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

 Book Review

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.

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

 Book Review

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.

Land of Milk and Honey (2023) by C. Pam Zhang

 

American author C. Pam Zhang

Book 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.

    

Abyss (2023) by Pilar Quintana

 Book Review

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.

Hangman (2023) by Maya Binyam

Author Maya Binyam

 

Book Review

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!

The Vaster Wilds (2023) by Lauren Groff

 Book Review
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. 

The Devil of the Provinces (2023) by Juan Cardenas

 Book Review

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.

Beyond the Door of No Return (2023) by David Diop

 

Book Review

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!

2023 Booker Prize Shortlist Announced

 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist Announced

Sarah Bernstein, “Study for Obedience”
Jonathan Escoffery, “If I Survive You”
Paul Harding, “This Other Eden”
Paul Lynch, “Prophet Song”
Chetna Maroo’s “Western Lane”
Paul Murray, “The Bee Sting”

  The 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist dropped earlier this week.  I've read three of the books already: This Other Ede, The Bee Sting and Western Lane. I tried the Audiobook of If I Survive You but didn't enjoy it and only made it about 10 percent of the way through before abandoning the attempt.  Prophet Song isn't out yet in the United States. Study for Obedience is the one title on the shortlist I don't know anything about.  I'm surprised that Old God's Time didn't make the cut. 

  If I was handicapping I would bet on The Bee Sting or Western Lane for the win.

The Fraud (2023) by Zadie Smith

 Book Review

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.