Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

This little novella is the sixth work I’ve read by Nghi Vo, making Vo the fiction author I’ve returned to most frequently over the last four or five years since her 2020 debut. What I appreciate about Vo is how each of her books explores the same theme, which I previously summarized as “the relationship between reality and the stories we tell, and how this relationship is modified by who tells the story.” I also enjoy her ability to linger in a strange world, letting its foreign logic wash over you without explaining it.

Mammoths at the Gates is the fourth instalment in her Singing Hills Cycle series, which each feature the monk Chi travelling through the land to collect stories to be stored in their monastery. Unlike in The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Book 1) and When the Tiger Came Down The Mountain (Book 2), the monk Chi is our protagonist, rather than the characters featured in the stories Chi collects. This fourth book therefore carries on in the vein of Into the Riverlands (Book 3), which was the first to bring Chi to the forefront, although story-telling remained a core aspect of the narrative. In contrast, in this novella most of the emotional moments and thematic exploration occurs within the “frame” story; story-telling makes up just brief passages mostly towards the end of the novella.

The book packs in a lot of world building, but rather than adding to the development of the themes or characters, it felt like rote exposition. We learn more about the long-memoried bird companions, the operational logistics of the monastery, and the monastery’s relationship with local politics. I wondered if this lore dumping was in response to fan questions. Myself, I preferred swimming in the more mysterious world of the previous volumes.

Without the distinctive features I enjoy about Vo’s work, the rest of the story was just fine. It’s a cozy setting: Chi returns home to their monastery after years of traveling. The plot is relatively simple and low stakes: the abbot has passed away and both the monastery and his granddaughters lay claim to his remains, a dispute that must be solved while everyone mourns his passing. The ideas explored revolve around homecoming and grief. Whether you leave or stay, the world moves on; it is never possible to go back to the same home you knew, but you can reconnect. You can grieve someone who was never in your life to begin with, like the abbot’s granddaughters, who only ever heard of him in stories. The loss of someone close to you can be transformative. This last theme underpinned the emotional climax of the novella, but having just read the heart-wrenching Ti Amo, which explored the same theme but more intensely introspectively, it felt a bit limited and plain.

Review: Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik

This book is an incredible feat. It is the diary pages of a woman a year or so into her husband’s diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, relating the transformative effect his illness had on their relationship and their lives. The author captures these ruminations in stark, breath-taking prose. Her narrator struggles to put the pieces of her life into a timeline, to make it make sense — when did the illness start? Who were they then? Who are they now? She weaves in past and present, existential and inconsequential, discovering herself as she writes (“...without anyone else knowing, and without me knowing either, because it’s something I’m not aware of until now, as I sit here writing again.”)

When halfway through reading the book, I learned that the author’s husband died shortly after she wrote this novella, following a similar fight with cancer. The work being one of autofiction answers some of the mysteries I had about how someone could write something so intensely and darkly introspective. It gave me a few new questions to ponder about how someone could take what must have been such a swirl of emotion, the most harrowing years of her life, and turn it into a story that a complete stranger can understand, can be moved by.

The narrator-author addresses her diary to you, her husband. It’s a powerful choice, from its opening lines drawing the reader into the intimacy of her relationship:

I love you. We say it to each other all the time. We say it instead of saying something else. What would that something else be? You: I’m dying. Us: Don’t leave me. Me: I don’t know what to do.

The book is called Ti Amo, "I love you" in Italian, and is, in a way, that “something else” the narrator wants to say in place of "I love you." The story itself is a tragedy, not only because her husband’s cancer proves terminal, but because it is the tale of two people who can’t sail through the storms together. With death looming on the horizon, the two of them cannot talk about death with each other.

The way I look into your eyes and at the same time, always, know that you’re going to die. It’s been you and me and death for so long now. Although in a way it’s just you, with me and death on the other side, because we don’t talk about death. I can’t understand how you can manage not to talk about it. I can only believe that somewhere inside you you do think about it. Are you not talking about it for my sake? It leaves us each alone with it.

For her, it seems she wants him to bring it up, to choose a time when he is ready for it. For him, he seems to keep the possibility out of mind, refusing to confront it. And so this gulf between them grows ever larger, amplified by his doctors’ decisions to withhold the prognosis from him (“He needs hope, something to cling to.”). By addressing her diary to you, the husband, the narrator creates the dialogue she longs for, a hundred-page conversation about death. Yet the hoped-for catharsis never arrives: the “you” she writes to cannot respond, and the reader cannot stand in for him. That absence is the tragedy.

We, the reader, don’t learn the resolution of it all. In that way, we are like the husband. We don’t see the final moments, or how she processes this intense period of her life, once she is no longer in the depths of it. The darkness of terminal illness is a novella. The life afterwards, the grieving, perhaps a novel.

Review: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

I went into this book unaware of what awaited me, and I was caught off-guard. It is an unusually structured book, and sails through history and historical personages at a brisk knot, and it took a while for me to find my sea legs.

The book begins with a three chapter preface, which makes up the first two fifths of the book. Labatut threads together 20th century inventions and discoveries: cyanide, black holes, algebraic proofs. Inventors and inventions both find themselves deployed in wars. Science and society are inextricably linked: developments in one shape the outcomes of the other. Both are driven by individuals, but advance on a scale so immense and interconnected that no one individual can turn the tides. Labatut’s stories are a mesmerizing blend of fact and fantasy, and it’s not always clear what is true, what is disputed, and what is fully invented.

The main section of the book continues in tone, focusing in particular on Schrodinger, Heisenberg, De Broglie, as they investigate the nature of matter and light. These hallowed figures find themselves caught up in madness, despair, sexual deviancy, mysticism, and spiteful feuds as they grapple with the biggest questions of physics and ramifications of their answers.

The final tenth of the book is a 5-part essay titled The Night Gardener. It echoes the themes and motifs of the preceding pages, but now without the giants of 20th century science: suicide, poison, fascists, the misuse of science in society, the struggle for individuals to shape society, society’s likely impending doom.

Negative reviews of this book point at its rehashing of tired science tropes: the lone genius driven mad by his discovery, oblivious to social norms and lacking in emotional awareness. Women enter the pages only to be objects of sexual desire. The author revels in the popular aesthetics of science — frantic midnight scribblings covering reams of paper, dramatic postulations at a lecture stand — more than shedding light on the experience of actually doing science. 

While these critiques are well-founded, it would be a shame to entirely dismiss the book on these grounds. Although the narrative revolves around science, the emotional aspects explored are not unique to science. What do you do when you cease to understand your world, when what you thought you knew is unveiled to be an illusion? Perhaps you’ve discovered your government aids a genocide, or someone dear to you breaks your trust. Do you withdraw into yourself? Abandon everything or end your life? Throw yourself back in with everything you have, and keep fighting? What is it like to feel torn between ambitions of greatness and feelings of uselessness? How do you come to terms with the fruits of your creative labour dispersing into the wild to be used and transformed beyond your intentions, out of your control? Labatut repeats these refrains in different keys and different voices. His unusual storytelling makes for a thought-provoking read with more to offer than a summary might suggest.

Review: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

I almost gave up on this book after the first few pages. The main character’s voice was gratingly irritating. The themes the book promised to explore seemed like pale imitations of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler — that is, meditations on the acts of reading and writing and the relationships that form between reader and writer. Looking back, I had a good read on the book. It was both those things. There was a little more than that, but not much more.

One of our two main characters is a Japanese girl named Nao. Her diary pages make up about half the novel, and it was this prose that I found so irritating. The author deftly captured the odd mixture of childishness and worldliness of a lonely teenage girl. Our other main character, Ruth, is a middle aged woman living on a remote island in British Columbia, who finds Nao's diary. Her chapters act as a foil: her small everyday activities like walking to the post office are a respite from the excruciatingly severe bullying, familial trauma and sexual exploitation Nao experiences. Ruth’s interpretation of the diary is also a device that allows the author to discuss emotional insights that Nao was too immature to write about. (This is a drawback of the teenage diary device. Another approach is the one used in David Copperfield, where the protagonist recounts his childhood and youth from a close first-person perspective but with the hindsight granted by old age.)

There were many touching moments in the story. Nao’s realization that she was using the diary as an imaginary friend in her intense loneliness and search for escape, for example, was well done. Ruth's marriage with her husband was also sweet, and rare in fiction if not in life: their quiet mutual support, their familiarity (and occasional grumbling) with each other's quirks that can only be collected over many years together, their squabbles and reconciliations. I enjoyed much of Grandmother Jiko's mentorship of Nao: “surfer, wave, same thing.” (“A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”)

But overall, I thought the book attempted to do too much, and ended up rather less than the sum of its parts. The event that determines the outcome of the climax involves Ruth time-travelling during her dreams. In a book like If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, where surrealism and magical realism infuse every page, such a climax might serve to further develop themes of the translucency of the barrier between reader and writer. However, A Tale for the Time Being — for all the extreme sexual violence and emotional torture Nao suffers through — is otherwise realistic. The difficulty in reaching out of your shell and communicating your suffering is one of the major themes Ozeki explores through Nao and her father, and the deus ex machina of a fairy godmother dream sequence felt cheap.

Similarly, the themes of the relationship between reader and writer were overshadowed by the intensity of Nao’s life’s twists and turns. It seems the author might have found these two threads difficult to weave too. In balancing the development of Nao’s life and the frame story of Ruth reading and responding to the diary, the author had Ruth act inexplicably, like forgetting that a diary encased in a barnacle-encrusted lunchbox detailing events shortly after the dot-com bubble burst were not actively unfolding in the 2010s, or choosing to read the diary slowly so as to live at the same pace as Nao, while worrying incessantly about her welfare. Again, the various themes kept stepping on each other’s toes.

Nao’s great uncle was a pacifist Kamakazi pilot, and through learning about his experiences, Nao reflects on resolve and fortitude, finding the strength to pull through her own plight. Although these passages did contain some beautiful moments, I thought the book’s treatment of fascism was overly simplistic. All the fascists were incomprehensible bad people who were in positions of power: the prime minister, commanding officers in the army, etc. All the people portrayed with complexity were objectors to fascism: Nao’s family members, other soldiers in the fascist army. But this is never how fascism comes about: fascists are found amongst your neighbours and colleagues. Fascism’s sway is comprehensible. This element of the book is underdeveloped, perhaps because the book is already trying to accomplish too much and stumbling over itself. Nao’s uncle briefly describes (secondhand) the Nanjing Massacre, but the brutality of the Japanese treatment of China is not really tied to the brutality of Nao’s classmates towards her. It was a missed opportunity to explore the violent ideology and othering of fascism that continues on in our cultures. Perhaps fittingly, Heidegger's philosophy is also presented abstracted away from his Nazi past, a harmless well of wisdom about “authentic temporality, historicality, and Being-in-the-World” stripped of its fascistic implications.

Nao’s uncle commits suicide, intentionally landing his plane harmlessly in the sea. This is a heroic act, but it is also one that exonerates the individual without changing the battle lines between fascism and anti-fascism. Similarly, Nao’s father heroically sacrifices his career in objection to the military application of his inventions, but the relationship between Silicon Valley and the American military industrial complex blazes ahead unstopped. These acts of individual purity and detachment from the real world are consistent with the Buddhist philosophy explored through Nao’s grandmother. Life is about a search for personal enlightenment and lightness in one's soul, not a struggle against the fascistic violence that continues to cause suffering in our society.

Review: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse takes place by the sea, and Virgina Woolf’s prose is itself ocean-like, washing over you in waves, immersing you and buffeting you about. Her stream of consciousness perspectives allow you to explore the thought processes that make up our understanding of ourselves and of others.

One theme Woolf explores is our ability to relate to others. Sometimes we feel an aching loneliness that we can never be truly known by another person (“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.”). Other times, our loved ones show us they know exactly what we are thinking, what we need (“And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him.”). And at other times still, we think we are alone in feeling a certain way, when many share our same thoughts (“for each thought, ‘the others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fisherman. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’”). Woolf presents her characters so intimately and details their relationships with others so meticulously that small gestures between them are imbued with as much meaning to us as they hold for the characters (“And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.”).

Another theme Woolf explores is the linear passing of time, at odds with our much more circular examination of ourselves and our inner thoughts. The characters contemplate how they’ve spent their lives: Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay each consider how the demands of raising eight children impacted their abilities to pursue other sorts of fulfillment. Lily reflects on the happiness of married couples, and her decision to remain unmarried. In their introspections, each character bounces between the past, the present, and their dreams of the future. Time itself presses onwards unrelentingly (“as she … left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”).

How well can one know another person? Much of the novel occurs while Lily paints a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, and the novel itself is itself a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. We see Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of each character (“Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with”), and she is someone different to each of these people. And yet, all these facets of Mrs. Ramsay are who she is. When James finally visits the titular lighthouse, he remarks that the Lighthouse seen from a distance, the “silvery, misty-looking tower,” and the Lighthouse seen up close, inhabited with “washing spread on the rocks to dry,” are both the Lighthouse: “For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too.” Mrs. Ramsay is likewise the mother, the wife, the cheerleader, the beautiful woman, the warm woman who knows how to bring people together, the cold woman who cannot say “I love you.”

Lily perhaps knows Mrs. Ramsay best of all the others — maybe because she is also a woman, and therefore sees her as an equal and understands the many social pressures placed on women. Her grief at the loss of Mrs. Ramsay is beautifully written, exploring our changing relationships with those who are no longer with us (“It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.”). Fittingly, when Lily’s portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is finished, the novel ends too.

Review: The Knowledge Economy and Socialism by Agustín Lage Dávila

Our current age is remarkable for the rapidity with which knowledge is produced and integrated into products. New technology, like CRISPR or LLMs, explode onto the scene and change the game in such a way that news and technology from 6 months prior is already out of date. A company’s competitiveness hinges on how fast they can produce, respond to, and apply knowledge. Capitalist competition on this battlefield has led to the increasing privatization of knowledge, such as through institutions like patents. For most of human history, science played a liberating role in helping humans meet their needs and overcome the challenges of nature. Under capitalism, scientific output is increasingly commodified. What does an alternative model for the role of science in society look like?

Agustín Lage Dávila is a Cuban immunologist who played a leading role in developing Cuba’s remarkable biotechnology sector. In this series of essays written between 1994 and 2013, Lage Dávila reflects on the role science plays in society, and the way Cuban leaders used their understanding of economics and science to create a successful biotech hub in the unlikely soils of an underdeveloped and heavily embargoed country.

One of Lage Dávila’s insights is that the Cuban high-tech sector benefited from a highly educated populace, in contrast with mainstream approaches to development that prioritize development goals over educational excellence. For Cuba, success in exportable high-tech goods is a matter of survival: it is a small island and so its market is too small to support the production of specialized goods nor is its labour market able to transform into a major manufacturing hub (like China’s approach). It is also poor in natural resources, and so its ability to trade for the things it needs necessarily comes from the export of high value-add products, like its vaccines and cancer drugs. 

Lage Dávila contrasts the path Cuba took with capitalist approaches to the knowledge economy, as well as to approaches taken by other socialist states, particularly the USSR and China. Some of his observations are a little dated: in particular, China’s world leadership in science and technology has only emerged in the last few years. Cuba has also struggled in recent years due to the US’s devastating illegal sanctions. Due to this book's origins as a series of individually published essays, it also becomes somewhat repetitive. Still, his account is clear-sighted and thoughtful, and as a scientist, I found it incredibly applicable to understanding my own role in society.

Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

How should you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? One option is to peer into it for hints of how it has shaped thinking in the 1900 years since its writing — this collection of disconnected aphorisms is one of the most famous texts of the Roman Empire. In this reading, you might reflect on the author’s views on cosmic order and nature and on the cyclical flow of time, and how philosophers as diverse as Isaac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche might have approached his writing on these themes. Or perhaps you might do more of a feminist critique: how has Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism shaped what it means to be a man? To be unbothered by other people’s opinions of you, to prize rationality, to be principled and purposeful and not caught up in frivolities — these commandments continue to shape social expectations of masculinity. I like this reading, and if you’re interested in the development of human thought it’s a worthwhile reason to read this book.

Another reading would take Marcus Aurelius’s writing as normative life advice. This is a reading I don’t care for. Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teeters on nihilistic individuality, and therefore reinforces the status quo: time is cyclic and your life is short so you shouldn’t strive to change society; forget about what other people think, follow your own nature. It is also only a partial picture of morality: he has relatively little to say about community, about our social obligation to each other, or about resolving conflicting perspectives (we could call these feminine virtues). That said, it is a philosophy more compassionate about accepting the shortcomings of others than some individualistic worldviews (“If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.” (Book X)). But to approach this work as a source of guidance is to invite cherry-picking of poignant quotes: it is not a systematic, rigorously developed worldview, but a scattering of sometimes contradictory thoughts.

A third reading — and this is where my mind kept going as I read the work — is to read it metatextually: why did Marcus Aurelius write these particular thoughts down? The work was never meant to be published: he wrote it for himself. What personal struggles was he grappling with as he penned these meditations? Death, surely, was one: he emphasizes over and over the fleetingness of life. Other anxieties appear to trouble him too; when he writes lines like

What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. (Book III)

does he speak from a self-chastising position, as someone still trying to care less about what some other person is thinking of? Is he thinking of a particular example, but cloaking it as a general conclusion? (If so, Marcus, you would have loved the invention of the subtweet.)

I like this metatextual reading best for a few reasons. First, it explains his contradictory and repetitive writing: he is trying an idea on for size to see how it fits, or working through a difficult idea. While many of his aphorisms are expressed as confident exhortations, others are tentative explorations of a thought:

If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state. (Book IV)

I think we should read these statements — the confident and the tentative — as more in continuity than a superficial reading might suggest (“To read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book.” (Book I)). These meditations are not battle-tested wisdoms the author hopes to disseminate broadly, but pep talks he gives to himself (“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil." (Book II)), or records of his deliberations for himself.

Second, this reading explains the incompleteness of the morality presented here. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher-king, his views on man-as-citizen or man-as-shaper-of-society he would have debated extensively and applied as part of his imperial duties. The views scribbled here, just for him, naturally cover what remains: how to handle day-to-day emotional challenges in the right way.

Finally, there is a comfort in recognizing that even the literal Emperor of Rome struggled with navigating the complex waters of his internal life.
 

A few favourite lines not woven into the above:

• “We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.” (Book III)
• “Men quarrel with that with which they are most constantly in communion.” (Book IV)
• “First, do nothing inconsiderately, nor without a purpose. Second, make thy acts refer to nothing else than to a social end.” (Book XII)
• “How close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence.” (Book XII)
• “If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state.” (Book IV)
• “By remembering, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself, I shall do nothing unsocial, but I shall rather direct myself to the things which are of the same kind with myself, and I shall turn an my efforts to the common interest, and divert them from the contrary. Now, if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as thou mayest observe that the life of a citizen is happy, who continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow-citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.” (Book X)
• “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. But thou art thinking only of seeds which are cast into the earth or into a womb: but this is a very vulgar notion.” (Book IV)