (this being the early 1980's and a reasonably good time to be publishing literary fiction), but he hadn't broken through with either the critics or the public.

  I went back and read the contemporary NYT review for Suttree published on February 18th, 1979, and it's clear that McCarthy wasn't close to a household name in 1979.  You can also see that this was still the case when Blood Meridian was reviewed by the NYT in 1985, it's a respectful review where the author clearly has an understanding of the appeal and potential of the book and author, but there are no references to the fact that McCarthy was already a cultural phenomenon. 

  My idea is that I'm going to go back and listen to all the McCarthy Audiobooks before I polish off the last four books I haven't read.  It was pretty straight forward for The Road, published in 2006 and after McCarthy had cemented his reputation with the Border Trilogy-  so it got an Audiobook published at the same time as the novel itself.  Things were less straightforward with Blood Meridian. Originally I checked out an eight hour abridged version before I found the unabridged 13 hour version narrated by Richard Poe and published in 2007.  The abridged version came out in 2009 and was narrated by Robert Slade.  I ended up listening to almost half the abridged version, so I can tell you that one thing the abridged version does is edit out the prolific and frequent use of the "n-word"- often used by the characters to refer to Native Americans.  

   The unabridged edition, on the other hand, captures McCarthy in his full glory- I think you can make the argument that an unabridged Audiobook of many of his works competes with the books themselves.  Certainly that's the case with Blood Meridian, where the distractions of McCarthy's austere punctuation are absent and you actually hear these characters make the speeches from the book, instead of having to do them in your head as a reader. 

    This is my second time through the book after reading it back in 2016- loved, loved, loved it back then.  Since then it's never been far from my thoughts, more so than the Border Trilogy, which is great, but, you know, a trilogy.  I've driven out to Yuma a dozen times and stopped at the Territorial Prison and overlooked where I imagine the ferry crossed the Colorado river in the book.  This time through, it seemed to me that the central fact of the book is what the character of Judge Holden says about War, which he addresses for the first time in Chapter 17:

The judge cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was war.

The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled, his face shining with grease.

What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That’s your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. Brown studied the judge.

You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.

The judge smiled. (page 259-261).

 

  I've bolded a couple of phrases there.  But it's also important to note that the Judge returns to the subject at the very end of the book- which- I hardly even remembered from when I read the book, where he says:

“As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance, and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?...Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” (page 344)

   I think if you are looking at a statement regarding McCarthy's literary philosophy, these two sections contain it.  Not just for this book, but for all his books.   I think the natural connection for a 21st century reader to make between the Judge's speeches about war and the meaning of life are to equate them with the idea of social Darwinism- which was current at the end of the book- 1878, but not in the 1840's, when Darwin himself was just getting going.   A more likely influence seems like Baron Von Clausewitz, whose Theory of War was published in 1832.  McCarthy does include German among the Judge's languages- referred to as Dutch/Deutsch in the book, which was a contemporary usage back then. 

    The second time through, I was less taken with the idea that the Judge was somehow a supernatural entity.  Listening to the actual end of the book this time through, it struck me that the Judge was a more conventional 19th century adventurer and that the Judge's journey is no different than that of a dozen Joseph Conrad protagonists- men who seek to escape civilization for whatever reason and to misbehave in the uncivilized other.   The behavior can be seen both as an endorsement of colonialism or a critique of it, depending on the perspective of the reader. 

    The other aspect of Blood Meridian I focused on was the whole ending- everything that happens after the Yuma episode.  In that part of the book the Kid has a fever dream- the text of which I can't track down- while he's recovering from leg surgery in San Diego, that struck me as particularly important.