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: 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: Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

“It is hideous, is it not, to speak in a breath of money and affection.”
— Delphine to Eugène, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Love and capital are the questions this novel pre-occupies itself with, like so many other novels of the nineteenth century. Let’s start with the topic of capital, leaving love to the end.

 

As in Villette (1853) and Persuasion (1817), Père Goriot (1835) reflects the tumult as the bourgeoisie overtakes the aristocracy in fits and bursts. The novel takes place during the first few years of the Bourbon restoration: aristocracy is back, baby. Goriot, a doting father and wealthy vermicelli merchant, thought himself lucky to have married his daughters to a Baron and a Comte during the Napoleonic era, when the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the landed gentry. With a Louis back on a throne, Goriot is considered too gauche to grace the parlours of his now-genteel daughters. Showing remarkable composure, Goriot bids farewell to the dreams he had of spending his final years lounging in the well-appointed homes of his daughters — he gifted them nearly all his wealth as dowries — and retires to a humble boarding house, where we meet him. The first third of the novel is driven by the mystery of who this solitary old man is, who are the fancy women who visit him, and what caused his successive moves from the well-appointed room at 1200 francs a year to the drafty and threadbare room at 45 francs per month? (Like in David Copperfield, prices are detailed at every opportunity; the reader can never forget how very expensive it is to go on living.) We find out it is his daughters bleeding him dry — but I get ahead of myself. We are still discussing themes of capital, not love.

 

One of the other boarders is Eugène De Rastignac, a well-born but not well-off aristocratic lad. His family scrapes together just enough money to keep him in respectable quarters while he studies at the university in Paris. Granted a taste of life among the cream of society, he starts looking for get-rich-quick schemes. A fellow boarder, Veltran, teaches him the hard truths of the world: he can toil his way through school and the ranks of the bureaucracy, never earning more than a mediocre salary, or he can scheme his way into marriage with an heiress, and live a life of luxury. Veltran offers him a Faustian bargain: the hand of the wealthy heiress requires assassinating a man. Eugène quickly finds that high society has low morals — when everyone cheats, exploits, and lies, are his own minor transgressions really so bad? Besides, the moral road of the bourgeoisie is just as ruthless; Goriot is implied to have founded his fortune “selling flour for ten times its cost” during the Revolution of 1789. To gain entry to the class born to leisure, Eugène needs to raise funds for fashionable finery, so he begs his mother and sisters, bleeding them dry. Here, Eugène parallels both Goriot in his entrepreneurial mind as well as Goriot’s daughters in their exploitation of familial affection for personal gain. Perhaps it is not possible to discuss capital without also dealing with love?

 

Père Goriot is a tragic love story about not romantic but paternal love. Goriot’s affection for his daughters is obsessive, idolizing. It is an obscure form of love — infatuation without romance or eroticism. Every day, he walks to the Champs d'Elysees to watch their coaches go by, hoping to catch a glimpse of their visages as they pass him by. He spends his days in his damp and cramped quarters daydreaming about how they spend their evenings.

I love the very horses that draw them; I envy the little lap-dog on their knees. Their happiness is my life. Every one loves after his own fashion, and mine does no one any harm; why should people trouble their heads about me?

Goriot is delighted to discover Eugène and his (married) daughter Delphine have fallen in love. He lives vicariously through Eugène, and schemes to create a secret apartment for the couple to use to carry out their affair — including nearby quarters for himself. He basks in her reacquired company: “He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.” Goriot’s sheer happiness is plain to see, but also uncomfortable to read: we see how little the daughters’ affections are returned, how self-centered they are, how blindly consuming Goriot's love for them is, and how poorly he understands the women his little girls have grown into.

 

Goriot’s daughters find themselves in dire financial straits and so he sells every last asset and trinket to address their pleas. Their tribulations cause him such distress that he falls ill, but with not a franc left for medicine or firewood. Goriot’s daughters do not visit his sickbed, too caught up in the dramas of their own lives. Instead, Eugène and another student boarder nurse Goriot as they listen to his dying ravings about the wonders and treacheries of the two women. Had he not given them his fortunes, they would have still showered him with affection, he deplores. He daydreams about how he will rebuild his wealth and buy back his daughters’ love by importing processed wheat goods — he remains to his deathbed a capitalist. It is heartbreaking to read Goriot discover his daughters are not coming to visit him, when just seeing their faces and hearing their voices would mean so much to him, and equally wrenching to see him finally come to terms with their natures. 

 

The daughters are just as uninvolved with his funeral, turning away requests for help with the dismissal that they are “in deep grief over their loss.” His gravestone thus bears the words “Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students.” Like living, the reader is reminded that dying is frightfully expensive. 

 

The three young people around Goriot lie at different points along the axis of moral corruption. Daughter Anastasie is cold, calculating and most aware of how much she exploits her father’s deluded love. It is ironic that she is just as deluded about her affair partner as her father is about her: she pours hundreds of thousands of francs into funding his gambling addiction. Passionate and romantic Delphine deceives herself into not seeing her abuse of her father’s love or finds ways to rationalize it (“Why did he allow us to marry when we did? Was it not his duty to think for us and foresee for us? Today I know he suffers as much as we do, but how can it be helped?”). Her outbursts are so spirited that it is tempting to dismiss her flaws and fall in love with her like Eugène does.

At this moment I have but one fear left, but one misery to dread—to lose the love that has made me feel glad to live. Everything is as nothing to me compared with our love; I care for nothing else, for you are all the world to me.

While Eugène cares tenderly for Goriot, he is easily distracted by the luxury of a ball, and derelict towards his own family. Like Delphine, he also finds ways to rationalize or ignore the immorality of his actions (“Eugène did not wish to see too clearly; he was ready to sacrifice his conscience to his mistress.”).

 

Balzac’s characters are flawed, but understandable. He shows us how each character’s decisions are shaped by social forces. It is Parisian culture that is skewered: its dazzling splendor is an artifice concealing a cut-throat, turbulent, and unhappy core. Characters like Delphine understand this but see no escape — “Half the women in Paris lead such lives as mine; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls are tormented by anxiety” — despite the high price of playing the game. Lives are wasted on ingenuine relationships. It’s a beautifully written book, and though the Bourbon era is long gone its themes remain poignant: financial pressures, social pressures, and a culture of individuality still trouble the development of genuine love.

Review: Democracy or Bonapartism by Domenico Losurdo

This is an incredibly relevant work for understanding modern day democracy and its discontents. Losurdo traces history from the French Revolution through the 1992 US Presidential election to show the development of Bonapartism. We see how soft Bonapartism of the US and other countries of the West (versus the war Bonpartism of fascism) is remarkably stable, and yet fails to deliver on the emancipation and social welfare one might expect would come of universal suffrage.

Bonapartism is a political structure characterized by a powerful and charismatic executive, who legitimizes their power through the support of the masses, and who becomes the interpreter of the nation — that is, power is personalized. To pave over internal strife between economic classes within a nation, conflict is externalized, and the Bonapartist leader is imbued with a mandate to protect (and expand) the lofty ideals of the nation. Soft Bonapartism is able to shift from states of exception to states of normality, and part of its stability comes from its ability to change out heads of state when the current Bonapartist leader no longer can point to popular support. This is accomplished by having competitive elections between multiple factions of a single party.

Along with the increasing power of the Bonapartist leader comes a reduction of the power of political parties, if not through overt legal means, via the implementation of single-member districts over proportional representation. We also see increased monopoly over theoretical production, i.e., the consolidation of mass media under the control over a few billionaires. Though soft Bonapartism comes with universal suffrage (first for just white men, and now for nearly all adults), we also see a disemancipation in our ability to participate in political decision-making and debate.

Readers may be particularly curious about Losurdo’s assessment of the socialist states of the twentieth century. Losurdo argues that none of these leaders were Bonapartist figures (though Mao at one point came closest), in part due to the role political parties play in mediating power. Because political parties act as forums for political education and debate, they maintain the political engagement of the masses and act as insulation against the personalization of power.

Losurdo notes that we are currently in a wave of disemancipation, and that the end is not yet in sight. He has few answers for the steps going forward, although reading between the lines it seems like fighting for proportional representation and re-taking control over the means of information dissemination (education, news, etc) are likely bets. I’d recommend this book as a good introduction to Marxist critique of modern political structures, and as a first book by this author.

Review: The Dialectical Biologist By Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin

Although it is possible to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in a field like biology without taking a single post-secondary philosophy course, I don’t think it should be. Through practice, biology can teach you how to think, but I don’t think it teaches you how to think about how you think. Philosophy helps you step outside your thought patterns and examine assumptions or limitations you didn’t realize you were making. 

The essays in this book take as their target scientists who are correct in applying their craft — at least by conventional standards of logic and statistics — but nonetheless draw incorrect conclusions. These vary from incorrect models of evolution (e.g., one-way adaptation of creatures to their environment instead of a dynamic relationship between creature and environment), to deductions of processes that fail to consider the contingency of an observed relationship, to the chauvinism of expecting a western model of science to be universally optimal.

This anthology is now several decades old and biology has necessarily abandoned some of its insistence on what the authors term Cartesian science — a reductionist approach that fails to account for mutual interdependence, interconnectivity, and change. My own PhD research examined some of this: how do certain relationships change while other environmental variables are also in flux? In trying to navigate such a problem, I found myself becoming more fluent in dialectical materialism, although I didn’t know the term for it. 

Although biology has progressed, Cartesian reductionism remains prevalent. I find myself butting up against it often when I try to communicate the work I do. The essays felt cathartic to read: here, too, were other scientists fighting the same fights I fight (particularly chapter 4).

Because this book is a collection of essays not intended to be read together, the essays sometimes repeat metaphors or examples or concepts. An abridged reading of my favourite chapters that retains the sweeping scope and remains feeling fresh and pertinent would be the Introduction, followed by chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13 and the Conclusion.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This history of the United States is familiar history, in the way that Wicked is familiar to The Wizard of Oz fans: the formation and development of the United States told from the perspective of those indigenous to the continent. Rather than extolling the inventions of liberties and freedoms, this history is a tragic devastation of a rich network of communities, and their struggle for survival, recognition and restitution.

One of the key themes of this work is how genocidal ideology doesn’t spring out of nowhere. The dehumanization of peoples in Europe preceded the dehumanization of peoples of the Americas, if to a less radical degree. England used bounties to capture priests (who they would then kill) as part of its conquest of Ireland; to conquer the vast distances of the Americas, this practice turned into scalping (Chapter 2). A religion whose God called upon them to wander the wilderness, defeat the heathens, and to occupy a promised land, went on to do just that in the New World (and then later, in Palestine), calling it Manifest Destiny (Chapter 3). The dispossession of peasants across England during the birth of capitalism reverberated in the dispossession of indigenous people of the Americas, using many of the technologies of capitalism — debts, cheap commodities (Chapter 3) — and benefitting from a self-interested volunteer army of settlers (or squatters) instead of the compelled labour of feudalism (Chapter 7). 

Another key theme is that this ideology is not a thing of the past. As the conclusion argues beautifully, the same techniques of quelling insurgencies, the same dehumanization of the barbarous enemy are present in United States imperialist wars of the 20th and 21st century (Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines, Kora, and others). Manifest Destiny developed into a belief that is the United States’ right to have military bases across the world, to bend the world to its will through legal tools and economic tools and, of course, violence. 

I think everyone should read this book.

Review: Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel by Domenico Losurdo

This is a 1000-page book about Nietzsche. This might seem like a lot of pages to read about one single philosopher (and it is a long book!), but it’s also an in-depth journey into late 19th-century philosophy, battles that shaped the ideology behind World War I and then later World War II as well as (from an opposite perspective) the 1917 October Revolution and then later the mid-20th century wave of national liberation movements. You come away from the book with not only a close familiarity with the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought over his ~20-year career, but also an understanding of origin myths and national identity, nihilism and the critique of religion, metacritique and an outsider’s critique of status quo ideology, judeophobia and antisemitism, eugenics and imperialism, masses and elites.

Losurdo argues that the consistent project in Nietzsche’s otherwise contradictory body of work is one of anti-communism and counter-revolution. Nietzsche held the creation of art and culture to be of the highest value, and something that could be achieved only by individuals afforded complete leisure and spared from mind-numbing toil. The maintenance of this class necessitated the enslavement of the rest of humanity, enforced by violence and eugenics and ideology. Socialism — in its declaration that all humans are equal — was a threat to this world order.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is repugnant, and Losurdo does not shy away from calling it so. But this book is not a 1000-page screed against a terrible philosopher. Throughout the book, it is clear how much Losurdo respects Nietzsche for his intellectual rigour and his ability to find new ways of interrogating the ideology of his world. The target of this tome is not so much Nietzsche but left Nietzscheans, or those who would wish to use him to socialist (or even liberal) ends. Losurdo renders this position ridiculous; he shreds attempts to interpret Nietzsche metaphorically or as a dreamy innocent distorted by a conniving sister. 

A common pattern in this book is to establish the contemporary discourse on a particular topic — education, the military, the poverty of the masses — and show Nietzsche’s continuities with conservative and liberal thinkers of his time, and then examine the ways Nietzsche was able to radicalize these critiques, to transcend the limitations of Christian or liberal thought, and recognize the full implications of their consistent application. I am left with more respect (as well as more repulsion) for him than I expected, and have a better sense for what it means to do “good philosophy”.

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For a more detailed, academic review of the contents and approac, I like this one by Matt Sharpe.

Review: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House is a tightly plotted play about the limited agency and opportunities for fulfillment that women had during marriage. It must have been explosive, cathartic, to see performed when it first came out in 1879. But even reading it in 2023, I was pleasantly caught off-guard by the bold confrontation between vivacious Nora and her superficially doting husband. Building to the climax, I grimaced continuously at how he kept calling her his little bird, his little dove, his little squirrel, his flattery of her looks, his opinions on how embroidery was a much more attractive hobby than knitting, his pressing himself on her despite her protestations, his calling her childlike. “It was the nineteenth century, maybe it was normal” I told myself. To have Nora come to the recognition that his infantilizing, objectifying attitude was the problem in their marriage, that he cared not for her as a person but for her as a decoration in his home, oh it felt so satisfying.

Conspectus: Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns by Domenico Losurdo

Twentieth century history unfolded from battles in nineteenth century philosophy, which itself was a reaction to the French Revolution. One path of nineteenth century philosophy and twentieth century history objected to the French Revolution’s upsetting of the natural order of things (are all men really equal?). In this path, we find the liberals Burke and Toqueville, neoliberals like Hayek, and the philosophers of fascism. The other path developed a philosophical expression (and eventually, political implementation) of the values that sparked the French Revolution: all men are equal, and political rights are meaningless without economic rights. This path follows Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and from there continues to Marx and Engels, to Lenin and leaders of socialist movements world-wide. Given the crucial role Hegel played in this second path, it’s worth understanding his philosophy in some depth, and Losurdo’s book delivers beautifully.

Losurdo starts by asking, “is Hegel a liberal or a conservative?” (I suppose I am a little jealous that these are the arguments in which Losurdo feels he must intervene; the misunderstandings I see of Hegel revolve around a sort of “that guy loves kings…. and Spirit??”) The answer is that neither binary fits Hegel well, and in fact presupposes the rather peachy view of liberalism that liberalism views to be self-evident about itself. A better axis on which to situate Hegel would be “Patrician or plebeian?” On this axis, liberals and conservatives alike end up in the former camp, while Hegel is clearly situated in the latter (for all his approval of kings!). Hegel’s political positions are complex, and, Losurdo argues, must be understood in the context of the historical events and debates of the time. Losurdo leads us through these battlefields, examining Hegel’s perspectives on revolution, the sovereign, education and the rights of the child, and the role of the state in addressing poverty.

The one gap I felt was missing from this book was an examination of Hegel's racist statements about other civilizations. These statements also have roots in his philosophy (nothing in history is eternal, the actual is rational, and so why did Europeans become the dominant force in the 19th century?), and I think they could have fit within the argument of the book.

I feel so much more confident in the philosophical and historical issues of the nineteenth century having read this work. It's surprising (even disappointing?) how current discussions tread the same ground as discussions from two hundred years ago. Or perhaps it is instead Losurdo's skill at picking out the most relevant conflicts to our times, and presenting these clashes in ways that feel fresh but familiar. Regardless, it's a valuable book to read for understanding both the past and the present, and I strongly recommend it. However, it was a little dense, so as both a guide for myself and for other apprehensive would-be readers, I summarized the main arguments of each chapter. 

 Chapter I: A Liberal, Secret Hegel?

Utopias and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The point of dystopian science fiction is usually to take some aspect of our present society and exaggerate it to produce a terrifying but recognizable world. What if the government put extreme limits on free speech? What if we forced fertile women to give birth? What if advertising and consumerism got really out of control? It’s a tool for critiquing society, but tends to produce criticism in the form of warnings of slippery slopes. There’s an implicit acceptance of the status quo, except for this one part of it that society needs to be concerned about. Because of this, dystopian fiction stories often lack a solution to the problems in society they have identified, other than simply “don’t do the bad thing.”

Utopias start from the exact opposite premise, critiquing our current world by leaving it unchanged, foiling it against a better world. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, we follow a physicist, Shevek, as he grows disillusioned with his isolated anarchist society. Over the seven generations since its founding, shadowy bureaucratic hurdles and fears of trespassing ingrained social norms have produced a static, sick society that no longer upholds the radical individualistic and free-choice ideals on which it was founded. To pursue his scientific work, he turns traitor to his society, and visits the liberal, capitalist planet. Through his eyes, we explore a world virtually indistinguishable from our own. Elegant and highly educated people enjoy sumptuous cocktail parties, wear fur coats that cost two years of minimum wage salary, eat chocolate that comes wrapped in far too many layers of paper, and rarely have to encounter the miserable working poor. Escaping from the clutches of his well-spoken, well-shod captors, Shevek finds working class revolutionaries and becomes a figurehead for a mass strike — one brutally repressed by the liberal government's military. The violence the government exacts on its own people, the gender and class inequality he sees, and the way money and property distort all relationships lead him to view his own society in a more positive light. He broadcasts his research findings to all civilizations in the universe so as to prevent the capitalist society using it for profit or for colonization. He then returns to his home planet as a proud anarchist, fortified with the knowledge that revolution is hard, and has no end, but is ultimately worth it.

Because utopian fiction critiques our current world undistorted and through comparison with a hopeful alternative, it lends itself well to revolutionary fiction. In What Is To Be Done?, an 1863 utopian novel that inspired many within the Russian Revolution, Chernychevsky writes:

A person who’s never seen anything except hovels would look at a picture of an ordinary house and mistake it for a luxurious palace. How can one ensure that such a person should perceive the house as a house and not a palace? In the same picture one must depict at least one corner of a palace. From this corner it will be clear that a palace is really a structure of a completely different sort than the one in the picture, and the observer will realize that the building is really nothing more than a simple, ordinary house in which all people should live (if not in better ones).

The reader of The Dispossessed is presented with a palace of a sorts, if a flawed one, in which resources are shared equally with everyone within a community, where people view each other as a brotherhood, where there is complete gender equality and no shame in sex. Shevek, in a sense, goes through the reverse journey, discovering the hovels so that he can see the promise of the palace. Le Guin’s world-building is thoughtful and deep, exploring how everything from language to education to “who does the dirty work” might be different, better, in an anarchist society. 

While dystopian movies and novels have been staples of the box office and bestseller lists, utopian fiction is rarer. Dystopian stories are lauded as smart political commentary, while utopias are impractical, unserious. Indeed, Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian “what if we forced fertile women to give birth?” story, prides herself on not imagining anything new or better at all: “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in (...) history” (Foreword to The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017). The Dispossessed at the very least demonstrates that utopian stories can be Serious Literature. Utopian fiction being rare and dismissed isn’t unique to our current era. Chernychevsky accused those dismissing utopian fiction as suffering from sour grapes:

And as for the fact that [the idyll] is no longer fashionable, and therefore people spurn it, that’s no real objection at all. They shun the idyll as the fox in the fable spurned the grapes. They think it inaccessible; consequently they conclude, ‘Let it no longer be fashionable.’ But it’s pure nonsense that the idyll is inaccessible. 

— What is to be Done? (1863)

Chernychevky’s writing was crafted to get through Tsarist censorship, so some of his more ambitious designs for a better world are cloaked in metaphors and codewords difficult to follow a century and a half later without an annotated edition (the Michael Katz translation is good). The difficulty in producing utopian fiction today is perhaps no less fraught. Those with decision power over producing big-budget movies might find more appeal in stories like “our world, but what if the government put draconian limits on free speech” than “our world, but without money or property.” Regardless of issues on the "supply" side, is there demand for utopian fiction, or is it too unfashionable?

Chernychevsky was writing shortly after the abolishment of the serf system in Russia. The era in which Le Guin was writing was shaped by the Cold War, protests against the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Our present era, marked by pandemics and wars and increasingly evident climate change, seems similarly unstable, perilous. How can we work towards a better society if we don’t first imagine what that could be?  I wonder if we might therefore be ready for a change in fashion, a rediscovery of utopian fiction. I am, at least.

Review: "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" by Virginia Eubanks

Something about the digital world frightens people into believing they are facing a completely alien, Cthulian beast, as opposed to simply an online version of the usual suspects. Shoshana Zuboff makes this mistake in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, suggesting the 'behavioural surplus' extracted by Facebook and its ilk fuels an economic system fundamentally different from the wholesome, warm and fuzzy capitalism of Henry Ford and company. I wrote in my review of that book that she failed to substantiate her argument:

Is Google hiding how much data it collects from you really all that different from Apple hiding the conditions of its manufacturing facilities? Is Facebook's attempts to manipulate your emotions or your sense of self-worth really a whole new beast or just another step in the advertising industry's development? Is the desire of surveillance capitalism companies to expand vertically and horizontally into new parts of our lives and into new parts of the world, to privatize or profit off public goods any different from the same expansion drive of any other company?

Virginia Eubank's Automating Inequality sees through the Silicon Valley smoke and mirrors, and instead correctly draws a direct line from the poorhouses of the 19th century, through the scientific charity and eugenics of the 20th century to the automated and algorithmic social systems of today. She coins the term "digital poorhouse", likening the publicly-funded facilities that granted wretched living conditions in exchange for grueling work to the systems of digital tracking and automated decision-making that govern distribution of public resources today.

Like the brick-and-mortar poorhouse, the digital poorhouse diverts the poor from public resources. Like scientific charity, it investigates, classifies, and criminalizes. Like the tools birthed during the backlash against welfare rights, it uses integrated databases to target, track, and punish.

She tracks three systems in particular: IBM's "modernization" of the welfare administration system in Indiana, the social sorting algorithm implemented for sheltering the unhoused in Los Angeles, and a model implemented in Pittsburgh to predict child harm. The chapters detailing these examples are compelling, and combine stories from social workers and people affected by these systems with data and perspectives from academics. They're also infuriating and saddening to read.

The final chapter, in which she ties together these stories with the cultural practices that enable them to exist (e.g. culture of individuality, middle class anxiety, racism) is excellent. Eubanks founds her critique of these systems in historical understanding of how these systems came to be.

Just as the county poorhouse was suited to the Industrial Revolution, and scientific charity was uniquely appropriate for the Progressive Era, the digital poorhouse is adapted to the particular circumstances of our time. The county poorhouse responded to middle-class fears about growing industrial unemployment: it kept discarded workers out of sight but nearby, in case their labor was needed. Scientific charity responded to native elites' fear of immigrants, African Americans, and poor whites by creating a hierarchy of worth that controlled access to both resources and social inclusion. Today, the digital poorhouse responds to what Barbara Ehrenreich has described as a "fear of failing" in the professional middle class.

I think because she is able to see the similarities between current technological solutions and social systems of the past, she is better able to identify the unique aspects of modern automation and algorithms. She concludes that the digital poorhouse is hard to understand, massively scalable, persistent over time, and is alienating in a particularly new way:

Containment in the physical institution of a poorhouse had the unintentional result of creating class solidarity across race, gender, and national origin. When we sit at a common table, we might see similarities in our experiences, even if we are forced to eat gruel. Surveillance and digital social sorting drive us apart as smaller and smaller microgroups are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control. When we inhabit an invisible poorhouse, we become more and more isolated, cut off from those around us, even if they share our suffering.

Working in data science, I think often about the ethical obligations of the profession. Sometimes I wish books like this one (along with Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women) were required reading. I'm under no illusion that professional certification or licensing of data science would solve the issue. Eubanks isn't, I think, the first to suggest a Hippocratic Oath for data science. Perhaps that would help with a culture shift.

I'll end with her two questions she asks people developing technological solutions that address poverty, because I think they're great:

1. Does the tool increase the self-determination and agency of the poor?
2. Would the tool be tolerated if it was targeted at non-poor people?
   

Review: Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin

Mrs Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings.

"I suppose their father was a fly-by-night," a neighbour said, and laughed unpleasantly, sneaking round the dumpster."

"Maybe they have wings because I dream, before they were born, that I could fly away from this neighbourhood," said Mrs Jane Tabby.

I loved this little tale. So much fun Ursula Le Guin-style social commentary woven into a really cute story about kittens with wings. Not a word nor a sentence out of place.

I liked best the outrage of the birds at discovering cats that dared ascend into their ranks (and the lack of sympathy felt by the mouse towards the birds — "you could try tunnels").

Insofar as books about animals leaving their homes in search of a better life elsewhere go, this one is so much better than Watership Down — from a narrative perspective, from an allegorical perspective, from a feminist/not-misogynist perspective — that I can't believe anyone bothers reading the latter.

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.

Review: Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's The Odyssey

I do a little technical writing translation here and there for a website, after naively answering "yes" to "Hey, you speak French and know this one specific scientific domain, don't you?" I've since learned it's one sort of thing to carry a conversation or write a technical report in a language, and quite another sort of thing to faithfully translate both the tone and the content of words written by someone else within the limits of a restrictive character count.

Humbled by this experience, I was fascinated by Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's The Odyssey, a retelling in contemporary language arranged in iambic pentameter matching the line count of the original poem. These stylistic choices no doubt created quite the linguistic puzzle, but I loved the thought she put behind it, laid out in her translator's note:

The use of noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

She also took a thoughtful approach to how to portray moral values in this very ancient text in a modern, understandable way.

Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which a reader can see the original. (...)

Because The Odyssey has become such a foundational text in our educational system and in our imagination of Western history, I believe it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out its values, and to see the reader to see the cracks and fissures in its constructed fantasy.

This reconsideration of beliefs and mores made it fun to compare other translations, particularly when the poem dealt with feminist topics or relationships between the elite aristocrats and the slaves or the peasants. Here's an example of one of my favourite passages by Wilson, foiled against one by Alexander Pope (1725). The gods have staged an intervention, insisting Calypso allow Odysseus to leave her island, where he has been her captive for seven years.

Wilson's:

You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge 

whenever any goddess takes a man 

to sleep with as a lover in her bed. 

Just so the gods who live at ease were angry 

when rosy-fingered Dawn took up Orion, 

and from her golden throne, chaste Artemis

attacked and killed him with her gentle arrows.

Demeter with the cornrows in her hair

indulged her own desire, and she made love 

with Iasion in triple-furrowed fields

till Zeus found out, hurled flashing flame and killed him.

So now, you male gods are upset with me 

for living with a man. A man I saved! 

Zeus pinned his ship and with his flash of lightning

smashed it to pieces. All his friends were killed 

out on the wine-dark sea. This man alone,

clutching the keel, was swept by wind and wave, 

and came here, to my home. I cared for him

and loved him, and I vowed to set him free

from time and death forever.

Pope:

“Ungracious gods! with spite and envy cursed!
Still to your own ethereal race the worst!
Ye envy mortal and immortal joy,
And love, the only sweet of life destroy,
Did ever goddess by her charms engage
A favour’d mortal, and not feel your rage?
So when Aurora sought Orion’s love,
Her joys disturbed your blissful hours above,
Till, in Ortygia Dian’s winged dart
Had pierced the hapless hunter to the heart,
So when the covert of the thrice-eared field
Saw stately Ceres to her passion yield,
Scarce could Iasion taste her heavenly charms,
But Jove’s swift lightning scorched him in her arms.
And is it now my turn, ye mighty powers!
Am I the envy of your blissful bowers?
A man, an outcast to the storm and wave,
It was my crime to pity, and to save;
When he who thunders rent his bark in twain,
And sunk his brave companions in the main,
Alone, abandon’d, in mid-ocean tossed,
The sport of winds, and driven from every coast,
Hither this man of miseries I led,
Received the friendless, and the hungry fed;
Nay promised (vainly promised) to bestow
Immortal life, exempt from age and woe.

Wilson's translation highlights the agency of the goddesses (compare "indulged her own desire" with "to her passion yield"), emphasizing the double standards the famously promiscuous gods hold towards the goddesses. Calypso's interest in Odysseus is portrayed more as born of love versus an interest born of charity and pity, tinging her enraged censure of the gods with a little more heartbreak.

Another comparison of translations, this time spoken from the perspective of Odysseus' (eye-rollingly) loyal slave upon their reunion, on the subject of the suitors:

Wilson: 

We suffer / in bitter toil for these white-tusked pigs, / while others eat the food we labor for, / and give us nothing.

Samuel Butler (1900):

We have had trouble enough this long time feeding pigs, while others reap the fruit of our labour.

Pope:

For great and many are the griefs we bear, / While those who from our labours heap their board / Blaspheme their feeder and forget their lord.

The focus of Wilson's translation here is on the hardships of the slaves. Butler's is a substantially milder version of Wilson's. In Pope's, these lines serve as a sort of background chorus to emphasize how much the suitors shame Odysseus in his absence.

Reading the text, I felt very conscious that it was a translation. Although the story and the language were both familiar, it had an alien feel to it. There was a lot of unusual imagery ("Dawn's rosy fingers", "wine-dark sea"). There was an inordinate amount of time precisely detailing exactly how each sacrifice to the gods was made. It also felt very apparent that The Odyssey was first and foremost an orally performed epic. Key plot points were repeated several times over—presumably in case the poem wasn't performed in its entirety or someone missed something on a trip to the washroom. Unimportant characters were given a lot of inconsequential backstory—perhaps tying in the events and characters of the story to popular contemporary tales?

And what of the story itself? Classics are funny; you think you've absorbed a reasonably faithful understanding of the text based on triangulation of pop culture references. Sometimes it works out; the various works inspired by Pride & Prejudice provide a pretty good picture for what you'll find following the famous phrase "It is a truth universally acknowledged". On the other hand, pop culture is a terrible coordinate system for Frankenstein and it is similarly a poor mirror for The Odyssey.

I was surprised by how little of The Odyssey was sea monsters and sirens. Indeed of the 24 "books" that divide the poem, only books 5-13 relate to Odysseus' wanderings. This part of the poem starts in medias res, and follows Odysseus for an adventure or two in the third person, until he finds an eager audience to listen to his tale, allowing him to catch us up to his exploits since the Battle of Troy in the first person. This part of the poem felt a little like a musical; characters are given extensive monologue time to impress upon the audience just how impressive (or not impressive) they find Odysseus, while the plot moves from event to event with tenuous or circumstantial links between problems and resolutions. I was surprised at how much the Coen Brother's O Brother Where Art Thou really nailed the tone of this part of the book.

The remaining nearly two thirds of the book have a more forward momentum sort of plot, but it wasn't at all what I expected from The Odyssey. It was your basic vengeance story. The suitors courting Odysseus's wife Penelope are cartoonishly selfish and irredeemable. Odysseus' slaves and dog are obsequiously, irrationally, loyal to him. There are dozens of long scenes dedicated to everyone from Odysseus' son Telemachus to the slave swine-herders to the gods themselves wailing about how much the suitors disrespect Odysseus. There's an odd scene in which a disguised Odysseus is humiliated by the suitors, seemingly just to sweeten his revenge and his displays of superior bowman-ship. This all culminates in a bloody, gruesome, merciless slaughter of the suitors and the slave women who slept with them. The story was reined in from veering into vengeance porn only by virtue of Penelope being a fascinating character and her eventual reunion with Odysseus being really quite sweet. (For the nuanced portrayal of Penelope, I assume I have much to thank Wilson for.)

The main theme linking Odysseus' wanderings and his vengeance was the idea of how you treat guests. Penelope's suitors overstay their welcome and eat their way through Odysseus' wealth. Calypso violates hospitality expectations in the other direction, hosting Odysseus and lavishing him with gifts but refusing to let him leave. Odysseus himself violates the sanctity of one's home; invading Polyphemus' peaceful abode, blinding him and stealing his sheep. Odysseus is a gracious, entertaining guest at Alcinous' palace, and Alcinous inexplicably rewards him with mountains of treasure.

Odysseus is not particularly sympathetic; Wilson translates the opening lines of the epic to describe his as "a complicated man", and "complicated" really captures her portrayal of him.

I'll end my review here with one more quote from Wilson's Translator's Note that I think summarizes what makes this such an interesting read.

The gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It's been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad I picked it up finally. It wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a sort of Woman Versus The Dystopian State tale, something along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World but with more women. And instead, it was a much more internal look at the how one responds to changing systems and to oppression - the lies we tell ourselves to survive and the lies we tell ourselves to forgive ourselves for perpetuating oppression.

The prose was beautiful; vivid. I think if there were more women in the metal scene, there would probably be a Handmaid's Tale concept album. A lot of very metal motifs: like contrasting flowers/life with rot, Offred's thoughtful reflections about her surroundings giving way to unbridled hatred about her situation, the ghost of the former Handmaid in Offred's room, mistrust, surveillance.....

The dynamic between the Commander and the Handmaid was well woven and reminiscent of much of the #MeToo kind of stories (despite Atwood's somewhat poor take on the movement). The commander trying to lead Offred into saying everything is better now than it was before; the way he exerted power over her to make her attend him and visit the brothel with him; the way he deludes himself into thinking she was there because she wanted to be....

I wasn't such a fan of the epilogue. The details of the world were not particularly interesting to me, and the issues Atwood takes aim at (AIDS, nuclear power plants) did not age all that well. The epilogue critiques how little we are able to empathize with the pain/humanity of people from centuries ago - but the tonal shift wasn't quite what I wanted to read at that point.

I read this during the Summer of 2020, Shelter In Place orders intact, the week after George Floyd's was murdered by the police, with curfews lasting days in cities across the country. I saw somewhere a criticism that the world reflected in The Handmaid's Tale is too unrealistic; society doesn't change so quickly. That criticism rings so hollow right now - it is very easy to see how society could change so significantly over the course of a few years. I hope it does - but in a very different direction.

Review: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

 It's early in the year, but I think this might end up being my favorite read of 2020.

This really is a beautiful book. The political intrigue and murder mystery are tightly plotted, and the pacing is good, but really, the book is about so much more than that.

As a language nerd, I very much appreciated the theme of culture shaping language, and language shaping how we perceive ourselves and our histories.

"Teixcalaan has seen eighty years of peace. Three of your lives, stacked up, since the last time one part of the world tried to destroy the rest of it."

There were border skirmishes reported every week. There'd been an outright rebellion put down on the Odile System just a few days back. Teixcalaan was not peaceful. But Mahit thought she understood the difference Six Direction was so fixated on: those were skirmishes that brought war to outside the universe, to uncivilized places. The word he'd used for "world" was the word for "city." The one that derived from the verb for "correct action".

I loved the philosophical elements of what does it mean to be a person? It was neat to explore this particularly through the eyes of Mahit, whose perspective on this answer is probably quite different from our own. Is personality just endocrine responses? Is a person just the sum of their memories?

I loved that this book discussed the biases inherent to artificial intelligence - that there is no such thing as a neutral algorithm.

There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past -- a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed. A city run by Ten Pearl's algorithm had Ten Pearl's initial interests embedded in it. A city run by an algorithm designed to respond to Teixcalaanli desires was not innocent of those same Teixcalaanli desired, magnified, twisted by machine learning.

Perhaps not since I've read Robin Hobb's Fool's Fate have I felt the same level of emotional tension while reading a book. Mahit's sense of loneliness and abandonment by her imago. The strange mix of both loving the cultural output of the Empire and the very real fear of the Empire destroying her home. The irony of self-discovery through culture that is foreign to your own, and in a foreign language. The mix of pride in being complimented in mastering imperial customs combined with the sadness in being subjugated and knowing that no matter your mastery you will never 'belong' in the Empire.

The dialogue, particularly between Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea, was great. Really enjoyed their dry humor and banter (while also really feeling Mahit's envy of their friendship).

I wish I enjoyed the poetry in the book. I often felt like I didn't quite get it - but maybe that was the point. Like Mahit, the nuances of Teizcalaanli art is too alien.

I liked the way romance was weaved in - explicitly polyamorous and non-heteronormative. Love shapes the people and the events in small ways, rather than being massive story-shifting forces. But nor is the romance just orthogonal to the rest of the plot. The reveal of Yskandr being both in love with the emperor and with Nineteen Adze is a little thread that adds support and tension to the web of events, but it's not the keystone that the whole structure of the intrigue relies on. Even if he hadn't been in love with those people, his maneuvering could have made sense. But, the relationships also feel very real and human, and messy in the way those kinds of things can be messy.

I enjoyed that much of the rest of the universe was left mysterious. It makes me curious to discover what the next book will be about.

Review: My Brilliant Friend & the rest of the Neopolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

I almost gave up on the first book of the series about ten percent of the way in. It starts slow: character sketches of Neapolitans. This man was a fascist, was feared by the neighbourhood, and made his money on the black market. This woman loved a married man and went crazy when he left her. The stories were all so disconnected, and I didn't get the sense that I "got" the characters. The language was simple. The story-telling was straightforward and yet so incredibly detailed. Sometimes I wondered why they mattered at all. How could this exegesis on a single elementary school exam possibly be so important that the narrator dedicates this many pages to it? I continued reading only because I had the audiobook, and the meditative cadence suited my mood on a late-night run.

I'm so glad I finished the first book. I'd intended this review to be a review of only the first instalment, My Brilliant Friend, but I devoured the next three novels over just a few weeks, and when I tried to type up my thoughts, I realized it didn't make sense to review My Brilliant Friend as a standalone novel. The series is very much one single story - indeed the first and second book both end on the very same days their sequels start. 

In a way, I felt like this story makes many other tales about the inheritance of trauma obsolete. Through Elena Grecco's own experience as a novelist, we learn that if you haven't done the work to understand people, and the way their environment and their choices influence their lives, it's just exploitative or navel gazy or moralizing or posturing as worldly. Formative experiences can't be captured in a few flashback scenes - how people recover or respond to their hurt, and how they come to understand the ways they've been hurt, is often as impactful for how a character is shaped.

The story was a perfect character study of the two women. On the one hand I feel like I have never read a novel that so perfectly captures what it feels like to be me before. Elena's thought patterns, particularly her self criticizing, her admiration of her role models, and her introspection, were so like my own. It felt almost intrusive. I've felt the same complicated pull of wanting to leave home and explore the world, then, having left, wanting to return. I've also felt dazzled by a room full of smart people talking about enticing politics ideas. I've felt the same type of love for a friend - admiration, but also competition. I felt uncomfortably betrayed when Lenu began her affair with Nino; he was so obviously a jerk and not worth her affections, and I would never do this. At one point, Lenu asks herself if she was just another woman to him, and would be strung along (or something to that affect) and I, in my frustrating screamed exasperatedly "yes!!" - this elicited a surprised look from the person I passed on my run.

On the other hand, I feel like there's a paradoxical sort of lesson here: that it is impossible to adequately portray the fullness of a human being using words on a page. Lila is painted through Lenu's eyes, somehow so real, and yet also unknowable. 

I loved the political threads. The union-building plot at Lila's sausage factory was a stand out arc. I particularly loved that politics was woven throughout, a constant backdrop in conversations and decisions and relationships. It felt very real. I wondered a little what the author's persuasions are - socialist/communist I think, but she plays a little coy about how she envisions it fitting into the world outside of a disapproval of guerrilla violence and assassination, I think.

Review: Ain't I A Woman by bell hooks

 Rating: 5/5 stars

In my review of Blackshirts and Reds, I wrote "There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me." Ain't I A Woman reads with the same cadence. Hooks has identified a very real problem, and presents it clearly, and passionately.

I've commented before that it can be tricky to review foundational books. Ain't I A Woman is forty years old. I've read a lot of feminist theory, and a lot of intersectional feminist theory. The core thesis of the book was not new to me. But I never felt that I was wasting my time revisiting the same old thing.  The focus of this book was, I felt, very much on the internal rationalizations of every-day people, rather than the public speeches of the movers and shakers of a particular time. For this reason, although there was a considerable amount of overlap with Race, Women and Class by Angela Davis, which indeed hooks cites, I view them more as good companion novels, rather than one being a replacement for the other. 

Nor did I feel like society has really changed so much in the intervening four decades that hooks' observations no longer ring true. The following passage, if it were written in 2021, would be just as searingly true as it was when first written:

When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong—and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Still, I found myself wishing for a follow-up essay - where have we come since?

I wish I'd read this book earlier - perhaps as a chaser to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I really struggled with Malcolm X's misogynist depictions of women (even women he claimed he admired and respected), and hooks' analysis of his position towards women, and the role of women more broadly in the Black Power movement, gave me a sense of closure and healing.

My most recent non-fiction, non-autobiography read was Stamped From The Beginning,  and Ain't I A Woman was a much-appreciated follow-up to that. Ain't I A Woman made it all the more starkly clear the limitations of focusing solely on the writings of academics and politicians and other people of power when trying to understand the experience of those oppressed by colonialism and patriarchy. Stamped From The Beginning also falls victim to its chronological organization gimmick. hooks is far better able to trace the history of racist thinking by following one idea from its roots in slavery to modern reincarnations of the concept, then move on to another idea.

There was one line that made me laugh out loud - "No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women’s movement." I thought immediately of Kate Manne's Down Girl and its questionable use of the murder of Michael Brown to discuss victim blaming of rape survivors.

I liked that hooks did not remove herself from her writing. Academic writing encourages this practice - and I think it is a shame! Research is not carried out in a vacuum from which all subjectivity can be removed. Nor are academics just brains on sticks. When women and/or people of color encounter philosophy that erases them or minimizes their experiences, it hurts. I appreciated hooks relating her reaction to reading and researching these topics.

The writing was approachable, and ideas were presented in intuitive ways. The thesis of intersectionality should be obvious to everyone, but frustratingly (often intentionally, as hooks demonstrates) isn't. Go read it.

 

Review: Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

Rating: 5/5 stars

There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me - that Parenti has spent so much time thinking of this topic that this work just flowed straight out of his pen.

This fluidity made it a joy to read. However, it was also not quite what I expected. I picked this book up in part because I enjoyed The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome so much, and I was expecting a similarly focused and well-cited exegesis. Instead it was a broad overview of the many facets of anti-communist and pro-capitalist propaganda and foreign policy in the 20th century. In some ways, it functions perhaps more so as an "introduction" chapter to the rest of Parenti's work - which I will probably read.

It took me a while to read; although flowing, it is dense with fantastic ways of framing or phrasing an issue that I think deserve a moment of contemplation.

I thought back a little to my review of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, where I complained that the illustrative examples of manufactured consent were all quite dated and unfamiliar to me, and were not fully explained, instead presuming the reader was already quite familiar with at least the mainstream media narrative of Pol Pot or Duarte or whoever (which I wasn't). Although the examples Parenti uses in this book are similarly old, more of the necessary background to understand them was presented.

Review: Michael Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome

 Rating: 5/5

This book is the overview of the Late Roman Republic that politically conscious social justice advocates didn't know they needed to read. It was at times frustrating to learn how old the ways the wealthy wield and accumulate power and fight for their class interests are.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification proffered by the assassins themselves. In this book I present an altnerative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.

Despite the cliché that "history is written by the victors", our popular view of history remains largely unquestioned. I really appreciated the emphasis in this book to point out how our narrative of Caesar has been constructed for us by a lineage of white, upper-class, male historians, and sorts through these biases.

The chapters are well organized, to the point, and not overly long. The language isn't dumbed down but nor is it overly academic (a welcome change of pace after my last read, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny). The author's passion for what he writes about comes through; at times he is drily humorous, sometimes he is a little snide, sometimes he incites compassionate feelings of injustice. It's a very readable book.