The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2021) by Richard Flanagan

Book Review

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2021)

by Richard Flanagan

  Australian (Tasmanian) author Richard Flanagan burst into international consciousness in 2014 when The Narrow Road to the Deep North, his novel about the Australian POW experience in South-East Asia during World War II, won the Man Booker Prize.  He followed the Booker win with First Person, in 2017, which to my knowledge, didn't even get a release in the United States, and which doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page.  

  I didn't read The Narrow Road to the Deeper North until 2018, even though I purchased the American hardback edition in the aftermath of the Booker Prize win.   I typically avoid books about World War II and the Civil War- whether they be fictional or non-fiction, simply because those two subjects suck up so oxygen in the fields of American History and Historical Fiction (ok, not as much as in non-fiction, but still).   I respect Australia as a literary market, they seem to be good for about one internationally recognized author per decade, so Flanagan makes a good bet for the 2010's and possibly the 2020's if he can get another hit.

  Brother, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is not it, in that regard- it's not a hit.   It is a well done piece of literary fiction about end-of-life issues viewed through the eyes of a woman and her two brothers as their mother wastes away in a hospital in Tasmania.  Although it is a work by an Australian author set in Australia, it feels like this book could take place in a half dozen English speaking cities- LA and San Francisco, New York and Boston, London and Manchester- the dynamic being the urban child having to return to the more remote locale of birth and upbringing, since the dying mother is still there.

  Anyway you want to slice it, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a somber and often depressing novel, which I guess is one criterion for greatness, but it doesn't make for a hit most times.  Asa prior winner, any qualifying title is a favorite for at least a Booker longlisting, but since he's won already he is easier to ignore.   We shall see next week when the longlist is announced for this year.

2034 (2021) by Elliot Ackerman

Book Review

2034: A Novel of the Next World War (2021)

by Elliot Ackerman

   I think I plucked this Audiobook straight from the New York Times best-seller list (which is, at the best of times, a wasteland for literary fiction.)  Elliot Ackerman is an interesting American author with a military background and several well-received works of literary fiction centering on military-middle-eastern themes- no hits, though.  2034 is a hit, and it no doubt represents an exciting breakthrough for Ackerman, even if he had to co-author this book with some Admiral (who is actually the author interviewed at the end of the Audiobook I listened to on the Libby library app.)  The Amazon  product page has over 6,000 customer reviews which is larger by a "zero" than what even a succesful work of literary fiction is likely to get. 

   Which is not to say that 2034 is a work of literary fiction.  I think it's closer to what you would call an international political thriller with the thrill replaced by the agonizing dread of the seemingly inevitable march towards a so-called "tactical" nuclear war between the US and China, basically over Taiwan, in the end, though the series of provocations leading up to the war is what takes up most of the book.  The road to war, if you will.   The Americans, Chinese, Indians, Iranians and Russians each get their own narrators, America, of course, gets two- an Indian-American foreign policy expert working for the President and a gung-ho top gun pilot who ends up with the job of nuking Shanghai. 

  Obviously, the idea behind writing this book is to avoid the dire future (Bye San Diego! Bye Galveston!) foretold, and personally, my take-away is that we need to let China have Taiwan and the South China Sea.  They want it, they should have it, why would try to stop them?  If they showed up off the coast of San Diego and started telling us what to do in the Pacific Ocean out there past Mexico you can bet we'd be pissed. 

  My own obsersavtion about China and their geo-political aims is that they have literally, in several thousand years of civilization, had an expansionary outlook for about fifty years.  Other than that they have been concerned with their traditional land area in Asia.   Even if we let them have literally everything they want they would literally not be a threat to our actual country. Compare that to 20th century nemesii like Nazi Germany of Soviet Russia, both of which actually possessed ideologies that paid lip service to world domination. 

Civilizations (2021) by Laurent Binet

Cover of the yet to be released American edition of Civilization

Book Review

Civilizations (2021) 

by Laurent Binet

  One of the amusing facets of international culture markets is the way distribution of new works still follows the geographical borders of nation-states, or "marketing territories."  Civilizations, for example, which was translated from French into English, has been out in the UK for half a year, but doesn't come out in the United States till the fall.  So while you can buy a copy easily enough on any number of UK websites, you can't read anything about it written in the United States.  It's not like it's illegal to write about an English edition of Civilizations, but a casual internet search reveals nothing written on this side of the Atlantic. 

  Which means I'm left being excited about this book all by myself.  If you were to ask me for a list of favorite current authors, Binet would be top three. HHhH is a canon level classic, and The Seventh Function of Language is a great book to recommend to the right person.  Other than the people to whom I've recommended The Seventh Function of Language, I haven't met anyone else who has read Binet let alone loves him.  And I get the criticisms- mostly from what I would call the literature-as-feelings or literature-as-origin story schools of thought, about Binet not really meaning anything- I get it.  But his books are actually fun to read, they make you think, they make you think about the novel as an art form. Like Michel Houellebecq- another French author I love and am vaguely embarrassed to love, Binet is clever, funny, dark and kind of a dick (or at least he comes across that way in interviews).

   Civilizations is his take on an alternate history, one where a rogue Incan Prince escapes from a South American civil war, manages to retrofit the ships Columbus abandoned after his expedition failed and sail to a Lisbon that has just been devastated by an earthquake.  The mechanism that Binet uses to launch his story is an opening chapter where Freydis, daughter of Eric-the-Red, continues Viking expeditions South, spreading knowledge of iron and inoculating local tribes in the Caribbean and Central America.  Thus, when Columbus arrives, the locals have horses and metal weapons, and the Europeans are entertainingly humiliated, with the remnants enslaved by a Caribbean tribe. 

  Atahualpa, the Incan prince is the central figure in the story.  He is engaging figure, and I'm looking forward to the prestige television version of this book hopefully adapted by Taika Waititi.  If you read this book, and you just think it's kind of a flip, sarcastic take on the genre of counter-history, I think you are missing the point, and maybe you don't know alot about the time period in question- because, as someone who knows about both areas- American and European history in the 16th century, I thought Civilizations was sharp.